The picture of Kath and me on the steps of Betsy and Joe’s first apartment house sits on
top of my green bookshelf at home, in the living room, in the white ceramic frame. Every
time I look at it I smile, and I think of Minneapolis and of writing and of posh hotels and
polished shoes and I wonder, often, whether I love Betsy because I’m a writer, or I’m a
writer because I love Betsy.

I think of our friend Dave, too—photographer and tour guide and “confidential friend” on
this trip—holding the camera and smiling, in that way that is so very indulgent and male
and yet somehow not at all condescending, as he takes our picture. Dave is fascinated with
all things feminine and womanly—and by this I mean not just the Victoria’s
Secret catalog but the sorts of things Blythe Clinchy and Mary Belenky might discuss as
“women’s ways of knowing,” from their study of women creating knowledge and communicating.
With Dave it is possible—important, even—to be a woman and a scholar— to talk postmodernism
and Pottery Barn—at one time and in one space. This makes him as fascinating as he is
fascinated. And Dave is, therefore and most of all, the very best kind of companion and
tour guide as we make our pilgrimage through the city.

We love Minneapolis, Kath and I. It is one of those rare cities where you feel at home
before you even get there. You are as excited to see it as you are to see an old and
important friend. And it is not just Dave’s presence awaiting us that makes us so anxious
to get there, although Dave is important. Dave is graduate school in Illinois important,
late nights and lots of coffee important—drag you back to reality from bad relationship
important. Minneapolis, though, is where we are born as feminists and as writers, before we
even get there.

And it is Dave who helps me to begin to realize this as we sit on Betsy and Joe’s front
steps, looking up at the elm tree that shaded their bay window, and negotiate our next stop
on our tour/shopping trip to the city. We’ve already been to Mankato, where Betsy and Tacy
grew up and went to high school. We’ve seen Betsy’s house, peeked in the windows of Tacy’s,
and we’ve shared a snack on the bench at the top of Hill Street. We’ve decided to visit
Longfellow’s Minnehaha Falls on the way home. Should we drive out to Lake Minnetonka, where
Betsy and Joe go on their honeymoon and plan their lives as writers? Or should we go
uptown, a district Dave says is actually in the south part of Minneapolis, where all the
trendy boutiques and antique stores are?

When someone asks me just what it is I like about the Betsy-Tacy novels, sometimes I have a
hard time getting beyond the descriptions of the clothes, and Vera Neville’s illustrations.
Sometimes, it’s like reading a fashion magazine.

Kathy and I go shopping at Dayton’s (without Dave, who says he has to draw the line
somewhere), and we talk about Betsy’s clothes as we try our own stuff on. We know her
wardrobe as well as she does, from the dress she wears to her first dance—“It was pink silk
with white daisies on it, and with it Betsy would wear a wreath of daisies in her hair” to
the Paris suit—“the skirt was long; the jacket belted with crushed crimson satin” she wears
home from Europe. I find a photo of my grandmother in a suit like Betsy’s, and I bring it
along to show Kathy.

We know that she curls her hair and rubs cream into her face every night, and we know that
“Like most girls, she had worked out a technique for fascination. With Betsy it was
thoroughly curled hair, perfume, bracelets, the color green, immaculate daintiness, and a
languid enigmatic pose.”

It’s easy to reminisce, for Kath and me, about the parties and dances and boys that inhabit
the high school books. College, too, goes by in a “gay whirl of parties.”

Sometimes Betsy is so very feminine—such the quintessential girl—that I think of her as
essentially not feminist, and that disturbs me.

There are other things, too. Just before her marriage, Betsy tells herself to “handle Joe’s
money well,” and “keep yourself looking nice when Joe’s around. Don’t plaster on sticky
creams at night or wear your hair in curlers.” When a family situation causes their first
real disagreement, she struggles, and then says, “One person in the family has to have the
final word. I want it to be Joe, always.” I want to dismiss this as a piece of the
Betsy-Tacy stories that is less timeless than the rest, but I have a hard time.

This is what is on my mind when I look at my little cousins, Kiera and Stephanie, and I
think about what books I’d give them if I were their mother. Even as their cousin, I choose
the books I give them carefully. I give Kiera Madeleine L’Engle, whose teenage character
Vicky Austin struggles to figure out who she is and what that means. I give Stephanie
Harry Potter, and wonder if, as one of my colleagues at school says, Harry should have been
a girl.

But when I see a compilation of the first four Betsy-Tacy books—perfect to mail to them—I
actually hesitate. And when I buy two copies, I justify it by saying, “Well, it’s a good
story about friendship between women.” I’m not sure what it meant to me as a feminist text,
or what I want them to learn from it. What did I learn?

There are all sorts of studies out there about adolescent girls losing self esteem and
about women being betrayed instead of empowered by their mothers and the media when they’re
taught to please men or society in general instead of valuing who they are. I don’t feel
betrayed by my mother, but I do remember junior high, and it wasn’t pretty.

We stay, in Minneapolis, at the Radisson, on the concierge floor, and although I’m 31, I
feel like a kid playing grownup. While we are out shopping, someone actually polishes our
shoes. We tell Dave we want to eat dinner somewhere trendy and fancy, just so we can dress
up—but not until after we enjoy the complimentary cocktail hour at the hotel. “Cocktails,”
Kathy says. “Not two beers, two bucks.”

Betsy fades in and out for me during this weekend—in as we roam around old Minneapolis,
looking at the first house she and Joe owned, walking streets she probably walked—and out
as we move from giddy girls having our picture taken on the apartment steps to chic diners
dressed all in black at a trendy city restaurant talking literature. But in that way, I
realize, we’re like Betsy.

Betsy spends a lot of time figuring out who she is and what matters to her, and then she
spends a lot of time carving out a space for that person. She loses herself in life and
parties and relationships, and finds herself in her writing. “Was life always like that?
she wondered. A game of hide and seek in which you only occasionally found the person you
wanted to be?”

After dinner, Dave takes us on a walk through the Marsh Arcade—now the Nicollet Mall—where
Joe gets a job writing publicity to raise money for Belgian refugees, and where, Dave tells
us, decades later Mary Tyler Moore tosses her hat in the air and decides she’s going to
“make it after all,” and I consider this:

It’s about power, I think. In graduate school, we read often about empowering our students,
teaching in ways that are libratory and not oppressive. And we struggle a lot with the how
of this question. There are a lot of different conceptions of power according to a lot of
different theorists, but here is what I take away from all these discussions: you can’t
just give away power, like it’s a package. It’s no good for me to say, “I’m going to have a
student-centered classroom,” where my students are responsible for their own learning.
Nope, doesn’t work. I can’t just hand them the power. I can’t say, “Here is the syllabus,
and here is your equal share of the power in this room. If you lose it, I have extras.”

Power, I think, is about being careful about how the positions you take, the actions you
take, affect the people around you. And it is Dave who seems to know this—who shows it to
us—instinctively.

The space Betsy inhabits within “Betsy and Joe”—the relationship—is by its nature powerful.
I can almost feel it as I put myself in those same physical spaces, the spaces where Betsy
was created, where she created herself. The space exists for her to be exactly who she is,
who she wants to be—writer, wife, struggling housekeeper, burner-of-the-meat-pie and all
the spaces in between. Joe has not given her power; he has not “let her” continue to write.
He has accepted her just as she is. He is her Mark Darcy. He says, “This is who you are,”
when he insists she is not the typical 1914 housewife, and they hire someone to clean. He
says, “We’ll put it this way. You are a writer. You’ve always been writing stories, and the
last few years you’ve been selling them.”

Betsy’s high school commencement speech begins, “The heroines of Shakespeare are
essentially human.” So is Betsy, so are we human and complicated and flawed. Seeing Dave,
talking to him about Marxist criticism and new sofas, politics and Thai food, I realize it
about Betsy, and that helps me realize it about myself.

Dave has somehow escaped graduate school unscathed by the elitist, snobby and old-school
feminist positions we encounter so often. He tries to get inside our minds and when he
does, he is often in awe of what he finds there—almost like the very best kind of teacher,
the kind you know loves you, so you’re not afraid to take chances. He makes it cool to be
who you are.

So we sit in red leather chairs in the hotel bar at the Radisson drinking whisky and soda,
and we feel just as cool as Betsy and Tacy did as juniors, when they had coffee at
Heinze’s, and realized that they were young women with manicures and skirts to their ankles
and busy, vital lives, and not just playing at it anymore.

Somewhere along the line we realize that we, too—Kath and me and even Dave—have busy vital
lives—the kind we are no longer waiting to start, the kind we are no longer playing at, the
kind we are living right now. We haven’t made a decision to be feminists, or not to be—to
be frivolous and fashion-conscious or to be intellectuals. It’s not a binary: either/or.
It’s more of an and—Dave is, and we are.

And I bring home photos of Mankato and Minneapolis, of Betsy’s house, Tacy’s house, the
bench at the top of Hill Street. And I tell Kiera and Stephanie that as soon as they’re old
enough, I’ll take them there, and we’ll eat on Betsy and Tacy’s bench, and we’ll walk
through the Marsh Arcade, picnic at Minnehaha Falls and look for the Japanese boathouse at
Lake Minnetonka. And we’ll talk about Betsy’s life as a writer, a woman, a wife and mother,
and we’ll build our own lives as we go along.

Elizabeth Cone teaches writing at a community college on Long Island, New York. She first found Betsy-Tacy in the Children’s section of the Smithtown Public Library, and has been a fan ever since. Elizabeth is currently on sabbatical and working on a collection of essays about the stories families tell about themselves and how those stories work to define family members.