The Women's Room (2 page)
The cowboy’s choice of horse and open trail over the yearning blonde in a high-necked gingham dress was no less inevitable than the affirmation of true love for women. Men were – and are still – being told that true manhood consists of freedom, work, adventure, and isolation; women were – and are still – being told that true happiness resides in love, shown as sexual attraction that endures. Thus, conventions are not mere devices: they are expressions of moral and political laws.
In the fifties and sixties, films about women – when there were any – occasionally entered the troublesome area of sexual freedom for women, depicting sympathetic women who did not remain utterly virginal or faithful. But one knew that as inevitably as a private eye would lose his dream woman to a murderer’s bullet or a jail sentence – and thus be able to return, accompanied by the wail of a lonely clarinet, to his cheap apartment, his bottle of booze, and his lonely isolation – the sympathetic sexual woman would be dead by the end of the film, often killed in an accident caused by her own hysteria or
remorse. Much as we might like Elizabeth Taylor or Simone Signoret, a higher justice was operating.
While some conventions, like the demand for sexual ‘purity’, have eased, many remain. Convention has always held women’s work – what is still called women’s work – illegitimate as subject matter for serious literature: one could describe ruined casseroles or erupting washing machines or screaming children only as the comic frustrations of a wry, witty ‘mad housewife’. Christina Stead’s magnificent and still insufficiently read
The Man Who Loved Children
depicts actual domestic drudgery by the tormented, pathetic Henny: but that book took twenty-five years to reach a substantial audience, and survived only by word-of-mouth passed by women’s networks. And it is still savaged by male critics. Although novels like Stead’s, and Doris Lessing’s great
The Golden Notebook
and, later,
The Women’s Room
treat women’s work seriously, the subject still consigns a work to less than serious status in the eyes of literary critics. To put it another way: under no circumstances may the actual daily occupation of half of the world’s population be taken seriously.
Most women, whether living alone or with others, have all or most of the responsibility for creating and maintaining a felicitous living place, for doing work that ranges from utter drudgery to sensitive psychological examination and highly creative invention. ‘Women’s work’ takes up much of the lives of almost all the women in the world. Indeed, it is the most important single work in the world. Without it, all other endeavors would falter; children and men would die or go mad, the world would be emotionally barren. In places where ‘women’s work’ includes farming, the people would starve without it – yet even here, men treat it as without value.
We must question why women’s work is universally trivialized. Literary conventions are not mere technical devices; they are expressions of cultural laws. That women’s work is elided or trivialized in literature is directly related to the fact that this work is unpaid. Women comprise, in fact, a huge slave labor force throughout the world. To suggest that their work is
important would undermine this economic arrangement. People who believe they are doing important, even essential, work demand appropriate payment.
Further, that women are not paid for their work in a world that values money and worldly power above anything else, suggests that women are unworthy of respect. Thus, men can ignore the world view women develop in the course of lives spent taking care of others – children, men, the sick, friends, relatives. Men can complacently continue to exalt rationality, power, possession, and hierarchy, and to justify domination as a necessary and natural principle, unhampered by the criticism of women or men who entertain a different value system. Men in power do not even hear radical criticism because they have pre-labeled it invalid, soft-headed, or insane. Because the dominant class controls the discourse, only the independently thoughtful even perceive the insanity of our present culture.
The Women’s Room
broke another convention, one which has eroded further because of feminism and the emergence of wonderful lesbian novels. This is the idea that men are central to women’s lives. As long as a novelist observes this convention, no one will object to the fact that all the men in the novel are repulsive, hollow, selfish, or wooden. Male character is less important than male centrality. In a male-centered novel, the heroine clearly needs a man; whatever her fate, the male reader does not feel threatened since he knows she could be happy if only she had the love of a good man – one very like himself. (In an interesting sidenote to this, film depictions of Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth
invariably show Selden as emotionally present and available – only somehow not at the moment – to Lily. This mocks the conclusion of the novel, and undermines Wharton’s point. If Selden were willing to marry Lily, she would not have to commit suicide. But filmmakers cannot bear to depict a male refusing to be a ‘hero’.)
In fact, men are central to many women’s lives in puberty and early adulthood, when sexual identity is being explored. At this time, women are central to many men, too. But as we grow older, our work – whatever it may be – occupies most of our time and
thought. ‘Love’ moves to a secondary or even tertiary position in our universe. The convention of male centrality was built into the novel, a form that emerged in a period in which man-made laws forced women into economic, political, and social dependence upon men. Women’s achievement of independence in these areas is still new, and since women continue to be expected to take total responsibility for rearing the young, independence remains a difficult and risky enterprise. The same male desire that created laws making women dependent on men appears in men’s adamant continuing refusal to accept responsibility for raising children, and often, for maintaining themselves and their living spaces – something all male animals do except man. Both acts foster the illusion of control, to which the masculine principle is dedicated. And again, forcing dependency on women serves to silence them, contains and gags radical criticism. Making men central to women’s lives serves to exalt men, to make them pivotal to all life, which they are not: millions of women and children live without men.
But perhaps the major taboo in art, especially that created by women, is the suggestion that the male is not, by nature or desert, superior to the female. It is permissible – at least for men – to show a male as evil, ridiculous, or weak; but not to suggest that men as a class have no right to the authority or status they claim. The single belief that all world religions and nation-states share, whatever their deity or economic system, is in male domination. To challenge the assumption that men are, by nature or divinity, entitled to superiority over women is to challenge the core of almost every society in existence. Feminism challenges that core: if you believe that women are human beings who matter as much as men, you cannot accept that men are superior to women, whether morally, physically, intellectually, or politically.
The Women’s Room
challenges belief in male domination directly, and this challenge has led to attacks on the author as a ‘man-hater’.
When I was asked, in 1977, what I would wish for
The Women’s Room, I
said I wished for a world in which no one would comprehend it because women and men had found a way
to live together in felicity. Unfortunately, despite many easements on female life in the west, the world’s ethos has moved in the opposite direction – toward more hostility between the sexes. So severe is the situation today that I can imagine a time when novels like this one will not be allowed to be published. It is therefore still brave of Virago to publish it, even after all these years.
Marilyn French, 2006
1
Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room. She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word
ladies’
in the sign on the door, and written
women’s
underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she saw the cross-out on the door, had never thought about it. ‘Ladies’ room’ was an euphemism, she supposed, and she disliked euphemisms on principle. However, she also detested what she called vulgarity, and had never in her life, even when handling it, uttered the word
shit
. But here she was at the age of thirty-eight huddled for safety in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall, gazing at, no, studying that word and others of the same genre, scrawled on the gray enameled door and walls.
She was perched, fully clothed, on the edge of the open toilet seat, feeling stupid and helpless, and constantly looking at her watch. It would all have been redeemed, even translated into excitement, had there been some grim-faced Walter Matthau in a trench coat, his hand in a gun-swollen pocket, or some wild-eyed Anthony Perkins in a turtleneck, his itching strangler’s hands clenching and unclenching – someone glamorous and terrifying at any rate – waiting for her outside in the hall, if she had been sitting in panic searching for another way out. But of course if that were the case, there would also be a cool and desperate Cary Grant or Burt Lancaster sliding along the walls of another hallway, waiting for Walter to show himself. And that by itself, she thought mournfully, feeling somehow terribly put upon, would have been enough. If she had one of them, anyone at all, waiting for her at home, she would not be hiding in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall. She would have been upstairs in a corridor with the other students, leaning against a wall with her books at her feet, or strolling past the unseeing faces. She could have transcended, knowing she had one of them at home, and could therefore move alone in a crowd. She puzzled over that paradox, but
only briefly. The graffiti were too interesting.
‘Down with capitalism and the fucking military-industrial complex. KILL ALL FASCIST PIGS!’
This had been answered. ‘You simplify too much. New ways must be found to kill pigs: out of their death new pigs spring as armed men sprouted from the bulls’ teeth planted by that mcp Jason. Pigs batten on pig blood. The way is slow and hard. We must cleanse our minds of all the old shit, we must work in silence, exile, and cunning like that mcp Joyce. We must have a revolution of sensibility.’
A third party entered the argument in purple ink:
‘Stay in your cocoon. Who needs you? Those who are not with us are against us. Anyone who supports the status quo is part of the problem. THERE IS NO TIME. THE REVOLUTION IS HERE! KILL PIGS!’
Writer No. 2 was apparently fond of this booth and had returned, for the next entry was in her handwriting and in the same pen: ‘Those who live by the sword die by the sword.’
Wild printing in the purple felt-tip followed this in great sprawling letters:
‘FUCKING CHRISTIAN IDIOT! TAKE YOUR MAXIMS AND STUFF THEM! THERE IS ONLY POWER! POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE POOR! WE ARE DYING BY THE SWORD NOW!’
The last outburst ended that symposium, but there were others like it scrawled on the side walls. Almost all of them were political. There were pasted-on notices of SDS meetings, meetings of Bread and Roses, and Daughters of Bilitris. Mira withdrew her eyes from a crude drawing of female genitalia with ‘Cunt is Beautiful’ scratched beneath it. She presumed, at least, that it was a drawing of female genitalia, although it looked remarkably like a wide-petaled flower. She wasn’t sure because she had never seen her own, that being part of the anatomy that did not present itself directly to the vision.
She looked at her watch again: she could leave now. She stood and from force of habit turned to flush the unused toilet. On the walls behind it someone had printed great jagged letters in what looked like nail polish. The red enamel had dripped and each stroke had a thick pearl at its base. It looked as if it had been written in blood. SOME DEATHS TAKE FOREVER, it read. She drew her breath in sharply and left the booth.
It was 1968.
2
She washed her hands vigorously, also from force of habit, and combed her hair, which was arranged in careful curls. She stood back, examining it in the glaring light of the lavatory. It looked a strange color. Since she had stopped dyeing it last year, it had grown out not just grayer, but with a mousy brown tinge, so she had been tinting it, and this time it had come out perhaps a bit too orange. She moved closer to the mirror and checked her eyebrows and the blue eye shadow she had applied only an hour before. Both were still okay.
She stepped back again and tried to see her whole self. She couldn’t do it. Ever since she had changed her style of dress – that is, ever since she had been at Harvard – her self refused to coalesce in the mirror. She could see bits and pieces – hair, eyes, legs – but the pieces wouldn’t come together. The hair and eyes went together, but the mouth was wrong; it had changed during the past years. The legs were all right, but didn’t go with the bulky shoes and the pleated skirt. They looked too thin under the thicker body – yet she was the same weight now she’d been for the past ten years. She began to feel something rising in her chest, and hastily looked away from the mirror. This was no time to get upset. Then she turned back jerkily, looking at nothing, pulled out her lipstick and applied a line of it to her lower lip, her eyes careful to look at nothing but the mouth. In spite of herself, however, her eyes caught her whole face, and in a moment her head was full of tears. She leaned her hot forehead against the cool tile wall, then remembered that this was a public place full of other people’s germs, and straightened up hurriedly and left the room.
She climbed up the three flights of ancient, creaky stairs, reflecting that the ladies’ room was in an inconvenient location because it had been added long after the building was erected. The school had been planned for men, and there were places, she had been told, where women were simply not permitted to go. It was odd. Why? she wondered. Women were so unimportant anyway, why would anyone bother to keep them out? She arrived in the corridor a little late. No one was left in the hallway, lingering, loitering outside the classroom doors. The blank eyes, the empty faces, the young bodies that ten minutes earlier had paced its length, were gone. It was these that, passing her
without seeing her, seeing her without looking at her, had driven her into hiding. For they had made her feel invisible. And when all you have is a visible surface, invisibility is death. Some deaths take forever, she found herself repeating as she walked into the classroom.