Paris Was Ours (17 page)

At dinner one evening, I glimpsed the top of a tall Afro leaving the refectory. I didn’t know there were any other black people in the residence and was intrigued by the dark-skinned young woman retreating with a tray of food. The next time I saw her slipping out with her dinner, I said, “Bonsoir.” Her friendliness surprised me; she invited me to drop by her room anytime. Her name was packed with syllables—Myrianne Montlouis-Calixte—and she was from Martinique, a place I hadn’t heard of, and was in Paris studying math. She spoke almost no English and my French was in its infancy, but
we managed to communicate. Appearances notwithstanding, Myrianne wasn’t antisocial, just anti-French. She found Parisians as cold and gray as the city, and missed her island home.

Through my new friend, I discovered an entire community of
antillaises
from the West Indian bourgeoisie tucked away in the residence and was invited to some of their social gatherings outside the
foyer
. These girls from Guadeloupe and Martinique ate alone or in each other’s rooms. They were elated to meet an African American and bombarded me with questions about racism, Harlem, black entertainers, and anything that touched upon the lives of black people in “America.” They giggled at my French and laughed outright when I attempted to explain that I was black, not American. “
Mais
, Jeannette, you are so ver-ry
américaine
,” said Marie, who spoke a little English. She said I looked American, dressed American, and walked like an American.

I was curious about their hostile attitude toward the Paris-born
antillaise
, who took her meals with French friends and described herself as
française
. They said the French didn’t accept them as equals; therefore, French West Indians should refuse to claim a French identity. Even more annoying to them was Binta, a twenty-year-old Senegalese married to a much older French businessman. The relationship incensed the West Indians, and the framed photo of her husband that Binta kept on a bedside nightstand did little to improve her standing. Binta certainly was a special case. Just before my return to the United States, she begged me to send her some American skin-lightening cream. “I want to be light-skinned and beautiful like Diana Ross and Donna Summer.” These and other cross-cultural friendships were eye-opening: while African
Americans continued to reel from the destructive legacy of slavery and racism, people of color worldwide struggled with their own forms of racial turmoil. I realized that the social and psychological effects of racism transcended national borders. Other friends I made that year were equally fascinating. Much of my time was spent with Linda and Ernie, Indonesian twins who were classically trained pianists. The three of us had long conversations in each other’s rooms and were sometimes joined by Ike, also Indonesian. Ike’s father had named her after his hero, President Eisenhower. I was also very close to Wisdom, a gorgeous African from Togo whose dream in life was to move to Colorado and “live like an American.” His father had given Wisdom’s four brothers names that were just as remarkable: Peace, Light, Love, and Might. There were times in Paris when I felt as if my brain could barely process the wealth of new impressions, surprising names, and puzzling accents.

During spring break I traveled to the walled town of Saint-Malo in Brittany. I explored the ramparts, cruised around on a rented Mobylette pretending to be a member of Hell’s Angels, and, at low tide, ventured out by foot to Grand Bé Island to visit the tomb of Chateaubriand. By year’s end, I had visited Martinique, fallen in love with French literature, and read everything available on the experiences of African Americans in Paris; no one claimed France was perfect, but many African Americans saw it as a haven from racism. My greatest accomplishment, however, was that I had learned to speak good French, which couldn’t be said of the American students who had continued through the year to huddle together in cafés.

Senior year, I returned to Vassar with a stack of French records and an obsession with Paris. I’d also fallen head over
heels for a teenager from Martinique, but the long-distance relationship didn’t survive the voyage across the Atlantic. I kept French as my major, and the year passed in a flurry of term papers, thesis research, and preparations for graduation. Unable to come up with a feasible plan for my future, I applied to graduate school in French literature as well as to law school, in the hope that fate would make the decision I couldn’t. No such luck. I was admitted to both. Unable to decide one way or the other, I enrolled in an NYU master’s degree program in France and deferred admission to Cornell Law School until the following September. All I wanted was more of Paris; real life, with its dreary careerism, could wait a year.

Graduation day sparkled with flashbulbs and grins. The French department gave me an achievement award. Ernest had also successfully completed four years—in prison—and had been paroled; we posed for photos and called ourselves “The Graduates.” I was a project girl
and
a Vassar girl now, and glad to be both. A bright sun slowly crossed campus, pulling with it light and shadow, just as I had done.

Toward a Politics of Quality of Life

T
HERE WAS A
book that I wanted to write, during the nearly six years that I spent in France, called
The Tyranny of Seduction
.

I had become convinced that Frenchwomen were on the Wrong Track—obsessed with their looks, preoccupied by their men, mired in a perpetual game of kittenish femininity. They were willing participants, it seemed to me, in a culture that made a fetish of sexual difference, with women’s part of
différence
being a constellation of outdated ideas that sapped their brains and spirits and ultimately made them incapable of (indeed, unfit for) equality.

My sense of this was confirmed in large part by the French media. For that was an era of aggressive chest beating in France about men being men and women being women, all irresistibly attracted to one another. And in so being, they guaranteed a degree of social harmony that, the pundits said, was utterly lacking in the United States, where a virulent strain of feminism had turned women into wannabe men, effectively ruining relations between the sexes.

Even French feminists shared this view. “We want to keep the freedom to be seduced—and to seduce,” wrote the feminist
philosopher (and wife of the French prime minister) Sylviane Agacinski, as she argued against the “politically correct” American model of gender relations in her 1998 book,
Sexual Politics
. “There will never be a war of the sexes in France.”

It seemed to Agacinski, as to many other European feminists, that by embracing a public image of gender-neutral egalitarianism, American women had cut themselves off from the perks of being female—good maternity leave, for example. And even from the little, politically incorrect joys of life—doors being held, a chance to be treated, in private life, at least, with a pleasant, noncompetitive gallantry.

In other words, American women were living dogs’ lives.

While I lived in Paris, I persisted in thinking otherwise. Sure, I discovered, when I had my first baby there, life with a child was easy. The social protections were fantastic, even for a foreigner. A five-day hospital stay, tax breaks to help pay for a nanny, wonderful part-time preschool starting at age sixteen months, all underwritten by government funds. Some of my French friends, who were fully covered by the system, had even better perks: six-month paid maternity leaves, government subsidies, the right to work a four-day week.

But as a reporter for
Newsweek
specializing in women’s issues, I also saw a dark side to these special privileges: a work-place culture with pervasive sexual harassment—after all, if men were men and women were women, you couldn’t stop the “attraction” between them; and near-institutional sex discrimination, as employers seized upon the costs and constraints of the country’s protective laws to avoid hiring women of child-bearing age. And how, I reasoned, could it be otherwise? If women wore their sexuality like a banner, in public as well
as in private, it was only natural that they would bring upon themselves all the reactions that their sexuality generates: age-old prejudices, intolerance, hostility. By playing the femininity card, Frenchwomen had mired themselves in the confines of traditional sexism.

I was particularly convinced of this in 2000, when the French passed a new “parity” law intended to encourage a fifty-fifty split of elected posts between men and women. This was promoted partly on the grounds that women, being more concrete in their thinking, more honest, cooperative, and down-to-earth than men, would change the way France is governed. This initiative, which was put to the test for the first time in municipal elections in 2001, brought voters candidate lists that were 50 percent female. It also brought an onslaught of Minnie Mouse candidates—unschooled, unprepared, unable in any real way to govern. Like Sabine Fettu, a conservative candidate for city council in the Paris suburb of Courbevoie and a self-described schmoozer, who campaigned in a fur coat urging other women candidates to dress appealingly and went around spouting, “We’re all products. We’ll do anything to make a sale.”

This was not what I had associated with women’s equality. As an American girl of the 1970s, as a feminist coming of age in the 1980s, I was a devotee of the girls-can-do-anything school—a socialization that rested on the idea that, not only was biology not destiny, it was largely irrelevant. And I truly believed, as I gazed back at my country from France, that American feminists had managed to secure for American women a sex-free public space in which they could operate with dignity as people first and women second.

And so, when a French phone salesman tried to sell me a junky, light blue “feminine” cell phone, or when a French source suggested that I’d get better interviews if I were less direct and more “feminine” in my approach, I felt a shiver of superiority. “I am an American,” I told the phone salesman, as though this meant that as a woman, I had risen to a higher sphere of personhood. It was the closest thing to nationalism that I felt in those years abroad.

It’s very easy, when you’re an expatriate, to idealize your homeland and project onto it all the virtues lacking in your host country. Especially when your thoughts of home are supplied by CNN and the movies you see on the Champs-Élysées. My years in France coincided with the era of Janet Reno and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Of Madeleine Albright and Christiane Amanpour. Of
G.I. Jane
and a kickboxing Ashley Judd and a black-belt René Russo playing a character who can break heads while pregnant, and a whole slew of new female action heroes looking fabulous as they ran around with walkie-talkies and guns.

I would watch these American Amazons and thrill to the virile virtues they projected. I would leave the theater and see the Frenchwomen lighting their cigarettes, tugging on their male companions’ arms, and pouting their way into the night, and I’d think: God bless America. We’re doing something right.

And then I moved back to the United States.

My family and I settled in Washington and I started casting about for work. I met with an older woman who worked for a female politician. I casually asked if there might be any kind of writing I could do on the Hill. “That’s not for you,” she said. “That’s for a young person, without children.”

I made some interested noises about working for a magazine. “You wouldn’t want to,” I was told. “None of us have children.”

I had moved to France as a childless twenty-nine-year-old. I came back to America a mother of two. And this was an eye-opener.

American women, I found, weren’t more evolved than Frenchwomen. If anything, they were caught in sex roles more traditional than those I had seen in France. Suddenly, the horizon seemed lower, for me and my peers—who, quite honestly, really did seem to be leading dogs’ lives.

THE STAY-AT-HOME MOMS
had no time of their own. They were on an infernal treadmill: school and play dates and soccer and violin and gymnastics and ballet and tutoring. Mommy and Me and volunteering, with do-gooder meetings running into the night. And topping it all off, a mental chorus of admonition, running in their minds like the drone of NPR in their minivans: Did anyone realize how hard they were working? Did anyone realize they still had a brain? Did anyone appreciate the time they were giving? Did anyone care about what they had to say?

This übermomming represented a level of selflessness that would have been considered downright neurotic in France. No woman with a family life, the thinking would have run (once the laughter subsided), no woman who wanted to preserve her family life (which, after all, was anchored around her husband), would be out doing children’s activities all day, let alone at night.

As for the working mothers I got to know in America: They looked tired and harried. And adding to their stress was their
own background noise, the media-fed dirge of guilt: Were they doing the right thing with their lives? Had they made the right choices? Were their children well taken care of? Should they be working less, differently, not at all? Were they really good enough mothers?