Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye

by Florence King

  If we want to regain the respect of the world, we should begin by announcing that children have no business expressing opinions on anything except “Do you have enough room in the toes?” As for me, I’ll take cats, those symbols of adultness and chief spreaders of impetigo in sandboxes—every little bit helps.

  Do my precious little readers want to play book review? All right. One, two, three—go!

  Asked to judge the prospects of women writers, Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, replied: “If you can take their minds off their wombs, you can help them to some kind of intellectual development.”

  It’s too late for Mary Gordon. Her maternity is so obsessive that reading Men and Angels is like being licked. Although her heroine, Anne Foster, is an art historian, she is such a primitive of the motherhood school that she comes across more bovine than human, and gives off a fetid reek every time she opens her mouth on the subject of her children—which is constantly:

  “And to her son she gave much that was important in a mother’s love: a steamy, rich affection, redolent of the cave”.

  “There are my children … She could smell their thin high sweat.”

  “How primitive it was, this love of children; flesh and flesh, bone, blood, connection.”

  “His hair smelled acrid, overripe, like stored grain: she put her lips to it and got a yeasty taste … She kissed her son’s damp head … it was the strongest love she knew, this mother love, knit up of blood.”

  “Children’s rooms were like the warm, cluttered nests of hibernating rodents.”

  Mothers like this are why God made military schools, but little Peter is surrounded by a regiment of women. So that her story can pulse on like an uncut umbilical cord, Gordon eliminates paternal interference in the first chapter by sending Anne’s husband, Michael, off to France on a year’s sabbatical.

  Fathers don’t count for much in the uterine confines of Mary Gordon’s mind. “How were children attached to their father’s bodies, where they had never lived, she wondered? He never saw himself as once the flesh that housed them.” The supportive Michael offers to take the kids to Europe with him so Anne can finish writing her art catalogue in peace and quiet, but of course she says no. “She’d felt ill with fear when he suggested it. She could barely explain to him what the prospect of living without her children made her feel: derelict, unfranchised, as if she were sleeping on the street.” An apt comparison, in view of the fact that women like this created saloons, hobo jungles, and the French Foreign Legion.

  Left alone with a mentally disturbed babysitter named Laura Post, Anne revels in an atmosphere in which emotional choices dominate ethical ones: “She couldn’t bear to hurry the children, so she knew she would be late for the appointment Laura had made with the electrician.”

  Even Gordon’s passing comparisons are pedophilic. A gesture by an adult is described as “something one of the children would have done to get attention.” A woman of seventy-five is given “a childish look of pure disappointment.” Not even the weather report can get out of the womb. “She imagined children at the ocean; it was that kind of morning.”

  But the most riveting sentence in the entire novel occurs when Anne puts clothes on the corpse of a suicide victim: “As a posture, this was not unfamiliar to her; it was not unlike dressing a sleeping child.”

  Not surprisingly, Gordon’s literary style is frequently labored, even dilated: “She despised that tendency in people, that abdication of responsibility in favor of some totemic theory of the power of proximity.”

  Her metaphors need high forceps: “Anne exchanged the unhealed fear of her children’s danger for the dry, well-formed white bone of justice.”

  Sometimes they even require an episiotomy: “At the same time she was riven, a torrent split her, top to bottom, with a violent slice.”

  And there is a gem of unconscious humor when Anne concentrates on “keeping her fists clenched so she wouldn’t strike [the babysitter].” If we didn’t already know that Gordon is feminine, we know it now.

  Even though Anne’s shoulders assume the “stoop of apology,” this novel would make a wonderful vehicle for Joan Crawford. She could chant her famous “I’ll do anything for those kids, you hear me, anything,” and Geraldine Fitzgerald could play the hapless babysitter. As for the male characters, they’re such bemused satellites that Wendell Corey could play all of them.

  What are we to make of this breeched presentation of female priorities coming on the heels of twenty years of feminism? Come close, darlings, and your maiden Aunt Flossie will whisper something in your ear. Ready?

  Women will never be free until Mary Gordon’s picture appears on a milk carton. Now get the hell out of here and go play on the freeway.

  4

  SPINSTERHOOD IS POWERFUL

  Step into my time capsule. We are going to pay a visit to the Unfriendly Insurance Company, a downtown monolith whose lobby features marble columns topped with gilded acanthus leaves and a ruggedly institutional concrete floor that smells of disinfectant.

  We take a slow Up elevator, passing New Policies, passing Claims, passing Annuities, passing Public Relations, passing everything, until we come to an eyrie marked File Room. Under normal conditions this would be the seraglio of Unfriendly Insurance because it contains four dozen females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, but these are not normal conditions as we have come to know them in the glorious eighties.

  Opening the file room door, the first thing we hear is a hush. Row after row of occupied desks, wall-to-wall girls, yet not a sound except the rustle of papery industry. Our astonishment increases when we look at the clock on the wall. It is 9:10 A.M., yet not only are all the girls working, they are also fully dressed. No one is in curlers, no one is filing her nails, no one is eating, no one is talking on the phone, and no one is reading the horoscope in the morning paper.

  The girls don’t even look up as we enter. Theirs is not to reason why, and we are about to meet the reason why.

  At one end of the room, raised on a dais, is an old oaken desk at which sits the personage known in the men’s room as “the Old Oaken Bucket.” On the front of the desk, exactly in the center, is a bronze nameplate so heavy that it looks like the door of a mausoleum. Unlike today’s plastic models, it has no provision for sliding out an old name and inserting a new one because it was made in a forge. It has never been necessary to change the name on this nameplate, and it never will be, because it belongs to Miss MACINTYRE.

  Miss MacIntyre started working as a file clerk at Unfriendly Insurance the day after she graduated from high school during the administration of William Howard Taft; she has been supervisor of the file room since the second administration of Calvin Coolidge. She has two generic names but neither of them is “career woman.” The male executives call her a “company girl,” which signifies a distaff measure of devotion who is married to her job. She calls herself a “businesswoman.”

  Miss MacIntyre lives with her widowed mother, who cooks her breakfast every morning and sends her off to work with a hearty lunch in a brown bag. She arrives at the office fifteen minutes early and is buried in work by the time her charges come in at nine on the dot.

  She works all morning without a break and exhibits an awesome immunity to distraction. So do her charges. Miss MacIntyre runs a tight ship; being popular interests her not at all. As the supervisor of a bevy of sweet young things who are marking time until they get married, she knows her first duty is seeing to it that they deliver a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. Her technique predates company-sponsored workshops in group dynamics; the moment she hears a giggle or a whisper she barks “Girls!” and it stops.

  Except for the direst emergencies, her girls are forbidden to make or receive personal phone calls, or to practice what Miss MacIntyre calls “fraternization.” What will one day be called sexual harassment is unknown at Unfriendly Insurance, thanks to a highly successful pre-feminist version of consciousness raising: whenever a new male em
ployee indicates a lubricious interest in the file room, one of his seasoned co-workers takes him aside and says, “Watch out for Miss Mac.”

  At noon Miss MacIntyre unpacks her lunch and eats it at her desk. She does not vanish into the boutique veldt for two hours because Mother makes all her clothes from Butterick patterns. Nor does she take time off for psychotherapy; people who know that an entire organization would collapse without them rarely suffer from a lack of self-esteem.

  When she gets home she eats the hot dinner that Mother has ready and waiting. The two of them play gin rummy with neighbors until ten o’clock, when Miss MacIntyre goes to bed and gets her usual good night’s sleep.

  In her fifty-two years at Unfriendly Insurance, Miss MacIntyre has been late to work only once, the time it snowed twenty inches, and of the nearly one thousand sick leave days she has earned since joining the company, she has used nine. Tardiness and absenteeism—which to her way of thinking include Christmas shopping days and “personal leave”—have no place in her rigid conception of herself as a businesswoman.

  Miss MacIntyre had a big crowd for her retirement dinner, but many people came out of duty, and a number of them had privately renamed the occasion “Thank God She’s Gone Day.” Throughout the meal they swapped horror stories about her ironclad ways, the men speculating about whether she had ever had a sex life and the women shaking their heads and saying “the poor thing.”

  But then something strange happened. During the presentation of the gift watch, when the company president said “You could set your watch by Miss Mac,” people started swallowing hard and blinking back tears. Emotions rose still higher when they presented her with her bronze nameplate mounted on a plaque, and by the time they all stood and sang “Auld Lang Syne” there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  Miss MacIntyre has long since gone to her reward but her legend still lingers down at Unfriendly Insurance (since renamed). Whenever the old-timers see a pregnant career woman doing Lamaze exercises on her desk, somebody always says “I bet Miss Mac is spinning in her grave.”

  It is typical of America that having invented efficiency apartments, singles bars, Me-ism, Soup-for-One, and That Cosmo Girl, we have dropped spinster from the language and consider old maid a sexist slur.

  I make a point of using both whenever I get a chance. When I fill out forms that ask for my marital status, I skip the printed selections, write in spinster, draw a block beside it, and check it. When an aluminum-siding telephone salesman asked to speak to “the man of the house,” I said “There isn’t any, I’m an old maid,” and derived enormous satisfaction from his audible gulp.

  I am often accused of being an anti-feminist, and my name is mud at Ms. magazine, but in truth my whole life has been a feminist statement. The conflict lies not in my outlook and attitudes but in the definition of feminism that has been foisted on America in the late twentieth century.

  When feminism awoke from its long sleep in the sixties, I assumed it would be a movement for careerist spinsters who chose to renounce marriage and motherhood for a life of the mind lived with spartan simplicity and dedicated to professional achievement. What else, after all, could “women’s liberation” mean?

  I soon found out. In no time, the movement split along two pseudo-feminist fault lines, the Lunatic Fringe and the Lunatic Warp and Woof. The former consisted of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Lesbian separatists, and guerrilla theaters like WITCH and SCUM. The latter consisted of frustrated suburban housewives roused by the melancholy seal barks of Betty Friedan.

  To isolate the Lunatic Fringe and make feminism “nice,” the Lunatic Warp and Woof took pains to tailor the movement to fit the needs of “mainstream” women—that is, married women. They were losing their minds, said Friedan, because they weren’t realizing their potential. Thanks to the marvels of technology, housework was now so easy that it could be done in an hour or two, but married women were still stuck at home because our patriarchal Judeo-Christian heritage denied them access to all the competing, achieving, aggressive, assertive, dress-for-success fun. To this end, when Friedan called a Woman’s Strike Day she devised a slogan that had housewife written all over it: “Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot.”

  Next came the Wombies, who unfurled the banner of anthropology à go-go and combed through history looking for the Great Mother. In The First Sex, Elizabeth Gould Davis drained Atlantis and found a prehistoric matriarchy full of wonderfully well-adjusted people who chewed on umbilical cords instead of beef jerky and worshipped the birth bucket instead of the machine. Jane Alpert joined the fray with her “Mother Right” theory, triggering earth mother fantasies and fertility dances in the tofu-and-alfalfa set. Wombie feminists rhapsodized about breastfeeding and natural childbirth, and promoted gynecological self-examinations so that women could see and touch the wondrous reproductive equipment that had ruled the universe before our patriarchal Judeo-Christian heritage spoiled all the affirming, sensing, feeling, nurturing, bonding, burgeoning, moon-and-tides fun.

  Wife-and-mother feminism encouraged women to Have It All. As soon as they found out what this cavalier phrase involved, they started complaining like Victorian invalids. The housework that Friedan claimed took only an hour or two was killing them; they were too tired to burgeon, too conflicted to nurture, too busy to bond, too guilty to affirm. They wanted to be able to put their families first without being accused of neglecting their careers, and at the same time, to be able to put their careers first without being accused of neglecting their families.

  Always ready with an oxymoron, pseudo-feminists came to the rescue with demands for “caring workplaces”—maternal leave, paternal leave, “massive” government day care, “high quality” on-site corporate day care, flextime, and job sharing so that we could all live the way people used to live ’way back before our patriarchal Judeo-Christian heritage spoiled all the sharing, humanizing, cooperating, partnering, compromising, synthesizing, whelp-and-hoe fun.

  Feminism’s first duty is to give all women a good name but pseudo-feminism has done the opposite. Countless employers have now discovered that the hand that rocks the cradle rocks the boat; most married women with small children are no use to anybody unless the stock exchange is hiring amok-runners. The ceaseless demands of pseudo-feminists and their arrogant premise that the corporate world exists to provide women with careers regardless of cost and upheaval have caused so much hostility and resentment that sexism and misogyny have been rejuvenated and the phrase “women ‘n’ children” is running together like “damnyankee.”

  Instead of trying to harden women as real feminists should by preaching renunciation and dedication, pseudo-feminists have torn them apart by promoting masculine work while simultaneously condemning masculine work habits. Take, for example, Adrienne Rich: “I want to make it clear that I am not saying that in order to write well, or think well, it is necessary to become unavailable to others, or to become a devouring ego. This has been the myth of the masculine artist and thinker; and I repeat, I do not accept it.”

  Bull, madam, bull. If you really reject it, why not say so simply and briefly, instead of dragging in Nixonian preambles, italics, and “repeats”?

  The “myth” of the masculine artist and thinker—or any worker—is not myth but fact and I accept it without question. Its real name is concentration, and it is achieved by making oneself unavailable to others. Considering how persistent and thickheaded “others” can be, it is also necessary to become what Rich calls a “devouring ego” and I call a double-barreled bastard.

  Mendacious pep talks such as Rich’s keep married women in a perpetual state of self-doubt and confusion about priorities and make them resentful and jealous of unencumbered women who have never married. Women are always jealous of something. It used to be legs and bosoms; now it’s careers and lifestyles. The New Jealousy is marked by a phrase that I encounter regularly in my fan mail.

  “If I could do what you do … .”

  Write the same page twenty times
?

  “If I could do what you do … .”

  Write all day Christmas?

  “If I could do what you do … .”

  Get halfway through a book only to realize that you started too late in dramatic time and the whole thing is turning into a flashback? Anybody who chose that moment to ask “When’s dinner?” would get killed, ladies, and liberal, compassionate Adrienne Rich knows it. She won’t tell you; I just did.

  One of the best places to find conflicted Having-It-All career matrons is the publishing world, where the damage they do lives after them under somebody else’s name.

  Editing requires precise concentration combined with a running memory. If, for example, you cut a paragraph about Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, all subsequent references to Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch must also be deleted—known as “following through on the cut.” If you notice strange things in your reading material, it’s because Mary Marvel stopped what she was doing to follow through on the telephone with the babysitter.

  Some Having-It-All careerists are so conflicted that they take refuge in denial, like the pregnant editor who simply went underground for the final trimester without ever telling her writers that she was pregnant. First, she stopped answering her mail. Next, she and her secretary worked out a complex system of creative excuses so that nobody could get her on the phone: she was either in an editorial conference, or a sales meeting, or she had “stepped away from her desk.” To make sure nobody got a good look at her, she stopped going to literary cocktail parties and turned down invitations to business lunches so that none of the agents would find out. That boon to Mary Marvel malingering, the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association (she’s getting ready to go to ABA, she’s at ABA, she’s recovering from ABA) luckily coincided with the worst period of her pregnancy, so she was able to string it out for another three weeks.