The Female Eunuch (34 page)
I daresay if I’m lucky enough to find a secure job bringing in really good money I’ll get like the rest of them. It’s amazing what a little money in the bank and a nice home will do for you. You start thinking about running a car and keeping your garden tidy and life insurance, and two telly sets—and you don’t have time to worry about the larger issues of how many people are starving in Africa.
Security can be a killer, and corrode your mind and soul. But I wish I had it.
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Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves. It is agreed that Englishmen coped magnificently with a war, and were more cheerful, enterprising and friendly under the daily threat of bombardment than they are now under benevolent peacetime, when we are so far from worrying about how many people starve in Africa that we can tolerate British policy in Nigeria. John Greenaway did not realize that his bastions of security would provide new opportunities for threat. The Elizabethans called the phenomenon
mutability
, and mourned the passing of all that was fair and durable with a kind of melancholy elation, seeing in the Heraclitean dance of the elements
a divine purpose and a progress to a Platonic immutability in an unearthly region of ideas.
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Greenaway cannot have access to this
kind of philosophic detachment; neither can he adopt the fatalism of the peasant who is always mocked by the unreliability of the seasons. He believes that there is such a thing as security: that an employer might pay him less but guarantee him secure tenure, that he might be allowed to live and die in the same house if he pays for it, that he can bind himself to a wife and family as assurance against abandonment and loneliness.
The oddest thing about the twentieth-century chimera of security is that it was forged in the age of greatest threat. No disaster so im- minent and so uncontrollable as total war was ever dreamt of before the atomic age. It seems as if men have only to defuse one kind of threat before another takes its place. Disease grows more complic- ated; the possibilities of aggression and destruction exceed Pope Gregory’s wildest dreams. An international agreement proscribes the use of gas and so germ warfare must be developed. And so forth. Insecurity in human life is a constant factor, and I suppose efforts to eliminate it are just about as constant.
Greenaway mixes up security of life and possessions with emo- tional security, and it is difficult to see how he could do otherwise. Part of the mystery in our use of the idea is the suggestion of blame in the epithet
insecure
when applied to a personality. Moreover, it is assumed that women especially need to feel secure, reassured of love and buttressed by the comforts of home. Women who refuse to marry are seen to be daring insecurity, facing a desolate old age, courting poverty and degradation. But husbands die, pensions are inadequate, children grow up and go away and mothers become mothers-in-law. Women’s work, married or unmarried, is menial and low-paid. Women’s right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a
possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty-odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be. The laws which make divorce easier increase the insecurity of a wife. The jibe of emotional insecurity is a criticism of a woman’s refusal to delude herself that she cannot be abandoned; it is hard indeed to rely upon an uncertain relationship which will become even more fragile if it is tested by demands for reassurance. The marriage service promises security: for the religious it is a sac- ramental sign and the security is security in heaven where husband and wife can be one flesh; for women who understand it as a kind of lifelong contract for personal management by one man it is a patently unsatisfactory document. The safeguards and indemnities ought to be written into it at the outset as they are in management contracts and then it would have at least the value of a business document. A sacramental sign in an atheistic age has no value at all. It would be better for all concerned if its contractual nature were a
little clearer.
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If marriage were a contract with safeguards and indemnities in- dicated in it it would still not provide emotional security. Its value would be in that it
did not appear to
provide it, so that women would not be encouraged to rely absolutely upon a situation which had no intrinsic permanence. The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband’s house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the
reductio ad absurdum
of the case of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employ- ment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked. The only alternative for the worker and the wife is to refuse to consider the bait of security and bargain openly. To do this a woman must have a different kind of security, the kind of personal
security which enables her to consider insecurity as freedom.
Women are asked to exercise the virtue of personal security even if they do not have it, for they are supposed not to feel threatened within their marriages and not to take measures to safeguard their interests, although they do do all these things. Self-reliance is theor- etically necessary within marriage so logically there is no reason to accept a chimeric security which must not be relied upon if it is to eventuate. The search for security is undertaken by the weakest part of the personality, by fear, inadequacy, fatigue and anxiety. Women are not gamblers even to the small extent that men are. Wives tend to limit their husband’s enterprise, especially if it involves risks, and consequently the opportunities for achievement, delight and surprise are limited.
Marriage—having a home and a wife and children—has a very im- portant place in life. A man wouldn’t be complete without them—but I don’t believe in tying yourself down until you’ve done something on your own first.
Most people get the best job they can, work for promotion and when they’re earning enough money meet a girl and marry her. Then you have to buy a house and a car, and there you are—chained down for the rest of your life. When you get to thirty-five you’re frightened to try anything new in case you lose your security. Then
it means living with all the regrets about things you wanted to do.
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This is how Mike Russell, the twenty-one-year-old reporter on the
Edinburgh Evening News
saw marriage and security in 1964. What he identified was the function of the wife in screwing her husband into his place in the commercial machine. The welfare state justifies its existence by the promise of security and forces the worker to in- sure against his own restlessness and any accident that may befall him by taking contributions for his old age and illness out of his wages, at the same time as it uses some of his earnings to carry on developing the greatest threats to his continuing existence in the name of defence. A wife is the ally in such repression. The
demands of home, mortgages, and hire-purchase payments support the immobilizing tendencies of his employment, militating against his desires for job control and any interest in direct action. If the correct level of remuneration is maintained, and the anomalies of the situation are not too apparent, the married man is a docile and reliable worker. By playing upon insecurity fears about immigrants and discontent with wage freezes and productivity deals, an adroit Tory can convert the working class to the most arrant conservatism. If women would reject their roles in this pattern, recognizing in- security as freedom, they would not be perceptibly worse off for it.
Cynics notice that economically unmarried couples are often better off on taxation deals and so forth than married ones. Spiritually a
Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a
search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society
is friendship.
Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, pp. 56–7
woman is better off if she cannot be taken for granted. Obviously informal relationships can be more binding than formal ones if pat- terns of mutual exploitation develop, and they usually do, but if women were to keep spontaneous association as an ideal, the stulti- fying effects of symbiosis could be lessened. The situation could re- main open, capable of development into richer fields. Adultery would hold no threat if women were sure that the relationships they enjoyed were truly rewarding and not merely preserved by censor- ship of other possibilities. Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to com- municate. Many a housewife staring
at the back of her husband’s newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room. Much of the loneliness of lonely people springs from distrust and egotism, not from their having failed to set themselves up in a conjugal arrange- ment. The marriage bargain offers what cannot be delivered if it is thought to offer emotional security, for such security is the achievement of the individual. Possessive love, for all its seductive- ness, breaks down that personal poise and leaves its victims newly vulnerable. Those miserable women who blame the men who
let them down
for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves. They would not have been any happier if they had remained married. When a man woos a woman he strives to make himself as indispens- able as any woman is to any man: he may even determine to impreg- nate her to break down her self-sufficiency. In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inad- equacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early condition- ing tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to re- member that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self- reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and ob- scenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep.
Women have very little idea of how much men hate them. Any boy who has grown up in an English industrial town can describe how the boys used to go to the local dance halls and stand around all night until the pressure of the simplest kind of sexual urge prompted them to
score a chick
. The easier this was the more they loathed the girls and identified them with the guilt that their squalid sexual re- lease left them. ‘A walk to the bus-stop was usually good for a wank,’ they say bitterly. The girls are detached, acquiescent and helpless, probably hoping that out of the relief they imagine they are giving some affection and protective sentiment might be born. The more reckless get fucked, standing up against a wall, or lying on a leather coat thrown on the ground in the Woolworth’s bike sheds. No greater satisfaction ensues from this chilly expedient. ‘A wank was as good as a jump in those days.’ Afterwards the boys are brusque, hurrying the girls to the bus-stop, relishing only the prospect of telling the other boys about their conquest. In the moments immedi- ately after ejaculation they felt murderously disgusted. ‘For when
I’m finished I’m finished. I wanted to strangle her right there in my bed and then go to sleep.’
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They are all permanently broke, living
at home with their parents; even if they strike up a steady relation- ship with one girl, it is a querulous business based on deadly routine and constant whining and bickering. In a rapt and haphazard way they find release in fighting any other bunch of boys who look good for a scrap. They fight bitchily, leaping at unprepared enemies, biting them savagely on the face or
the neck, and running away before they can retaliate, dumb with outrage.
To such bitter children the only interesting women are the avail- able ones; they do not think more highly of the unavailable girls, for they find in such exclusivity only the desire to strike a harder bar- gain: these are the bitches, the others are the slags. A man is bound to end up with one or the other. Marriage is viewed with fatalism, sooner or later you are sure to find yourself screwed permanently into the system, working in a dead-end job to keep a fading woman and her noisy children in inadequate accommodation in a dull town for the term of your natural life. Soon even the energy to fight will ebb away, and the only escape will be momentary, an hour or two in the pub as often as the missus will let you go there. So they see sex as their undoing, a vile servitude with women as its unwitting enforcers.
One has the right to doubt whether the wars between the baboons are as cruel and deleterious for males and females when they are free.