A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  The book could not have been better timed, appearing just as a new young generation of women’s movement activists cohered into a political force. The women’s liberation movement had built rapidly in the sixties, emerging from women’s growing discontent with limited roles in the home and rampant discrimination in the workplace. It was fueled as well by a powerful civil rights movement that involved black and white women in the struggle for freedom, and nurtured by a search to end the war in Vietnam that encouraged women as well as men to challenge the twin gods of manliness and wartime bravado. An Unfinished Woman caught the crest of the moment. It followed on a year of rapid and almost invisible organizing that included the emergence of radical women’s groups like Red Stockings and the increasing success of a three-year-old National Organization of Women. It paralleled the spread of small consciousness-raising groups designed to allow women to “speak bitterness” and to confront a growing sense that private life was lived in the context of public decisions as well as shaped by them. The year 1969 followed on a widely publicized August 1968 protest action against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, which demanded an end to the fetishizing of women’s bodies. It was the year that young women began to understand and to repeat the mantra “The personal is political.” And it preceded an August 1970 mass march by women who celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage with banners that read WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE AND EQUALITY.

  Nineteen sixty-nine was also the year that tensions emerged between the political and cultural strands of the women’s movement. Radical feminists urged women to focus on changing the organization of personal life and familial relationships. If women eliminated the demeaning attributes of language and lifestyle, thought radical feminists, if they controlled their own reproductive choices, if they resisted limited gender roles, they could win equality between the sexes. These changes would require overturning a patriarchal power structure whose insidious effects materialized in the everyday actions of men and women. To radical feminists, questions of chivalry—who opened car doors or held coats or walked nearest the sidewalk—mattered as symbols of the larger patriarchy. Liberal feminists, to whose ideas Hellman’s came close, believed, in contrast, that economic opportunity held the key to gender equality. The first step, they thought, should be to drop the barriers to women’s education, occupational choices, and career aims by fighting for legislative and policy changes that would provide access to job training and professional education, make available credit and financial resources, and ensure fair treatment in the workplace for women regardless of their family status.

  Hellman was already in her mid-sixties when women’s liberation became a movement, and she was approaching her seventies by the time the conflict between liberal and radical feminists became apparent. Ironically, perhaps, her own remarkable successes as a playwright drew attention at the time because she had achieved them as a woman. Hellman, who had never wanted to be identified as a “woman playwright,” now found herself a heroine to women who admired her achievements because of her identity, not her politics. Her readers focused as well on the unorthodox lifestyle she celebrated in An Unfinished Woman. The long-term relationship with Dashiell Hammett, the several abortions of which she made no secret, the sexual liaisons in which she continued to indulge even as she grew older: all these turned her into a model for the new women’s movement.

  Yet the Lillian Hellman dramatized in her memoir bore little resemblance to the Hellman her friends and lovers knew. The strident and outspoken persona that Hellman memorialized presented another side in private. She could, says Feibleman, “walk into a room very quietly and sit down, and the room would turn to her, and people wanted to get to know her or wanted to be in her good graces. She was very electric, electrifying, magnetic.” Nor was she, in real life, sexually adventurous or aggressive. Peter Feibleman describes her as shy sexually, a description that affirms the femininity that others noticed in private moments. She was, says Feibleman, “very passive, very unaggressive, very feminine—one of the most feminine women I’ve ever known. The bark and the bite were political or emotional. Never sexual, never sexual.”42

  This second Lillian, this woman who, to paraphrase Feibleman once again, both lived her life and performed it, made no secret of her contempt for issues of cultural change. She believed she had become successful as a result of her own talents and efforts, not as the result of her sexually liberated lifestyle. She had earned her way to the top, and her success had given her access to political culture that promised to shape the world. She had deployed her fame to espouse political causes that could address issues of racial and gender equality. She had used her visibility to help organize screenwriters in the 1930s; she had relied on her talent to raise her voice in the fight against fascism and on her celebrity to raise funds for causes she cared about in the forties. Hellman had done all this without particularly focusing on women’s issues, though always with an eye to the collective strengths of politically mobilized women.

  To Hellman, women’s equality was never a goal in itself. Rather, she believed in equality as a vehicle for achieving national and worldwide political progress and the good society she imagined. From early on, women’s failures to help each other had systematically disappointed her. While political emancipation had led to advances for individual women, in her early forties she wrote, “it has nowhere gone in quite the most desirable direction.” She expected that since women had always been underdogs, they “would become the most advanced, the most liberal.” She hoped that because women “suffered from the deprivation of certain basic human rights” she would be “in the forefront of the fight for others’ human rights,” and she anticipated that “because she is the giver of human life, she would be also the most zealous guardian of it—instead she is often the most bloodthirsty.”43 These lessons stuck with her. At a Women for Wallace luncheon during Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign, she accused her female audience of being “remarkably indifferent to the problems of our time … Another generation gave us the vote and either we have not used it at all or we have too often used it for the wrong issues and the wrong men … another generation worked hard to establish us as equal people, capable of doing more than giggling at dinner tables, or scrubbing floors for those who did. We responded with little enough gratitude, little true interest, in the affairs of our country or the state of the world.”44

  To Hellman, “career” women, as the postwar world defined them and as the new women’s movement of the late sixties and early seventies proposed to empower them, did not automatically harbor the kinds of values necessary to political progress. Career women who adopted the aggressive strategies and power-grabbing mentality of successful men would only emulate their politics. And while she understood that wealth ruled the world, she believed that most real wealth was inherited from husbands and fathers rather than earned, so it was folly to assume that women with careers would exercise significant amounts of power. In her view only a broad education, one not oriented toward a particular career, could lead women and men to decide how to live their lives and to define their own values. “Pick yourself a few decent standards and stick by them,” she advised one audience.”45

  Despite her skepticism, An Unfinished Woman spoke directly to the lives of the young women then marching. Its depiction of a sexually free, politically engaged, and economically successful life, a life filled with love and friendship, with courage and determination, resonated with a generation of young women in search of models. In direct and clipped prose, less reminiscence than an evocation of self, Hellman recalled a life lived not by the standards of her mother’s generation or those of the postwar young, but by those whom she so frequently called “my generation.” These standards, as she remembered them, were rooted in integrity and honesty, in a lack of pretense and an absence of sentimentality. “My generation,” she would say repeatedly, “didn’t emulate the standards of their mothers; they chose to go their own ways.” Rejecting conventional
modes of being, Hellman painted herself, as one reviewer noted, as “impatient with ‘lady stuff’ … attracted towards dangerous places and brave intelligent men.”46

  Lillian shrugged off the adulation. She did not believe that women’s liberation could or should be a matter only or primarily of sexual freedom. In the series of tours and interviews and invitations that followed the publication of An Unfinished Woman and then, four years later, Pentimento, Lillian expressed her impatience with what she thought of as the diversionary tactics of the current women’s liberation movement. They had taken their eyes off “the problems implicit in our capitalist society.”47 Middle-class white mothers had failed to teach their daughters values like courage, loyalty and integrity, warning them that these were “unfeminine, unfashionable qualities,” inconsistent with “the qualities that will get you a husband.”48 The result, she argued, was a generation of women without real values. From these generalizations she exempted black women and poor women, who, since they had always needed to work, had developed more substantial characters. The educated white woman, in her eyes, bore responsibility for women’s bad name.

  These views undermined Hellman’s position in the women’s movement. In 1972, in the heady moments of women’s liberation, Hellman moderated a panel on the “condition of women today.” Panel members—seven distinguished women writers, novelists, and critics—had been invited by Hiram Haydn, editor of the American Scholar, to record a conversation that he later published in the pages of the journal. The exchange began with a question originally suggested by Hannah Arendt: “What will we lose if we win?”49 The debate, which took place in mid-May, was sometimes heated and often acerbic. In it, Hellman revealed her sense of what being a woman meant to her. Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with her life, she argued that the most significant issue for women was economic independence. Nothing mattered, she repeatedly asserted to panelists who generally disagreed with her, as much as good jobs for women. “Equal wages, equal opportunities” seemed to her the crucial issues. When another panelist sought to override these concerns, telling her, “That goes without saying,” Hellman replied sharply, “I’m afraid it doesn’t go without saying. I think one of the troubles with women’s liberation is that it has not touched women of the so-called lower classes, deprived classes. It’s really been a movement of intellectuals and well-heeled middle-class ladies. It’s too bad.” Challenged by African-American novelist Alice Walker to explain why black women, who had historically earned their own livings, nevertheless remained sweet and compliant to their men, Hellman replied that such behavior “pays better.” Nor did she credit cultural issues with paving the way to change. Dismissing impatiently the significance of “who takes out the garbage and who takes care of the children,” deriding the debate over whether women should or should not burn their brassieres, she returned insistently to the idea that “the liberation of people comes about through economic equality. Men could not put women down if women were truly equal.”50

  Hellman repeated this theme endlessly, offering herself as the archetype of the successful woman who had achieved renown and a substantial fortune on her own merits. “It seems to me a question of what dignity is about,” she told that 1972 audience, and dignity in her mind involved “economic equality, spiritual equality,” the capacity to meld a satisfying personal life with fulfilling wage work. Dignity manifested itself in a refusal to idealize marriage and motherhood. That made her insufficiently womanly to some, and decidedly masculine to others. Perhaps she was something of a throwback, for even as she drew on the models of the twenties to flout the gender assumptions of the seventies, she insisted that she was merely following the conventions of the most interesting people of her generation. “Enlarging the norms is good for everybody,” said Elizabeth Janeway, who hoped for a broader conception of what a woman could be.51 Lillian Hellman agreed. She had, she thought, done her bit to do just that.

  In some respects, Lillian was repeating what she had always said: she hoped women might acquire what she variously called self-respect or dignity. She believed women could achieve these only if they had the possibility of earning their own livings. Lack of economic independence produced ugly emotions and despicable acts, as she had written in two of her best plays. Regina of The Little Foxes challenged her brothers, took the life of her husband, and risked the love of her daughter to acquire control of family resources. The two aging sisters in Toys in the Attic remained so invested in the love of their younger brother that when his newfound success threatened to reduce his dependence on them, they sabotaged him rather than allow him to reverse roles. Nobody was better at drawing the portraits of women who, like those in her mother’s family led frustrated lives that revolved around the desire to have, to keep, and to construct something of their own; nobody was better at articulating the sense that women’s traditional economic dependence undermined their capacity to be unselfishly loving; nobody better captured the ambivalence of women whose emotional dependence was forged in their inability to control their own money.

  To the goal of a women’s movement that could produce self-respecting women and free them from the internal pressures and tensions of pretense and self-abnegation, Hellman remained faithful even as her own fame and wealth grew. Despite her consistent vanity—she carefully cut and dyed her hair, dressed modishly, and wore perfume daily—she ridiculed the attention paid to issues of language, insisting on being addressed as Miss Hellman rather than the clumsy Ms. She preferred to be published by general literary publishing houses and magazines rather than those dedicated to “militant feminist publications,” but she would settle for publication by such houses over no publication at all.52 She turned a deaf ear to pleas to lend her name or her funds to feminist causes. Nor did she particularly identify, as a writer, with women’s issues. Rather, as she told a series of graduating college students, she hoped that young women would “speak out for the benefit of others” and wished for them that they “have something to do with making the country what it must and ought to be.”53

  For Hellman, the important symbiosis, the tension that called young women to act, was between work and politics rather than between money and love. In the spring of 1975, she gave a commencement address at Barnard, which she later published in the editorial pages of the New York Times and then republished in the college issue of Mademoiselle magazine. In the various drafts of this address she connected the threads of her concern with what women would become. The world ahead of them, she told the graduates, was a troubled one, and America was filled with people who misused power to make it worse. But these graduating women had a responsibility to connect their book learning with what was happening in the world. America would grow better only if they undertook the responsibility of examining their lives and their goals. To do that, they first needed to make a living. “How can there ever be liberation of women,” she asked, “unless they can earn a living?” Ibsen’s Nora, she noted, “having slammed the door and opened it for women’s liberation,” was embraced by students but not really recognized for what she did or couldn’t do. What happened to Nora after she slammed the door? she asked. And then answered her own question: “The talk of brassieres or no brassieres, who washes the dinner pots, whether you are a sex object … has very little meaning unless the woman who slams the door can buy herself dinner and get out of a winter wind.”54

  To Hellman, who had managed to do far more than get out of a winter wind, the lessons of women’s freedom were clear. Hellman hoped that a women’s movement would be a means to an end—the end being a more engaged and politically informed community of citizens. She wanted to eliminate boundaries imposed by class and wealth in order to assure the personal and cultural freedom that could lead women to make a better world. And she made no secret of her contempt for women who used wealth conspicuously or wastefully. My Mother, My Father and Me, her last attempt at writing for the theater, mocked the aridity of a 1950s family whose life focused on the meaningless consumption of a vapid mo
ther and the empty goals of her purposeless teenage son. The lesson of these shortcomings was hard to miss: if she was going to argue for real values, she would have to put her own on the line. And her own commitments were laid out in the books that brought her a second chance at celebrity. All her life she fought for decency, self-respect, and dignity that could be achieved only by self-support and political engagement in the struggle for a better world.

  Small wonder, then, that for all that she was idolized by the young feminists of the 1970s, Hellman could not fully identify with the modern version of women’s liberation. In that 1972 panel, Elizabeth Janeway and Carolyn Heilbrun among others tried to tell her that questions of life’s meaning and purpose, of socialization and self-confidence, could not be disentangled from those of economic opportunity and freedom to choose jobs. Hellman thought otherwise. By herself, through hard work and talent, she had achieved money, status, and fame in her lifetime and by her own hand. She was a self-made woman. Her capacity to live freely—her sexual liberation, her personal freedom—rested on the economic foundation she built for herself. Young women, she thought, could choose to emulate her unorthodox lifestyle—to emulate her capacity “to walk out if somebody insults me”—only if they were economically independent. But the younger generation of women reserved their adulation for her style. They admired her brash and outspoken stance, her ability to smoke and to swear and above all her courage in living by her own rules of personal conduct. “I was so bored. I got so nasty,” she told an interviewer about that famous panel. “Nobody seemed to be talking about economics.”55