The Female Eunuch (45 page)

families, the paternal role of the father is not as pronounced as it is in middle-class homes, for often working-class women are quicker with their letters and more adept at manipulating the authorities

than their husbands are.
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A worker husband could well be proud

of a ‘thinker’ mate. Marriage would mean that after taxation her earnings made little difference to the family’s financial situation. Professional earnings in this country are so low and hours so long that no man need feel his earning capacity undermined by his wife’s, however highly qualified she was. Socialist women, now fulminating in segregated groups after waiting hand, foot and buttock on the middle-class revolutionary males in the movement, might be better off placing their despised expertise and their knowledge of the basic texts at the service of the class they were meant for. Women’s achievement is usually assessed in terms of how far up out of their class they succeed in mating. A revolution in consciousness might reverse that notion. Of course, it must be done genuinely—there is no scope for condescension.

If women are to effect a significant amelioration in their condition it seems obvious that they must refuse to marry. No worker can be required to sign on for life: if he did, his employer could disregard all his attempts to gain better pay and conditions. In those places where an employer has the monopoly of employment this phenom- enon can be observed. It should not be up to the employer to grant improvements out of the goodness of his heart: his workers must retain their pride by retaining their bargaining power. It might be argued that women are not signed up for life in the marriage contract because divorce is always possible, but as it stands divorce works in the male interest, not only because it was designed and instituted by men, but because divorce still depends on money and independ- ent income. Married women seldom have either. Men argue that alimony laws can cripple them, and this is obviously true, but they have only themselves to blame for the fact that

alimony is necessary, largely because of the pattern of granting custody of the children to the mother. The alimonized wife bringing up the children without father is no more free than she ever was. It makes even less sense to sign a lifelong service contract which can be broken by the employer only. More bitter still is the reflection that the working wife has her income assessed as a part of her hus- band’s, and he on the other hand is not even obliged to tell her how much he earns. If independence is a necessary concomitant of free- dom, women must not marry.

What does the average girl marry for? The answer will probably be made—love. Love can exist outside marriage—indeed for a long time it was supposed that it
always
did. Love can take many forms; why must it be exclusive? Security? Security is a chimera, especially if it is supposed to mean the preservation of a state of happy togeth- erness which exists at the time of marriage. Should no obvious dis- asters like adultery or separation occur, people still change: neither partner will be, ultimately, the person who got married in the begin- ning. If a woman gets married because she is sick of working, she asks for everything she gets. Opportunities for work must be im- proved, not abandoned. If a woman married because she wants to have children, she might reflect that the average family has not proved to be a very good breeding ground for children, and seeing as the world is in no urgent need of her increase she might do better, for contraception is very possible, to wait until some suitable kind of household presents itself. The scorns and disabilities suffered by the single girl who cannot have a mortgage and is often considered an undesirable tenant can be experienced and challenged only by a single girl; cowardly marriage is no way to change them. Even though there are more problems attendant upon bringing up an ille- gitimate child, and even friendly cohabitation can meet with outrage and prosecution from more orthodox citizens, marrying to avoid these inconveniences is a meaningless evasion.

It is all very well to state so categorically that a woman who seeks liberation ought not to marry, but if this implies that married women are a lost cause, any large-scale female emancipation would thereby be indefinitely postponed. The married woman without children can still retain a degree of bargaining power, on condition that she resolves not to be afraid of the threat of abandonment. The bargain- ing between married people generally works unevenly: the wife eventually finds that her life has changed radically, but not her husband’s. This state of affairs is by and large considered just: for example, a Home Office decision recently refused a woman the right to live in her country of origin because she had married an Indian and ‘it was customary for the woman to adopt her husband’s country

of origin’.
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The same goes for her home town, or his workplace, his

chosen domicile and his friends. The inequality in the give-and-take of marriage can best be explained by an emotional inequity at the heart of it, although in many cases this inequity is a bluff. Many men are almost as afraid of abandonment, of failing as husbands as their wives are, and a woman who is not terrified of managing

The Rebel Girl

Words and Music by Joe Hill, Copyright 1916

CHORUS

That’s the Rebel Girl, that’s the Rebel Girl! To the working class she’s a precious pearl. She brings courage, pride and joy

To the fighting Rebel Boy;

We’ve had girls before but we need some more In the Industrial Workers of the World,

For it’s great to fight for freedom With a Rebel Girl.

I. W. W. Songs

on her own can manipulate this situation. It is largely a question of nerve. As the stirring of the female population

grows, it ought to follow that various kinds of cooperative enterprise spring up to buttress the individual’s independence, although there are probably fewer women’s clubs and cooperative societies now than there were between the wars, if we consider the picture painted in
Girls of Independent Means
. The principal value in organizing is not the formation of a political front but the development of solidar- ity and mutual self-help, which can be useful on quite a small scale. Going home to mother is a pretty vapid ploy, because mother is usually difficult to live with, reproachful, conservative and tired of her children’s problems. Most women still need a room of their own and the only way to find it may be outside their own homes.

The plight of mothers is more desperate than that of other women, and the more numerous the children the more hopeless the situation seems to be. And yet women with children do break free, with or without their offspring. Tessa Fothergill left her husband, taking her two children, and began the struggle to find a flat and a job on her own. She had so much difficulty that she decided to found an organ- ization for women with her problems and called it Gingerbread.

Another similar group already existed, called Mothers-in-Action.
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However slow the progress past official obstruction may be, it is easier accomplished together. Eventually a woman’s newspaper will be founded in which such groups could announce their formation and canvass for collaborators. Most women, because of the assump- tions that they have formed about the importance of their role as bearers and socializers of children, would shrink at the notion of leaving husband and children, but this is precisely the case in which brutally clear rethinking must be undertaken. First of all, the children are not
hers
, they are not her property, although most courts strongly favour the mother’s claim against the father’s in custody cases. It is much worse for children to grow up in the atmosphere of suffering, however repressed, than it is for them to adapt to a change of regime. Their difficulty in adapting is itself evidence of the anti-social strengthening of the

umbilical link, and it is probably better for the children in the long run to find out they do not have undisputed hold on mother. In any case, the situation ought to be explained because they always feel unease, and worry more about obscure possibilities than they do about facts. A wife who knows that if she leaves her husband she can only bring up the children in pauperdom, although she could support herself, must make a sensible decision, and reject out of hand the deep prejudice against the runaway wife. In many cases, the husband is consoled by being allowed to retain the children and can afford to treat them better with less anxiety than a woman could. He is more likely to be able to pay a housekeeper or a nanny than a woman is. And so forth. Behind the divorced woman struggling to keep her children there always looms the threat of ‘taking the chil- dren into care’ which is the worst of alternatives. A woman who leaves her husband and children could offer them alimony, if society would grant her the means.

The essential factor in the liberation of the married woman is un- derstanding of her condition. She must fight the guilt of failure in an impossible set-up, and examine the set-up. She must ignore inter- ested descriptions of her health, her morality and her sexuality, and assess them all for herself. She must know her enemies, the doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, marriage counsellors, priests, health visitors and popular moralists. She must analyse her buying habits, her day-to-day evasions and dishonesties, her sufferings, and her real feelings towards her children, her past and her future. Her best aides in such an assessment are her sisters. She must not allow herself to be ridiculed and baffled by arguments with her husband, or to be blackmailed by his innocence of his part in her plight and his magnanimity in offering to meet her half-way in any ‘reasonable’ suggestion. Essentially she must recapture her own will and her own goals, and the energy to use them, and in order to effect this some quite ‘unreasonable’ suggestions, or demands, may be neces- sary.

It is not a complete explanation of the development of the subjug- ation of the female sex to say, as Ti-Grace Atkinson does, that men solved the biological mystery of procreation. In fact they did not and have not solved the mystery of paternity. It is known that a father is necessary, but not known how to identify him, except

All that is good and commendable now existing would continue to exist if all marriage laws were repealed tomorrow…I have an inalienable constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please!

Victoria Claflin Woodhull, 20 November 1871

negatively. Women have freely counteracted this disability of patern- ity by offering, after perhaps initially being forced by incarceration and supervision to offer, guarantees of paternity and its concomitant, fidelity. Now that cloistering of wives is an impossibility, we might as well withdraw the guarantees, and make the patriarchal family an inpossibility by insisting on preserving the paternity of the whole group—all men are fathers to all children. The withdrawal of the guarantee of paternity does not necessarily involve ‘promiscuity’, although in its initial stages it might appear to. The promiscuity of casual secretaries in choosing their employment can work as a re- volutionary measure, forcing recognition of their contributions to the firm and its work; likewise, the unwillingness of women to commit themselves with pledges of utter monogamy and doglike devotion might have to be buttressed by actual ‘promiscuity’ to begin with.

Women must also reject their role as principal consumers in the capitalist state. Although it would be a retrogressive step to refuse to buy household appliances in that women’s work would be in- creased and become more confining than it need be, it would be a serious

blow to the industries involved if women shared, say, one washing machine between three families, and did not regard the possession of the latest model as the necessary index of prestige and success. They could form household cooperatives, sharing their work about, and liberating each other for days on end. Their children instead of being pitted against one another could be encouraged to share the toys that lie discarded as soon as they are sick of them. This would not be so repugnant to children as parents hope. I can recall being beaten for giving away all my toys when I was about four. I really didn’t want them any more. Children do not need expensive toys, and women could reject the advertising that seeks to draw millions of pounds out of them each Christmas. Some of the mark-up on soap powders and the like could be avoided by buying unbranded goods in bulk and resisting the appeal of packaging. In the same way food can be bought in direct from the suppliers, and if women combine to cheat the middlemen they have an even better chance of making it work. ‘Cheaper by the dozen’ does not have to be limited to one family. Women ought also to get over the prejudice attaching to second-hand clothes and goods. The clothes children grow out of can be shared about and if children weren’t already victims of oversell they wouldn’t mind. Baby carriages and the like are already swapped around in most working-class families. Part of the aim of these cooperative enterprises is to break down the isolation of the single family and of the single parent, but principally I am consider- ing ways to short-circuit the function of the women as chief fall-guys for advertising, chief spenders of the nation’s loot.

Most women would find it hard to abandon any interest in clothes and cosmetics, although many women’s liberation movements urge them to transcend such servile fripperies. As far as cosmetics are used for adornment in a conscious and creative way, they are not emblems of inauthenticity: it is when they are presented

as the real thing, covering unsightly blemishes, disguising a repulsive thing so that it is acceptable to the world that their function is deeply suspect. The women who dare not go out without their false eye- lashes are in serious psychic trouble. The most expensive prepara- tions in the cosmetic line are no different in essence from the cheapest; no miraculous unguents can actually repair failing tissue. It is as well to consider diet and rest for the raw materials of beauty, and use cosmetics strictly for fun. The cheapest and some of the best fun are the colours used on the stage in greasepaint. Kohl is the best eye make-up, and the cheapest, and can be bought in various forms. Instead of the expensive extracts of coal marketed with French labels, women could make their own perfumes with spirit of camphor, and oil of cloves and frankincense, as well as crumbled lavender, patchouli and attar of roses. Instead of following the yearly changes of hairstyle, women could find the way their hair grows best and keep it that way, working the possible changes according to their own style and mood, instead of coiffing themselves in a shape or- dained by fashion but not by their heads.