The Female Eunuch (46 page)

Some of these trends are already apparent. Most young girls do not inhabit the hairdressers anything like as much as their mothers do. They have vanquished the couturier singlehanded and wear whatever they please, from the oldest and most romantic to the most crass adaptations of men’s sporting gear. There are signs that they are abandoning prestige eating habits as well, especially alcohol and the wine game. Many of them are finding ways of survival as stu- dents that they will not abandon as grown women. The pattern of rejection of cigarettes and beer for illicit marijuana has far-reaching effects for the economy if it is taken up on any large scale. The taste for macrobiotic food and much less of it reflects both an attitude to eating and to the marketing of food. So far only a minority is follow- ing such trends, but it is a much larger minority than we find trum- peting behind the banners of women’s liberation. Yet it is

liberation that they are seeking, just the same. The hippie rejection of violence may be considered to have failed, for policemen were not ashamed to respond to a flower with a baton, but the question has been defined and the debate is not over yet.

The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsive- ness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for
fun
. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle. The analogy is best understood in the case of drugs: women use drugs as anodynes, compulsively, to lessen tension, pain, or combat anxiety symptoms, entering almost automatically into a dependence syn- drome so that it becomes impossible to discern whether the drug caused the symptom for which the drug was taken, and so it goes on. The person who uses marijuana has no need to do so: he uses it when he wants to feel in a certain way, and stops his intake when he is at the point that he wants to be at. He is not tempted to excuse his use as a kind of therapy, although regulations about the use of cannabis are trying to force some such construction of the situation. In the same way, it ought to be possible to cook a meal that you want to cook, that everybody wants to eat, and to serve it in any way you please, instead of following a timetable, serving Tuesday’s meal or the tastefully varied menu of all new and difficult dishes you have set yourself as a new cross, and if you simply cannot feel any interest in it, not to do it. Unfortunately the ideology of routine is strongly established in this country, and even deliquent housewives use their bingo and their stout as a routine, that ‘they don’t know what they would do without’. Housework is admitted to be a typical vicious circle; work makes more work and it goes

on. It is so difficult to break such a circle that it seems almost essential to break right out of it, and insist on doing something else altogether. Regular periods of ‘freedom’ are still contained within the circle, and this is why they won’t work. Most forms of compromise will not do the job, although they may alleviate symptoms of strain temporarily. For the same reason, incorporating some self-chosen work in the circle will not work in so far as incentive and energy are constantly being vitiated. There is no alternative but rupture of the circle.

For some the rupture of the circle has meant that the centre cannot hold and chaos is come upon the world. The fear of liberty is strong in us, but the fear itself must be understood to be one of the factors inbuilt in the endurance of the status quo. Once women refuse to accept the polarity of masculine-feminine they must accept the exist- ence of risk and possibility of error.

For my arguments, Sir, are debated by a disinterested Spirit—I plead for my sex, not for myself. Independence

I have long considered the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue—and independence I will ever secure

by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792, p. iv

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them. There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all. Vociferous women are guyed in the press and sneered at by others who collect a fat pay-packet and pride themselves on femin- inity as well, but at least they are no longer burnt. It is too much

to expect that women who have set out to liberate themselves should become healthy, happy, creative and cooperative as if by magic, al- though generally the more appalling symptoms of depersonalization do disappear. The old conditioned needs and anxieties linger on, continuing to exact their toll, but now they are understood for what they are and borne for a purpose. The situation will only emerge in all its ramifications when it is challenged, and women might initially be horrified at the swiftness with which police forget their scruples about hitting women, or the vileness of the abuse which is flung at them, but such discoveries can only inspire them more doggedly to continue. The key to the strategy of liberation lies in exposing the situation, and the simplest way to do it is to outrage the pundits and the experts by sheer impudence of speech and gesture, the exploita- tion of cliché ‘feminine logic’ to expose masculine pomposity, ab- surdity and injustice. Women’s weapons are traditionally their tongues, and the principal revolutionary tactic has always been the spread of information. Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power

and gentle cajolery are fools.
4
It is slavery to have to adopt such

tactics.

It is difficult at this point to suggest what a new sexual regime would be like. We have but one life to live, and the first object is to find a way of salvaging that life from the disabilities already inflicted on it in the service of our civilization. Only by experimentation can we open up new possibilities which will indicate lines of develop- ment in which the status quo is a given term. Women’s revolution is necessarily situationist: we cannot argue that all will be well when the socialists have succeeded in abolishing private property and restoring public ownership of the means of production. We cannot wait that long. Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx

will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it. Let the men distribute leaflets in factories where the proletariat have become hire-purchase slaves instead of communists. The existence of hire- purchase slaves is also based upon the function of the wife as a stay- at-home consumer. Statistics show that almost all hire-purchase contracts are entered into by married people. If women revolt, that situation must change too. Women represent the most oppressed class of life-contracted unpaid workers, for whom slaves is not too melodramatic a description. They are the only true proletariat left, and they are by a tiny margin the majority of the population, so what’s stopping them? The answer must be made, that their very oppression stands in the way of their combining to form any kind of solid group which can challenge the masters. But man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin. We need not challenge anyone to open battle, for the most effective method is simply to withdraw our co- operation in building up a system which oppresses us, the valid withdrawal of our labour. We may also agitate hither and thither, picket segregated bars and beauty competitions, serve on committees, invade the media, do, in short, what we want, but we must also re- fuse, not only to do some things, but to want to do them.

Experience is too costly a teacher: we cannot all marry in order to investigate the situation. The older sisters must teach us what they found out. At all times we must learn from each other’s experience, and not judge hastily or snobbishly, or according to masculine cri- teria. We must fight against the tendency to form a feminist elite, or a masculine-type hierarchy of authority in our own political struc- tures, and struggle to maintain cooperation and the matriarchal principle of fraternity. It is not

necessary for feminists to prove that matriarchy is a prehistoric form of community, or that patriarchy is a capitalist perversion in order to justify our policies, because the form of life we envisage might as well be completely new as inveterately ancient. We need not buy dubious anthropology to explain ourselves, although women with a studious bent might do well to research the historic role of women in some attempt to delimit our concepts of the natural and the pos- sible in the female sphere. The time has come when some women are ready to listen, and their number is growing; it is time also for those women to speak, however uncertainly, however haltingly, and for the world to listen.

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is
joy in the struggle
. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. For a long time there may be no perceptible reward for women other than their new sense of purpose and integrity. Joy does not mean riotous glee, but it does mean the purposive employment of energy in a self-chosen enterprise. It does mean pride and confidence. It does mean communication and cooperation with others based on delight in their company and your own. To be emancipated from helplessness and need and walk freely upon the earth that is your birthright. To refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveli- ness. To have something to desire, something to make, something to achieve, and at last something genuine to give. To be freed from guilt and shame and the tireless self-discipline of women. To stop pretending and dissembling, cajoling and manipulating, and begin to control and sympathize. To claim the masculine virtues of mag- nanimity and generosity and courage. It goes much further than equal pay for equal work, for it ought to revolutionize the conditions of work completely. It does not understand the phrase ‘equality of opportunity’, for it seems that the opportunities will have to be ut- terly changed and women’s souls changed so that they desire oppor- tunity instead of

Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually,

On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!

Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, p. 55, pl. 65–6

shrinking from it. The first significant discovery we shall make as we racket along our female road to freedom is that men are not free, and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody should be free. We can only reply that slaves enslave their masters, and by securing our own manumission we may show men the way that they

…among the disbelievers of revealed religion I have not found during a life of half a century, a single opponent to the doctrine of equal rights for males and females.

Long, ‘Eve’, 1875, p. 112

could follow when they have jumped off their own treadmill. Priv- ileged women will pluck at your sleeve and seek to enlist you in the ‘fight’ for reforms, but reforms are retrogressive. The old process must be broken, not made new. Bitter women will call you to rebel- lion, but you have too much to do. What
will
you do?

Notes

SUMMARY

1. ‘Boadicea Rides Again’,
   Sunday Times Magazine
   , 21.9.1969.
   

2. Ibsen,
   A Doll’s House
   , Act III.
   

GENDER

1. The embodiment of anthropological and ethnological prejudice is the stupendous three-volume study of H. H. Ploss and M. and P. Bartels; the plates of the original German edition were destroyed by Hitler, but not before Dr Eric Dingwall had prepared an English version,
   Woman
   (London, 1935). Hereinafter it is referred to as Ploss and Bartels.
   

2. F. A. E. Crew,
   Sex Determination
   (London, 1954), p. 54.
   

3. Ashley Montagu,
   The Natural Superiority of Women
   (London, 1954), pp. 76-81.
   

4. The Cropwood Conference on Criminological Implications of Chromosomal Abnormalities, held at the University of Cambridge in the summer of 1969, discussed this matter at length. The biblio- graphy on the XYY syndrome now reaches upwards of 500 titles.
   

5. Gray’s
   Anatomy
   (London, 1958), pp. 219-20.
   

6. Robert Stoller,
   Sex and Gender
   (London, 1968),
   passim
   .
   

BONES

1. See for example Joan Fraser,
   Stay a Girl
   (London, 1963), p. 3:
   

   A woman needs a different type of exercise from a man. He needs movements aimed at developing his physical strength and hardening his muscles, but a woman does not want hard muscles. She needs a non-fatiguing form of exercise, movement which refreshes and relaxes her. One which, besides toning up her muscles, joints, glands, respiratory and digestive organs, will give her everyday movements a grace, litheness and poise which enhance her femininity.
   

2. The pedomorphism of women has always been remarked upon,
   

   e.g. by Bichat in his
   General Anatomy
   (London, 1824), and of course by Ploss and Bartels (
   op. cit.
   , p. 90), but these commentators did not see that it might prove to be an advantage as did W. I. Thomas in
   Sex and Society
   (London, 1907), pp. 18, 51, and Ashley Montagu (
   op. cit.
   , pp. 70—71).
   

3. See Gray’s
   Anatomy
   (
   op. cit.
   ), pp. 402—7.
   

4. Evidence for the slighter differentiation in pelvic formation among primitive or hard-working women can be derived from Ploss and Bartels, who cite for example Hennig’s ‘Das Rassenbecken’, from
   Archaeologie für Anthropologisten
   (1885—6), Vol. 16, pp. 161—228.