The antifeminist forces have massed themselves across town, at the Astrodome, where Phyllis Schlafly is a puppet for the men. Man after man—low-level politicians, military men, born-again homosexuals—strides up to the podium to shout horror of sex, abortion, sex, homosexuality, sex, the devil. Families have been bused in by their churches from all over the Southwest, from the West as far north as Utah, from the East as far as Georgia. They fill the Astrodome, they rise to their feet, stamping, cheering with ferocity. A woman alone, I feel frightened there, people are looking at me, where are my husband, my children? Why am I carrying a camera? Taking pictures? I am afraid they will mob me. I try to work my way out, slowly, no sudden moves or sharp gestures. But even as I walk safely, breathing slowly, deeply, down the last staircase, I hear their fervor. No positive chords here, no agenda for the future, only terror, knowledge of the anti-Christ. What constitutes life, the good, is not made explicit, perhaps it does not need to be spoken, presumably they all know, for they rise, thousands of them at once, screaming death to the devils on the other side of town.
Back to the Coliseum. Voting has begun. It is hard now to keep this hall in order. Calls for votes, gavel rapping, requests for silence, a chair who refuses to respond if she is addressed as “Madame Chairman,” insisting on “Chairwoman.” Women line up in front of microphones to speak for or against each issue.
The abortion problem has been eased by renaming it so it does not come up first in the alphabetized list of resolutions and split the convention on the very first vote. Now it is called Reproductive Freedom. The vote is for, the hall explodes, everyone looks around to see who will leave, and women do, rows of them, how many? Will this destroy the convention? It takes twenty minutes for things to settle down. About a hundred women have left, a handful in that hall, there is more cheering, silent sighs of relief.
The next stumbling block is Sexual Preference—lesbianism. The hall falls as still as such a hall can be. The arguments begin. Betty Friedan, who in the past, fearing loss of mainstream women, opposed it as a plank, gets up to urge it. The explosion cannot be contained, it goes on and on, the chairwoman cannot stop it, women are jumping on their seats, whistling through their fingers. The resolution in favor passes and thousands of balloons are released, thousands of voices raised in cheers, no one leaves this time, the convention as a body has chosen to be courageous, to risk opprobrium, to support all women, even those traitors to the system who do not desire men.
I am very busy. I shoot fifty rolls of film that afternoon. I would like to feel superior to what is going on; I know how the men I know would see it, I know their thinking: they admire men with power, and adopt the way those men think. They call it being realistic. I want to be realistic, which in this case means having contempt for the naïveté and simplicity of these women. But I can’t. Something is blocking my “reason,” something odd is happening inside of me. It feels like an unborn baby turning itself completely over in my uterus, I am dizzy but I keep my hands steady, my eye focused. I go back to the hotel exhausted, eat a sandwich alone in my room, lie back on the bed still dizzy. There is a sharp pain low in my gut like a baby wanting to be born.
I think about my origins as a photographer and the hundreds of pictures I took of babies and their mothers, of women caught, trapped, bewildered by motherhood, impaled forever on their ambivalence—love and resentment in almost equal proportions. How I did that coolly, with the eye of an outsider, as if I weren’t one of them, caught in the same knot. As if I were objective.
And before that, when I was young, unmarried, a girl. I didn’t want to be a woman, no, not at all. In the first place, I knew how men looked at women, talked about them, had contempt for them, preyed upon them. But more important, I didn’t want a woman’s life. And I tried not to have one, fool that I was, as if you could renounce your body, as if a woman who was drawn to men could escape. Even women not drawn to men can’t escape—if you are a woman, you are treated like one. I had a woman’s life in the end, no matter what Mother says.
I didn’t want to be a woman because I didn’t want to have a life like hers. I knew somehow, even very young, that lives like hers were built in for women, they had no choice about it. How old was I? when I set my teeth and swore to myself that I would have a choice, I would not live like her. I had watched too carefully her endless labor, the tedium of her days, the insufficiency for anyone’s life of the tasks and worries that filled her days, day after day after day. Even her satisfactions—stretching a few dollars far enough to put good dinners on the table for her children and Ed, or to buy a cheap remnant of a good-quality fabric to make new dresses for the girls for the first day of school or a coat for Easter Sunday; or saving dimes and nickels for months to take them on a week’s vacation in the Catskills (and it rains), to pay for a small present at Christmas—oh, the farmwoman’s joy at half a cup of milk saved, an extra egg, to bake a cake for her child’s birthday, all the scraping and worry, all the labor, the painstaking work done by hand, all the planning and foresight, so pathetic, it makes me even now want to scream, to hurl something across the room: it is unbearable!
I leap up and run to the toilet. I have diarrhea. My head aches. I walk back, drained, and fall onto the itchy bedspread.
Oh god my heart aches thinking about it, about her. When in her there was a mind that needed something other, a body that needed…something. How she suffered the pain of something thrusting, like grass, that has to be pressed back day by day. I remember. I did it too when I was first married, when the children were small. It makes you tired all the time—constantly pressing back tiny shoots of impulse and desire, fixing your face, guarding your gestures, so they don’t show, so you won’t recognize them.
I wanted to avoid that but I didn’t. I just didn’t suffer from it as long as my mother. Mommy. Oh, Mommy, I slipped and slid, I evaded, and in the end, I escaped. But into what? I spent ten years of my life in a man’s world, meeting, speaking to, dealing with men only. The only women I met were girlfriends and secretaries. It was a rich time, I saw the world, I learned how to behave in it. I learned utter self-control—not to cry, not to lose my temper hotly, only coldly, not to show I was hurt, and in time, not to feel hurt, and in more time, not to feel anything. I learned to deal with the Orson Sonderses, the Woody Hedgecocks, the Russ Farrells of the world, with whom it is fatal to betray the slightest tremor of feeling. I mastered my feelings so completely that they disappeared and now I cannot find them myself.
I learned to function superbly in the system; I would never find myself ignorant and bewildered, humiliated, insulted, like the women who stood all night on a line in the hotel lobby, the women who were turned away. The knowledge made me firm and hard and I do not regret it. It also left me depleted, abject, alone….
I took my pleasure—warmth and closeness and fun—where I found it. I don’t regret that either but it had a cost. After how many? countless men, some sweet, some sexy, some fun, but some who raked my soul like the young man, Michael his name was, strange I remember that name, a man I met in a small town in upstate New York when I was shooting Lake Erie for a story about pollution. He flirted with me all night, then after we’d made love, said, “How do you know I won’t leave here and tell everybody about you?”
“What?”
“Sure. I mean, it’s a coup for me, fucking the great Stacey Stevens. How do you know I won’t tell the world?”
I looked at him in disbelief. Who was he, anyhow. “You won’t,” I said. What was he telling me? that he had fucked me not out of desire but in order to score? Was he telling me he hated me? Hated women? Hated easy women? What was he? Oh, I didn’t care what he was, I cared that he left me with a problem, because the next time, and the time after, ever after that I would wonder when a strange man flirted with me, is he doing this because he desires me? or because he wants to brag about a coup?
Or the man I invited up for a drink, it wasn’t late, I didn’t want to go to bed, I was high after photog
raphing all day, where was I? Bologna, I think. There was no bar in the place I was staying. And I gave him a drink and we talked and I realized I didn’t like him and I said I was tired and asked him to leave and he wouldn’t. He said my inviting him for a drink was tantamount to inviting him to bed, and he wasn’t going to put up with my being a cock-tease. He was six feet five and weighed over two hundred pounds, and he stood, head down like an animal, threatening me. I put on the cold contemptuous act, and bullied him into leaving, but the memory of him didn’t leave me.
Or the contained young Swiss, very stiff and formal when I met him, the representative of a company whose works I was shooting, who after dinner got a little high and stumbled speaking English and became charming, mixing German and English without realizing it, became funny, so I took him home with me. Who after we’d made love, sat up stiffly, suddenly, and announced in perfect English that he was married and expected me not to make trouble for him. Or the sweet Norwegian, who ran out the next day to buy me a piece of jewelry, as if I expected payment for my services.
The cost accrued. Spontaneous sex was fun until one day it was no longer worth the trouble, when I could take one look at a man and know which form of injury he would do me.
I hadn’t always put my career first; I had never treated my children as given, the way men do, ignoring them yet expecting them to love me. I hadn’t. But had that helped? Worrying about the kids, feeling guilty at leaving them, missing them, being as concerned about them as about my career only helped to age me. And they turned against me anyway. Except for Franny—so far.
I’d escaped nothing.
And now, here were these women. The men I knew would scoff at these women, would howl in derision at their impracticality, their delusion. I’d heard them belittle even men who talked about hope; and any woman was fair game for mockery—“present company excluded, of course,” with a laughing nod in my direction. They didn’t think of me as a woman, but as one of them. And so did I.
Lying there on the lumpy hotel pillow staring at the carefully-chosen-to-be-inoffensive wallpaper and drapes which nevertheless offended me, my insides completely turned over. As if I had, from youth, been looking at life through a pair of bifocals and just now discovered there were two ways of seeing through bifocals: you could look up—or down—and things looked somewhat different. Suddenly it seemed that the occupations of my mother’s days, the meat loaf, the lemon pie, the smocked pink silk dress she made me when I was eleven, were as important, more important, than all the dams and hydroelectric plants, the oil rigs, the highways, the articles, the photographs, the magazines that occupied the other world, the world I was part of. And that she was as heroic, more heroic than the men who built cars and planes, paved roads, shot bullets at each other, dropped bombs. Because what were they doing and what did it cost them? The highest price extracted from such men was their lives; they never had to pay the higher price, the price she’d paid—daily sacrifice, slow torture, day by day by day, the hard way.
Even forget sacrifice: I never worshiped sacrifice, never wanted to sacrifice, I wanted to live, to experience everything. And I had—everything that seriously mattered to me. No, we shouldn’t judge according to sacrifice but according to what a person gives, what contribution they make to the huge intricate organism that is the world, and what is worth what. And there was no contest. To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons or certainly, to take photographs for a magazine.
Oh, I know the world would say I’m crazy. But I have been thinking about all this ever since I came back from Houston. Here I am, nearly fifty years old, looking back at my past and feeling as if I’m reviewing the biography of a dead person, yet I’m unable to say here or here is where I went wrong, this was my mistake. I don’t feel I made mistakes: but if I didn’t make mistakes, how come I ended up dead while I’m still breathing? I approve of what I had and how I lived given the information I started with. It was that information that was flawed. Because I was taught that life was split into two parts, one for women, the other for men. If you were an extraordinary woman, you could take the man’s role. And I was and I could and I did. Veni, vidi, vici.
But somehow, even though I was extraordinary and filled the man’s role, I still had to be a woman. And even if I hadn’t had kids, I still would have had to be a woman, because how many men are willing to be housewives for women? I had to be a housewife, somebody in the house has to, and even though for some years I had a man who did it, I had to do it too. And when I was being a housewife, I always felt resentful about it. I felt I was doing menial work, the damned laundry, the boring marketing, the dismal cooking. I was too intelligent, too talented, to do such stuff. That wasn’t the part I’d chosen, I just had it dumped on me.
But seeing those women has changed the way I think about all this. Maybe it wasn’t just seeing those women. It has taken me years, but now that there is only Franny and me and the kitchen sink, I enjoy cooking dinner with her. I won’t say I can sew, but I do sew on a button for her once in a while, or iron a blouse. It’s no more tedious than cleaning all my lenses. Franny and I grow herbs in window boxes. We love watching them get taller. It’s taken me fifty years to realize that domestic things, women’s work, can be fun and has its own dignity. I’d not seen that when I was a child because it wasn’t fun for my mother. And it wasn’t fun for my mother because she wasn’t doing it by choice.
That’s the secret. Men choose what they do, or feel they choose what they do. And I guess lots of men’s work isn’t fun. But the kind I did, do, is fun, is wonderful. So how come it turned me into a zombie? That’s what Clara calls me, Stacey the zombie-woman.
These women weren’t zombies. They were alive, the short fat women in sweatshirts, the slender Asian women in brocades and satin, the leggy young women in shirts and jeans, the middle-aged, middle-class women with permed hair and neat wool suits and mid-heeled shoes shouting for Reproductive Freedom and aid to battered wives, the sixty-year-old women in wheelchairs, wearing baseball caps with huge pins proclaiming YES! SEXUAL PREFERENCE FOR WOMEN! were unafraid to appear naive, were not worrying about their image, not even caring if people saw their emotions. Dreamers, imagining that what they did there would matter a damn to Carter or any president; idealists, imagining that the world of felicity and harmony they envisioned was possible; fools full of love and energy and hope. I loved them.
I wished I could be like them. Because it was better to stand with the women, better to rise and cheer believing in hope, faith, and charity, than to slump on a barstool or banter over golf with the guys with a heart full of despair, knowing The Great Game for what it is, unable to bear it, unable to change it, unable to go on looking at it and unable to look away: feeling noble and self-righteous in one’s cynicism. Better to be a fool for god, whatever god might be—ourselves, maybe, the future, the children….Better. But how can I change now? I’m so old.
DECEMBER 2, 1977. The women at Woman are upset about my Houston photographs, and asked me to come down and talk to them. I went today. What a difference from World! World occupied most of a building: fifteen floors identical to each other, miles of corridors with hundreds of doors leading to neat anonymous cubicles, all the floors and walls the same color grey, you could never be sure where you were. This magazine is housed in a loft that has been haphazardly divided into small offices, erratic in shape and very crowded, with three or four desks jammed into each one. At World, you could always tell someone’s status by their office, by its size, by whether it had a window or not, whether it was a corner office—the premium space. At Woman, the biggest office houses the four secretaries, who need more space than the editors because they have a wall full of file cabinets and the only large electric typewriter.
I wound my way through the maze to what I was told was the editor’s office, a cluttered cubicle with two desks and a filing cabinet in which a woman was typing on an old-
fashioned machine. I said hello, and introduced myself; she turned and gave me a broad smile, leaped up, and shook my hand, “Oh, I just loved your photographs!” She is Lu Marcus, in her fifties, a little plump, a little grey, dowdy, but with brilliantly clear, intelligent grey eyes.
She put her head out her door and cried “Margot!” and waved me to the other chair as she fished around on top of the filing cabinet and brought out a folder with several contact sheets. Then she sat and, leaning toward me, repeated herself.
“We love your pictures. There is so much humanity, such compassion in them. And the composition is superb!”
I could not help comparing this with my awed introduction to World, to the murmured understated praise, the barely polite smiles Russ and Lou gave me. Humanity and compassion were words rarely uttered there, and the need to impress was far greater than the desire to be agreeable. In this different atmosphere, I tried to act like a human being, pleased with praise, responsive. But I am too imbued with the World style. I smiled, it was the best I could do.
“But…” she paused, looked at me sharply, “some of them are disturbing to some of the editors.” She put on a pair of eyeglasses and examined the contact sheets. “This one,” she pointed. “And this, and this.” She picked out about a dozen shots. A few showed women arguing angrily, there were a couple of the chairwoman looking fierce and grim, and several showed a small group of well-known political figures talking privately, their faces as hard and dark as any man’s. Four showed women walking with their arms around each other.
I was confused. I understood of course why they didn’t like these pictures. But why consult me? The pictures were their property, and they would do, magazines always do, exactly as they chose with their property. World never complained if I showed men looking silly: they just didn’t use the shots. I often shot men grimacing in anger or strain, or looking hard and mean—World rather liked shots like that. They just didn’t like to see men appearing foolish. I raised my eyes to Lu in question.