‘It’s a disastrous combination. I just sat there with the kids in bed, watching TV and drinking. Night after night.
‘It’s lovely being with the children. Tracy is now thirteen and Kate is eight. But, of course, they have their own chums.
‘And it can be very lonely, sitting there alone in a big house at nights. That’s how drink became my big problem.’
‘News of the World’, 5 April 1970
He does not ponder why it is that women can get themselves into such a state that trivial matters can become unbearable. It is not surprising that he has such a tiny proportion of successes, if this is the level of analysis to which these women are subjected.6 The Glasgow Committee of the Royal Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children reported that an increasing number of Glasgow mothers were taking drugs ‘to escape from reality’, another morally suspect activity.7 The housewives’ life is not real: it is anachronistic and thwarting: women have been exposed to too many other kinds of life to revert to four walls and people two foot high without strain. The refusal to accept this as a rewarding life is not a refusal to accept reality. All these symptoms of tiredness, lassitude, ‘nerves’, as women are apt to call them, are neurasthenia, and have the complex psychosomatic origin that the name implies. No amount of direct medication can be effective, unless women can also be brainwashed into deluding themselves that their monotonous and unremitting drugery in the home is for any purpose or doing any good. A housewife’s work has no results: it simply has to be done again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because children come up just the same, brought or not. The confusion about the degree of bringing necessary, and the multitude of mistakes which the unsuspecting mother is assured on all sides that she will make, and has made, if things aren’t working out, show that she is without guidance yet loaded with responsibility.
…give their existence some object, their time some occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature…
From a letter of Charlotte Brontë
Women often imagine that they would be less miserable if they were better off. Perhaps it’s a baby-sitter they need, or a maid, or long holidays, or fewer financial worries. The evidence is that the fewer masking problems there are the greater the strain on the central problem of the marital relationship itself. In western culture the ultimate success-figure is the astronaut; the wife of an astronaut can bask in money and reflected glory. The cosmonaut is the American aristocrat; presidents fly to him, he prays on behalf of the nation standing on the moon: his domestic set-up must have everything money and planning can provide. A NASA psychiatrist was quoted as saying that Cape Kennedy was the world’s most active spawning ground for divorce. Certainly divorces occur there at double the national average. Housewife alcoholism is higher than anywhere else in America except Washington. ‘Space industry seems to rob men of emotion.’ The deliberate desensitizing of astronauts has its problems; they might contain themselves brilliantly on the moon, but they contain themselves everywhere else too, including their wives’ beds, for the degree of sexual activity at the Cape is agreed to be very low.8 We may take the computer society of Cape Kennedy to be the logical development of the tendencies of our increasingly organized chaos, even in poor and backward England where people cannot afford to get divorces. A cosmonaut’s wife cannot be fat and frumpish, so she must express her misery in drunkenness and promiscuity which are at least modish and expensive habits. In England a ‘neglected’ and ‘downtrodden’, ‘bored’, ‘lonely’ housewife is likely simply to eat too much, too much rubbish. Advertising of chocolate bars and biscuits in England has recently recognized the function of escapist eating. What we are told to expect from such machine-made sludge is ‘a taste sensation’, an ‘explosion’, excitement, and visions of faraway places. Television advertising of candy promises hallucinations and orgasms. Certainly a Mars Bar costs less than a divorce.
Female revolt takes curious and tortuous forms, and the greatest toll is exacted by the woman upon herself. She finds herself driving her husband away from her by destructive carping, fighting off his attempts to make love to her, because somehow they seem all wrong. Frigidity is still a major problem, but know-how about the female structure and orgasms will not change it. Women are ill-adapted by their conditioning to accept sexual reality and orgasm. Often husbands report that frigidity has developed in a wife who seemed to enjoy sex in the early days of marriage. Sexual love is not a matter of orgasm or of romanticism: approaching each other from their opposite poles husbands and wives miss each other in the dark and clutch at phantoms. Contraception takes a toll of female sexuality. It is appalling to reflect that the most popular form of contraception in England is still the sheath. One British couple in five still practises premature withdrawal. One and three-quarter million English women use the pill, not even an eighth of the housewife population. Even if they do use the pill, all problems are not solved. Every week the press features another pill horror story, of a bride dead of thrombosis within weeks of her marriage. A story in the News of the World is that the Family Planning Association warns that the 400,000 women supplied by the Association with the pill are suffering an assortment of fifty side-effects.9
I resent the fact that my husband doesn’t want to make love to me very often but on the rare occasions when he does, I resent that even more and freeze up on him because I feel that he’s making a wishy-washy attempt at pretending there’s still something between us or that he’s not going with another woman at the time (I’m sure he has a few girl friends). We often row about this; sometimes he denies it and sometimes he says I drive him to other women because I’m cold with him. But how can a woman warm up to a man who never says or does anything romantic?
(Mrs) C. T., ‘Forum’, Vol. 2, No. 2
Professor Victor Wynn of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, says taking the pill can lead to thrombosis, liver disorders, obesity and depression.10 When he says it, we may begin to believe it, although as a woman who complained of oedema and apathy when taking the pill, I can testify that my GP pooh-poohed the idea. A number of letters in the Lancet in the summer of 1969 discussed the matter of pill-depression and admitted that the pill hormone did interfere with the secretion of tryptophan, ‘a dietary chemical essential to good health and which may also be associated with mood control’.11 The withdrawal of sixteen brands from the market has not done much for the women who are now using the others. The coil has a painful failure rate in about twenty per cent of cases and can be an oddly disquieting resident in the body. Mrs Monica Foot wrote a horrifying account of spontaneous abortion with a bow-type coil in the Sunday Times and was reviled for her candour.12 The diaphragm is a nuisance, is perceptible to the woman, and the spermicides interfere with her secretions and the tactile sensations of the surrounding membrane. Moreover, husbands can drag it out, if they insist upon impregnation. As long as women have to think about contraception every day, and worry about pills, sheaths, and devices of all kinds, and then worry every time a period is due, more irrationality will appear in their behaviour. The almost universal problem of menstrual tension is certainly aggravated for today’s women, and added neurasthenia makes it more acute. Misery, misery, misery.
There are more women who attempt suicide than men, more women in mental hospitals than men13; there are hundreds of children injured by desperate parents every year, and even cases of infants bodily put to death by deranged mothers.14 Postnatal weeps are a recognized syndrome; some women have suffered them for as long as a year after the birth of the child. The tiny scandalous minority of baby-bashers and husband-murderers get into the press. The majority of women drag along from day to day in an apathetic twilight, hoping that they are doing the right thing, vaguely expecting a reward some day. The working wife waits for the children to grow up and do well to vindicate her drudgery, and sees them do as they please, move away, get into strange habits, and reject their parents. The idle wife g
irds her middle-aged loins and goes to school, fools with academic disciplines, too often absorbing knowledge the wrong way for the wrong reasons. My own mother, after nagging and badgering her eldest child into running away from home (a fact which she concealed for years by talking of her as if she were present, when she knew absolutely nothing of what she was doing), took up ballet dancing, despite the obvious futility of such an undertaking, studied accountancy, and failed obdurately year after year, sampled religion, took up skiing and finally learnt Italian. In fact she had long before lost the power of concentration required to read a novel or a newspaper. Every activity was an obsession for as long as it lasted—some lasted barely a month and those are too numerous to list. She resisted television, resisted homemaking and knitting, the usual opiates. She did not play bingo or housie-housie, partly because of middle-class snobbery. She did not fall in love with a dog, or a budgerigar. Others do.
Of course, single women do not escape female misery, because of the terrific pressure to marry as a measure of feminine success. They dawdle and dream in their dead-end jobs, overtly miserable, because they are publicly considered to be. The phenomenon of single women devoting their lives to aged parents, which has no counterpart in the male sex, is incompletely understood if we do not consider the element of self-cloistering which inspires these women. The mockery of spinsters and acid-faced women is not altogether the expression of prejudice, for these women do exude discontent and intolerance and self-pity. As usual it is a vicious circle.
Given the difficulty of marriage as a way of life, and the greater difficulties of spinsterhood, happiness must be seen by women to be a positive achievement. Ultimately, the greatest service a woman can do her community is to be happy; the degree of revolt and irresponsibility which she must manifest to acquire happiness is the only sure indication of the way things must change if there is to be any point in continuing to be a woman at all.
Resentment
Although he doesn’t know it, I have attended his funeral several times. Each time I look ADORABLE in my black tight-fitting suit and Spanish lace veil. And, each time, after a decent period has elapsed, I have remarried a very rich man and become famous for the ethereal look on my beautiful pale face.
Christine Billson, ‘You Can Touch Me’, 1961, p. 20
Misery is not borne without resentment. It is commonly admitted that there is a battle waging between the sexes but like most other facts which we dare not directly contemplate it is most commonly referred to facetiously. The battle is universal and deadly serious unlike the isolated skirmishes of the women’s liberation movements with the male establishment. Whether it is waged at home or abroad it is always infighting without rules or conventions and its conclusion is death. We observe it all the time but we seldom recognize it for what it is, even when we are in there battling tooth and nail ourselves. Because they have the upper hand, men usually conduct themselves with more grace than women do upon the battleground. Men do not realize that they are involved in a struggle to the death until they have lost it and are facing the ruinous capitulations of the divorce court, when in chagrin at their foolishness in neglecting their defences they give vociferous vent to their conviction that the world is run for the benefit of predatory and merciless women. The winning woman knows that her victory is Pyrrhic.
Female resentment has an astonishing range of public expression. The most catalytic situation is a party. Parties in our society are very rarely occasions of spontaneous festivity. They are usually arranged for a purpose: to introduce a new arrival to a group, to emphasize the importance of an event, to get to know each other. It is a time to stand up and be counted. Men take women to parties and therefore women are at a disadvantage from the outset. The group’s cohesion derives from the relationships of the men; order is preserved by acknowledging nuances of rank. The women are expected to pick up on these nuances and subtly strengthen their men’s representation in the group. Every woman arriving on her escort’s arm knows what her role is, and yet she habitually subverts and destroys the social situation with an astonishing variety of ambiguous tactics. The most obvious, usually practised by women who are not seriously attached, is the stimulation of male rivalry by more or less subtle flirtation. A woman may appear to operate this technique unconsciously; she is very rarely entirely in control of it, none the less it is extremely effective. In playing this game she may take advantage of tensions already existing in the masculine group and aggravate them. Her best bet is to exploit the male chauvinism which prompts her escort to display his catch for the evaluation of his peers. She may subtly indicate that he is a boor (for her glass has been empty for hours), that he is a lovable sweetie (that is to say a schmuck), she may welcome anecdotes which tell against him; or if she really doesn’t give a damn, she may reject him outright preferably for a friend of his, best of all for his best friend or his most successful rival. More irrevocably attached women only use such techniques in moderation, because they have constructed a whole battery of minor artillery, a sort of lingering death of a thousand cuts to be constantly dealt out to their chosen victim. Joke-telling by the husband is a hazardous endeavour, for his wife will sigh or tell everybody that they have heard it or that Max Bygraves told it so much better; she won’t laugh whatever happens. If her husband is the life of the party she will languish and demand querulously to be taken home, or become overcome by liquor curiously fast even to the extent of making an exhibition of herself. If he is having fun she will hiss in his ear that he is drunk and making a fool of himself, or remind him that he has to drive home, or, if he remains proof against her, accuse him of gaping after every attractive woman in the room. All this destructiveness derives from her dulled apprehension that she is only there as her husband’s appendage: she is not at ease in the social situation. All she was ever prepared to do when she was unattached was to engineer an attachment: now that that is done her little stump of wit and conversation is quite withered away. She feels stupid and probably dowdy: she has never really enjoyed herself, except when she was the object of rivalry and flattery, and she doesn’t know how. The sight of her mate playing around evokes her contempt. She bets that he would enjoy himself much better if she wasn’t there, a speculation all too often thoroughly grounded in fact. If she doesn’t hit back in some snide way her energy has absolutely no outlet. She is wiped out, obliterated, and her older friends murmur among themselves how suppressed she is since she got married, shacked up or whatever. If she should reverse the traditional party situation and coruscate to her husband’s disadvantage (and most likely at his expense) bitter revenge will be exacted later, as bitter as anything she could devise herself. It’s best to sit it through or try a last blackmailing technique, to sneak off home leaving him wondering what has become of her. Most women adopt the expedient of segregation, so that they can wage war from covered territory.
I have seen more spectacular tactics, which depended upon the publicness of the situation for their effect. One female casualty of my acquaintance used to retire to the lavatory when she could make no headway in the situation, smash her glass and roll in the splinters screaming until some strong man broke the door down and carried her out in picturesque disorder. Another girl provoked a sharp belt in the face, by the simple expedient of screaming unbearably until she got it and then spent all her energy trying to fling herself down three flights of stairs, so that every man there had to lend a hand to restrain her. Another girl used to react suspiciously fast to a modicum of liquor, and tear her clothes off while her mate besought her to cool it, and the rest of the party pretended that they were observing liberated behaviour. This is part of the larger strategy of insinuating that the old man’s virility is not equal to his lady’s demands, an extreme and bohemian form of flirtation.
The ignorance and isolation of most women mean that they are incapable of making conversation: most of their communication with their spouses is a continuation of the power struggle. The result is that when wives come along to dinner p
arties they pervert civilized conversation about real issues into personal quarrels. The number of hostesses who wish that they did not have to ask wives is legion. The number who seize the excuse of a wife’s absence to invite a man for dinner because the poor fellow cannot do for himself (ostensibly) has its own significance. This must not be taken to indicate that men have not their part to play in the battle. Their tactics are condescension and patronizing of a woman’s attempts to contribute to a discussion, simple setting aside of her remarks or ignoring them, exaggerated courtliness to other women, extravagant praise of the cooking (for all the world as if they were constantly starved or poisoned at home), loving mockery of the little woman and so on. Because of their winning position, their techniques do not have to be strident or obscene or anti-social, and this fact itself can drive a woman to madness and direct aggression. I am reminded of one of my girl students who got so tired of being patronized at a Union meeting at the university that she threw a full pint of bitter over the chairman. Her fleeting satisfaction was qualified by the eventual realization that she had lost on all counts.
The real theatre of the sex war despite the atrocities committed in social situations is the domestic hearth; there it is conducted unremittingly. Because of the inequity of the situation and the impossibility of any telling action, the woman must unpack her heart with words and fall acursing like a very drab, a scullion, because, as Hamlet construed from his own example, she lacks gall to make oppression bitter. Verbal aggression is not the reflection of penis envy but the inevitable result of induced impotence. However, the fruitlessness of the reproaches and the endless reiteration of the same spurious complaints (spurious because she is ignorant of what her genuine grievance is) bring about an increasing stridency and a terrible disregard for the real meaning of what she is saying. Her attacks grow more destructive and more unforgivable until she realizes in some helpless way that she is tearing down her house with her own hands, but she is by now powerless to stop brutalizing her own environment. She hears the squalid succession of ‘You never’s’ and ‘You always’s’ and realizes that most of what she is saying is unjust and irrelevant, but something is badly wrong, how else can she say what it is? Her guilt increases; her power to break from a situation which is aging and altering her beyond recognition diminishes every day. Occasionally she breaks down and confesses that she doesn’t know what is wrong with her. Her husband suggests that she take a pill and the bitter battle recommences with her upbraiding of his stupidity and heartlessness, his refusal to see that he is partly responsible for her pitiable condition, and so on.
The Female Eunuch Page 30