The Female Eunuch (31 page)

proved, except negatively. The most intense vigilance will not ensure absolutely that any man is the father of his son.

Is there no way for men to be but

Women must be half-workers? We are bastards all…
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When there was property to pass on and legitimacy to be upheld, it was imperative to surround women with guards, to keep them in one place, keeping their natural curiosity and urge for movement and expression as undeveloped as possible. The chastity belt which warrior barons clapped around their wives when they went to war was the outward emblem of the fruitlessness of the struggle, the at- tempt to provide a barricado for a belly. Nowadays women demand trust and offer their free assurance about paternity, honouring the contract that they have made, to be protected, fed and housed in return for ensuring immortality in legitimate issue.

The family which is set up when a young man installs his bride in a self-contained dwelling is not really well-designed to perform the functions of ensuring paternity.

The wife is left alone most of the day without chaperone: the degree of trust demanded is correspondingly greater. The modern house- hold has neither servants nor relatives to safeguard the husband’s interest and yet it seems natural and proper, as the logical outcome of all the other patriarchal forms which have preceded it. In fact the single marriage family, which is called by anthropologists and soci- ologists the
nuclear
family, is possibly the shortest-lived familial system ever developed. In feudal times the family was of the type called a
stem
family: the head was the oldest male parent, who ruled a number of sons and their wives and children. The work of the household was divided according to the status of the female in question: the unmarried daughters did the washing and spinning and weaving, the breeding wives bred, the elder wives nursed and disciplined the children, and managed the cooking, the oldest wife supervised the smooth running of the whole. The isolation which makes the red-brick-villa household so neurotic did not exist. There was friction but it had no chance to build itself into the intense intro- verted anguish of the single eye-to-eye confrontation of the isolated spouses. Family problems could be challenged openly in the family forum and the decisions of the elders were honoured. Romantic love as a motive for cohabitation was hardly important. A man only needed to desire to breed by a woman who would fit in with his household. Disappointment, resentment and boredom had less scope. The children benefited by the arrangement and in parts of Greece and Spain and Southern Italy still do. Someone, if only grandfather or an unmarried uncle or aunt, always had time to an- swer questions, tell stories, teach new skills, or go fishing. As soon as children could walk well by themselves they had a little respons- ibility—the hens, or the dovecote, a lamb or a kid to bring up. They were not sent to bed in a dark room while their elders talked in the kitchen, but allowed to stay and listen and learn until they fell asleep in someone’s arms. Then they were quietly undressed and put to bed without

waking. There could be no generation gap because the household represented all age groups. When I lived in a tiny hamlet in Southern Italy I saw such a family bravely holding together in spite of the grimmest poverty and the absence of most of the men who were working in Germany, and their children were the happiest, the least coy and irritable of any that I have ever observed. As all the neigh- bouring families were kin, the community was strongly cohesive. The exigencies of such group living had created strong decorums which were always respected. We would have starved if it had not been for the exchange of whatever goods the kin-families had in excess for our own superabundances, for we could not have afforded food at the exorbitant prices which the
latifondiste
charged on the open market.

The stem family can provide a source of cohesion which is inimical to state control for it is immovable, and its strongest loyalty is to it- self. When the principle is exerted in defiance of instituted authority it can become the infamous
famiglia
of the Mafia. The rituals of family honour have involved the anti-social manifestations of
vendetta
and
omertà
but these are not significant until the familial, regional community is threatened by political authority. The American liber- ators were quick to see the organizational importance of the Mafia in Sicily; what they did not see was that the kind of cohesion they sought to exploit was already anachronistic and economically non- viable.

The effects of industrialization and urbanization in changing the pattern of settlement and requiring the mobility of labour have hastened the decay of the stem family, which declined in western Europe some time before the sixteenth century. The changes in tenure of land, the decay of regional authority, the centralization of govern- ment, enclosures and development of money rents and absentee landlordism all played a part in the development of the nuclear family, and yet it is only recently that the nuclear family has dwindled to the stump of community living that it now is. When the

largest proportion of the working community was in service in large households, when spinsters and unmarried sons lived in the household, when sons and daughters were most often sent away to work in other households, the family remained organic and open to external influences. Husbands and wives could not indulge in excessive introversion about their relationship which was buttressed firmly by the laws against divorce, public opinion, and the uncon- trolled size of families. Aging parents were kept and cared for in the household. But there was no longer a family business, no longer a heritage to be developed and served. The denseness of the urban community entailed estrangement from immediate neighbours, and the necessity of finding work led sons outside the immediate purview of the family. The effect of education estranged families even more especially when compulsory education created a generation more literate than their parents. The gradual expansion of education generation by generation is prolonging this effect. By the time Ibsen and Strindberg were writing their domestic tragedies the family had become a prison where the young struggled to escape the dead hand of the old, where the outside community was only represented by the policeman, the doctor and the parson, where the servants were strangers and class enemies. Puritan morality had resulted in hypo- crisy, frustration and pornography. Husband and wife danced a dance of diurnal murder. The father-protector, unable to assume any other field of superiority or prowess, was principally moral ar- biter although unfitted for the role: the wife was a designing doll, disillusioned about her husband, confused and embittered by her own idleness and insignificance. The syndrome of vicarious leisure, which Veblen describes, had come full circle. Female occupations were more conspicuously meaningless than ever. The embitterment of marriage partners had become so evidently destructive that laws to facilitate divorce began to be promulgated in most western countries. Women began to clamour for the right to

work outside domestic service, and expanding industry came to need them, especially with the depredations of the First World War upon manpower. The number of unmarried women became greater, aggravating a problem which had existed since the turn of the cen- tury. Gradually the big Victorian-built houses were subdivided into smaller units. In response to requirements for higher density housing the flat proliferated. More and more of the functions of the large household devolved upon the state: the care of the old, of the sick, of the mentally infirm and backward.

The family of the sixties is small, self-contained, self-centred and short-lived. The young man moves away from his parents as soon as he can, following opportunities for training and employment. Children live their

If strict monogamy is the height of all virtue then the palm goes to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50—200

proglottides or sections and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.

Friedrich Engels, ‘The Origin of the Family’, 1943, p.31

lives most fully at school, fathers at work. Mother is the dead heart of the family, spending father’s earnings on consumer goods to en- hance the environment in which he eats, sleeps and watches televi- sion. Children tend more and more since the war to create more vital groups of their own, assuming tribal characteristics of dress and ritual behaviour. Even the girls tend to go to work and set up house with other girls in the enormous bed-sitter belts of major cities. The wife is only significant
qua
wife when she is bearing and raising small children, but the conditions under which she carries out this important work and the confusion which exists about the proper

way to perform it increase her isolation from her community and intensify the parental relationship in these earliest years.

The working girl who marries, works for a period after her mar- riage and retires to breed, is hardly equipped for the isolation of the nuclear household. Regardless of whether she enjoyed the menial work of typing or selling or waitressing or clerking, she at least had freedom of movement to a degree. Her horizon shrinks to the house, the shopping centre and the telly. Her child is too much cared for, too diligently regarded during the day and, when her husband re- turns from work, soon banished from the adult world to his bed, so that Daddy can relax. The Oedipal situation which is always duplic- ated in marriage is now intensified to a degree which Freud would have found appalling. Father is very really a rival and a stranger. During the day the child may be bullied as often as petted: what is certain is that he has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother

The complex known to the Freudian school, and assumed by them to be universal, I mean, the Oedipus complex, corresponds essentially to our patrilineal Aryan family with the developed ‘patria potestas’, buttressed by Roman law and Christian morals, and accentuated by the modern economic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie.

Bronislaw Malinowski ‘Sex and Repression in Savage Society’, 1927, p.5

and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother’s accessibility, badgering her with questions and demands which are not of any real consequence to him, embarrassing her in public, blackmailing her into buying sweets and carrying him. De- pendence does not mean love. The child’s attitude towards school, which takes him away from his mother after five years

of enforced intimacy, is as ambivalent as his feelings about his mother. As long as it is an escape it is welcome but when it becomes demanding the child finds that he can play mother and school off against each other. The jealousy which mothers have of school and the attempt of the school to establish a source of control over the child in opposition to the mother can result in highly fraught situ- ations. The anti-social nature of this mother—child relationship is very evident to schoolteachers especially when it is a question of

discipline or treatment of emotional disturbance.
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The unfortunate wife-mother finds herself anti-social in other ways as well. The home is her province, and she is lonely there. She wants her family to spend time with her for her only significance is in relation to that almost fictitious group. She struggles to hold her children to her, imposing restrictions, waiting up for them, prying into their affairs. They withdraw more and more into non-commu- nication and thinly veiled contempt. She begs her husband not to go out with the boys, marvels that he can stand in the pouring rain at the football and then be too tired to mend the roof or cut the grass on the finest day. She moans more and more that he doesn’t care what the children are up to, that discipline is all left to her, that nobody talks to her, that she’s ignorant, that she had given the best years of her life to a bunch of ungrateful hooligans. Politics is a mystery and a boring one; sport is evidence of the failure of men to grow up. The best thing that can happen is that she take up again where she left off and go back to work at a job which was only a stop gap when she began it, in which she can expect no promotion, no significant remuneration, and no widening of her horizons, for the demands of the household must still be met. Work of all kinds becomes a hypnotic. She cleans, she knits, she embroiders. And so forth.

Women trying to counteract the tendency of the nuclear household to isolate them from social contacts have peculiar difficulties. Anne Allen reported this

conversation with a young married woman in the
Sunday Mirror
:

‘Look,’ she said. ‘We have about a dozen really good friends. People I am closer to than anyone in my family. People I like better and know better.

‘But what happens?
We have to organize ourselves in order to meet
. Someone has to find a baby-sitter. The other couple feel bound to make a nice supper for us.

‘Then either the baby is ill, or someone feels tired, and you wish you had not arranged it. Or we all enjoy ourselves so much that it is really sad that it all has to break up so early.

‘But just think what it would be like if a close group of friends lived in one building, or one street. It could happen.

‘There are architects working on one or two specially planned buildings where everyone has his own bit and a huge communal living area.

‘Personally I could not bear to share sexually, and I would be as bad as my mother about sharing a kitchen. I value my privacy too much.

‘But there are dozens of times when I long for someone to talk to in the daytime. Or when I am lonely if my husband works overnight. Or when he and I are arguing and I want to get away for an hour.

‘I just can’t think of any way I would rather live than with my husband and with most of my closest friends around us. After all, thousands of people become close friends with their neighbours.

We would just be reversing the procedure.’
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