The White Album (14 page)

1968-70

to make an
omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make fifty-one percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class
.
The creation of this revolutionary “class” was from the virtual beginning the “idea” of the women’s movement, and the tendency for popular discussion of the movement to center for so long around daycare centers is yet another instance of that studied resistance to political ideas which characterizes our national life
.

“The new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality,” the feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone announced flatly in 1970
.
“It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history
.
”
This was scarcely a statement of purpose anyone could find cryptic, and it was scarcely the only statement of its kind in the literature of the movement
.
Nonetheless, in 1972, in a “special issue” on women,
Time
was still musing genially that the movement might well succeed in bringing about “fewer diapers and more Dante
.
”

That was a very pretty image, the idle ladies sitting in the gazebo and murmuring
lasciate ogni speranza,
but it depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for “fulfillment,” or “self-expression,” a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and capable of engendering only the most
pro forma
benevolent interest
.
In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women’s movement would have seemed to have any interest at all
.
Marxism in this country had ever been an eccentric and quixotic passion
.
One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point
.
The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having
.
The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed:
it developed that they actually
cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game
.
They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of “brotherhood
.
”

And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women’s movement, and the invention of women as a “class
.
”
One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration
.
The notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, “named” and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away, exactly confirmed one’s idea of where nineteenth-century transcendental instincts, crossed with a late reading of Engels and Marx, might lead
.
To read the theorists of the women’s movement was to think not of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Margaret Fuller at her most high-minded, of rushing position papers off to mimeo and drinking tea from paper cups in lieu of eating lunch; of thin raincoats on bitter nights
.
If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family
.
If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend, via technology, “the very organization of nature,” the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, “that goes back through recorded history to the animal kingdom itself
.
”
I
accept the universe,
Margaret Fuller had finally allowed: Shulamith Firestone did not
.

It seemed very New England, this febrile and cerebral passion
.
The solemn
a priori
idealism in the guise of radical materialism somehow bespoke old-fashioned self-reliance and prudent sacrifice
.
The clumsy torrent of words became a principle, a renunciation of style as unserious
.
The rhetorical willingness to break eggs became, in practice, only a thrifty capacity for finding the sermon in every stone
.
Burn the literature, Ti-Grace Atkinson said in effect when it was suggested that, even come the revolution, there would still remain the whole body of “sexist” Western literature
.
But of course no books
would be burned:
the women of this movement were perfec
tly
capable of crafting didactic revisions of whatever apparen
tly
intractable material came to hand
.
“As a parent you should become an interpreter of myths,” advised Letty Cottin Pogrebin in the preview issue of
Ms
.
“Portions of any fairy tale or children’s story can be salvaged during a critique session with your child
.
”
Other literary analysts devised ways to salvage other books: Isabel Archer in
The Portrait of a Lady
need no longer be the victim of her own idealism
.
She could be, instead, the victim of a sexist society, a woman who had “internalized the conventional definition of wife
.
”
The narrator of Mary McCarthy’s
The Company She Keeps
could be seen as “enslaved because she persists in looking for her identity in a man
.
”
Similarly, Miss McCarthy’s
The Group
could serve to illustrate “what happens to women who have been educated at first-rate women’s colleges—taught philosophy and history—and then are consigned to breast-feeding and gourmet cooking
.
”

The idea that fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology
.
They had invented a class; now they had only to make that class conscious
.
They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a “rap session,” then called “consciousness-raising,” and in any case a therapeuti
cally oriented American reinter
pretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as “speaking bitterness
.
”
They purged and regrouped and purged again, worried out one another’s errors and deviations, the “elitism” here, the “careerism” there
.
It would have been merely sententious to call some of their th
in
king Stalinist: of course it was
.
It would have been poin
tl
ess even to speak of whether one considered these women “right” or “wrong,” meaningless to dwell upon the obvious, upon the coarsening of moral imagination to which such social idealism so often leads
.
To believe in “the greater good” is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension
.
Ask anyone committed to Marxist analysis how many angels stand on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins
.

To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a
particularly narrow and cracked
determinism
.
Nonetheless it was serious, and for these high-strung idealists to find themselves out of the mimeo room and onto the Cavett show must have been in certain ways more unsettling to them than it ever was to the viewers
.
They were being heard, and yet not really
.
Attention was finally being paid, and yet that attention was mired in the trivial
.
Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue
.
(This grievance was not atypical in that discussion of it seemed always to take on unexplored Ms
.
Scarlett overtones, suggestions of fragile cultivated flowers being “spoken to,” and therefore violated, by uppity proles
.
) They totted up the pans scoured, the towels picked off the bathroom floor, the loads of laundry done in a lifetime
.
Cooking a meal could only be “dogwork,” and to claim any pleasure from it was evidence of craven acquiescence in one’s own forced labor
.
Small children could only be odious mechanisms for the spilling and digesting of food, for robbing women of their “freedom
.
”
It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s grave and awesome recognition of woman’s role as “the Other” to the notion that the first step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman’s marriage contract (“wife strips beds, husband remakes them”), a document reproduced in
Ms
.
,
but it was toward just such trivialization that the women’s movement seemed to be heading
.

Of course this litany of trivia was crucial to the movement in the beginning, a key technique in the politicizing of women who had perhaps been conditioned to obscure their resentments even from themselves
.
Mrs
.
Shulman’s discovery that she had less time than her husband seemed to have was precisely the kind of chord the movement had hoped to strike in all women (the “click! of recognition,” as Jane O’Reilly described it), but such discoveries could be of no use at all if one refused to perceive the larger point, failed to make that inductive leap from the personal to the political
.
Splitting up the week into hours during which the children were directed to address their “personal questions” to either one parent or another might or might not have improved the quality of Mr
.
and Mrs
.
Shulman’s marriage, but the improvement of marriages would not a revolution make
.
It could be very useful to call housework, as Len
in did, “the most unproductive,
the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do,” but it could be useful only as the first step in a political process, only in the “awakening” of a class to its position, useful only as a metaphor: to believe, during the late Sixties and early Seventies in the United States of America, that the words had literal meaning was not only to stall the movement in the personal but to seriously delude oneself
.

More and more, as the literature of the movement began to reflect the thinking of women who did not really understand the movement’s ideological base, one had the sense of this stall, this delusion, the sense that the drilling of the theorists had struck only some psychic hardpan dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies
.
To read even desultorily in this literature was to recognize instantly a certain dolorous phantasm, an imagined Everywoman with whom the authors seemed to identify all too entirely
.
This ubiquitous construct was everyone’s victim but her own
.
She was persecuted even by her gynecologist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives
.
She particularly needed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist’s table
.
During the fashion for shoes with pointed toes, she, like “many women,” had her toes amputated
.
She was so intimidated by cosmetics advertising that she would sleep “huge portions” of her day in order to forestall wrinkling, and when awake she was enslaved by detergent commercials on television
.
She sent her child to a nursery school where the little girls huddled in a “doll corner,” and were forcibly restrained from playing with building blocks
.
Should she work she was paid “three to ten times less” than an (always) unqualified man holding the same job, was prevented from attending business lunches because she would be “embarrassed” to appear in public with a man not her husband, and, when she traveled alone, faced a choice between humiliation in a restaurant and “eating a doughnut” in her hotel room
.