The Female Eunuch (33 page)
Obviously any woman who thinks in the simplest terms of liber- ating herself to enjoy life and create expression for her own potential cannot accept such a role. And yet marriage is based upon this filial relationship of a wife who takes her husband’s name, has her tax declared on his return, lives in a house owned by him and goes about in public as his companion wearing his ring on her finger at all times. Alteration in detail is
…the signing of a marriage contract is the most important business transaction in which you will ever become involved…One or other of the principals
should function as the managing director of the household
—preferably the husband: although at times his only qualification for the position is brute strength…The children as they come along are the new investments undertaken by the firm; and the directors should see to it that there is a good return for the assets invested.
Cyrus Fullerton, ‘Happiness and Health in Womanhood’, 1937, pp. 40–41
not alteration in anything else. A husband who agrees that he too will wear a ring, that they will have a joint bank account, that the house will be in both their names, is not making any serious conces- sions to a wife’s personal needs. The essential character of the insti- tution asserts itself eventually. The very fact that such concessions are privileges which a wife cannot claim contains its own special consequences of gratitude and more willing servitude. And yet if a woman is to have children, if humanity is to survive, what alternative can there be?
To begin with, the problem of the survival of humanity is not a matter of ensuring the birth of future generations but of limiting it. The immediate danger to humanity is that of total annihilation within a generation or two, not the failure of mankind to breed. A woman seeking alternative modes of life is no longer morally bound to pay her debt to nature. Those families in which the parents replace themselves in two children are not the most desirable ones for chil- dren to grow up in, for the neuroses resultant from the intensified Oedipal situation are worse in cases where the relationship with the parents is more dominant than the problems of adjusting to a peer group of brothers and sisters. There is no reason, except the moral prejudice that women who do not have children are shirking a re- sponsibility, why all
women should consider themselves bound to breed. A woman who has a child is not then automatically committed to bringing it up. Most societies countenance the deputizing of nurses to bring up the children of women with state duties. The practice of putting children out to nurse did not result in a race of psychopaths. A child must have care and attention, but that care and attention need not emanate from a single, permanently present individual. Children are more disturbed by changes of place than by changes in personnel around them, and more distressed by friction and ill-feeling between the adults in their environment than by unfamiliarity. A group of chil- dren can be more successfully civilized by one or two women who have voluntarily undertaken the work than they can be when divided and tyrannized over by a single woman who finds herself bored and imposed upon. The alternative is not the institutionalization of par- ental functions in some bureaucratic form, nothing so cold and haphazard as a baby farm, but an organic family where the child society can merge with an adult society in conditions of love and personal interest. The family understood not as a necessary condition of existence in a system but as a chosen way of life can become a goal, an achievement of a creative kind.
If women could regard childbearing not as a duty or an inescap- able destiny but as a privilege to be worked for, the way a man might work for the right to have a family, children might grow up without the burden of gratitude for the gift of life which they never asked for. Brilliant women are not reproducing themselves because child- bearing has been regarded as a full-time job; genetically they might be thought to be being bred out. In a situation where a woman might contribute a child to a household which engages her attention for part of the time while leaving her free to frequent other spheres of influence, brilliant women might be more inclined to reproduce. For some time now I have pondered the problem of having a child which would not suffer from my neuroses and the difficulties I would have
in adjusting to a husband and the demands of domesticity. A plan, by no means a blueprint, evolved which has become a sort of dream. No child ought, I opine, to grow up in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a city flat, where he has little chance of exercising his limbs or his lungs; I must work in a city where the materials for my work and its market are available. No child ought to grow up alone with a single resentful girl who is struggling to work hard enough to provide for herself and him. I thought again of the children I knew in Calabria and hit upon the plan to buy, with the help of some friends with similar problems, a farmhouse in Italy where we could stay when circumstances permitted, and where our children would be born. Their fathers and other people would also visit the house as often as they could, to rest and enjoy the children and even work a bit. Perhaps some of us might live there for quite long periods, as long as we wanted to. The house and garden would be worked by a local family who lived in the house. The children would have a region to explore and dominate, and different skills to learn from all of us. It would not be paradise, but it would be a little community with a chance of survival, with parents of both sexes and a multitude of roles to choose from. The worst aspect of kibbutz living could be avoided, especially as the children would not have to be strictly persuaded out of sexual experimentation with their peers, an unnat- ural restriction which has had serious consequences for the children of kibbutzim. Being able to be with my child and his friends would be a privilege and a delight that I could work for. If necessary the child need not even know that I was his womb-mother and I could have relationships with the other children as well. If my child ex- pressed a wish to try London and New York or go to formal school somewhere, that could also be tried without committal.
Any new arrangement which a woman might devise will have the disadvantage of being peculiar: the children would not have been brought up like other children in
an age of uniformity. There are problems of legitimacy and nation- ality to be faced. Our society has created the myth of the
broken home
which is the source of so many ills, and yet the unbroken home which ought to have broken is an even greater source of tension as I can attest from bitter experience. The rambling organic structure of my ersatz household would have the advantage of being an un- breakable home in that it did not rest on the frail shoulders of two bewildered individuals trying to apply a contradictory blueprint. This little society would confer its own normality, and other contacts with civilization would be encouraged, but it may well be that such children would find it impossible to integrate with society and be- come drop-outs or schizo-phrenics. As such they would not be very different from other children I have known. The notion of integrating
For a male and female to live continuously together is… biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition.
Robert Briffault, ‘Sin and Sex’, 1931, p. 140
with society as if society were in some way homogenous is itself a false one. There are enough eccentrics carving out various lifestyles for my children to feel that they are no more isolated than any other minority group within the fictitious majority. In the computer age disintegration may well appear to be a higher value than integration. Cynics might argue that the children of my household would be anxious to set up ‘normal’ families as part of the natural counter- reaction. Perhaps. When faced with such dubious possibilities, there is only empiricism to fall back on. I could not, physically, have a child any other way, except by accident and under protest in a hand- to-mouth sort of way in which case I could not accept any respons- ibility for the consequences. I should like to be able to think that I had done my best.
The point of an organic family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being the extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that adults perform for them naturally without establishing depend- encies. There could be scope for them to initiate their own activities and define the mode and extent of their own learning. They might come to resent their own strangeness but in other circumstances they might resent normality; faced with difficulties of adjustment children seize upon their parents and their upbringing to serve as scapegoats. Parents have no option but to enjoy their children if they want to avoid the cycle of exploitation and recrimination. If they want to enjoy them they must construct a situation in which such enjoyment is possible.
The institution of self-regulating organic families may appear to be a return to chaos. Genuine chaos is more fruitful than the chaos of conflicting systems which are mutually destructive. When heredity has decayed and bureaucracy is the rule, so that the only riches are earning power and mobility, it is absurd that the family should persist in the pattern of patriliny. It is absurd that people should live more densely than ever before while pretending that they are still in a cottage with a garden. It is absurd that people should pledge themselves for life when divorce is always possible. It is absurd that families should claim normality when confusion about the meaning and function of parenthood means that children born within a decade of each other and a mile of each other can be brought up entirely differently. To breast feed or not breast feed? To toilet train when and how? To punish, if ever? To reward? It is absurd that so many children should grow up in environments where their existence is frowned upon. It is absurd that children should fear adults outside the immediate family. Generation X, the generation gap, the Mods, the Rockers, the Hippies, the Yippies, the Skinheads, the Maoists, the young Fascists of Europe,
rebels without a cause, whatever patronizing names their parent generation can find for them, the young are accusing their elders of spurious assumption of authority to conceal their own confusion. Vandalism, steel-capped boots, drugs, football rioting, these are chaos and the attempts of instituted authority to deal with them are more chaotic still. The juvenile offender dares the system or one of the systems to cope with him and it invariably fails. The status quo is chaos masquerading as order: our children congregate to express an organic community in ritual and uniform, which can make non- sense of state authority. The Californian police do not dare to inter- fere with the Hell’s Angels who make a mockery of their punitive law by refusing to do the things that their parents might have done if they had had that power. The same sort of mockery is uttered by the Black Panthers. The family is already broken down: technology has outstripped conservatism. The only way the state-father can deal with its uncontrollable children is to bash and shoot them in the streets or send them to a war, the ultimate chaos.
Reich described the authoritarian compulsive family as ‘part and parcel, and, at the same time, prerequisite, of the authoritarian state
and of authoritarian society’.
9
Like the family, the state belies itself
by its own confusion and permissiveness although ultimately it in- tervenes to exercise its authority chaotically. In England the ‘excesses’ of youth are contained and allowed to spend themselves until they can be controlled or punished discreetly, so that they do not inflame the dormant young population unduly. The result is political and social chaos, the ‘sexual wilderness’. The formlessness, the legal non- existence of my dream household is a safeguard against the chaos of conflicting loyalties, of conflicting education apparata, of conflict- ing judgements. My child will not be guided at all because the guidance offered him by this society seeks to lead him
backwards and forwards and sideways all at once. If we are to recov- er serenity and joy in living, we will have to listen to what our chil- dren tell us in their own way, and not impose our own distorted image upon them in our crazy families.
There is no such thing as security. There never has been. And yet we speak of security as something which people are entitled to; we explain neurosis and psychosis as springing from the lack of it. Al- though security is not in the nature of things, we invent strategies for outwitting fortune, and call them after their guiding deity insur- ance, assurance, social security. We employ security services, pay security guards. And yet we know that the universe retains powers of unforeseen disaster that cannot be indemnified. We know that superannuation and pension schemes are not proof against the fluctuations of modern currency. We know that money cannot repay a lost leg or a lifetime of headaches or scarred beauty, but we arrange it just the same. In a dim way we realize that our vulnerability to fortune increases the more we rig up defences against the unforesee- able. Money in the bank, our own home, investments, are extensions of the areas in which we can be damaged. The more superannuation one amasses the more one can be threatened by the loss of it. The more the state undertakes to protect a man from illness and indi- gence, the more it has the right to sacrifice him to the common good, to demolish his house and kill his animals, to hospitalize his children or take them into approved homes; the more government forms upon which his name appears, the more numerous the opportunities for him to be calumniated in high places. John Greenaway fell for the mythology of the welfare state, and allowed the chimera to tan- talize him before he was eighteen years old.
I don’t feel very secure, and I’d like to marry one day. I suppose it’s for security.
You have to feel secure first and foremost. If you have no money in the bank to fall back on you can never be free from worry…
It’s not that I have much insecurity at home, I have a good home.
I just can’t feel secure because of the state of the world…