The Female Eunuch (39 page)
I started with tranquillizers at the time I went to my family doctor to ask his advice about a problem concerning my marriage.
This letter appeared in
Forum
as a caution to other women who might follow the primrose path of symptomatic treatment for an intolerable situation. Mrs J. S. used up two supplies of pills in all innocence, and then discovered that she had withdrawal symptoms:
When the new supply ran out I thought I’d try to do without them. On the first day I felt a bit jumpy, but after a couple of drinks in the evening my nerves quietened down. The following day it was worse. I was terribly irritable with my husband and the children. I had palpitations and the palms of my hands were sweaty. As the days passed, there was no question but that I had become addicted to tranquillizers. I just had to have more pills.
She went to another doctor to be cured of the addiction, but he gave her more pills. At least the addiction supplied a more pressing and uncomplicated problem than her intolerable situation. Her story has no end:
I had to continue taking my tranquillizers to stop worrying about my new worries. Today, I can’t imagine life without my pills any more than an alcoholic can without a drink. I was talking with a friend last week who is attending a psychiatrist. Anyway, she was telling me what a marvellous thing analysis is and how her doctor has helped her. I was with her a few hours and I noticed that during that time she twice went to her handbag and took a little pill. I could
have sworn that they are the same as mine. She thinks they are little miracle workers. I didn’t even bother to explain to her their futility.
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Mr Michael Ryman, a psychiatric worker with the drug-addiction unit at All-Saints Hospital, Birmingham,
reported that he had watched for eleven years while increasing numbers of housewives (he did not supply figures) trailed into the clinic to be weaned off high
Then Miss Simmons, who is married to the Hollywood producer—director, Richard Brooks, explained: ‘I was terribly lonely when Richard was away on his movies. It was like you see on the screen. I was hooked on TV
and booze.
‘It’s a disastrous combination. I just sat there with the kids in bed, watching TV and drinking. Night after night.
‘It’s lovely being with the children. Tracy is now thirteen and Kate is eight. But, of course, they have their own chums.
‘And it can be very lonely, sitting there alone in a big house at nights. That’s how drink became my
big problem.’
‘News of the World’, 5 April 1970
dosages of barbiturates, tranquillizers and stimulants. He admitted that their success rate with these cases was particularly small. His attitude was moralistic, as the professional attitude always is, eventually. He spoke of women using sleeping pills ‘because they cannot sleep or face the sexual advances of a too-ardent husband’ (the double-think in the latter idea is masterful), who ‘live on tran- quillizers to counteract the slightest domestic crisis’, who ‘swallow anti-depressant capsules to help them through their dull and dreary day’. ‘Tranquillizer addicts have, for example been known to rush to the pill bottle after such minor upsets as boiling potatoes dry, finding a light bulb smashed and getting behind with the weekly wash’.
He does not ponder why it is that women can get themselves into such a state that trivial matters can become unbearable. It is not
surprising that he has such a tiny proportion of successes, if this is the level of analysis to which these women are subjected.
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The
Glasgow Committee of the Royal Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children reported that an increasing number of Glasgow mothers were taking drugs ‘to escape from reality’, another morally
suspect activity.
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The housewives’ life is not real: it is anachronistic
and thwarting: women have been exposed to too many other kinds of life to revert to four walls and people two foot high without strain. The refusal to accept this as a rewarding life is not a refusal to accept reality. All these symptoms of tiredness, lassitude, ‘nerves’, as wo- men are apt to call them, are neurasthenia, and have the complex psychosomatic origin that the name implies. No amount of direct medication can be effective, unless women can also be brainwashed into deluding themselves that their monotonous and unremitting drugery in the home is for any purpose or doing any good. A housewife’s work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not. The confusion about the degree of bringing necessary, and the multitude of mistakes which the unsus- pecting mother is assured on all sides that she will make, and has made, if things aren’t working out, show that she is without guidance yet loaded with responsibility.
…give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature…
From a letter of Charlotte Brontë
Women often imagine that they would be less miserable if they were better off. Perhaps it’s a baby-sitter they need, or a maid, or long holidays, or fewer financial worries. The evidence is that the fewer masking problems there are the greater the strain on the central problem of the marital relationship itself. In western
culture the ultimate success-figure is the astronaut; the wife of an astronaut can bask in money and reflected glory. The cosmonaut is the American aristocrat; presidents fly to him, he prays on behalf of the nation standing on the moon: his domestic set-up must have everything money and planning can provide. A NASA psychiatrist was quoted as saying that Cape Kennedy was the world’s most active spawning ground for divorce. Certainly divorces occur there at double the national average. Housewife alcoholism is higher than anywhere else in America except Washington. ‘Space industry seems to rob men of emotion.’ The deliberate desensitizing of astronauts has its problems; they might contain themselves brilliantly on the moon, but they contain themselves everywhere else too, including their wives’ beds, for the degree of sexual activity at the Cape is
agreed to be very low.
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We may take the computer society of Cape
Kennedy to be the logical development of the tendencies of our in- creasingly organized chaos, even in poor and backward England where people cannot afford to get divorces. A cosmonaut’s wife cannot be fat and frumpish, so she must express her misery in drunkenness and promiscuity which are at least modish and expens- ive habits. In England a ‘neglected’ and ‘downtrodden’, ‘bored’, ‘lonely’ housewife is likely simply to eat too much, too much rubbish. Advertising of chocolate bars and biscuits in England has recently recognized the function of escapist eating. What we are told to expect from such machine-made sludge is ‘a taste sensation’, an ‘explosion’, excitement, and visions of faraway places. Television advertising of candy promises hallucinations and orgasms. Certainly a Mars Bar costs less than a divorce.
Female revolt takes curious and tortuous forms, and the greatest toll is exacted by the woman upon herself. She finds herself driving her husband away from her by destructive carping, fighting off his attempts to make love to her, because somehow they seem all wrong. Frigidity is still a major problem, but know-how about
I resent the fact that my husband doesn’t want to make love to me very often but on the rare occasions when he does, I resent that even more and freeze up on him because I feel that he’s making a wishy-washy attempt at pretending there’s still something between us or that he’s not going with another woman at the time (I’m sure he
has a few girl friends). We often row about this; sometimes he denies it and sometimes he says I drive him to
other women because I’m cold with him. But how can a woman warm up to a man who never says or does anything romantic?
(Mrs) C. T., ‘Forum’, Vol. 2, No. 2
the female structure and orgasms will not change it. Women are ill- adapted by their conditioning to accept sexual reality and orgasm. Often husbands report that frigidity has developed in a wife who seemed to enjoy sex in the early days of marriage. Sexual love is not a matter of orgasm or of romanticism: approaching each other from their opposite poles husbands and wives miss each other in the dark and clutch at phantoms. Contraception takes a toll of female sexual- ity. It is appalling to reflect that the most popular form of contracep- tion in England is still the sheath. One British couple in five still practises premature withdrawal. One and three-quarter million English women use the pill, not even an eighth of the housewife population. Even if they do use the pill, all problems are not solved. Every week the press features another pill horror story, of a bride dead of thrombosis within weeks of her marriage. A story in the
News of the World
is that the Family Planning Association warns that the 400,000 women supplied by the Association with the pill are
suffering an assortment of fifty side-effects.
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Professor Victor Wynn of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, says taking the pill can lead to thrombosis, liver disorders, obesity and
depression.
10
When he says it, we
may begin to believe it, although as a woman who complained of oedema and apathy when taking the pill, I can testify that my GP pooh-poohed the idea. A number of letters in the
Lancet
in the summer of 1969 discussed the matter of pill-depression and admitted that the pill hormone did interfere with the secretion of tryptophan, ‘a dietary chemical essential to good health and which may also be
associated with mood control’.
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The withdrawal of sixteen brands
from the market has not done much for the women who are now using the others. The coil has a painful failure rate in about twenty per cent of cases and can be an oddly disquieting resident in the body. Mrs Monica Foot wrote a horrifying account of spontaneous abortion with a bow-type coil in the
Sunday Times
and was reviled
for her candour.
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The diaphragm is a nuisance, is perceptible to the
woman, and the spermicides interfere with her secretions and the tactile sensations of the surrounding membrane. Moreover, husbands can drag it out, if they insist upon impregnation. As long as women have to think about contraception every day, and worry about pills, sheaths, and devices of all kinds, and then worry every time a period is due, more irrationality will appear in their behaviour. The almost universal problem of menstrual tension is certainly aggravated for today’s women, and added neurasthenia makes it more acute. Misery, misery, misery.
There are more women who attempt suicide than men, more women in mental hospitals than men
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; there are hundreds of chil-
dren injured by desperate parents every year, and even cases of in- fants bodily put to death by deranged mothers.
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Postnatal weeps
are a recognized syndrome; some women have suffered them for as long as a year after the birth of the child. The tiny scandalous minority of baby-bashers and husband-murderers get into the press. The majority of women drag along from day to day in an apathetic twilight, hoping that they are doing the right thing, vaguely expect- ing a reward some day. The working wife waits for the children to grow up
and do well to vindicate her drudgery, and sees them do as they please, move away, get into strange habits, and reject their parents. The idle wife girds her middle-aged loins and goes to school, fools with academic disciplines, too often absorbing knowledge the wrong way for the wrong reasons. My own mother, after nagging and badgering her eldest child into running away from home (a fact which she concealed for years by talking of her as if she were present, when she knew absolutely nothing of what she was doing), took up ballet dancing, despite the obvious futility of such an undertaking, studied accountancy, and failed obdurately year after year, sampled religion, took up skiing and finally learnt Italian. In fact she had long before lost the power of concentration required to read a novel or a newspaper. Every activity was an obsession for as long as it las- ted—some lasted barely a month and those are too numerous to list. She resisted television, resisted homemaking and knitting, the usual opiates. She did not play bingo or housie-housie, partly because of middle-class snobbery. She did not fall in love with a dog, or a budgerigar. Others do.
Of course, single women do not escape female misery, because of the terrific pressure to marry as a measure of feminine success. They dawdle and dream in their dead-end jobs, overtly miserable, because they are publicly considered to be. The phenomenon of single women devoting their lives to aged parents, which has no counterpart in the male sex, is incompletely understood if we do not consider the element of self-cloistering which inspires these women. The mockery of spinsters and acid-faced women is not altogether the expression of prejudice, for these women do exude discontent and intolerance and self-pity. As usual it is a vicious circle.
Given the difficulty of marriage as a way of life, and the greater difficulties of spinsterhood, happiness must be seen by women to be a positive achievement. Ultimately, the greatest service a woman can do her community is to be happy; the degree of revolt and
irresponsibility which she must manifest to acquire happiness is the only sure indication of the way things must change if there is to be any point in continuing to be a woman at all.
Misery is not borne without resentment. It is commonly admitted that there is a battle waging between the sexes but like most other facts which we dare not directly contemplate it is most commonly referred to facetiously. The battle is universal and deadly serious unlike the isolated skirmishes of the women’s liberation movements with the male establishment. Whether it is waged at home or abroad it is always infighting without rules or conventions and its conclusion is death. We observe it