The Female Eunuch (7 page)
Although we do not believe in green-sickness any more, since maidens became an essential, if menial, part of the work force, we do believe that old maidens are apt to be consumed and wasted by frustration. Only recently have the other terrifying functions of the womb been publicized and accepted. Husbands are allowed to participate in the mysteries of birth, which need no longer be carried out in a coven of females. Women do not have to be purified or churched after childbearing any more. Attempts are being made to reduce the impression that childbirth is a kind of punishment for women, and to re-educate them in breeding, while the more sinister companions of childbed—puerperal fever and sudden haemor- rhage—have been brought under control. Although few men have still to watch in horror while their wives breed themselves through miscarriage and prolapse helplessly to death, we still have not come to terms with the sinister womb. The most pervasive and significant manifestation of that atavistic fear surviving is in the common atti- tude to menstruation.
Women who adhere to the Moslem, Hindu or Mosaic faiths must regard themselves as unclean in their time of menstruation and se- clude themselves for a period. Medieval Catholicism made the stipulation that menstruating women were not to come into the church. Although enlightenment is creeping into this field at its usual pace, we still have a marked revulsion for menstruation, principally evinced by our efforts to keep it secret. The success of the tampon is partly due to the fact that it is hidden. The arrival of the menarche is more significant than any birthday, but in the Anglo- Saxon households it is ignored and carefully concealed from general awareness. For six months while I was waiting for my first menstru- ation I toted a paper bag with diapers and pins
in my school satchel. When it finally came, I suffered agonies lest anyone should guess or
smell
it or anything. My diapers were made of harsh towelling, and I used to creep into the laundry and crouch over a bucket of foul clouts, hoping that my brother would not catch me at my revolting labours. It is not surprising that well-bred, dainty little girls find it difficult to adapt to menstruation, when our society does no more than explain it and leave them to get on with it. Among the aborigines who lived along the Pennefather river in Queensland the little girl used to be buried up to her waist in warm sand to aid the first contractions, and fed and cared for by her mother in a sacred place, to be led in triumph to the camp where she joined a feast to
celebrate her entry into the company of marriageable maidens, it seems likely that menstruation was much less traumatic.
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Women
still buy sanitary towels with enormous discretion, and carry their handbags to the loo when they only need to carry a napkin. They still recoil at the idea of intercourse during menstruation, and feel that the blood they shed is of a special kind, although perhaps not so special as was thought when it was the liquid presented to the devil in witches’ loving cups. If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood—if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.
Menstruation, we are told, is unique among the natural bodily processes in that it involves a loss of blood. It is assumed that nature is a triumph of design, and that none of her processes is wasteful or in need of reversal, especially when it only inconveniences women, and therefore it is thought extremely unlikely that there is any ‘real’ pain associated with menstruation. In fact no little girl who finds herself bleeding from an organ which she didn’t know she had until it began to incommode her feels that nature is a triumph of design and that whatever is, is right. When she discovers that the pain at- tending this horror is in some way her
fault
, the result of improper adaptation to her female role, she really
feels like the victim of a bad joke. Doctors admit that most women suffer ‘discomfort’ during menstruation, but disagree very much about what proportion of women suffer ‘real’ pain. Whether the contractions of the womb are painful in some absolute sense or could be rendered comfortable by some psychotherapy or other is imma- terial. The fact is that no woman would menstruate if she did not have to. Why should women not resent an inconvenience which causes tension before, after and during; unpleasantness, odour, staining; which takes up anything from a seventh to a fifth of her adult life until the menopause; which makes her fertile thirteen times a year when she only expects to bear twice in a lifetime; when the cessation of menstruation may mean several years of endocrine de- rangement and the gradual atrophy of her sexual organs? The fact is that nature is not a triumph of design, and every battle against illness is an interference with her design, so that there is no rational ground for assuming that menstruation as we know it must be or ought to be irreversible.
The contradiction in the attitude that regards menstruation as di- vinely ordained and yet unmentionable leads to the intensification of the female revolt against it, which can be traced in all the common words for it, like the
curse
, and male disgust expressed in terms like
having the rags on
. We have only the choice of three kinds of expres- sion: the vulgar resentful, the genteel (‘I’ve got my period’, ‘I am indisposed’), and the scientific jargon of the
menses
. Girls are irre- pressible though: in one Sydney girls’ school napkins are affection- ately referred to as
daisies
; Italian girls call their periods
il marchese
and German girls
der rote König
. One might envy the means adopted by
La Dame aux Camélias
to signify her condition to her gentlemen friends, but if it were adopted on a large scale it might look like a mark of proscription, a sort of leper’s bell. There have been some moves to bring menstruation out into the open in an unprejudiced
way, like Sylvia Plath’s menstruation poem.
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Perhaps we need a
film to be made by an artist
about the onset of menstruation, in which the implications emerge in some non-academic way, if we cannot manage a public celebration of a child’s entry into womanhood by any other means.
Menstruation has been used a good deal in argument about wo- men’s fitness to undertake certain jobs: where women’s comfort is concerned the effects are minimized—where the convenience of our masters is threatened they are magnified. Women are not more in- capacitated by menstruation than men are by their drinking habits, their hypertension, their ulcers and their virility fears. It is not neces- sary to give menstruation holidays. It may be that women commit crimes during the premenstrual and menstrual period, but it is still true that women commit far fewer crimes than men. Women must be aware of this enlistment of menstruation in the anti-feminist ar- gument, and counteract it by their own statements of the situation. Menstruation does not turn us into raving maniacs or complete in- valids; it is just that we would rather do without it.
In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists to beautify her. The sun shines only
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p. 90
to burnish her skin and gild her hair; the wind blows only to whip up the colour in her cheeks; the sea strives to bathe her; flowers die gladly so that her skin may luxuriate in their essence. She is the crown of creation, the masterpiece. The depths of the sea are ran- sacked for pearl and coral to deck her; the bowels of the earth are laid open that she might wear gold, sapphires, diamonds and rubies. Baby seals are battered with staves, unborn lambs ripped from their mothers’ wombs, millions of moles, muskrats, squirrels, minks, er- mines, foxes, beavers, chinchillas, ocelots, lynxes, and other small and lovely creatures die untimely deaths that she might have furs. Egrets, ostriches and peacocks, butterflies and beetles yield her their plumage. Men risk their lives hunting leopards for her coats, and crocodiles for her handbags and shoes. Millions of silkworms offer her their yellow labours; even the seamstresses roll seams
and whip lace by hand, so that she might be clad in the best that money can buy.
The men of our civilization have stripped themselves of the fineries of earth so that they might work more freely to plunder the universe for treasures to deck my lady in. New raw materials, new processes, new machines are all brought into her service. My lady must therefore be the chief spender as well as the chief symbol of spending ability and monetary success. While her mate toils in his factory, she totters about the smartest streets and plushiest hotels with his fortune upon her back and bosom, fingers and wrists, con- tinuing that essential expenditure in his house which is her frame and her setting, enjoying that silken idleness which is the necessary condition of maintaining her mate’s prestige and her qualification
to demonstrate it.
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Once upon a time only the aristocratic lady could
lay claim to the title of crown of creation: only her hands were white enough, her feet tiny enough, her waist narrow enough, her hair long and golden enough; but every well-to-do burgher’s wife set herself up to ape my lady and to follow fashion, until my lady was forced to set herself out like a gilded doll overlaid with monstrous rubies and pearls like pigeons’ eggs. Nowadays the Queen of En- gland still considers it part of her royal female role to sport as much of the family jewellery as she can manage at any one time on all public occasions, although the male monarchs have escaped such showcase duty, which devolves exclusively upon their wives.
At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and ‘handsome is as handsome does’, she was emerging as the central emblem of western art. For the Greeks the male and female body had beauty of a human, not necessarily a sexual kind; indeed they may have marginally favoured the young male form as the most powerful and perfectly proportioned. Likewise the Romans showed no bias towards the depiction of femininity in their predominantly monumental art. In the
Renaissance the female form began to predominate, not only as the mother in the predominant emblem of
madonna col bambino
, but as an aesthetic study in herself. At first naked female forms took their chances in crowd scenes or diptychs of Adam and Eve, but gradually Venus claims ascendancy, Mary Magdalene ceases to be wizened and emaciated, and becomes nubile and ecstatic, portraits of anonym- ous young women, chosen only for their prettiness, begin to appear, are gradually disrobed, and renamed Flora or Primavera. Painters begin to paint their own wives and mistresses and royal consorts as voluptuous beauties, divesting them of their clothes if desirable, but not of their jewellery. Susanna keeps her bracelets on in the bath, and Hélène Fourment keeps ahold of her fur as well!
What happened to woman in painting happened to her in poetry as well. Her beauty was celebrated in terms of the riches which clustered around her: her hair was gold wires, her brow ivory, her lips ruby, her teeth gates of pearl, her breasts alabaster veined with
lapis lazuli, her eyes as black as jet.
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The fragility of her loveliness
was emphasized by the inevitable comparisons with the rose, and she was urged to employ her beauty in lovemaking before it withered
on the stem.
3
She was for consumption; other sorts of imagery spoke
of her in terms of cherries and cream, lips as sweet as honey and skin white as milk, breasts like cream uncrudded, hard as apples.
4
Some celebrations yearned over her finery as well, her lawn more
transparent than morning mist, her lace as delicate as gossamer, the baubles that she toyed with and the favours that she gave.
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Even
now we find the thriller hero describing his classy dame’s elegant suits, cheeky hats, well-chosen accessories and footwear; the imagery no longer dwells on jewels and flowers but the consumer emphasis is the same. The mousy secretary blossoms into the feminine stereo- type when she reddens her lips, lets down her hair, and puts on something frilly.
Nowadays women are not expected, unless they are Paola di Liegi or Jackie Onassis, and then only on gala
occasions, to appear with a king’s ransom deployed upon their bodies, but they are required to look expensive, fashionable, well- groomed, and not to be seen in the same dress twice. If the duty of the few may have become less onerous, it has also become the duty of the many. The stereotype marshals an army of servants. She is supplied with cosmetics, underwear, foundation garments, stockings, wigs, postiches and hairdressing as well as her outer garments, her jewels and furs. The effect is to be built up layer by layer, and it is expensive. Splendour has given way to fit, line and cut. The spirit of competition must be kept up, as more and more women struggle towards the top drawer, so that the fashion industry can rely upon an expanding market. Poorer women fake it, ape it, pick up on the fashions a season too late, use crude effects, mistaking the line, the sheen, the gloss of the high-class article for a garish simulacrum. The business is so complex that it must be handled by an expert. The paragons of the stereotype must be dressed, coifed and painted by the experts and the style-setters, although they may be encouraged to give heart to the housewives studying their lives in pulp magazines by claiming a lifelong fidelity to their own hair and soap and water. The boast is more usually discouraging than otherwise, unfortunately.
As long as she is young and personable, every woman may cherish the dream that she may leap up the social ladder and dim the sheen of luxury by sheer natural loveliness; the few examples of such a feat are kept before the eye of the public. Fired with hope, optimism and ambition, young women study the latest forms of the stereotype, set out in
Vogue, Nova, Queen
and other glossies, where the man- nequins stare from among the advertisements for fabulous real estate, furs and jewels. Nowadays the uniformity of the year’s fashions is severely affected by the emergence of the pert female designers in Britain who direct their appeal to the working girl, emphasizing variety, comfort, and simple, striking effects. There is no longer a single face of the
