The World Split Open
Page 45
Kramer vs. Kramer, based on a novel by Avery Corman, was about what happens when an unhappy wife walks out on her husband and their six-year-old child, only to return eighteen months later to claim custody of their child. But the film was also an exploration of feminism’s impact on unsuspecting adults.
The film opens with a tight close-up of a very depressed woman. As the frame widens, we watch Joanna (Meryl Streep) putting her son to sleep. “See you in the morning,” he says. Hesitantly, she replies, “I love you.” The viewer already senses that she is about to leave her child. Her husband, Ted (Dustin Hoffman), is an assistant art director who is married to his work. He arrives home late that night, ecstatic that he has just received a promotion, just as Joanna announces that she is about to leave. Completely bewildered, Ted defends his neglect of his family: “I was busy making a living. Tell me what I did wrong.” Her reply, which mystifies him, is simply “I can’t take it anymore.” Fleeing suicidal impulses, Joanna adds, “And I don’t love you anymore.” She leaves no address, she simply vanishes.
Initially, Ted blames her disappearance on feminism. “Sisterhood,” he growls to Joanna’s best friend (Jane Alexander). But her friend reminds him of Joanna’s deepening depression and insists that “it took a lot of courage” for her to leave. Ted angrily snaps, “How much courage does it take to leave your kid?”
Ted has been the proverbial breadwinner and absentee father, and knows nothing about his son, not even what grade he’s in at school. His first attempt to make breakfast is a comic farce. But he’s determined to learn, a nod perhaps to the feminist insistence that men were also capable of raising and nurturing children. “Life can go on without Mommy,” Ted tries to convince himself. “Daddy can bring home the bacon and cook it up too.”
Immersed in his career, driven by ambition, Ted never realized how much time it takes to create an intimate relationship with a child. As he and his son grow closer, his work suffers. His boss reminds him that he “needs him seven days a week and twenty-five hours a day,” another nod to the women’s movement and its advocacy of a flexible and family-friendly workplace. At home, he can no longer work in the evenings without interruption. Nor can he stay late at work to socialize with promising new clients. His son, he gradually realizes, comes first.
By the end of the film, the audience understands why the Kramer family disintegrated. Children of the fifties, Joanna and Ted automatically embraced the breadwinner and housewife roles of that era. The script could have been lifted straight out of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. A graduate of Smith College, Joanna worked briefly for Mademoiselle magazine and then married. After the birth of her son, she quit her job to take care of her family. Although she wanted to discuss her unhappiness with her husband, he seemed too distracted by his career to care about her deepening sense of despair.
Ted now understands the ludicrousness of his attempt to turn his well-educated wife into a homemaker. Trying to explain his failures to his son, he admits, “I tried to make her be a certain kind of wife that I thought she was supposed to be.” When Joanna unexpectedly returns, she explains why she left: “I didn’t know who I was.” Always someone’s daughter, wife, or mother, she had no independent identity. “And that’s why I had to go away.” “Away” turns out to be California, the heartland of therapeutic America, where Joanna finds a job and a “good” therapist. A newly reinvented Joanna now seeks custody, but Ted feels too close to his son to simply let him go.
And so begins a courtroom drama—Kramer vs. Kramer—in which estranged husband and wife fight for possession of their child. Appealing to traditional values, Ted’s attorney forces Joanna to admit that her husband was a faithful, gentle provider. With scathing sarcasm, turning his back to her, the lawyer adds, “I can see why you left him.”
What the judge must decide is whether a mother who abandons her small child still has a right to custody. Ted challenges this implicit legal assumption. When questioned by Joanna’s attorney, he concedes that he had been a poor parent. But he insists that he has now become a loving and responsible father. What law, he asks, says that women make better parents? If women have the right to men’s work, why don’t men have the right to custody?
Predictably, the court awards custody to the mother, leaving the audience with a sour taste and the sense that feminists seem to want “it” both ways. Though devastated, Ted tenderly prepares his traumatized son for another major transition. Now a devoted father, his only concern is for his son’s happiness. Then, a humbled Joanna suddenly arrives, realizes that her son is already home, and allows him to stay with his father.
By film’s end, both parents have rededicated their lives to the best interests of their child. Traditional values have been upheld, even though the father has gained primary custody. Both have been chastised for “abandoning” their child. The story ends on an ambiguous note, leaving the impression that it’s just possible these two parents might reconcile, on new terms, with new ground rules, united by the recognition that what really matters is not career, ambition, or self-invention, but the well-being of their son.
A number of feminist critics viewed the film as antifeminist because it implied that the “best Moms are Dads,” a theme that surfaced with alarming frequency in films and TV sitcoms of the seventies and eighties. They also objected to the mother’s mysterious abandonment of her child. By associating individual whim with feminism, some argued, the film trivialized the actual feminist goal of making family and work available to both men and women. Some feminists also chided the film because, as they accurately noted, in the real world, it is fathers, not mothers, who generally abandon their children.65
An Unmarried Woman opens with scenes from a perfect family: Erica (Jill Clayburgh) is blessed with a nearly perfect stockbroker husband, a charming and witty daughter, a part-time job in an art gallery, and a circle of women friends (dubbed “the club”) who meet weekly at restaurants for mutual support. We soon learn that appearances, as always, deceive. The daughter suddenly announces that she will never marry. Then Erica’s husband tearfully admits that he’s in love with a younger woman.
Erica must now live as “an unmarried woman.” In her search for a new life, she beds a number of men, and reassesses her marriage. “I was a hooker,” she says, reinterpreting her former economic and emotional dependence. Now she is determined to support herself. By the end of the film, she meets Mr. Right (Alan Bates), a handsome and lovable artist who wants to whisk her away to his Vermont retreat. It is an enticing invitation; he offers a new home, and the promise of a new life.
To his astonishment, Erica declines, explaining that she might return to school, and that what she seeks is greater challenge in her work and the opportunity to be more independent. But Erica is not all that convincing. “Independent?” he asks. “Trying to be,” she admits. Mr. Right departs for Vermont, leaving open the possibility that, if and when Erica finds her cherished independence, they may get back together again. Here, too, the ending is ambiguous. We don’t know the answer and neither do they.
Both Kramer vs. Kramer and An Unmarried Woman appeared just before the backlash against feminism began to demonize independent women. Both captured the culture’s anxieties about feminism without turning its women characters into psychopathic killers (as would happen in films like Fatal Attraction in the eighties). At the same time, both films contributed to the image of feminism as a matter of upper-middle-class women searching for identities beyond that of mother and wife.
Significantly, the films encouraged the audience to judge men by feminist values. We admire Ted only after he finds a balance between family and work. In An Unmarried Woman, the “club” members explicitly describe their ideal (feminist) man. “A ‘good man’ is tender, gives long massages, never rushes lovemaking, and craves intimacy. He doesn’t pounce; he cuddles.” For these women, the achingly sensitive Alan Bates or Alan Alda has replaced the silent and rugged machismo of a John Wayne.
THE NEW SUPERWOMAN
The all-around Supermom rises, dresses in her vivid pants suit, oversees breakfast and the search for the sneakers and then goes off to her glamorous high-paying job at an advertising agency, where she seeks Personal Fulfillment and the kids’ college tuition. She has, of course, previously found a Mary Poppins figure to take care of the kids after school. Mary Poppins loves them as if they were her own, works for a mere pittance and is utterly reliable.
Supermom II comes home from work at 5:30, just as fresh as a daisy, and then spends a truly creative hour with her children. After all, it’s not the quantity of the time, but the quality. She catches up on their day, soothes their disputes and helps with their homework while creating something imaginative in her Cuisinart (with her left hand tied behind her back). After dinner—during which she teaches them about the checks and balances of our system of government—she bathes and reads to them, and puts the clothes in the dryer. She then turns to her husband and eagerly suggests that they explore some vaguely kinky sexual fantasy.66
The American woman, Goodman decided in a moment of despair, had not won all that much. “The only equality she’s won after a decade of personal and social upheaval is with the working mothers of Russia.”67
Barbara Ehrenreich similarly worried about the new Superwoman. What bothered Goodman, Ehrenreich, and other feminist critics was that the feminist had turned into a mythic figure who bore little resemblance to ordinary women and the problems they daily faced. She was as remote from their lives as the anorexic models who advertised the cigarettes and liquor that promised women new freedoms. Only the well-to-do could afford to be that thin or that well dressed or hire full-time nannies or housekeepers. As Ehrenreich noted, “For the millions of women who suffer from embarrassing handicaps like poverty, deadend jobs, small children or even excess pounds, the New Woman is a constant reminder that they, in all probability, are still ‘losers.’” Feminism had become unrecognizable. Consumer and therapeutic feminism emphasized individual problems and proposed individual solutions. Where had the collective effort to advance all women gone?68
Even as feminists puzzled over that question, economic necessity continued to push even more women—and even more mothers of very young children—into the labor force. These women found themselves worn down by frantic schedules and numbing exhaustion. When viewed up close, the lives of these women often seemed like a Sisyphean effort to fulfill endless responsibilities. Absent a full-time housekeeper, many a working mother, teetering precariously at the edge of a cliff, had to learn to become an expert “juggler.” With muscles tensed, the superwoman threw all her balls into the air, caught them, breathed a sigh of relief, threw them up once more, and caught them, again and again. But when the baby-sitter called in sick or the school declared an unscheduled holiday, the balls came crashing down and she wept and blamed herself for her failure.
Susan Douglas has shown how popular culture created a grotesque vision of feminism that trivialized and ridiculed rebellious women. To this I would add that the media also helped depict the feminist as an eager participant in America’s wildly accelerating consumer and therapeutic society, joining prosperous men in the creation of a life dedicated to consumption and self-absorption.69
The historic rupture between home and work, which began for many men in the nineteenth century, affected most women a century later. For the male entrepreneurs and workers of that time, commuting between the home with its religious and neighborly values and the competitive nature of the market proved confusing, sometimes even disabling. Sooner or later, men became accustomed to the schizophrenic nature of work and home life. At work, they learned to bluff and fight for the dollar. At home, they could assume a titular patriarchal role and enter what social critic Christopher Lasch called a “haven in a heartless world.”70
Meanwhile, middle-class white women took on the cultural burden of guarding the home from market values, which conferred upon them a mantle of moral superiority. They launched reform movements—asylums for the mentally ill, shelters for wayward girls, charities for the poor, and the immediate abolition of slavery—to care for the casualties of early American capitalism. They became the ones who patrolled society and culture for transgressions against the purity of the home and family.
Early-twentieth-century Americans witnessed—with considerable ambivalence—the gradual transformation of their society from a nation that extolled character, a work ethic, and a producer mentality into a consumer culture that celebrated leisure, consumption, and “personality.” The hedonistic values of that new culture directly challenged those traits publicly cherished by the nineteenth-century middle class—self-control, restraint, and delayed gratification. Advertising made honesty seem quaint. Consumerism celebrated vanity and leisure rather than hard work. The cultivation of “personality” and of celebrity, rather than old-fashioned character, made sincerity seem downright eccentric.
In the years after World War II, a Depression-scarred generation justified their new enthusiasm for consumer goods by purchasing products mainly for home and family, not for the individual self. But in the sixties, sensing a change, advertisers began to target the individual consumer rather than the family. Consider the change in the promotion of bed linens. In the 1950s, a typical magazine ad for linens used the image of the dainty housewife, dressed in a modest shirtwaist and apron, putting nicely folded, well-ironed sheets into a linen closet. By the mid-sixties, the same linen manufacturer advertised the same product with an image of a woman in a see-through negligee, provocatively stretched upon those same sheets, implicitly announcing her sexual availability. Nothing, one might say, remained in the closet.71
The baby boomers, the children of the Great Depression generation, came of age just as the sexualization of consumer culture began to crest. Raised in relative affluence and accustomed to few sacrifices, they came into conflict with parents whose values reflected the ordeals of the Depression and the war. But members of both generations, in fact, felt bewildered by what was, by any measure, a profound societal transformation, one that challenged a past that valued work, delayed gratification, and commitment to families.
In hindsight, the emergence of something like the human potential movement in the seventies now seems inevitable. The therapeutic culture was not merely a fad. It offered secular guidance to modern men and women, at a time when the self was becoming increasingly unmoored from family and community. The human potential movement, in its many guises, tried to reassure the confused men and women from two generations, in a world where all values seemed up for grabs, that individual happiness should be one’s highest priority. And this, of course, fueled a consumer culture that was now targeting and producing for the individual, rather than the family.
The second wave of feminism did not create this individualistic culture, but it emerged at a time when a majority of Americans were already worried, however inchoately, that the celebration of the individual was eroding the cohesion of family and community life.
Middle-class women had long provided moral cover for the spiritual loss and soulless greed that created a society governed by the profit motive and market values. Now such mothers and wives worked outside the home, producing and promoting that very culture. Without women as moral guardians, Americans had to face the threat of a society-wide sense of moral bankruptcy. Who would preserve communal and religious values? Who would counsel compassion rather than competition? Who would care for the nation’s children, families, and communities?
The feminist, as remade by the media and popular culture, emerged as a superwoman, who then turned into a scapegoat for America’s irreversible decline into a nation of individual consumers. For this, the women’s movement was blamed, even though this selfish superwoman would have s
eemed bizarre, not to say repellent, to most of its early members. Ironically, the women’s liberation movement, which had attacked both consumerism and the commodification of women’s bodies, ended up being consumed—and condemned—for promoting the very materialism its early members had attacked.
The backlash against feminism, directed as it was against the women’s movement, reflected a profound moral revulsion against the shallow self-absorption of that consumer and therapeutic culture. Nonetheless, the growing New Right and social critics like Christopher Lasch blamed feminism—not consumer culture—for the loss of “traditional values” and the unraveling of the family.72 And when Americans took a good, hard look at this narcissistic superwoman who embraced the values of the dominant culture, they grew anxious and frightened, for they no longer saw loyal mothers and wives who would care for the human community, but a dangerous individual, unplugged from home and hearth, in other words, a female version of America’s ambitious but lonely organization man.
*Metrecal was a widely used diet drink.
Chapter 10
BEYOND BACKLASH
“If you’re on the right track, you can expect some pretty savage criticism,” veteran feminist Phyllis Chesler warned young women at the close of the twentieth century. “Trust it. Revel in it. It is the truest measure of your success.” Words of wisdom from one of the pioneer activists who understood the meaning of a fierce backlash.