Fear of Fifty (47 page)

—Doris Lessing, Introduction to The Golden Notebook

Men and women are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.

—Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

 

 

Raised as the meat in the sandwich between two sisters, I have always been aware of the ruthlessness of women, the fierce competitiveness possible between sisters. As a little girl, I wanted to join the Brownies or Girl Scouts and didn't dare to because my older sister considered Girl Scouts goody-goody and pathetically square. At Barnard, anointed with an appointment to the Honor Board (something that gave you the dubious privilege of wearing a black gown and monitoring final exams), I hid this from my older sister, also a Barnard alumna, knowing she would mock me. She was the rebel and I was the goody-two-shoes, while my younger sister, Claudia, was, I thought, my charge, my responsibility, my cross to bear. I used to lie in bed wondering whether the nail scissors in my mother's bathroom would mysteriously fly out of the nail kit and stab my baby sister in the heart. Then I would think up elaborate schemes for preventing them from doing so—undoing my own wish.

So I know how mean women can be to other women. I know it from my own repressed wishes. Men in my life have usually been kinder and less critical. Even my literary career has been encouraged by kind men—from James Clifford to Louis Untermeyer, from John Updike to Henry Miller to Anthony Burgess. Sometimes these very men, famed as sexists, would exhibit more good-natured approbation of the female imagination than many women. Many women, in fact, seemed to demand that literature
not
be playful, that heroines adhere to some party line or other. Writing fiction and poetry, I often felt I could do no right because versimilitude was not the goal but a political correctness so Byzantine that it seemed as if no one could measure up—not even the lawgivers. If I wrote about a woman in thrall to a man, I was considered wrong to do so—as if my fiction might
create
fact, as if the mirror held up to nature were a sword instead. If I wrote about loving to nurse a baby, I was considered counterrevolutionary, a bad sister—as if the breast were not our symbol. If I wrote that women could be unkind, I was considered a traitor—as if it were not
worse
treachery to pretend that all women were always kind. I was not
allowed
to play on the page. Everything was seen as a political prescription and therefore dangerous. I discovered (as many women writers have discovered) that the rules were much more stringent coming from women than from men.

I had a bitter taste of this in 1979, when, a new mother, who had just stopped nursing, I read a group of poems about pregnancy and birth at a women's poetry festival in San Francisco. I began with this one:

When I finished, I realized many in the audience were hissing.

Having become converted to the transformative power of motherhood, I had come to understand that it was part of female heroinism: that once becoming a mother, a woman might be radicalized in her feminism. She had a greater stake in saving the earth from male politicians. She had a greater stake in education and health, in the environment, in all social policy. She finally understood the way our society makes children and mothers the lowest of priorities.

But the women at that festival—many of them fans of
Fear of Flying, How to Save Your Own Life,
and the early poetry books—seemed to feel betrayed by this and other poems about motherhood. They hooted and booed the
Ordinary Miracles
sequence, though many of them had children in their arms. At the time, I was devastated. Hadn't I sought to be a writer and a mother? Hadn't I tried to support other women creators? Wasn't I trying to show that mothers could also be passionate creators? The criticism by women hurt far more than any criticism by men. It seemed written on my skin by my mother and sisters, who had long resented me for my success.

But my whiplash generation had grown up with notions of compulsory motherhood. We were called names like
elderly prima gravida
and worse. Liberation meant no more compulsion. Maybe the booing women in that audience were feeling that I was adding my weight to compulsory maternity—though of course I was not. A late, reluctant mother, an elderly prima gravida, it had taken all my strength and courage to decide to have a baby. And then it surprised me that I was transformed by pregnancy and that I fell in love with the baby. I was hardly mellowed by the maternal transformation. If anything, my feminism grew more fierce.

But I could not verbalize all this that day in San Francisco. I didn't yet understand it myself.

This experience, and others like it, taught me that it is crucial for women to learn to be allies. We are deliberately trained not to be good at forging alliances. Even with all the team sports now available to teenage girls, they plot against each other as girls of my generation did. They compete about clothes, guys, status, money, and they still call each other names.

Once I walked into my daughter's room, to overhear her and two girlfriends calling another girl a “slut.”

“Don't ever call a girl a slut,” I said. “It's a sexist term.”

Molly: “But she is a slut, Mommy.”

Mommy: “It's a way of putting down women for being sexual.”

Molly (to friends): “This is because my mom is the sex-writer of the Western world. She's been married
a lot.
”

“Four husbands is not a lot, considering how old I am,” I say, quoting Barbara Follett, who has also been married four times.

Molly's friends titter.

I close the door.

 

Separatism between the sexes does not automatically mean feminism and feminism does not automatically mean man-hating. Plenty of mothers and wives who wanted to be involved with organized feminism in the seventies reported the kind of painful rejection I had experienced. Feminist ideas were never more powerful to my generation than they were then. But a chronic shortsightedness made it hard for some feminist organizations to strike while the iron was hot. If you practiced a “bourgeois lifestyle,” you were treated as an outcast. You got the feeling that unless you had the trappings of radical lesbianism about you, you would be shunned. And trappings they were. There was a style prevalent then to which you were expected to conform: overalls, workboots, no makeup. It was important to
look
like you'd stepped right off the commune. Lipstick and eyeshadow were not only counterrevolutionary, they would be mentioned in reviews of your books. Nobody was more sexist than these feminists.

How could our generation suddenly forswear the values with which it had been raised? It couldn't. So some of us became extremists, as all frightened people do. As usual in revolutions, the zealots drove out the moderates. And the haters of feminism exploited the split for their own ends. Thus, a whole generation of daughters grew up turned off by the term “feminist.”

The truth was, we were all discriminated against simply for being female—why did we fail to see this? Women rejecting each other for their political impurity would never solidify and expand feminism. We needed all kinds of feminists. We still do.

Who is in more trouble during a holocaust—the few who join the resistance and devote their lives to the struggle or the many who think it will blow over and life will be normal again?

Married women with children must be recruited, because they are in danger of deceiving themselves about the “protection” they receive from men. It may take unfair divorces, the molestation or kidnapping of their children, or brutal abuse to wake them up. The daily, ordinary domestic atrocities that occur in male-female marriage may create rage, but they cannot build a movement. That is the role of feminism.

All women have common cause. Separatism is bad for our movement. Separatist tendencies of the seventies set our progress back and helped open the door to backlash.

No wonder the word “feminism” was feared. It had been much too narrowly defined. I define a feminist as a
self-empowering woman
who wishes the same for her sisters. I do not think the term implies a certain sexual orientation, a certain style of dress, or membership in a certain political party. A feminist is merely a woman who refuses to accept the notion that women's power must come through men.

The resurgence of woman-hating in the eighties was partly a product of right-wing political power. But it was also at least partly a reaction to women-against-women politics. Imagine what we could have done to counter the backlash had we been
united
rather than
divided?
We only woke up and began the process of building solidarity when the reaction against feminism had been entrenched for over a decade.

Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore?

A publisher who specializes in excellent volumes of poetry recently wrote to me in despair that every major woman poet he had contacted had refused to “blurb” a book by a gifted new young woman poet he was publishing. He couldn't understand why women were so loath to help each other—even in the supposed “Year of the Woman”—and he begged me to read the book. I read it, was moved by it, and “blurbed” it. But the notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping this poet, I might be hurting my own chances for something or other—
what
I did not know. If there was room for only one woman poet, another space would be filled.

“Fuck it,” I said to myself. And I mailed off the blurb. But my reaction is telling. If I still feel I am in competition with other women, how do less well known women feel?
Terrible,
I have to assume.

I have had to train myself to pay as much attention to women at parties as to men. I have had to nurture my relationships with my sisters and try to root out the hostility and envy. Gradually my younger sister and I are building a new, adult relationship. I long to do that with my older sister as well. I have had to labor on my friendship with my best friend and make it work against all odds. I have had to force myself not to be dismissive of other women's creativity. We have been semislaves for so long (as Doris Lessing says) that we must
cultivate
freedom within ourselves. It doesn't come naturally. Not yet.

In writing about the drama of childhood development, Alice Miller has created, among other things, a theory of freedom. In order to embrace freedom, a child must be sufficiently nurtured, sufficiently loved. Security and abundance are the grounds for freedom. She shows how abusive child rearing is communicated from one generation to the next and how fascism profits from generations of abused children. Women have been abused for centuries, so it should surprise no one that we are so good at abusing each other. Until we learn how to stop doing that, we cannot make our revolution stick.

Many women are damaged in childhood, unprotected, unrespected, and treated with dishonesty. Is it any wonder that we build up vast defenses against other women, since the perpetrators of childhood abuse have so often been women? Is it any wonder that we return intimidation with intimidation, or that we reserve our greatest fury for others who remind us of our own weaknesses—namely other women?

Men, on the other hand, however intellectually condescending, clubbish, loutishly lewd, are rarely as calculatingly cruel as women. They tend, rather, to advance us when we are young and cute (and look like darling daughters) and ignore us when we are older and more sure of our opinions (and look like scary mothers), but they don't really
know
what they're doing. They are too busy bonding with other men and creating male pecking orders
¹³
to pay attention to us. If we were skilled at compromise and alliance-building, we could transform society. The trouble is: We are not yet good at this. We are still quarreling among ourselves. This is the crisis feminism faces today.

Reading younger feminists like Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe has been instructive. Here are two women raised by brilliant and accomplished feminist mothers in a time when women could go to Princeton and Yale and become Rhodes scholars, and both have found themselves uncomfortable, in different ways, with programmatic contemporary feminism. What have they been uncomfortable with? Put simply: with feminism's failure to take into account female sexual desire and female ambivalence about power. Katie Roiphe reacts to the Take Back the Night Marches on her Princeton campus with a plea for seeing sexuality as a human trait rather than something imposed on women by raving rapists. Naomi Wolf dares to explode the myth of “victim feminism” and pleads for allowing women to be as full of good and bad desires as men, as avid for sexual fulfillment and power as men, but held back by the twin myths of good-girlism and sentimental sisterhood. Though she is perhaps too sanguine about women quickly overcoming their fear of power, Wolf fills me with hope because I see her analysis as having shattered the false categories that imprisoned my generation. Women do not have to agree about
everything
to join in alliance with each other to promote female power. Women do not have to cast out their inner bad girl to assert their right to power. Women do not have to cast out their sexuality to be “good sisters.”