The Female Eunuch (40 page)

Although he doesn’t know it, I have attended his funeral several times. Each time I look ADORABLE in my black tight-fitting suit and Spanish lace veil. And, each time, after a decent period has elapsed, I have remarried a very rich man and become famous for the ethereal look on my beautiful pale face.

Christine Billson, ‘You Can Touch Me’, 1961, p. 20

all the time but we seldom recognize it for what it is, even when we are in there battling tooth and nail ourselves. Because they have the upper hand, men usually conduct themselves with more grace than women do upon the battleground. Men do not realize that they are involved in a struggle to the death until they have lost it and are fa- cing the ruinous capitulations of the divorce court, when in chagrin at their foolishness in neglecting their defences they give vociferous vent to their conviction that the world is run for the benefit of

predatory and merciless women. The winning woman knows that her victory is Pyrrhic.

Female resentment has an astonishing range of public expression. The most catalytic situation is a party. Parties in our society are very rarely occasions of spontaneous festivity. They are usually arranged for a purpose: to introduce a new arrival to a group, to emphasize the importance of an event, to get to know each other. It is a time to stand up and be counted. Men take women to parties and therefore women are at a disadvantage from the outset. The group’s cohesion derives from the relationships of the men; order is preserved by ac- knowledging nuances of rank. The women are expected to pick up on these nuances and subtly strengthen their men’s representation in the group. Every woman arriving on her escort’s arm knows what her role is, and yet she habitually subverts and destroys the social situation with an astonishing variety of ambiguous tactics. The most obvious, usually practised by women who are not seriously attached, is the stimulation of male rivalry by more or less subtle flirtation. A woman may appear to operate this technique unconsciously; she is very rarely entirely in control of it, none the less it is extremely ef- fective. In playing this game she may take advantage of tensions already existing in the masculine group and aggravate them. Her best bet is to exploit the male chauvinism which prompts her escort to display his catch for the evaluation of his peers. She may subtly indicate that he is a boor (for her glass has been empty for
hours
), that he is a lovable sweetie (that is to say a schmuck), she may wel- come anecdotes which tell against him; or if she really doesn’t give a damn, she may reject him outright preferably for a friend of his, best of all for his best friend or his most successful rival. More irre- vocably attached women only use such techniques in moderation, because they have constructed a whole battery of minor artillery, a sort of lingering death of a thousand cuts to be constantly dealt out to their chosen victim. Joke-telling by the husband is a hazardous

endeavour, for his wife will sigh or tell everybody that they have heard it or that Max Bygraves told it so much better; she won’t laugh whatever happens. If her husband is the life of the party she will languish and demand querulously to be taken home, or become overcome by liquor curiously fast even to the extent of making an exhibition of herself. If he is having fun she will hiss in his ear that he is drunk and making a fool of himself, or remind him that he has to drive home, or, if he remains proof against her, accuse him of gaping after every attractive woman in the room. All this destruct- iveness derives from her dulled apprehension that she is only there as her husband’s appendage: she is not at ease in the social situation. All she was ever prepared to do when she was unattached was to engineer an attachment: now that that is done her little stump of wit and conversation is quite withered away. She feels stupid and probably dowdy: she has never really enjoyed herself, except when she was the object of rivalry and flattery, and she doesn’t know how. The sight of her mate playing around evokes her contempt. She bets that he would enjoy himself much better if she wasn’t there, a spec- ulation all too often thoroughly grounded in fact. If she doesn’t hit back in some snide way her energy has absolutely no outlet. She is wiped out, obliterated, and her older friends murmur among themselves how suppressed she is since she got married, shacked up or whatever. If she should reverse the traditional party situation and coruscate to her husband’s disadvantage (and most likely at his expense) bitter revenge will be exacted later, as bitter as anything she could devise herself. It’s best to sit it through or try a last black- mailing technique, to sneak off home leaving him wondering what has become of her. Most women adopt the expedient of segregation, so that they can wage war from covered territory.

I have seen more spectacular tactics, which depended upon the publicness of the situation for their effect. One female casualty of my acquaintance used to retire to the

lavatory when she could make no headway in the situation, smash her glass and roll in the splinters screaming until some strong man broke the door down and carried her out in picturesque disorder. Another girl provoked a sharp belt in the face, by the simple expedi- ent of screaming unbearably until she got it and then spent all her energy trying to fling herself down three flights of stairs, so that every man there had to lend a hand to restrain her. Another girl used to react suspiciously fast to a modicum of liquor, and tear her clothes off while her mate besought her to cool it, and the rest of the party pretended that they were observing liberated behaviour. This is part of the larger strategy of insinuating that the old man’s virility is not equal to his lady’s demands, an extreme and bohemian form of flirtation.

The ignorance and isolation of most women mean that they are incapable of making conversation: most of their communication with their spouses is a continuation of the power struggle. The result is that when wives come along to dinner parties they pervert civilized conversation about real issues into personal quarrels. The number of hostesses who wish that they did not have to ask wives is legion. The number who seize the excuse of a wife’s absence to invite a man for dinner because the poor fellow cannot do for himself (ostensibly) has its own significance. This must not be taken to indicate that men have not their part to play in the battle. Their tactics are condescen- sion and patronizing of a woman’s attempts to contribute to a dis- cussion, simple setting aside of her remarks or ignoring them, exag- gerated courtliness to other women, extravagant praise of the cooking (for all the world as if they were constantly starved or poisoned at home), loving mockery of the little woman and so on. Because of their winning position, their techniques do not have to be strident or obscene or anti-social, and this fact itself can drive a woman to madness and direct aggression. I am reminded of one of my girl students who got so tired of being

patronized at a Union meeting at the university that she threw a full pint of bitter over the chairman. Her fleeting satisfaction was quali- fied by the eventual realization that she had lost on all counts.

The real theatre of the sex war despite the atrocities committed in social situations is the domestic hearth; there it is conducted unre- mittingly. Because of the inequity of the situation and the impossib- ility of any telling action, the woman must unpack her heart with words and fall acursing like a very drab, a scullion, because, as Hamlet construed from his own example, she lacks gall to make oppression bitter. Verbal aggression is not the reflection of penis envy but the inevitable result of induced impotence. However, the fruitlessness of the reproaches and the endless reiteration of the same spurious complaints (spurious because she is ignorant of what her genuine grievance is) bring about an increasing stridency and a terrible disregard for the real meaning of what she is saying. Her attacks grow more destructive and more unforgivable until she realizes in some helpless way that she is tearing down her house with her own hands, but she is by now powerless to stop brutalizing her own environment. She hears the squalid succession of ‘You never’s’ and ‘You always’s’ and realizes that most of what she is saying is unjust and irrelevant, but something is badly wrong, how else can she say what it is? Her guilt increases; her power to break from a situation which is aging and altering her beyond recognition diminishes every day. Occasionally she breaks down and confesses that she doesn’t know what is wrong with her. Her husband suggests that she take a pill and the bitter battle recommences with her up- braiding of his stupidity and heartlessness, his refusal to see that he is partly responsible for her pitiable condition, and so on.

The housewife accepts vicarious life as her portion, and imagines that she will be a prop and mainstay to her husband in his noble endeavours, but insidiously her

unadmitted jealousy undermines her ability to appreciate what he tells her about his ambitions and his difficulties. She belittles him, half-knowingly disputes his difficult decisions, taunts him with his own fears of failure, until he stops telling her anything. Her questions about his ‘day at the office’ become a formality. She does not listen to his answers any more than he heeds her description of her dreary day. Eventually the discussion stops altogether. It just isn’t worth it. He has no way of understanding her frustration—her life seems so easy. She likewise feels that he cannot know how awful her days can be. Conversation becomes a mere power struggle. She opposes through force of habit. Why should he be always right? Ever right? Men are deluded in the situation because they cannot believe that an issue is merely a pretext for another kind of confrontation. I re- member a controversy which raged between my parents about the merits and demerits of a large tree which was struggling to grow just outside our house. My father painstakingly weighed pros and cons and decided it was best to let it struggle on a little longer for it had been traumatized by the construction of the house and could make a better showing in another season. My mother foxed about, refusing to confront the issue until father decided definitely that he was opposed to its felling. Mother went out the next day and ring- barked it, so it definitely died, and had to be felled after all. My father had decided fairly early on that life at home was pretty un- bearable; and he lived more and more of it at his club, only coming home to sleep. My mother did not protest about this, as it gave her an opportunity to tyrannize the children and enlist their aid to dis- enfranchise my father completely, but many wives impose heavy restrictions on their husband’s recreation out of simple jealousy. The objection is made on many counts, of expense, of loneliness (often genuine), of fear of intruders, or need of help with some aspects of running the house. Working-class wives manage to ration their husband’s recreation severely, apportioning the money

for it after they have taken the pay packet out of the old man’s pocket when he has finally arrived home on pay-night. One of the few acts of defiance against the welfare state is the refusal of security which gambling represents and this form of release is most severely opposed by wives, who are acting out their parts in anchoring their men in the system. The release of drunkenness is likewise blocked as much as possible by women, sometimes with good reason, but more often not. The degree of inebriation which is bitterly upbraided by women is so slight that it may be all but imperceptible. Much of the violence which drinking men wreak upon their women is pro- voked by their voiced or unvoiced reproaches. The wives refuse to recognize their husbands’ need of various forms of release because they feel, however bad his situation is, it is not as bad as a woman’s lot and women do not seek release, not overtly.

The most sinister aspect of domestic infighting is the use of the children as weaponry and battlefield. Not all women are as desperate as my mother was when she used to mutter to me that my father was a ‘senile old goat’. Usually the use of the children both as weapons and causes of contention is more subtle. It is in a woman’s interest to keep the children babies as long as she can, because then they cannot disown her even if they are sons, because they need her ministrations. She mocks their father because he cannot know what they need, screams when he takes them out to a football match in the rain, insists on waiting up for them when they go out, both be- cause she is jealous of their freedom, which always seems more than she had, and because she wants to prove that they need her solicita- tions and surveillance. The most extreme feats of child-exploitation by women are rarer but more striking. The obvious case is the enlist- ment of the son to depose the father, which is very common in poorer families where dad’s inadequacies can be ruthlessly underlined. The son accepts mother’s account of her suffering at the hands of his brutal father, and endeavours like Saturn to displace

him in his own house. Given a less intense Oedipal situation a son may find himself attacked by his mother in order to get at his father. Once my mother knelt on my small brother’s chest and beat his face with her fists in front of my father and was threatened with violent retaliation, the only instance of my father’s rising to her bait that I can recall. My brother was three years old at the time.

Much wifely frigidity is the withdrawal of a pleasure as punish- ment, although this is never admitted. Likewise the exaggeration of illnesses, to the point of valetudinarianism and hypochondria, is often motivated by continual reproach and not organic at all. The subtler form is that which keeps the little woman on her feet through all the vicissitudes of illness, so that everybody feels guilty and never more so than when they feel most irritated by the not so subtle martyrdom she compels them to witness. The withdrawal or ration- ing of sexual favours is an important weapon in the expression of resentment of the male. It is true that even in reasonably elevated strata of English society (for example, among the wives of some of my colleagues) sex is granted to the husband as a reward for some- thing accomplished or as a consolation for some setback. The blackmail is that there is nothing in it for her, so that her husband feels both bestial and grateful when she allows him the use of his conjugal hole. Nowadays this kind of parleying is frequently con- ducted in the guise of a birth-control drama, where the wife finds herself unable to bear any form of contraception, even claiming that she finds no pleasure in intercourse unless there is the possibility of issue, or forcing the husband to suffer
coitus interruptus
. When it eventually fails, she can claim that he betrayed her because he is a selfish beast. The variations on this theme are legion. In every case the woman herself is also the loser, but as she has no conception of how she could gain by a different attitude that is not significant in her motivation. She is out to get him.