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A Personal and Political Tribute to Phyllis
IT 'S A STAPLE of American comedians to make fun of in-laws in general and mothers-in-law in particular. But, in my case and with no offense to Michael, I could have married my husband simply for his parents.
In fact, I knew of Julie and Phyllis long before I met Michael. When I was at Princeton as a young woman, doing research on the U.S. left, I came across the book T he N egro and the American Labor Movement edited by Julius Jacobson and written before the term African-American came into common and preferred usage. Because of this, I was already impressed when I met Michael Jacobson, the son of an American leftist - the quite-cool-and-interesting-to-mesounding radical, "Third Camp Socialist" figure Julius Jacobson.
But, as I know well as a feminist, much as I loved and respected my father-in-law, there could and would have been no Julie qua respected left democratic socialist theorist and debater without Phyllis. They were a team: Phyllis-and- Julie, Julie-and-Phyllis, inseparable and linked at the hip even though they grew up in (and tried to transcend) a traditionally gendered, raced and classed world. In some ways, their lives were conventional in terms of gender roles: Phyllis did more of the cooking, taking care of the house, more of the raising of Michael (it was, after all, the 50s), more of the administrative work for their long-standing publication New Politics - and more of the typing, transcribing and editing of all JuHe 's articles. In other ways, though, their love - for I will always think of Phyllis and Julie's story as, at one level, a love story - transcended gender hierarchies and conventions. I saw this very clearly after Phyllis' tragic stroke when JuHe, as so many men of his generation would never have done, refused to leave her bedside, setting up a telephone and bringing his books so that he could be by her side. He wouldn't even leave to go to the Socialist Scholars Conference one year, saying to me that "being with Phyllis was much more important, and what gave his life meaning."
But why did Phyllis mean...