Becoming the Change We Seek

By Margaret Heilbrun -- Library Journal, 10/15/2006

It is as hard for some of us to comprehend that Jane Fonda will turn 70 next year as it is to fathom the passage of our own lives. But the title of her recent memoir—My Life So Far—reminds us that there is lots more of the journey to come. A few months after Fonda’s book was published came historian Mary Hershberger’s Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon, which sought, especially after renewed hostility to Fonda by conservative anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans, to establish an objective historical record of Fonda’s work against the Vietnam War. Hershberger’s editor at the New Press suggested that an edition of Fonda’s writings and speeches might next be in order.

Words onto paper, thanks to the CIA

“Writings,” Hershberger had learned, was not always a term applicable to Fonda’s activist work. For this book, Jane Fonda’s Words of Politics and Passion (see review, p. 76), half of the selections from the 1970s proved available to Hershberger thanks only to the CIA, which had made transcripts of Fonda’s speeches, thus preserving them when Fonda herself was not focused on self-documentation— “I never would have sought to publish my speeches,” Fonda told LJ. The gap in Hershberger’s collection between the pieces from the Vietnam era and those from the 1990s to the present is in part owing to this disinclination of Fonda’s.

A cohesive whole

In a recent speech to the National Press Club, included in this collection, Fonda spoke about her memoir and said that, considering her life in three acts and being in the last of those, she wanted to “pull all the random bits and pieces of the first two acts into a cohesive whole.” Reading Hershberger’s collection, one is struck far more by a steady credo and a coherant evolution than by a mercurial nature, but when LJ points this out to Fonda, she is unwilling to accept the observation outright: “When I decided to make a short video of my first two 'acts’ to show at my 60th birthday I asked my daughter to help me with it. She’s made several documentaries. She said, 'Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen!’ Ouch! I wasn’t sure that she was wrong....But by the time I [went] back over my life...I realized that there were themes that connected my various morphings....Courage was one theme. Resilence was another. I saw that in all the stages I’d been a seeker. Finally, at 60, I could begin to own who I am. Better late than never!”

Always a reader...

One of Fonda’s abiding traits, evident in Hershberger’s collection as well as from Fonda’s own memoir, is that she has always been a reader and a student of texts. Because an irony of librarianship is that one can feel oppressed, daunted, and plain worn out by the choice and number of books to be selected, processed, and made available—who has time for reading them!—Fonda’s reminder to LJ that “When I imagine my life without reading I feel like I am smothering” is a useful restorative. “My children and grandchildren are avid readers....[Reading] allows me to view the world through a new lens, someone else’s lens, and that puts one at a great advantage when it comes to figuring out how to live and how to think. Some might see that as chameleon-ish. I see it as growth and expansion.”

...but not of her own words

She has not, however, read over all of these pieces—“It makes me feel self-conscious. I do think that my public speaking improved when I got brave enough to speak from the inside out....[F]or so long after I became an activist in 1970, I lacked the confidence to develop my own analysis of why things were as they were. The men I organized with and then the man I married, Tom Hayden, seemed to have a deep grasp of 'The Big Picture.’ But it was his big picture. I would wonder: Was there a big picture—a unifying narrative—that I could embrace as a woman? It took me 30 years and then some to discover my own gender-grounded narrative.”

Power and who has it

Gender-grounded, yes. In this collection we see Fonda’s work to support reproductive rights, to prevent teen pregnancy, and to empower girls, but the issue for Fonda has never been female vs. male. “It has everything to do with power and who has it,” she declared in a 2004 speech “The New Feminism,” an emblematic and stirring mixture of the political and the personal. “[I]f we’re going to lead, we have to become the change that we seek.”

Another part of her grounding? She word processes and keeps track of her own speeches now. The CIA and FBI are no longer (as far as anyone can tell) serving as stenographers. Hershberger’s source for the later pieces here was Fonda’s own hard drive.