The Female Eunuch (41 page)
While a wife may be fondly understood to spur her
husband on to greater efforts by her observation of what the Joneses have that they have not, the main reason for pointing out what the Joneses have in the first place is to contrast that with what they have got, thereby stressing the husband’s inadequacy. Such a wife goads her husband on to the foreseeable finale of a coronary and a long widowhood, which is somehow not what she wanted at all, because she has never been given an opportunity to understand her own motives for hastening her spouse to his death. This is another aspect of that jealousy of a man’s life outside the home, which in extreme cases provokes a wife to badger her husband into giving up a work he loves and which he does very well, for something tedious but lucrative which will keep the family abreast of the Joneses. The Rosamund syndrome, for George Eliot has produced the paradigm
in the case of Lydgate’s disastrous marriage to that spoiled darling,
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is the most extreme form of female jealousy of the problem-centred male life, which gives rise to such unforgettable dialogue as ‘You love that silly Stradivarius better than you love me’ and so forth. The complementary figure is that equally common one of the wife who gave up her Stradivarius to make a good wife to her husband, to whom everybody is too polite to point out that she would have made a lousy violinist anyway. The cheaper form is the listing of the enormously successful men she might have married, or the blanket reproach, ‘I’ve given you the best years of my life!’ Men are often led to believe that women’s motives for this kind of provoking behaviour are merely acquisitive: in fact the motivation is more often the simpler one, resentment, which inspires a need to prove the husband inadequate, or morally inferior, or both. Any allies can be and are used in the fight. Doctors, analysts, girl friends, even the secretary or the boss, as well as the children, can all be enlisted in the hounding of the husband. The efficacy of the process cannot be construed as a female victory, but simply as the sour fruits of unre- cognized revenge.
A far better account of the miserable destructiveness
of womankind is made by Charles M. Schultz in his characterization of Lucy van Pelt in the brilliant saga of
Peanuts
. Lucy’s constant nagging anxiety, her imperviousness to all suffering but her own, her ruthless aggravation of Charlie Brown’s inadequacy fears, her self-righteousness, her jealousy of Linus’s blanket, her utter incom- prehension of Schroeder’s music together with her grotesque at- tempts to vamp him, her crabbiness, her fuss-budgetry, the diabol- ical intensity of her housekeeping, her inability to smile except ma- liciously, her effect upon Charlie Brown’s ill-fated baseball team, it’s all there and any woman who cannot recognize, however dimly, her own image in that unhappy little face, has not yet understood the gravity of her situation. Nevertheless, Schultz’s portrait of the embattled female is incomplete. To complement Lucy’s destructive- ness we need the fuller statement of Strindberg’s about the mortal combat of the sexes, in
The Dance of Death
, as well as Ibsen’s more oblique statements in plays like
Hedda Gabler
and
A Doll’s House
. A battle which is fought through inauthenticity and hypocrisy by concealed blows and mutual treachery looks very much like a game, and Eric Berne described some of the most superficial of the tactics that women adopt in his justly celebrated
The Games People Play
, but any woman who reads his Section 7, ‘Marital Games’, could very swiftly add a score or more of other infighting techniques which he has omitted. The last comment on the whole gigantic mesh of ma- nipulation which characterizes most of our relationships, but most of all those between the sexes, from father and daughter, to dated and dater, and husband and wife, and mother and son, is most fit- tingly expressed in Berne’s words. ‘Many games are played most intensely by disturbed people; generally speaking, the more dis- turbed they are, the harder they play.’ The alternative to game- playing, to the defensive process which is the game of war, is what every woman must now seek for herself, autonomy.
For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behaviour, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spon- taneity; and something more rewarding than games, and that is in- timacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their solution in popular techniques of special action, such as ‘togeth- erness’. This may mean that there is no hope for the human race,
but there is hope for individual members of it.
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There have always been women who rebelled against their role in society. The most notorious are the witches, the women who with- drew from ‘normal’ human intercourse to commune with their pets or familiars, making a living somehow by exploiting their own knowledge of herbal medicine and the credulity of the peasantry, and perhaps indulging in the mysticism of other possibilities, magic white or black, perhaps Satanism. Careful reading of the depositions at witch trials reveals that some of the women were persecuted in the horrible fashion reserved for witches because they were troublemakers inciting the villagers to subversion or open rebellion. One of the punishments, the ducking stool, was the most primitive form of punitive psychotherapy, corresponding to shock treatment of today’s melancholic or recalcitrant females.
There was a woman known to be so bold That she was noted for a common scold;
And on a time, it seems, she wrong’d her Betters Who sent her unto Prison, bound in Fetters:
The Day of her Arraignment being come, Before grave elders, this then was her Doom: She should be ducked over head and ears,
In a deep Pond, before her Overseers. Thrice was she under Water, yet not fainted,
Not yet for aught that I could see, was daunted; For, when with Water she was covered,
She clapped her hands together o’er her head, To signify that then she could not talk,
But yet she would be sure her hands should walk; She had no power, but yet she had a will,
That if she could, she would have scolded still:
For after that, when they did her up-hale Fiercely against them all then did she rail
This proves some women void of reasonable Wit; Which if they had, then would they soon submit.
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The invalid conclusion to this tale is typical of male arrogance; the refusal to consider the content of her grievance is characteristic still of conservative accounts of the attempts of women to take action themselves in the hope of changing their condition. The charge of penis envy, or frustration, or perversion, is no more respectable than the anonymous author’s assumption that his heroine is void of reasonable wit. We will know a good deal more about the history of feminism when we learn to read between the lines in cases of witchburning and other forms of female persecution. Many female heretics, such as the members of the Family of Love, had joined the sect precisely because they offered new scope for female self-determ-
ination.
2
The phenomenon of female gossipry, which entailed co-
operation to gull husbands and enrich their wives as well as to pro- cure adultery and abortions, certainly had its feminist elements, and there is evidence that educated women throughout the ages were particularly loath to submit to male sovereignty: as now, it was most frequently the education that was found at fault, and not the male sovereignty.
Much lesbianism, especially of the transvestite kind, may be un- derstood as revolt against the limitations of the female role of passivity, hypocrisy and indirect action, as well as rejection of the brutality and mechanicalness of male sexual passion. All forms of lesbianism involve an invention of an alternative way of life, even if the male—female polarity survives in the relationship to the degree that there is butch and bitch within it. Dildoes are not used by butch lesbians however. The prevalence of tribadism as the principal les- bian mode of lovemaking argues the relative unimportance of the masculine fantasy in the relationship. However, such
sexual deviations have been treated with so much lecherous curiosity and violent insult that most lesbians are unable to make of their choice of an alternative anything like a political gesture. The opera- tions of relentlessly induced guilt and shame cause the lesbian to conceal her condition, and to mis-state her own situation as a result of a congenital blight or the mistakes of her parents. It is true that her inability to play the accepted role in society probably results from a failure in conditioning, but that is not itself a disqualification from the ability to choose lesbianism in an honourable, clear-eyed fashion, rejecting shame and inferiority feelings as a matter of prin- ciple, whether such feelings exist or not. The lesbian might as well claim that she had no other acceptable course to follow and become the apologist of her own way of life. Unfortunately, too often she is as blinded by spurious notions of normality as her critics are.
The women who are most conscious of the disabilities which afflict women are those who are educated to the point of demanding and deserving the same kind of advancement as men. In the higher education establishments in which women are segregated there is a curious air of constipated revolt. Most women teachers are not married and do not have any very significant intercourse with the opposite sex. Their students sometimes suspect them of sexual rela- tionships with each other, and certainly there is an intensity in their personal relationships which would argue some degree of thwarted attraction or affection, although I would maintain that the extreme repressions practised by such women on themselves in other respects indicate impotence in this regard. When a group of girl students presented a rather churlishly expressed list of grievances to the principal of a women’s college in which I had the misfortune to be immured for a whole year before I could escape, she and her cronies clung together in her Hollywood-interior lodge, refusing to deal with the matters expressed in the petition, except to complain that they had wanted us to be so happy and we had
hurt
them. It is a kind of female rebellion to
eschew cosmetics and the business of attraction, and some of these establishment rebels certainly cultivated respectable slatternliness to an impressive degree. Gentility went by the board as well. One such eminent lady, whose bloated form in a red knitted bathing suit had been known to drive every vestige of colour from a male don’s cheek, was famous for farting and belching at table, and I once saw her put a meringue which she had shot on to the floor back on her plate and eat it with complete unconcern. Rather than concede some sort of genetic imbalance in these gifted women I should claim that their braying voices and shattering footsteps were deliberate reac- tions against feminine murmuring and pussy-footing. They were helped by the existence of an acceptable British stereotype of the aristocratic country-woman, who is a good sport and more capable with a plough or a snaffle bit than many a man. Only a small propor- tion of the girls in their charge emulated them, for most of them were still coming through the last stages of puberty, and developing along more orthodox feminine lines despite their mistresses’ attempts to keep them playing hockey and beating the men’s marks at the end of the year.
Such unremarkable and unconscious forms of rebellion against the feminine role are old and ineffectual. If we were to compare the high incidence of positive homosexuality as well as effeteness and epicenity among male inhabitants of the establishments of higher learning we might discern a valid reaction against the male stereo- type of brawn and insensitivity, but as long as the situation remains unrationalized it has little significance except as a personal motiva- tion or a partial factor in neurosis. Rationalization has begun how- ever, and it was first practised by women from this class, the most privileged of their sex. The history of suffragettism and its survival until our own day is beyond the scope of this book, although it is remarkable how many of today’s militant women can remember some extraordinary old lady who sought (in vain) to plant the seeds of rebellion
in their minds. From time to time wonderfully vivid old women appear on TV, or are written up in obituaries in
The Times
, to remind us not only of the continuity of the movement but of the tactical address and joyful courage of petticoated, corseted and hatted gen- tlewomen of a lifetime ago. The progress since their times has not been uniform: women’s clothes have fluctuated between the loose and unrestricting and the voluminous and pinching, the novelette heroine has been plucky and good-humoured, and then once more sexy and languishing. The beginning of the second feminist wave, of which this book must be considered a part, was Betty Friedan’s research into the post-war sexual sell which got American women out of the factories and back into their homes. Mrs Friedan is a
summa cum laude
graduate of Smith College and held a research fellowship in psychology at Berkeley, a professional woman of considerable reputation and attainments. What she discovered during the five years that she worked on her book has led to her forming the most influential of the women’s groups in America, the National Organ- ization of Women, which now has a membership of more than three thousand and branches in many cities. Somewhere on the way she shed the husband to whom she dedicated her book. Her movement is the only one to achieve any degree of recognition from the political establishment. When NOW was formed it was read into the Congres- sional record; it provides most of the motivation and the personnel for the numerous women’s groups and committees which now figure in various Congressional bodies. Clearly, what Mrs Friedan suggests cannot be at all radical. Her whole case rests upon the frustration suffered by the educated woman who falls for the Freudian notion that physiology is destiny. For Mrs Friedan sexuality seems to mean motherhood, an argument which other feminist groups also seem to be misled by, so that in rejecting the normative sex role of women they are forced to stress non-sexual aspects of a woman’s destiny at the expense of her libido, a mistake which will