From the Archive: April 1st, 1969
What would you expect a woman’s first words in The Nassau Literary Review to be? In the 1969 issue of The Nassau Literary Review, the year women were first admitted to Princeton, the last piece is authored by a woman, maybe the first ever — Sara K. Swan.
Swan’s poem cuts with imagery of a brutal murder, a murder of a life she was intimately related to: in fact, it was “inside” of her and existed “between the sheets.” The life was, most likely, a fetus. Swan invites us to complete her sentence, “At the third month, [a baby is] an average length of”… three to four inches. Three months also marks the first trimester of pregnancy, during which miscarriages most commonly occur. “Blood is staining the white sheet,” she says, and the “life” that was “thinned to blood” during a “deathlike sleep.”
The speaker’s anatomical description of this fetus’s death, of a head being “cut off” and “tiny bodies … dismembered,” shows that she envisions this death as violent and unexpected. Her tone is also troubled. “She never asked to be a murderer,” the speaker states, indicating profound regret.
Did this speaker’s experience of losing a baby belong to Swan? To a friend? A made up person? I was unable to find “Sara K. Swan” in the Class of ’69 Directory, making me wonder if it’s a pseudonym. Regardless, by refusing to police her emotions, Swan has written a surprising first-ever female contribution to The Nassau Literary Review. Simply by being penned by a woman, this poem’s very existence is already a form of protest. But it’s also an exceptional form of protest which speaks unabashedly about an experience that’s usually reserved for hushed conversation. Think about it: pregnancy is construed to be a womanly expectation, or even a requirement; today, and definitely in 1969, one could argue that fertility makes a woman identifiable as a “woman.” It could also be said in 1969 that the ability to create and birth life quietly, without a fuss, emerging afterwards emotionally and physically unchanged, is what makes women “good women.” Despite this, Swan makes her description of the baby’s life being “drained” from the woman’s body loud, uncensored, and just a big bloody mess. It completely abandons the notion of a “good woman.”
I smile thinking about this poem being published by an all-male editorial team and read by a majority-male student body. Pseudonym or not, Sara K. Swan’s writing must’ve rippled throughout Princeton’s campus on April 1, 1969.
This piece is part of The Nassau Literary Review’s From The Archive series, made possible by the work of Aaron Robertson ’17 and Papers of Princeton. Its publication coincides with She Roars: A Celebration of Princeton Women 2018.
