There are specific ways in which specific people are silenced, but there is also a culture that withers away the space in which women speak and makes it clear men’s voices count for more than women’s. There are expert witnesses to the phenomenon.
In classical literature, Tiresias was a priest who was transformed into a woman as punishment, lived as one for seven years, and was then transformed back into a man. The gods went to him for firsthand testimony about gender and sexuality. In this era, trans people are expert witnesses to the way gender roles are enforced and reinforced. One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford University. In 2006, he wrote in the journal Nature about the bias he had experienced as a woman in the sciences, from losing fellowships to less qualified male candidates to being told a boyfriend must have helped her with her math. He was told that he was smarter than his sister by a man who confused his former, female self for that sister. Some things he didn’t notice until they stopped.
Then, like a good scientist, he observed carefully: “Anecdotes, however, are not data, which is why gender-blinding studies are so important. These studies reveal that in many selection processes, the bar is unconsciously raised so high for women and minority candidates that few emerge as winners.” He spoke up to counter Harvard president Larry Summers’s 2005 assertion that innate biological differences in aptitude explained why men did better than women in mathematics and the sciences. (At the time, the Guardian noted, “During Dr Summers’s presidency, the number of tenured jobs offered to women has fallen from 36% to 13%. Last year, only four of 32 tenured job openings were offered to women.”) In a sidebar about his personal experience, Barres said wryly, “By far, the main difference I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect: I can even finish a sentence without being interrupted by a man.”
Men and women are given different kinds and amounts of space to occupy, literally, geographically, conceptually, and conversationally. This is measurable in movies, but exists in real life as well.
In 2010, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reported statistics from three years of Hollywood family films: “Of all speaking characters, 32.4% are female in G-rated films, 30% are female in PG-rated films and 27.7% are female in PG-13-rated films. Of 1,565 content creators, only 7% of directors, 13% of writers, and 20% of producers are female.” In 2014, the institute conducted another study of films from the ten largest movie markets worldwide and found that more than two-thirds of speaking and named characters were male, and less than a quarter of films “depicted a girl or woman in the lead or sharing the story’s journey with another main character.”
A similar study of the 700 most successful movies from 2007–2014 by the Annenberg School for Communications found “In 2014’s 100 most popular movies, 21 featured a female lead, about the same percentage as the 20 found among the top films of 2007. Of the top 100 films in 2014, two were directed by women. In 2007 there were three. Of the 700 films examined, three were directed by African Americans.” None of the top 100 films of 2014 starred a woman over forty-five. A 2016 study of 2,000 films by Polygraph found that men had 88 percent of the leads.
When women are on the screen, they don’t necessarily speak, and even when they speak they don’t necessarily speak to each other, or they speak to each other about the men who remain central to the film. Graphic novelist Alison Bechdel came up with what’s now well known as the Bechdel Test, the requirement that a movie have two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. It’s a ridiculously low standard many films fail to meet. In the original Star Wars trilogy, women other than Princess Leia speak for 63 seconds of the films’ 386 minutes, a recent investigation concluded. Those 63 seconds are divided among three women in the three films for what amounts to about a third of 1 percent of the running time.
But such films are not described as boys’ or men’s films, but as films for all of us, while films with a similarly unequal amount of time allocated to female characters would inevitably be regarded as girls’ or women’s films. Men are not expected to engage in the empathic extension of identifying with a different gender, just as white people are not asked, the way people of color are, to identify with other races. Being dominant means seeing yourself and not seeing others; privilege often limits or obstructs imagination.
The space to speak and the public sphere are intertwined, and this goes back millennia.
Classics scholar Mary Beard has analyzed the geographies of gender over the millennia. In a landmark essay from 2014, “The Public Voice of Women,” she notes that silencing women begins almost as soon as Western literature does, in the Odyssey, with Telemachus telling his mother, Penelope, to shut up. Penelope is already chastely stranded at home and besieged by suitors while her husband leisurely wanders around the Mediterranean getting laid. (You can imagine a feminist revision in which Penelope enjoys her autonomy, takes some of the suitors as lovers, and maybe doesn’t yearn for her husband’s return; Margaret Atwood tried out a version of this with her Penelopiad.) Beard describes how having a voice—preferably a deep one—was considered definitive of masculinity, and the public sphere is the masculine sphere: “A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.”
She became a much-attacked public figure herself in the twenty-
first century, with the rise of social media:
It doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it, it’s the fact you’re saying it. And that matches the detail of the threats themselves. They include a fairly predictable menu of rape, bombing, murder and so forth. But a significant subsection is directed at silencing the woman—“Shut up you bitch” is a fairly common refrain. Or it promises to remove the capacity of the woman to speak. “I’m going to cut off your head and rape it” was one tweet I got.
Which probably distinguishes her from most of the male classics professors at Cambridge. She told the New York Times in April 2016, “We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.”
Women are often disqualified from participation in the kind of public life Beard speaks of.
There are myriad ways to remove women from public and professional life. Women who work in engineering speak of the ways in which their access to training and meaningful roles was denied; women who competed in chess speak of sexual harassment and denigration; the same stories emerge from women in many other fields. Women in politics are criticized for their appearances, for their voices, for being ambitious, for not serving their families full-time (or for not having families). Words like strident and bossy are largely reserved for women, the way that words like uppity are reserved for African Americans. Women in politics must not be too feminine, since femininity is not associated with leadership, but they must not be too masculine, since masculinity is not their prerogative; the double bind requires them to occupy a space that does not exist, to be something impossible in order not to be something wrong. Being a woman is a perpetual state of wrongness, as far as I can determine. Or, rather, it is under patriarchy.
I have looked at the reception of Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book about the devastating effect of pesticides, Silent Spring, many times, appalled at the ways she was dismissed as hysterical, emotional, unqualified. As I was writing this book and researching another project, I read an oral history in which a man who had been on the board of the Sierra Club at the time Silent Spring was published, making Carson perhaps the best-known environmentalist of the 1960s, said: “I can’t think of her name now but some woman who is not a scientist wrote a story about terrible pesticides.” The only description he wanted to associate with this scientist—who held a master’s and only for financial reasons failed to complete a PhD in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins, who had worked as a scientis
t for the federal government and then for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—was that she was “not a scientist.”
That was an old man talking about a bygone era, but the idea that women are not qualified regardless of their qualifications is rampant now, as it was in Carson’s time. Investigative journalist Suki Kim went undercover to report on conditions in North Korea, but her publishers insisted on casting her 2014 exposé as a memoir. A book about public and collective life was reframed as a personal journey for marketing reasons, but also with a sense that women belonged in the personal realm and, by extension, did not belong outside it. In 2016, she wrote in the New Republic,
By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best. It was a subtle shift, but one familiar to professional women from all walks of life. I was being moved from a position of authority—What do you know?—to the realm of emotion: How did you feel?
She was kicked out of thinking about and knowing others, confined to her own emotions, as though the only realm in which she was competent was that of herself.
The imprisonment echoed the old order in which women were confined to the home and to private life, and public life was men’s business. Of course the corollary is the exclusion of men, often, still, from emotional and personal life. Both realms matter, but economic, political, and social power depend on one’s standing in the public realm. The revolution is for free movement of everyone, everywhere. It is not finished; it is under way; it has changed all the maps; they will change more.
IV: The Flooded City
“I want to write a novel about silence.
The things people don’t say.”
—Virginia Woolf
A feminist literature investigates the nature of those silences, their causes, and their effects, peaking in the 1970s and early 1980s with a plethora of essays on silence. Mary Wollstonecraft and nineteenth-century feminists addressed exclusion and powerlessness, including the exclusion from education. Suffragists pointed out that to be without the vote was to be silenced politically, excluded from full citizenship, self-determination, and the public sphere. Charlotte Perkins Gilman spoke in 1911 of women “hedged in with restrictions of a thousand sorts . . . the enforced ignorance from which women are now so swiftly emerging.” In the era when women had gained the vote—in 1920 in the United States, in 1918 in Britain—but lacked so much else, the investigation of silence continued.
Virginia Woolf sounded the alarm in two landmark essays. The more famous A Room of One’s Own came out in 1929, based on a pair of talks in 1928, about the practical, financial, social, and psychological restrictions on women writing and, by implication, having a voice. But what kind of a voice could she have? Adrienne Rich wrote, half a century later,
I was astonished at the tone of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men.
Woolf’s “Professions for Women,” originally delivered as a speech to the National Society for Women in 1931, addresses the other kind of voice, not the convincing one Rich criticized (and women’s tone of voice is so often criticized), but the comforting one. She describes the internalized instructions to women to be pleasant, gracious, flattering, that can silence a real voice and real thoughts: a real self. She indicates that there are ways to speak that are silence’s white noise: the platitudes and reassurances, the politenesses and denials that lubricate a system that perpetuates silence. You speak for others, not for yourself. Woolf talked about the voice within women that tells them, “Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.” She called that voice the Angel in the House and boasted of murdering her, out of necessity, so that she might have a voice. So that she might break the silence.
Half a century later, in her book Pornography and Silence, Susan Griffin quoted Norman Mailer on Marilyn Monroe: “She is a mirror of the pleasure of those who stare at her.” Meaning that Monroe appeared, and she spoke, but how she appeared, what she said, was not to express herself, to be herself, but to serve others. Griffin comments, “Yet knowing that her symbolic existence was a mask he refuses to look behind this mask. And yet, had another self not existed, a self to be lost and a self to be violated, the life of this actress would not have been a tragedy.” It was an analysis of how someone can be visible, audible, yet silenced.
Monroe can stand in for any woman, all women who silence, hide, disguise, or dismiss aspects of themselves and their self-
expression in pursuing male pleasure, approval, comfort, reinforcement. This is not only erotic business; it’s how a woman in the workplace or the classroom or on the street may have learned to navigate around male expectations, knowing if she is too confident, commanding, or self-contained she may be punished. It has its analogies—my friend Garnette Cadogan has written eloquently, excruciatingly, about how he as a Black man in public has to incessantly perform “not-a-criminal, not-a-threat” to assuage white fear and preserve himself. To be Black and a woman is to do double duty in this business of serving others.
Mailer, in calling Monroe a mirror of pleasure, fails to question what happens when the pleasure is routinely someone else’s. It’s a death of pleasure disguised as pleasure, a death of self in the service of others. It’s silence wrapped in pleasing nothings. The portrait of Monroe, who died young in 1962, is a sort of bookend to bell hooks’s observation about men’s “psychic self-mutilation”—it is a portrait of the other kind of self-mutilation, to make a self to meet and serve those mutilated selves. A silence to meet the silence, silences that fit each other like a mold and casting, a ghost story.
Tillie Olsen gave a talk in 1962, published in 1965 in Harper’s, that became part of her bestselling 1978 book Silences. Silence, or the desire to interrogate and annihilate it, had come of age. It begins, “Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all.” In other words there were kinds of silence, one kind for what was said and what remained unsaid and another for who said it and who was permitted to speak.
She takes time to come to her real subject, as though she must establish her credentials first, her knowledge and care for the great literature by men. Then she turns to the silence of women in literature, noting that most who had literary careers had no children, because time to oneself and for oneself and one’s voice is crucial to creation. That was about practical silence—the lack of time to build the palace of words that is an extended piece of writing—but there are many kinds of silence that pertained to women’s experience at the time. The second half of the book is a broad collection of “asides, amulets, exhumations, sources,” broadening the evidence for the silencing of women, and its consequences not only to women but to literature. A brief for the defense.
Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique was about “the problem that has no name,” about American women who lived in material comfort yet in social and political annihilation in their exclusion from public life and power at home and in the world. It can be and has been critiqued as a book about middle-class white women; it can also be appreciated as a book that, during the war on poverty and the civil rights movement, said that gender was also a problem worth contemplating, and that naming is a crucial part of transformation.
In he
r 2010 book At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle L. McGuire argues that the Civil Rights Movement was itself silenced, in a way, when it was rewritten as a history of what a movement led by men (and forgotten women) did about everyone’s rights. She restarts the history with Rosa Parks as an investigator of rape cases for the NAACP, thereby recasting the whole movement as launched by Black women for Black women’s rights, an intersection ordinarily erased from the history of that boulevard.
In contrast, in 1969 Susan Sontag published an essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” that is silent about gender. It’s about male artists and uses the male pronoun to describe “the artist.” She wrote about artists choosing silence, artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Arthur Rimbaud, for whom silence was a gesture of scorn or transcendence, a departure—but then she notes, “An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively.” It’s the quiet some choose after being heard and valued—the antithesis of being silenced.
What gets called second-wave feminism is full of accounts of revelations about oppressions that were not previously named or described, and of the joy in recognizing even oppression: diagnosis is the first step toward cure and recovery. To speak of, to find definitions for what afflicted them brought women out of isolation and into power. The writings of the 1960s and 1970s are a literature of exploration, even revelation: people stumble forward, not sure what they are encountering, describing it awkwardly, reaching for new language for things that have not been described before, seeing the new undermine assumptions about the familiar, becoming people who belong to this new territory as much or more than to the old one, crossing over to a world being invented as they go.
The Mother of All Questions Page 5