Though she was born into a very real world, and not a princess, it might be only a little fanciful to imagine that her birth was attended by a visitation of good fairies. Of these, one wished upon her kindly and indulgent parents. One, good health. One wished that she be surrounded by wealth sufficient to provide her with comfortable shelter, rich foods, costly adornments and entertainments, and a protracted time of growth free from the foreclosures of necessity. One wished that her mind not be restricted to the disciplines and techniques of everyday survival; another, that her imagination not be locked away from the gorgeous variety of recorded human experience; still another, that no hint of talent on her part, no childish display of capacity or inclination, be left to wither from neglect. And last but not least, there was one to wish that she be comely, perhaps even beautiful, so that she might know herself beyond doubt to be desired. If in this visitation was included no benign spirit expressly to wish upon her a sweet and sunny nature, certainly among all the others the conditions for such a nature had been fully anticipated.
This truly blessed event took place, let us say, just at the close of World War II. Those first years of postwar adjustment—her father a student or resuming the long-interrupted practice of his profession, her mother in a fever of taking hold of an orderly domestic existence—were spent by her in the material unconsciousness of infancy. By the time society intruded upon her self-centered world, when she entered school, she was safely settled within a community of the economically secure. She was to want for no necessity and to be denied very little, actually, in the way of luxury—and of this latter such denials as she would suffer would be grounded not in the idea of superfluity but in the definition of her own best welfare. Of fundamental luxuries—learned doctors to straighten her teeth or ease her melancholy, instructors of all sorts to enlarge her accomplishment and enrich her leisure, travels, holidays spent at seaside or lakeside or mountain, and, above all, the best and most attractive schooling available—of these the limit would be set only at her own need and capacity. Moreover, nothing in the surrounding atmosphere would even offer the suggestion that such privilege was hers by any but divine right.
For in addition to being economically secure, the community in which she was to grow up had organized itself around one central principle: namely, what would be most pleasing and in the broadest sense of the term most beneficial to her. Unlike that of most of the world’s children, past or present, her existence was not a thing taken for granted and hence left to piece itself in somehow with the general flow of life. From the moment of her conception, she had become the precise and elaborately defined responsibility of both her parents and of the society they were making. The house in which she lived would be architected to the centrality of her presence in it. The schools she attended would come under the sway of the idea that she must not be made to suffer in any way, physically, emotionally, mentally; that undue discomfort or anxiety would impede her fulfillment as both individual and pupil and thus constitute pedagogical failure. And perhaps most important, the mores of that community were adjusted to free her as much as possible from the sense of guilt that had been found so crippling by its adults. As a little child, she was not to be compelled to be clean or orderly or even formally well-mannered beyond some minimal point of tolerability to those around her. She was to be allowed as much expression—certainly, in particular, verbal expression—of her aggressions as could be consonant with domestic survival. Finally, when the time came for it, she was not to be denied her proper and expected and healthy experience of sex. The notion of what was proper or expected in sex might have been left somewhat vaguely defined, but at the very least included the idea that she must not, even if considerations of prudence had still to deter her, be made to feel guilty about it. For guilt was the mother of frigidity, and frigidity was the leading society-created crime against her humanity.
She, on her part, responded to these new expectations of home and community by appearing to fulfill most of them. That is to say, she tended to be somewhat disorderly and unmannerly but not intolerably so—compensating those around her for the chaos she created with a certain charm and generosity of spirit that might otherwise have been lacking. She was sometimes given to seizures of aggression that, once again, seemed compensated for by the intimacy and demonstrativeness that were their obverse. She went through school without any marked display of suffering and gave much evidence of the qualities deemed by everyone to be independence of mind and creativity. She was, in fact, to be accounted an educational success, having mastered her schoolwork easily, with time and spirit left over for the cultivation of special interests—which happened to be, in her case, literary; and in due course she and her school were repaid for their collaboration by her admittance to a prestigious Eastern college.
With her parents in particular, whatever difficulties she made were precisely the difficulties predicted, and so discounted in advance, by their ideology of parenthood. Thus while she often gave them great pain, particularly during her adolescence, in the very act of doing so she was also serving to vindicate them. If she showed them a certain disrespect, beneath that disrespect were felt to lie the kind of person-to-person relations made possible by their very refusal to take adult advantage. Hers, therefore, could never be the contempt in which they had once held their own parents, so basic, so full of plain snobbery, that it dared not be given casual utterance. If she tended, though of course accepting without scruple, to value at naught many of the comforts they had so mindfully provided her, this was no more than a tribute to the higher sensitivity such a life as hers had permitted to develop. If she tended to use her own still-unformed responses as the measure by which all things in the world were to be judged—instead of, as had generally been the case in her parents’ generation, the other way around—this again was the result of an enviable refusal on her part to be spiritually bullied. Hers would never be that docility in the face of accepted piety which had once so damped and narrowed their own youths and which they had vowed not to impose on her. And if she seemed, despite all tendencies to disrespect and self-regard somewhat overdependent on them—demanding their support in all her undertakings, their assent to all her decisions—this was seen to be the mark of an earned and merited faith in their devotion to her. So no matter what she did, the one thing she could not successfully do was storm the fortress of their anxious resignation to her will.
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The years of her adolescence, then, were spent pretty much in accordance with the times—being in this case the late 50’s and early 60’s—and her specially privileged estate. She enjoyed, for one thing, virtually unprecedented mobility for someone of her age. By the time of her graduation from college, she had owned a car in which she and friends had traveled twice across the United States and to Mexico; she had spent one year at school in, and two summers touring, Europe; she had spent several holidays with her family at an ocean resort, several others at camp or on bicycle trips, and served one stint as an au pair girl on an island in the Caribbean.
She also changed her style of presenting herself, which is to say her wardrobe, with regular frequency: always in the name of a new freedom from convention, always expensively, and always in accordance with the new social message it was required to bring. Sometimes that message was, I am a naughty and rather rowdy child; sometimes, I am a sexless sprite. She was never quite conscious of what any given wardrobe signified, but of the possibility for adopting new personae and playing with each of them to a quickly reached point of boredom she was never for one moment unconscious.
Being pretty and bright and usually high-spirited, she was a welcome presence among her peers. Boy friends were never wanting, but these she took, after the going fashion, one at a time and on the basis of a steady, if temporary, commitment. Each of them in turn was understood by friends and family to be her momentary property, he was invited into her home as she was into his, and when she wished to, she was permitted by adults to speak in their presence of “love.” This arrangement allowed her to exchange varying degrees of sexual bestowal for a large measure of personal security.
Somewhere in this process, say her senior year in high school or freshman year in college, the bestowal demanded of her was the final one: she entered into a full-blown affair. For this she was equipped by her family doctor with a diaphragm—later she would be given the Pill. She never discussed the exact nature of this affair with her parents, as some of her friends had done with theirs, but by their behavior they let her know that as long as she stayed out of trouble the terms of her sex life were naturally and rightly to be left to her own desires. They did not scruple to leave her at home alone if for any reason they were called away for a few days. Nor did they refuse her permission to travel off for a weekend on her own recognizance. With her girl friends she discussed her sexual affairs in great detail—likely as not emotional rather than erotic detail. They judged her, as she judged them, merely to be engaged in the inevitable and taken for granted.
With her lover (s) there was also a good deal of discussion, also not erotic but emotional (sometimes psychoanalytic) in focus. Suffering no sense of sin within themselves and no undue pressure from the outside, they were not particularly venturesome, neither in their acts of love nor in the conditions under which these acts were carried out. The whetting edge of danger for them, if and when it should be sought, was promised far more by the explorations and exposures of their minds under the influence of illegal chemical preparations. Out of bed, they became deeply dependent on one another for companionship. Any social activity sought by one which excluded the other was taken to be an intentional act of disloyalty. Between them they exchanged words of love but more often, and with more sincerity, competed for the right to expatiate on their respective “hang-ups,” fears, or new triumphs of emotional growth. He tended to flatter her for her powers of understanding, or sometimes to revile her for her lack of them; and she tended, in the sense of power afforded by the secret, erotic knowledge of his unequal need for her, to baby him.
And out there in the daylight world were friends, parties, diversions both frivolous and serious, and all overlaid with promising and highly valued achievements. In short, a full and interesting life.
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College, though it presented her at first with the shock of needing to establish herself as a uniquely identifiable person among strangers, was largely a continuation of what had gone before. To be sure, she had now to work harder at her studies and to manage relations with her peers and those in authority without the softening mediations of the familiar. Once the techniques for these were mastered, however, the charm, the openness to intimacy, the need for support, began to work their accustomed effect. Her school was a girls’ school, traditionally famous for harboring creativity and for being the sexual preserve of certain neighboring men’s colleges. Her classes, free of everyday male competition, were precisely on that account conducted in an easy spirit of flirtation between professor and student and vice versa. Self-expression was the highest demand of these classes, and constituted their definition of attainment. “The thing I really feel about Emma Bovary is. . .”; “But I can’t understand how Shakespeare, feeling as he obviously did about Cordelia, could have made her. . .”; “If, as you say, society and culture are not the same thing, how is someone like me to understand. . . .” In this atmosphere, no challenge of hers went unanswered, and no answer of her own was dismissed. She felt herself as each academic year went by to possess an ever greater grasp of the central ideas of her time and an ever keener sense of how to dispose of the errors and trivia of the past.
By the time of graduation, she knew one thing for certain about her future—whether it immediately held marriage, a career, or some pleasant temporizing on the way to either or both, it was going to take place somewhere at the center of “the action.” Her decision, naturally, had not come to such clarity solely or even mainly as a response to her studies. Certainly she had always had, though of late unadmitted, fantasies of chic; but all this provided no specific focus to her determination and by itself would only have sent her off passively down the track to meet whatever opportunity happened to come along first. Meanwhile, however, both on the campus and all around it, as far as her selective eye could see, she had found herself living in a turbulent and exciting—an important—world. First, of course, there had been the civil-rights movement, followed by the eerie titillations of black nationalist hostility. Then the war. Then the universities themselves, in their interesting new guise as the enemies and oppressors of people like her. She took no central part in these movements, preferring to remain a sympathizer, occasional demonstrator, but enthusiastic adopter of each new persona, replete with wardrobe, they engendered. Once again, her talent for personal demand made palatable by the affectionate gentleness with which she pressed it, gave her easy entrée to the brotherhood she sought. It was this new persona, as vague but unmistakably virtuous radical, clad with the appropriately artful shabbiness, that was taking her straight to the heart of the big-city center of communications.
Beyond her education, academic and political, college had meant for her the distillation of a way of life. This way of life, too, had been shaped by a movement, but a movement too amorphous to identify and one its adherents didn’t join so much as were overtaken by. At one extreme end, the movement was called Hippiedom and outspokenly advocated a life of quietistic bohemianism, a floating on the outer tides of a society too over-powering and too rigorous for the truly sensitive to manage. At the other extreme, it was a kind of training ground for the Jet Set, whose disciplines were created to promote the hard and unremitting pursuit of monied leisure. She and her friends located themselves somewhere in between, taking up the attitudes and behavior patterns of both of these extremes in some kind of mix that felt convenient to them. Those aspects of life they found unduly thorny or uncongenial they characterized with the adjective “Establishment.” “Establishment” could mean, in a leaning toward the hippie side, too rational and clear-cut, and it could mean, from the other side, simply too grubby. That massive though conspiratorial group from whose designation they derived their adjective—in addition to its broader responsibilities for the oppression of Negroes and the making of imperialist wars—was also, it seemed, concerned to see that they endure great boredom in the culture they were making for themselves. Thus their major forms of recreation, their music, their movies, their mystical readings and devotions, their pot-and-wine parties, constituted not only pleasure in themselves but the striking of a blow in behalf of a healthier society. Virtually nothing they did, and most particularly nothing they did with respect to sex, was devoid of this larger dimension.
Our heroine was never actually promiscuous as the learned doctors of the soul would have understood the word. That is to say, she had several affairs but continued, as before, to have them one at a time, each bearing, if briefly, the constraints of monogamy. Twice in her senior year she had spent afternoons in a motel with one of her youngest and most erotically inspiring professors. The actual experience was so alien to the fantasy that had overtaken her listening to the professor’s lecture, however, that she found some delicate way of being unable to see him more than twice. Her secret sense of triumph in the classroom after that was not quite overborne by her disappointment. Once, for a weekend, she had submitted to the lesbian advances of a dorm-mate. Something in the power of that experience both to repel her and overwhelm her with longings for self-destruction spoke to her imagination of the decisively ruinous role of sex she’d read about in early works of pornography.
For the most part, though, she couldn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. Either, as her culture told her and as she and her friends repeated ritualistically to one another, the lack of weight with which sexual activity floated among the other activities of her life was a sign that it had been put in its proper and natural place. Or, as in her secret heart she believed, there was something in the experience for others that she had been unable to attain to. The one lover who piqued her appetites—though, possibly by definition, he was the one who made the least observable effort to satisfy them—was a young lawyer she encountered her first year out of college. He talked very little except about matters relating to the progress of his career; until one night at dinner he quite unaccountably began to revile her—characterizing her in certain forceful four-letter terms she had often heard used and had often used herself but never in connection with her—then left the table and walked out; nor did he call her to apologize. After a few days she pronounced him dull and boorish and came upon the insight that it had been precisely his unworthiness which had made him so attractive to her in the first place. She vowed she would never be so sick as to be publicly humiliated again, and she never was.
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The deplorable experience with the lawyer had in fact been her first sexual encounter in New York City, where she had come, on being graduated from school, to seek her fortune. He was followed by a television documentary producer of some small but rather well-paid renown, a gentle and helpful but often gloomy man who had only recently separated from his wife and two young children. She and the producer took an apartment together, an arrangement which was to last less than a year and to end in considerable bitterness (among the causes of which was her first and only, and quite disagreeable, abortion) but in the meantime was to provide them both with exciting times. She exaggerated, by depending on, his strength and wordly wisdom, and he helped by scolding her a lot to assure her of her talent.
She came to the city with a job already in hand. In her senior year she had been first winner in an essay contest sponsored by one of the fashion magazines—subject: “Is Sex Freer on the Campus, and Why?”—and her prize was a junior position on the magazine’s staff. Once in the office, she felt she had been a naif to be pleased by the prospect before her. For one thing, the magazine was staffed mainly by women who were, or were becoming, technical experts in one or another of the phases of fashion-and-food presentation the publication specialized in. Mainly it was just not her kind of place and had nothing to teach her. Under the goading of, and enabled by the support of, her lover, she quit her job and began to write. Through his contacts she acquired an agent; and by the time they split up she had published two short pieces of film criticism and a feature piece about the audience of the New York Film Festival in a new, expensively produced magazine devoted to youth arts. Soon after this she became a more or less regular contributor of pieces of special reporting to an influential neighborhood weekly.
She made very little money, but managed with it somehow. Her parents gave her furniture for her one-room studio apartment and sent her checks—not at exactly regular intervals like an allowance but regularly enough so that she could count on them and never needed to think of asking. In addition, her parents tried manfully to suppress all expression of the anxiety that mingled, particularly after they learned of her arrangement with the documentary producer, in their pride and pleasure with her. And at certain of the parties she attended, there were bound to be one or two strangers who recognized her name.
Several of her former classmates had also come to New York to live and work. They were all still close enough to their school days to find social ease together. A couple of these were secretaries or editorial assistants somewhere in the publishing industry; one worked in television, in what capacity she could or would never make clear; one taught school; one worked in the poverty program and lived communally with a couple of painters, a jewelry designer, a dancer, and a ragged young couple with no visible occupation other than the preparation of various interesting potations consumed daily by the entire household. Sometimes these girls would be visited for a weekend, over a holiday, or on the occasion of some especially important demonstration by a group of the young men they had known in the neighboring colleges and who had remained on in graduate school to avoid the draft. In accordance with the established custom in these matters, their guests would be farmed out among them to spend the night, in sleeping bags on their floors or, if need be, in their beds—but not, as the rule had also been set down, there so casually to enjoy their favors.
She was always happy to see them, these boys (as she now took to calling them in her mind). But sometimes deep into the night, perhaps awakened by a certain discomfort in the sleeping arrangement, she could not evade the thought that were it not for the fury roused in her by society’s wish to have them kill or be killed, they wouldn’t be so very interesting to her any more. They seemed so beclouded, so lacking in the sharp personal edge of definition, so . . . interchangeable. She feared she might not remember which of them she had once slept with and which merely exchanged deep confidences with. The curious thing she found was that one of these visits, should it occur while she was in the middle of an assignment, seriously disrupted her ability to work. Of all her group of college acquaintances, she was thus far the most successful. She supposed she felt guilty about that, or at least inhibited about pulling rank. But her friends, particularly her male friends, made no trouble on that score. They were loyal, they praised the things she’d written, they suggested all sorts of hot, cool, or necessary subjects she ought to try her hand at next. They regarded her in fact as a sort of public-relations arm for their own particular concerns and causes.
Then—at some point in all this—came the most hopeful love affair of all. She guessed, though she didn’t want to push things, that this affair would be the final one. How her feelings of attachment to this lover differed from those in the past she would not have been able to say exactly. The two of them just—got on better. Their life together seemed grown-up and real. No man had been as sensitive to, or shown as much respect for, her feelings. No man had expressed such vulnerability to her erotic power. No man, in short, had been so genuinely accepting of her. She felt free to be herself as she had felt with no one except her parents, and enthusiastically set up house with him. He, being a much-employed news and fashion photographer, was away from home a good deal. She found his absences quite painful and his homecomings eventful. About her work he was patient, sympathetic, and totally permissive. He neither goaded nor inhibited her. If she wanted to be a writer, fine. If she wanted to relax and just be his girl, that was fine, too. For the first time she bought a cookbook and began to think about planning a meal now and then. He never demanded that, either, being quite heedless, though always appreciative, of what he ate. He did make an absolute point of having certain of his comforts but on the other hand insisted that she have hers as well. He insisted, too, on making love a good deal more often than she was accustomed to, but his demands were always expressed in terms of her irresistibility to him and thus became themselves irresistible.
If the foregoing does not describe a situation to which might be applied the traditional fairy-tale ending, surely it would be fair to say that the beneficent fairies who attended her birth had not till then deserted her. She did receive the tender nurture they had wished upon her. She did enjoy the freedom of mind and spirit, and at least a sufficient part of the wealth, they had invoked. She did always have reason to know herself desirable. They did manage to bring her without undue pain to the opportunity to develop her talent, and, finally, even into the arms of, if not Prince Charming, then at least the kind of man her great-grandmother might have mistaken for him.
The story does not end here, however. For where was that last ethereal spirit to bless her with contentment?
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II
She could not have said exactly when she first became aware of Women’s Liberation. As it does for most people with most movements, her consciousness of the new feminism developed and sharpened over time, following an accumulation of news items, incidents, conversations. Oddly enough, it was one of her old male college friends who supplied her with the first word of it to which she had a truly personal response. This took place over a dinner she had cooked for him—none too graciously in fact, for he had not even bothered to tell her he was coming and she was afraid he would also expect to be put up for the night (a custom in whose innocence her lover absolutely refused to believe). As it happened, he was going uptown to stay with some Columbia friends, still engaged in assessing the victories of their “insurrection” of the previous spring and now planning their strategy for the coming school year. Thus Columbia was much on his mind and in the course of discussing it he mentioned in passing, for her amusement, the doings of some of the female radicals in an occupied building. The girls had deeply resented the expectation of their male co-revolutionists that they would fulfill such traditional feminine roles as that of providing food and doing the typewriting. They had posted a sign in a corridor of one of the occupied buildings which said something to the effect of: This is a liberated area; therefore do not make sandwiches or type unless these happen to be ways in which you genuinely fulfill yourselves. She joined with him, laughing and shaking her head, in the moment’s insinuation of their common superiority, and then felt a sudden, overwhelming wash of resentment herself—at what she did not know, except that the dinner she had just cooked somehow came into it as well. To be sure, she did feel superior to those girls, or, rather, ashamed of them: with the war in Vietnam, the oppression of blacks, the general decay of American society to feel passionately about, how could they justify trying to get into the act as women? Yet why did she, if she were the fully developed individual she claimed to be, feel even so much of kinship with the female liberators as to experience her disapproval of them as shame? And why did she, who had never in her life but of her own free will either put together a sandwich or touched her fingers to a typewriter, recognize that she could empathize completely with their feelings?
Soon after, she had lunch with an editor in a publishing house who was showing some mild interest in her career. The editor was a woman, with a high-ranking position in the company’s trade department, a husband who was a very rich and successful doctor, and two growing children. Less than halfway through lunch the pretense of an editorial conference was abandoned and her hostess launched into an eloquent discourse on the position of women, which was partly a pitch for some books she was bringing out on the subject and partly a lamentation for the conditions of her own life, particularly her working life.
Our heroine was both taken aback and intrigued: the grievance of a woman like her own mother she could understand—a painter who had been unable to hang in and offer the proper devotion to her art, and whose overtime concern for the development of her daughter left her now beached and flopping around to fill up her days—but this woman? She would have supposed her to have reached the best of all reasonable settlements: a highly successful career of her own, a successful husband, children. . . . When she expressed these sentiments to her lunch companion, the tirade only intensified. Her husband, she said, for one thing had always believed her incompetent to share his professional concerns and for another thing did not altogether take her work seriously either, believing hers to be the major responsibility for the upbringing of the children and any time left over from that was for her to do with as she pleased. And as for her work itself, while it was true she was a senior editor, she was paid a smaller salary than many of her male colleagues on the ground that since she was already well taken care of money was not the issue, and—what particularly irritated her—she was never allowed to forget she was a woman. Just that very morning she had received a memo from the editor-in-chief asking for the “feminine point of view” on some manuscript or other. She was outraged as well for the younger girls who worked in her office, all of whom were far overqualified, by virtue of education and accomplishment, for the kind of ordinary routine work they were required to do. “And what about you?” she turned suddenly on our heroine. “Aren’t you a ‘girl’ writer? Do you think if you were a young man they’d send you on the kind of assignments they do—always the ‘personal side’ of things? And pay you so little? Do you think, if the world had taught you truly to take yourself seriously as a writer, you would have the kind of trouble getting down to things, or completing assignments, that you described to me earlier?”
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The agitation that resulted from this lunch ebbed and flowed in successive waves for nearly a week. She looked at the apartment she and her lover had set up and felt that it was not a writer’s apartment at all. The smallest alcove in it, hidden from view by a bent-wood screen, was the place where she had set up her writing table; her portable typewriter was kept in its case under the bed. The place was gradually filling up with domestic objects that required her attention, dusting or keeping up of some kind. She found by the end of that week that she had not once made the bed and that she was days overdue in getting her lover’s shirts to the laundry. Finally one evening in the process of clearing away the supper dishes, she looked down at herself and at her lover stretched out on the couch engrossed in a televised baseball game, and startled them both by simply letting the tray full of dishes crash from her hands to the floor and slamming out the door to the movies.
The coup de grâce was delivered by her old school friend who worked for CBS. “I am into Women’s Lib,” she announced. “It’s really straightened out my head. I want you to come to one of our meetings and do a story about it.” The “meeting” turned out to be a gathering of about fifteen young women in someone’s apartment. She and her friend arrived late, so whether or not it had had some ostensible purpose or agenda she never discovered. By the time of their arrival, the group was well into the heat of a kind of group-therapy session, with each girl in turn bearing witness, as it were, to the outrage done her person as a woman. They talked mostly of sex. One denounced men in the street for assuming that because she wore a miniskirt she was a proper object for their humiliating leers. Another said she finally understood that all this talk about the sexual revolution and new sexual freedom was just men’s propaganda to rob girls of an excuse for not going to bed with them. A third confessed, after a certain amount of verbal fidgeting, that she had never had an orgasm. She received a standing ovation. One or two spoke of their hatred for a family system that turned women into “walking wombs” and said they refused to be society’s “breeders.” All in all, the talk centered largely on the issue of the sanctity of the speakers persons and bodies and of a great variety of violations being perpetrated thereon. Our girl reporter noted that a number of the women in the room were not wearing brassieres, with the effect of making them look either younger or older.
She herself did not take part in the discussion but knew from the excitement pounding in her breast, an excitement rising to and echoing every word being spoken, that she would not, not yet, be able to write about it either. These girls were ten times more extreme than the lady editor had been. They also seemed, anyway the most articulate of them, to have some theory linking their problems to the evils of capitalist society; this, she had to confess, largely bored her. She had in her time demonstrated with the best of them against the triple evils of war, racism, and poverty that her contemporaries had discovered to be running rampant over the United States today, but she did not take the prospect of revolution seriously and real Marxists had seemed to her like members of a faith she was willing to tolerate but whose theology left her cold.
But never had she considered social evil as something being done to her—which accounted for her reaction to the story of the Columbia girls. She supposed that the kinds of emotion now coursing through her, as yet somewhat inchoate but with their main component a certain sweet bitterness, were the same kinds of emotion as are felt by blacks. She had never liked girls, or the company of girls, that much; though naturally, particularly at her age and in her circumstance, she had several close friends among them. Now she understood that liking or not liking them was beside the point, a smoke screen created by the illusion that she had many more free choices than in fact she had. They were her community. In their new responsibility to themselves as women, and to one another as women, they were being responsible to her as well.
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She began to read the movement’s documents. Each of them made her feel angry and made her feel good in that peculiar combination she was learning to take for granted. They told her that, like blacks, women were an oppressed class; that more than blacks, they had been oppressed throughout history. But what of the rights they had already won—to vote, to own property, to pursue careers, to move about, to have sexual experience before marriage, to have pleasure in such experience, to plan and control the having of babies? These were bogus, the literature replied. Voting, owning property, getting educated, going to work were all a sham that existed as theoretical opportunity only without true cultural sanction. What did it mean to vote or go to school or go to work for a living if the main assumption of the culture in which these activities took place, and which was shaping the actors themselves, was that they were creatures set apart, with special capacities and incapacities and with their own special roles to play? What did it mean, for instance, that no one would frown on a girl’s becoming a doctor if all her life the world had told her, in attitude and word, that this was an un-girl-like thing to do? Naturally she would—as she measurably did—show a lack of interest in the necessary scientific discipline. She had from the cradle been wrapped in pink, dressed in frills, encouraged to play with dolls, to read novels, to long for motherhood.
On the subject of sex, these documents, like the women at the meeting she’d attended, were both outspoken and livid. Women were objects. Their so-called new sexual freedom was only the freedom to have sex, not not to have it. Thus the pursuit of this freedom placed them even more squarely under the thumb of male power. And the notion of pleasure in sex—this was, several articles went so far as to say, nothing less than an outright male conspiracy. For the very definition of a woman’s pleasure now in currency—the attainment of orgasm by means of an act of sexual intercourse—was such as to equate it only with a man’s pleasure. In sending women out after sexual equality, men had sought to make them even more dependent than before on the male’s capacity to provide. Women without intercourse-induced orgasms had now to deem themselves sexually inadequate, failures. And being no longer required simply to withhold their favors as the true mark of feminine self-respect, they were left doubly the victims of the selfish brutality and inadequacy of others.
There were documents of another sort as well, but these again, like Marxist theory, interested her less. For one thing, they were boring to read, being not so much exchanges of personal experience or expressions of personal rage as laboriously gathered and documented statements of the inequities of women’s occupational status. These tended to convert their subject from an oppressed class into a pressure group, like a trade union, a conversion which did not release in her all those good ugly feelings but instead merely oppressed her with the implication of a need to act, to lobby in Washington or something, in general to perform good works. She supposed they were all absolutely true—women such-and-such a percentage of the labor force but only earning such-and-such a percentage of the annual earnings; women Ph.D.’s (a subspecies which it had always both tired and intimidated her to contemplate) without professorial rank; women (this piqued her more) holding only such-and-such a fraction of top executive jobs in the major American corporations. But despite their truth, they did not speak to her.
The Movement, of course, in wide variations of intensity of commitment and grievance, extended far beyond Women’s Lib. At one end there was WITCH, an acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Its members were, as their name indicated, extremely shrill, and from her point of view rather silly. They did things like picketing bridal shows and holding public brassiere-burnings. (She continued to wear hers, in enhancement of as fashionably expensive a collection of clothes as she could afford.) On the other side were the kind of women she thought of as old-fashioned feminists, women who followed the lead of Mrs. Betty Friedan, say, author of The Feminine Mystique. Their program was to continue to demand in more or less traditional terms rights for women equal to those of men and to harp on such things as the need for young girls to prepare themselves for the securing of their rights, on the need for reordering women’s education, and so on. Some few, but by no means all, of the new liberators were lesbians—her one college experience with lesbianism having made her extremely sensitive and accurate in the detection of these. Some, but very far from all, were as her lover had at first attempted to charge: homely, misfits, whose adherence to the Movement represented only their will to avenge themselves on the men who had always ignored them. There were those who, à la the blacks, thought to stage demonstrations against employers, demanding a quota of places for women in the echelons of management; and among these there was even a subgroup who, in the staging of one such demonstration against the male editor of a national woman’s magazine, insisted on smoking his cigars and using the men’s room. She would not have known precisely where to place herself in all this. Demonstrations like the last were certainly not her dish of tea; nevertheless, she supposed they were all in aid of the struggle to call attention to the problem. In any case she was, she had amply demonstrated to herself from college days, not cut out to be a joiner, only a supporter.
Her lover’s first response to the Movement had been to giggle—somewhat nervously, she thought. She and their other female friends soon gave him reason to stop giggling. His contention that Women’s Lib was nothing but a bunch of lesbians and homely girls grateful for their advances vanished in the discovery that not only she but most of the young, attractive, sexy girls she knew were being strangely roused by its propaganda. Next he tried to reason with her, advancing the arguments of human history, of innate biological difference, professing himself fully and forever liberal on the issue of equal pay for equal work, claiming his own virtue on the score of encouraging and allowing for her career, finally and in exasperation pointing out to her that as a husband he would still be expected to be the breadwinner and that, moreover, in his contentions both with the world and with her at home, he was the one not permitted to cry in the face of mistreatment. (Being a frequent and easy weeper, she was particularly infuriated by this last.) But all to no avail; for as he quickly found out, there is no appeal in argument from the absolute relativity of a position based on culture. Even granting that everything he said were so, she countered, it was still all his fault, since his very argument bespoke a passive acquiescence in the culture that made it so. They did not yet speak of these things as intimate individuals but rather as spokesmen for positions—about the act of sex, concerning which they both knew it impossible with the best will in the world to remain spokesmen, they spoke not at all—because they were not prepared to separate.
The blow-up between them over her liberation, when it came, was not about sex either: the possibilities for damaging one another by a head-on confrontation in this area were still too great for either of them to bear. Nor was the quarrel violent. It was, instead, an icy, steely, two-hour conversation which began with a complaint that she had forgotten to buy wine for their dinner; ranging from there across such topics as the unmade bed, his unlaundered shirts, her evident envy of a prize he had recently won for a news-photo, his having interrupted her in the telling of a story at a recent dinner party; and ending with his assertion that if she were a writer she would simply write, as he simply took pictures, rather than spend half her time telling anyone who would listen about all the things that made writing difficult for her, and with her counter-assertion that if he had been secure as a man, he would have wanted her to be successful rather than being merely permissive about it, which was just a way of withholding his support while pretending not to. They lay in bed that night back to back, each staring out into his particular half of the room and wondering how long, for the sake of one’s spiritual health, their affair ought to continue.
They were not to split up right away, for daily habit is powerful. They were possibly not in the end going to split up at all. But between them now, from breakfast to bed, would be the consciousness of a necessary, inevitable enmity and of the need to protect themselves most of all in the very place meant to be a haven from enemies—at home.
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III
What had brought this girl to such a pass? She was the pride, if the puzzle, of all who had a hand in her growing up. She was the envy of childhood friends. Even the society against whose “values” she had inveighed was eager to pronounce her, through all its media and honored spokesmen, a superior being to any it had heretofore produced. Nothing either—not even the once operative but now vanished notion of the beginner’s apprenticeship to his elders—had stood externally between her and her personal ambition. Moreover, out in the real world, as in school and at home, nothing produced by this ambition would go without at least its due measure of attention. The question of marriage, the question of having children, were now entirely in her own keeping. Yet she saw herself, felt herself, believed herself to be, oppressed. Oppressed by the parents who had always stood in awe of the possibility of her unhappiness; oppressed by the schools which had tracked themselves according to the contours of her particular capacities; oppressed by the working world which had issued her its most solemn invitation; and oppressed above all by the men who had wished to enter with her into some more or less negotiable pact of mutual advantage.
Partly, of course, she felt oppressed because she was invited to do so by the expression all around her of the same feeling in others. Movements like Women’s Lib always have some degree of that circularity about them. Which is to say, in addition to being expressions of a deep dissatisfaction, they do themselves constitute a culture of dissatisfaction, which gives it style and sanction among the semblables and soeurs of their leaders. And who would not, enjoying something less than divine happiness, be both soothed and excited by the idea that he was indeed a victim?
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Still, there must have been, had to have been, a very fertile ground in her own anxieties for all those public discontents to have taken hold there so quickly. A good deal of that anxiety had to do with her need to make a mark in the world. She had for the first time in her life suffered its very real pangs during her freshman year in college, when, bereft of a public identity, she had found herself quite unexpectedly with the need among strangers to, as it were, introduce herself. Such a demand must have existed for college freshmen everywhere and at all times, but no one had been less prepared for it by life than she. Convinced by the attitude of those around her that there would be no let or hindrance to her achievement, she was given to feel, on the other side, no corresponding pinch of necessity. Her condition in fact approached to not the least workable definition of freedom: a state in which all the options are open. She could succeed or get by; she could prepare herself to be fully self-supporting, to play some luxuriously “creative” if dependent role, or to enhance herself culturally and spiritually for a life of marriage and homemaking. She could stay in school or she could leave, to the disappointment of family and friends perhaps, but with none of the opprobrium attaching to what for a young man would have constituted the very definition of failure, future as well as present. Therefore she had to choose, and in choosing, stake something voluntarily on a definition of herself. This crisis as it was first enacted in school was, as we have seen, short-lived. Not only because she took the option to succeed but because, given her charm and the school’s commitment to the idea of what would be the best for her, the institution itself became implicated in her making the “right” choice. There was, then, no genuine settlement, only a deferral of the problem.
Her one brief job counted for very little in this particular connection. For one thing, she had not got herself this job, it was given to her. For another, in her almost immediate decision not to throw in her lot with the magazine’s lay the possibility to disregard altogether the question of her performance there. So what she actually knew of jobs she knew from hearsay. First, there was a crucial childhood memory: women sitting in the kitchen mornings over coffee, complaining of the dullness of the days with nothing but children for company while “he” was off in the city, mysteriously but no doubt profitably—and certainly no doubt pleasurably—spending his time “among people.” The men who returned home each night had looked in the ordinary way of things tired from a day’s work and often worried. Their conversation bespoke anything but a life of far-off adventure—they spoke of money a good deal, of problems, of enemies and allies. But the impression had been fixed: jobs were some kind of preserve of the privileged, they were meant to be interesting.
Then there were the jobs of her friends. Those among them who had been “best”—i.e., most liberally—educated seemed to have the least satisfying of these. Either, the complaint ran, the job was too routine and boring or it involved too many worries about things its holder preferred not to have to worry about—too much attention to precise detail, say, or being answerable to too many angry people when something went wrong. Funnily enough, though it was one of the cardinal planks in the feminist platform, very few of the complaints aired in her hearing had to do with money, except as an aspect of the appreciation or lack of appreciation being shown by management for the true qualifications and talents of the complainant. Nor did she ever hear a tale of someone’s demanding more money at the risk of her resignation and being turned down.
What she heard most about, though she did not articulate it to herself in so simple a fashion, were problems of status. The girls she knew who were secretaries resented being called secretaries, they would without hesitation trade ten dollars a week for some title that to a hearer would gloss over their exact position in a hierarchy, and they seemed to resent most bitterly of all those (to their mind) housewifely services they were expected to provide, such as procuring coffee, buying gifts, making reservations, etc. And most of them refused absolutely to work for other women. For it was difficult enough to “serve” a man, but someone differentiated from them only by position and title was nearly intolerable. Those on the other hand who had jobs carrying independent responsibility tended to be even more restive, for either the work was found to contain too large a component of drudgery or the pay to be insufficiently honorific or—and this a very common complaint, she’d so briefly made it herself—the purposes of the enterprise for which they were asked to assume some measure of responsibility were uncongenial to them.
She never heard men issuing such complaints as these, except for that special breed of men she had always in her mind’s privacy dubbed “losers”—who, no matter what they did, archly or self-righteously pronounced themselves superior to it and thereby were justified and ennobled in their failure. And putting all these things together—the “interestingness” of work to men, its obvious drudgery and lack of dignity for women—the conclusion was inevitable: the status of women was that of inferiors, they were not being handed a fair portion of that which had been preempted by, and was being desperately held as the nearly exclusive preserve of, men.
She had, to be sure, known men whose every day on the job involved them in a swallowing of pride, or at least the resignation to a good deal of unpleasantness, and who claimed to have no choice on the grounds of their need to support themselves and others. At college she had even met young men whose choice of studies and future career had hinged on some consideration of what was likely to yield the best return in terms both of money and conditions of work—though there were clearly many fewer of these than there had once been—and for them she and her friends had tended to feel a certain contempt. If there was, then, something of a logical flaw involved in training oneself for a life of monied leisure, in the study, say, of the English novel, only to find oneself bitter about being thought unqualified in spirit as well as training for valuable work, such a flaw was not taken by her friends to be their own. The world had been misrepresented to them, they said; or, more commonly now, the world, precisely in its unwillingness to make proper use of their superior endowments, was an evil place and must be forced to mend its ways.
For herself, a free-lance writer, the problem posed itself somewhat differently. She could not, in the actual conditions of work, claim to be discriminated against. She must inevitably sit down all by herself and face her typewriter. The product of this confrontation had to be judged immediately and found adequate or inadequate. Both the level and quantity of her production were up to her. But her difficulties were immense. She found she could not always do what she intended, and there were times when she would not meet her assignments at all. She often had to undergo that extremely painful experience for writers of having her work emended, altered, questioned, under what she came to feel was an altogether arbitrary editorial eye. In high school, then college, she had heard nothing but praise for whatever she was able to do. Now she was often criticized: editors rejected her, or people took exception to, umbrage at, something she’d published. She started to tighten up more and more at her typewriter. Once for a period of four or five months she was unable to write a sentence.
She began to tell herself that the real difficulty lay in the world’s expectations of her. The people around her, thinking of her inevitably as a wife and mother, did not care if she wrote or not. Her lover, pretending sympathy, demanded that he have clean shirts and a made bed—her contribution to the upkeep of their common household thus being made equal to her attention to her own concerns. Editors, pretending interest in her, seemed to keep raising the ante on her performance, asking her to take on more and more ambitious projects and to be responsible to more, and a wider range of, subjects that intimidated her. To this last, she responded with an ever greater concentration on those subjects where her expertise might not be challenged. Finally, with a large assist from Women’s Liberation itself, she found it most satisfying to write only about herself.
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Primary among the things she wrote about herself was a continuing discussion, carried on through symposia in virtually all of the major national magazines, of her attitude to men and sex. She might have suspected there was something slightly redolent of the exploitation of women in the sudden spate of requests to discourse in public on the facts and circumstances of her own sexual temperament, but she did not. In the light of the overwhelming importance the matter had come to assume in her own eyes, she took its importance for others as a matter of course. Whatever reservation she might have had about exposing not only herself but all the men she’d slept with or refused to sleep with vanished under the impact of the knowledge that her experience, far from being private, was exemplary. She told of her unhappiness as a sexual object, of the lack of satisfaction with her so-called freedom, she described the humiliations of her abortion. Her declarations began to feed on themselves, and she truly warmed to her subject.
No one, not even her lovers, was as likely to be taken aback by her revelations as her own parents, particularly her mother. The sexual freedom she had been granted since early girlhood was something that had cost them, not only the guilt of discovering in themselves a certain old-fashioned emotional resistance to it that had to be suppressed in the name of principle and fairness of mind, but had brought them considerable pain of simple envy. The freedom so largely denied to, and so valiantly striven for by, her mother—which striving formed the basis of a vow that her own daughter’s sexuality would not be distorted by adult hypocrisy and purposeless social punishment—had been her generation’s very definition of sexual equality: the right to live within a single standard of sexual conduct, and the corresponding right to demand as well as to give sexual pleasure. Now here was her daughter, untortured by the longings that had once imposed upon herself the need for deceit and deviousness, assisted and supported in the realization of her true nature, claiming that it was precisely the possibility to have a wide sexual experience that constituted the major block to women’s equality. For, said her daughter in effect, for a girl to be sexually active entangled her all the more with male egos and desires. And to seek pleasure in sex was to involve onself in judgments of success and failure that were essentially male, and not female, in character. A woman permitted honestly to seek her own needs, as men had since time immemorial been permitted to seek theirs, would be demanding love and respect for, and consideration of, her person, rather than the direct satisfaction of a lust she was in any case not sure she had ever felt.
Her lover’s response to this was not so much to be taken aback as to feel a curious relief mingled with rage and guilt. His boyhood, too—and until this moment he had not realized to how great an extent—had been held in thrall to the myth of the new sexual freedom of women. His success with girls, for instance, had been measured not by the number of them he could bring to submission but by the degree of sexual satisfaction he could bring each or any of them to. Each sexual encounter had been a test of his prowess not as a hunter but as a provider. So to have stalked and overcome his prey was not the end but only the beginning of his ardors. To this end, he, too, had been successively monogamous, disciplining the lust which now need shame him only by its most flagrant weaknesses—its impatience and its reluctance to differentiate individuals. With the result, as he said to himself bitterly, that the woman to whom he had given most of himself—to the point, if she had asked it, of marriage—was now telling the world what she had never in deepest intimacy told him: that it had all been for naught. As his rage was that of having been betrayed, so his relief was that of knowing what it was, finally, that stood at the center of those delicate negotiations on which he had lavished so much anxiety, so much deluded consciousness. His guilt grew out of the suspicion that, withal, her problem was his responsibility, that had he but succeeded with her . . . mental habits, especially with respect to sex, after all, die hard; he thought, however, that if she called him selfish oppressor long enough and often enough, he might yet rid himself of that guilt.
As for her, the satisfactions of her new burst of self-expression blinded her to the fact that in the act of announcing women to be the equals of men, what she was really saying was that women were very different from men and that they wanted fundamentally different things. Nor was she aware that in her denunciation of men for keeping her from her true freedom what she was really denouncing them for was their having submitted to an earlier set of female demands, demands which had failed to bring her true happiness, demands she felt enslaved to rather than liberated by, and which she would abjure but knew not now in the name of what.
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It is virtually an axiom of human nature that we will not know that which we are not forced to know. Thus given her upbringing and education, our heroine has attained to womanhood knowing very little about men and women. She need not know, for an elementary start, that the sexual revolution which oppresses her is a revolution made in her behalf by other women, wrested from men and assented to by them—as is always the politics of such cases—in the face of the power of the revolutionaries, and not from some notion of particular advantage to themselves. Nor need she, child of a marriage whose manners bespoke equality of husband and wife, know that marriage and children are not things imposed on women by men but quite the other way around. She would in fact be outraged by the proposition, taught in no school either of learning or life ever attended by her, that marriage is not a psychic relationship but a transaction: in which a man forgoes the operations of his blind boyhood lust, and agrees to undertake the support and protection of a family, and receives in exchange the ease and comforts of home.
Above all, being a creature of the 60’s rather than the 50’s, she need not know that freedom is an end in itself, a value whose strongest connections are thus not with happiness but with responsibility. The freedom granted her by society is, in so short a time as it has been demanded, remarkably equal to that enjoyed by men. It is the freedom to make certain choices and take the consequences. If she wishes to devote herself to marriage, she may do so. If she wishes instead to pursue a career, she may do so. If there are difficulties put in the way of the latter—of which her sex may or may not be one but is certainly not the only one and is often indeed not the one she complains of—she is free to attempt to overcome them. If she opts to have both marriage and a career, she will put herself in the way of certain inevitable practical difficulties, the managing of which will on the other hand also widen her options for gratification.
Perhaps most important, if she wishes not to be a sexual object, she may refrain from being one. What, after all, is to stop her from setting her own social and emotional price on her sexual complicity and then simply waiting for the man, if any, who is willing to pay it? If the price should be deemed too high, that also would be a freely chosen consequence. Or she might accept the implication of most of the pronouncements of Women’s Liberation and simply remain chaste, thereby restoring to herself that uniquely feminine power over men which many women so cavalierly made light of in their struggle for equality. Freedom, runs a social theory thought by her educators too stodgy to trouble her pretty head with, can only be granted by others in theory; its realization can lie only in one’s enactment of it.
To judge from what she says and does, however—finding only others at fault for her predicaments, speaking always of herself as a means of stating the general case, shedding tears as a means of negotiation-the freedom she truly seeks is of a rather different kind. It is a freedom demanded by children and enjoyed by no one: the freedom from all difficulty. If in the end her society is at fault for anything, it is for allowing her to grow up with the impression that this is something possible to ask. Even the good fairies who attended her birth would never have dared so far.
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