Ignoring, or rather choosing to ignore, the essentially political nature of French’s work –
The Women’s Room
is a call to arms, not a novel of manners – the critics fulminated in hairsplitting detail over stylistic points and syntax. Name-calling was rampant. What women recognized in
The Women’s Room
as the raw stuff of their daily realities, the reviewers deemed trivial drivel – ‘boring,’ ‘obdurate banality,’ and ‘essentially puerile and often embarrassing.’ What the critics were disparaging was not so much French’s accounting of the lives of housewives as the lives themselves. How dare she make the world of dirty dishes and diapers – ‘the shit and string beans,’ in French’s shorthand – the center of a novel? How dare she rend the gauzy romantic scrim her society had pulled across the domestic stage? And worst of all, now that she had yanked the curtain, what would happen when her female readers looked inside and spied the suburban Empresses with no clothes?
Harper’s
harumphed that the consequences couldn’t possibly be healthy; reading
The Women’s Room
, the magazine warned in surgeon-general tones, would be ‘bad for women, bad for men, and bad for children.’
French’s other sin was, simply, that she had succeeded. The
New Statesman
reviewer deplored the book’s female characters as ‘a group of bouncing, excitable products of the Women’s Liberation industry.’ That this industry
was
thriving galled the cultural arbiters most of all. Like the male novelists’ fury over Margaret Mitchell’s hit so many years earlier (a put-out William Faulkner declared
Gone With the Wind
a product of the triumph of ‘the Kotex Age’), the hackles of French’s fellow writers were raised precisely because she beat them at that most male of competitive sports – capitalist free enterprise. Rarely did a review of French’s novel fail to include a bitter reference to the handsome royalties French
must
be accruing. ‘A novel should be judged innocent of how it is sold in the marketplace,’
Harper’s
conceded, but even this reviewer couldn’t resist adding, grouchily, ‘but in the case
of
The Women’s Room
it’s impossible to ignore the treatment of the book’s debut as a publishing event. That, too, affects the picture. An almost million-dollar paperback [actually $750,000] sale guarantees an immense reading public.’ The critic had it exactly backwards; it was the hardcover’s immense reading public that guaranteed the hefty paperback sale, not the other way around. But the mere fact that French was making money made her suspect, There was something unseemly, unfeminine, about a female writer hitting the publishing jackpot. Especially when her genre wasn’t bodice rippers.
The scolding media tipped their hand in their treatment of
The Women’s Room
by their wilful misrepresentations of the book and the author.
People
magazine, for example, in a typical charge, insisted that French had said, ‘All men are rapists and that’s all they are.’ In fact, French had said no such thing. One of her
characters
did (not that that would be much of a distinction of the minds of certain nineties-era occupants of the White House), and the context is critical: the character’s daughter has just been raped and she can find no justice in the court system. That character, Val, also later dies in a hail of gunfire for acting on her views, hardly a ringing endorsement of her hard-line ideology.
People
also chose to ignore the long passage that immediately follows Val’s statement that all men are rapists, in which the central heroine, Mira, expresses shock and dismay over her friend’s newfound dark vision of the opposite sex. In fact, a rereading of
The Women’s Room
finds little evidence to uphold the popularly held view that the novel reduces men to The Enemy. On the contrary, French finds collaboration on both sides of the gender divide. ‘She began to see,’ French writes of Mira, ‘that his [her husband’s] authority over her was based on mutual agreement.’ In fact, in
The Women’s Room
, French is far more willing to examine the contributory roles both sexes play in women’s subordination than are her dogmatically hostile male (and female) critics.
As was the case with
Thelma and Louise, The Women’s Room
was denounced as a ‘comic-strip psychodrama.’ But who was being caricatured? Like
Thelma and Louise
, it was not the representation of the women that incensed the pundits; it was the novel’s portrayal of suburban men. French marginalized the male characters, pushed the husbands to the periphery of her story. And so, they come off flat, cartoonish. But the truth is, from the perspective of the fifties-era isolated suburban housewives, men really were at the periphery; they were the shadows, not the substance, of their daily lives. The men
were often strangers to their wives and children; they left early and they came home late – and few in the household knew exactly what happened between the time they got dropped off at the train station and the time they returned for dinner and a snooze by the TV. Most suburban women ranged across a feminized and juvenilized landscape, populated by mothers, toddlers, and female grade school teachers. Especially for women and men of this period who married early – for they had married earlier than any other generation – their mate was often someone they barely knew from the start, a half-made-up figure woven from teen romance fantasies and social mythologies. French intentionally portrayed the men as ‘stick figures’ – her words – as she observes in
The Women’s Room
, men and women who are polarized, men and women who are conforming to narrowly defined sex roles
do
come to view each other as two-dimensional after a while. ‘So maybe the problem is just that we don’t know each other very well, men and women,’ Mira says. ‘Maybe we need each other too much to be able to know each other. But the truth is, I don’t think men knew Norm [Mira’s husband] any better than I did … He bought an image and it was all he bought and now it’s all he has, and he is going round and round in it, living in it the way children live in daydreams.’
The final grievance lodged against
The Women’s Room
was the most erroneous – and, regrettably for us, it remains erroneous to this day. French’s portrait was deemed outdated. She was accused of grousing about a bygone era, when male society and male institutions still treated women as inferiors, sex objects and nursemaids.
‘The Women’s Room is
a wax museum of male-oppressor villains,’
Newsweek
opined at the time of the novel’s publication. Clearly, with battery by male ‘loved ones’ – then and now – the leading form of injury for women in America, with women still shouldering the vast proportion of the childcare and household duties, with women still making much less than men in the same jobs, with only a tiny single-digit percentage of women wielding any sort of formal political leadership in the country, French’s portrait of an inequitable society is hardly quaint. With sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape at plague-like proportions in the nineties, these male villains hardly belong to a wax museum. If only they did. In fact, as a recidivist reader of
The Women’s Room
in 1992, I was impressed, and distressed, most by the novel’s awful relevance to our times. I had hoped for signs of outmodedness, but the same damn problems French identifies are still with us: the failure of men to take part in the life of the home, the absence of women from the
halls of public power, the male culture’s insistence that women would be happier if they ‘just went home,’ the ignoring and demeaning and silencing of women’s voices in the schools and the courts and the offices and the national discourse, the general lack of respect for women’s needs and demands, the wilful inability of men in power to ‘get it’ when women speak up, and on and on. While a social revolution has occurred in the dreams and aspirations and attitudes of women, no equivalent transformation has taken place in the hearts and minds of men. Notwithstanding the rise of the men’s movement and the tendency of Yuppie lawyers to beat drums in the woods on weekends, men still don’t seem to know, or want to know, much more about the inner world of Norm – or Mira. They know only that their sex seems more lost and confused than ever – and that the feminists, somehow, are to blame.
While there is much that is relevant: to today’s woman in
The Women’s Room
, it seems to me that modern man in confusion over ‘what women want’ might profit even more from a reading of French’s novel. Male readers will find that French’s feminist characters, like feminists in real life, aren’t hell-bent on black magic, child-burnings or emasculations. All her heroines are asking for is an equal footing.
The Women’s Room
is not a rant against the breadwinning man or a glorification of the female suburban saint. Its message is far more fundamental and, consequently, far more incendiary. As Val puts it during one of the women’s discussions, ‘The simple truth – that men are only equal – can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb.’