Herstory
A History of Women in the West, Volume V: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century.
by Françoise Thébaud.
Harvard. 597 pp. $29.95
Caveat emptor. The title of this book—the fifth and crowning volume in a series—is misleading. It is not a history of women in the West, at least not one that is complete. For the most part a production of French academics, it focuses almost wholly on Europe, to the near-total exclusion of at least one major Western country—namely, the United States. Moreover, the one chapter devoted to America, “The Modern Woman of the 1920’s, American Style,” is concerned solely with the hygienic American consumer-Mom of academic fantasy, no mention being made of, for instance, the day-to-day liberties enjoyed by American women that have amazed foreign observers since Tocqueville’s time.
In her introductory essay, “Explorations of Gender,” the editor of the volume, Françoise Thébaud, writes that its intent is to separate the weave of history into “threads”—law, business, and so on—and “engender” them; to make people see how all these threads come to history’s loom stained with sexism and “symbolic violence”; and then to create a tapestry which will be whole. Certainly, the tapestry she has created is elegant in appearance: weighty in the hand, and handsomely bound. The prose, on the other hand, most of it translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer, is often leaden, impenetrable, and clotted with jargon (“the differentiae of sexual difference are not objectifiable”).
Nevertheless, in spite of the opaque writing, the tome’s central theme emerges with crystal consistency: 20th-century women have strained to escape patriarchy and “phallogocentrism” and its horrible servant—motherhood—but are nowhere near fully free. In five sections, plus two general introductions, the reader is guided through women’s struggle to poach in patriarchal Western preserves to achieve what is called here, delicately but comprehensively, “autonomous creativity outside the domestic setting.” By and large, however, the only data provided are those concerning work, child care, and the state’s attitude toward each. In their hypnotic, machinelike, turning and sifting of these topics, the contributing historians dutifully note which countries provide free day care, which have snatched away abortion rights, which politicians have praised motherhood too much, which have tried to abolish, which diabolically to encourage, the survival of the family.
Women’s liberation is completely bound up in the thinking of these scholars with the desire and right to work outside the home. Whatever is in aid of this end (day care, unfettered access to abortion) is objectively good, whatever hinders it is bad. Thus, labor unions are held to be less than progressive because historically they have opposed women working at times when men with families could not find jobs. The welfare state is seen as nothing better than a mixed blessing; true, it has ushered in waves of feminist legislation, but it has also buttressed the family with “child-centered” welfare payments that enslave mothers in their homes.
The social sciences come in for attack, too: not only do they study the status quo in an undesirably neutral way, but they have been a tacit ally of American advertising in keeping women chained to a false ideal of housekeeping. Modern medicine likewise has a sinister side, thrusting upon women new and burdensome instructions concerning the proper care of children.
And children themselves are the worst of all, bringing physical danger, poverty, and frustration to the progressive female class. “The more children women have, the less they work outside the home,” complains Rose-Marie Lagrave in a lengthy essay, “A Supervised Emancipation.” The point she makes—children interfere with a woman’s ability to work—is echoed repeatedly by others in this book.
In pursuing their remorseless theme, the authors lodge many truly weird claims and complaints. One of their number, for example, argues that war is valuable because it frees women to get men’s jobs. Another maintains that prosperous countries cannot afford high birth rates. A third holds that wages high enough for a working man to support his family on his own are “exploitative” of the family. Meanwhile, the series editor offers praise for Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang for giving women command positions while “reformulat[ing] the terrorist tradition.”
It would be unfair to criticize a collection of twenty essays ranging across all of 20th-century European history for telling, say, a disjointed story, or individual contributors for contradicting one another. But there are no such worries here. This book is a monolith. The writers do not disagree with one another or think independently; they simply follow any and all paths, however twisted and absurd, so long as they lead back to the closed circle of an ever more curious creed.
