The Female Eunuch (32 page)

Once upon a time everyone lived in a house full of friends with large communal areas, where the streets were full of friends because the immobility of the community meant that all its members knew one another and their family history. The system has its disadvant- ages: non-conformism often proved intolerable, and the constant attention of the whole community to the actions of individuals had disadvantages more striking than the advantages. In such a com- munity an old lady could not lie for four days at the foot of her staircase with a broken hip but a woman could not conduct a forbid- den love-affair either. Nowadays people live closer together than ever before but it is overcrowded isolation. Tower blocks contain dozens and dozens of little families who

have a great deal in common, but they are strangers to each other. Their front doors shut in a private world which cannot communicate past the blank corridors and lifts except to complain about each other’s noise. The women watching their children play in the com- munal play areas only know the parents of other children when some outrage demands parental interference. Competitiveness fre- quently means that each family clings to a fantasy of superiority, racial, moral, religious, economic or class. Town planners lament that tower dwellers will not undertake to keep their communal areas clean and pleasant, and the victims of this rehousing complain that the towers cause special anxieties connected with height and encap- sulation. Passing up and down in the lifts they never see each other, they cannot see in each other’s windows, or natter in their doorways while cleaning the stoop. Unspontaneous attempts to stimulate in- timacy don’t work. Women jealously maintain the separateness of their households, fearing all kinds of imaginary corruption of their children and their way of life by the inroads of strangers. Anne Al- len’s housewife rejects the possibility of sexual sharing, but at least she openly considers it. The kin-community safeguards its own sexual relationship by incest restrictions which do not have their initial justification in fears of the results of inbreeding, which were not known by the first promulgators of anti-incest laws. Women dwelling in tower blocks may not consciously fear the effects of in- timacy with stranger women, but the tension is there. Perhaps the failure of such community living could be avoided by including a pub and a laundrette in each block but economically it would appear that the jobs being tirelessly duplicated in each living capsule ought to be shared if genuine organic interaction is to result.

The architectural results of the nuclear family are universally deemed disastrous: the ungainly spread of ribbon developments, of acres of little boxes, has ruined the appearance of all of our cities. Upkeep of such areas is prohibitively expensive, access to services is difficult

to arrange. The defenders of high density housing have practicality and comfort on their side. What they do not realize is that the nuclear family is pulling against them; no amount of anthropometric invest- igation, no clever orientation of clean and efficient housing units towards light and warmth and open views can break down the suspicion that the Oedipal unit feels towards others of its kind. The stresses and strains of conjugal introspection cannot tolerate a wider horizon. One alternative is the takeover by the employer as father, as happens in specially constructed villages in America where the firms’ employees are housed according to income and position and encouraged to get together. Wives become faculty wives and corpor- ation wives. Togetherness is rampant. The long-term results are, to me at least, unimaginable. Every aspect of family life comes to be dominated by the firm; just as the unfortunate man gets his job on a personality assessment relating to his whole family, he must carry out the firm’s role in every aspect of his personal life. Even his sexual performance may become a business matter: Masters and Johnson have delineated the hedonistic norm. No serf, writhing under the law of
jus primae noctis
, handing over his sons to the service of his liege lord, ever had it worse. As securely as any gold-rush miner or freed slave, he owes his soul to the company store. The lo- gical outcome of the control of employment over the movement of labour has come about. His continued security is dependent upon the behaviour of his whole family; the desired result is complete immobility and predictability. This is why faculty husbands have a lower libido rating than others because they have become fat white mice in a hygienic laboratory, not because of the proximity of their

women, as Lionel Tiger claimed.
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Big Daddy the employer, the

spectre that looms over
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
, has castrated his sons. The human soul is indestructible however, and if the group is to form the special conscience, then the sin which can incapacitate it must be a group sin, so that no one can split to Big Daddy. The

pattern of American decadence is communal drunkenness, first of all, which is the only way into uncensored behaviour, and, ultimately, wife-swapping, the twentieth-century form of incest:

The autumn of 1962, the two couples were ecstatically, scandalously close. Frank and Marcia were delighted to be thrown together so often without seeking it. Janet and Harold in private joked about the now transparent strategems of the other two lovers. These jokes began to leak out into their four-sided conversations…

The other couples began to call them the Applesmiths…‘Don’t you feel it? It’s so
wrong
. Now we’re really corrupt. All of us.’
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Wife-swapping is seriously advocated by writers in ‘journals of human relations’, like
Forum
, as a method of revitalizing marriages which have gone stale. Shared but secret behaviour will cement any group into a conspiracy, but the results can be hard to live with. Changing partners is such a thoroughly unspontaneous activity, so divorced from the vagaries of genuine sexual desire—no more than a variant on the square dance. In such a transaction sex is the sufferer: passion becomes lechery. Ringing the changes on modes of
getting pleasure
disguises boredom, but it does not restore life. Sex in such circumstances is less and less a form of communication and more and more a diversion. Like bingo, slot-machines, hula-hoops, and yo-yos, it is fun. Manageable, homely amusement. Not innocent, but calculated; not dynamic, but contained. When Big Daddy countenances such naughtiness even sex will have come under his benign aegis. The overfed, undersexed white mouse is allowed a brief spell in another’s cage to perk him up. Sexual uniformity could be enforced this way: Mr Jones can apply to Mrs Jones what he learnt from Mrs Smith and so on. Universal domesticity buries all.

Anne Allen is a sensible, middling-liberal English housewife. With a matronizing glance at her young interlocutor she continues:

I find it a rather attractive idea in theory. But in practice I can’t think of a dozen, or even half a dozen couples I would like to be that close to. Or who would like to live that way with us…

I don’t like the way they bring up their children. I give my children less, or more pocket money, which could lead to fights.

I hate the way they fill their kitchen with strange cooking smells or squalor. Or I feel their beady eyes on my rather wobbly house- keeping.

But most of all, I am helplessly, hopelessly, possessive, and if my husband went off with some nearby dishy wife whenever I shouted

at him, there could be murder done.’
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Anne Allen is more like the average British housewife than the young woman she spoke to, and much more ‘normal’ than faculty wives or corporation wives or

As a social unit the family means the individual actuated by his most aggressively individualistic instincts; it is not the foundation, but the negation of society. Out of an aggregate of conflicting individualistic interests, human society emphatically has not and could never have arisen. It owed its rise to instincts that obliterated individualistic instincts, that moulded by binding sentiments of inter

-dependency, loyalty, solidarity, devotion, a group larger than the patriarchal family and from its nature capable of indefinite expansion.

Robert Briffault, ‘The Mothers’, 1931, p.509

swapped wives. She is not ashamed about the anti-social nature of her family although she might as well have said that there was not
one
couple that she could tolerate at such close quarters, and not many couples with whom she was in any sense intimate at all. The term
couples
itself implies the locked-off unit of male-female: she did not speak of families. This is virtually what the nuclear family has become. Women’s magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife’s involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband’s claims on her. What a notion—a family that is threatened

by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they
were
whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, and then isolation. So the baby-sitter must be introduced into the house sneakily, for if junior finds out that his parents are going out, he’ll scream. I think of the filthy two-roomed house in Calabria where people came and went freely, where I never heard a child scream except in pain, where the twelve-year-old aunt sang at her washing by the well, and the old father walked in the olive grove with his grandson on his arm. English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave. A sterilized parent is a eunuch in his children’s harem. To be sure, I recognize that efficient contraception is necessary for sexual pleasure and that sexual pleasure is necessary, but contraception for economic reasons is another matter. ‘We can only afford two children’ is a squalid argument, but more acceptable in our society than ‘we don’t like children’. A sterilized parent is forever bound to those children whom he has, more than ever immobile and pre- dictable, and those children are more securely bound to him. ‘We can only afford two children’ really means, ‘We only like clean, well- disciplined middle-class children who go to good schools and grow up to be professionals’, for children manage to use up all the capital that is made available for the purpose, whatever proportion it may be of the family’s whole income, just as housework expands to fill the time

available. The sterilized parent is the ultimate domestic animal. Masculine culture contains a strong vein of anti-domesticity, al- though men can hardly have the experience of it that women have had trained into them. The fantasy of the perfect partner exists alongside the consciousness of what family meant to a growing boy.

Marriage is the only thing that really scares me. With the right girl I suppose it’s okay but I couldn’t imagine myself having a house and a wife. I like to feel free, to go anywhere and not have to worry. That’s one nice thing about not having a girlfriend, you’re free to go out and enjoy yourself with the lads. Having a girl ties you down.
The more you go out with a girl, the more involved you get. I’m frightened of becoming engaged. That would finish me—because I’d never break off the engagement, it isn’t fair on the girl. Too many

teenagers rush into marriage…

The next time I have a steady girl I’m going to make it clear from the start that I want a free night off with the lads every week. Once you

lose all your friends, you’re stuck to the girl, and you’ve had it.
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You’ve had it, you’re hooked
, done for! Involved means tangled up, tied down.

Most people get the best job they can, work for promotion and when they’re earning enough money meet a girl and marry her. Then you have to buy a house and a car, and there you are—chained down for the rest of your life. When you get to thirty-five you’re frightened to try anything new in case you lose your security. Then it means

living with all the regrets about things you wanted to do.
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The disenchanted vision of these children has revealed the function of the patriarchal family unit in capitalist society. It immobilizes the worker, keeps him vulnerable, so that he can be tantalized with the vision of security. It gives him a controllable pattern of consumption to which he is thoroughly committed. His commitment is to his small family and his employer not to his community. The effect of wifely pressure on strikers has not to my knowledge been analysed. Often it is responsibility to a family which causes a striker to take drastic

action: if the employers can hold out long enough it is this same pressure which will bring him back to work. Wives distrust their husbands’ leisure; too often a wife would rather her husband earned less than hung about in the streets with his cronies getting into trouble. One of the saddest comments upon the family in industrial society was offered by the spectacle of the wives of miners thrown out of work by pit closures angrily refusing the solution of pay without work because their husbands would either be around the house all day doing nothing, or getting into mischief with the boys. Many girls undertake their anti-social functions very early, restricting their boyfriends’ association with their ‘mates’ severely in return for sexual favours. This is not altogether the fault of women’s selfishness for the male groups that threaten her do not admit her except under special circumstances and in a special capacity. She cannot play darts, drink beer, or kick a football about. Her distrust of these activities is not that her man will consort with other women in the company of his mates, but the knowledge that he enjoys these other activities and is dependent upon them in a way that he does not enjoy or depend upon her. She is jealous not of his sexual favours, but upon the partiality of his sexual passion, and the greater togeth- erness he might enjoy with men. Every wife must live with the knowledge that she has nothing else but home and family, while her house is ideally a base which her tired warrior—hunter can withdraw to and express his worst manners, his least amusing con- versation, while he licks his wounds and is prepared by laundry and toilet and lunch-box for another sortie.