The Female Eunuch

  The housewife accepts vicarious life as her portion, and imagines that she will be a prop and mainstay to her husband in his noble endeavours, but insidiously her unadmitted jealousy undermines her ability to appreciate what he tells her about his ambitions and his difficulties. She belittles him, half-knowingly disputes his difficult decisions, taunts him with his own fears of failure, until he stops telling her anything. Her questions about his ‘day at the office’ become a formality. She does not listen to his answers any more than he heeds her description of her dreary day. Eventually the discussion stops altogether. It just isn’t worth it. He has no way of understanding her frustration—her life seems so easy. She likewise feels that he cannot know how awful her days can be. Conversation becomes a mere power struggle. She opposes through force of habit. Why should he be always right? Ever right? Men are deluded in the situation because they cannot believe that an issue is merely a pretext for another kind of confrontation. I remember a controversy which raged between my parents about the merits and demerits of a large tree which was struggling to grow just outside our house. My father painstakingly weighed pros and cons and decided it was best to let it struggle on a little longer for it had been traumatized by the construction of the house and could make a better showing in another season. My mother foxed about, refusing to confront the issue until father decided definitely that he was opposed to its felling. Mother went out the next day and ringbarked it, so it definitely died, and had to be felled after all. My father had decided fairly early on that life at home was pretty unbearable; and he lived more and more of it at his club, only coming home to sleep. My mother did not protest about this, as it gave her an opportunity to tyrannize the children and enlist their aid to disenfranchise my father completely, but many wives impose heavy restrictions on their husband’s recreation out of simple jealousy. The objection is made on many counts, of expense, of loneliness (often genuine), of fear of intruders, or need of help with some aspects of running the house. Working-class wives manage to ration their husband’s recreation severely, apportioning the money for it after they have taken the pay packet out of the old man’s pocket when he has finally arrived home on pay-night. One of the few acts of defiance against the welfare state is the refusal of security which gambling represents and this form of release is most severely opposed by wives, who are acting out their parts in anchoring their men in the system. The release of drunkenness is likewise blocked as much as possible by women, sometimes with good reason, but more often not. The degree of inebriation which is bitterly upbraided by women is so slight that it may be all but imperceptible. Much of the violence which drinking men wreak upon their women is provoked by their voiced or unvoiced reproaches. The wives refuse to recognize their husbands’ need of various forms of release because they feel, however bad his situation is, it is not as bad as a woman’s lot and women do not seek release, not overtly.

  The most sinister aspect of domestic infighting is the use of the children as weaponry and battlefield. Not all women are as desperate as my mother was when she used to mutter to me that my father was a ‘senile old goat’. Usually the use of the children both as weapons and causes of contention is more subtle. It is in a woman’s interest to keep the children babies as long as she can, because then they cannot disown her even if they are sons, because they need her ministrations. She mocks their father because he cannot know what they need, screams when he takes them out to a football match in the rain, insists on waiting up for them when they go out, both because she is jealous of their freedom, which always seems more than she had, and because she wants to prove that they need her solicitations and surveillance. The most extreme feats of child-exploitation by women are rarer but more striking. The obvious case is the enlistment of the son to depose the father, which is very common in poorer families where dad’s inadequacies can be ruthlessly underlined. The son accepts mother’s account of her suffering at the hands of his brutal father, and endeavours like Saturn to displace him in his own house. Given a less intense Oedipal situation a son may find himself attacked by his mother in order to get at his father. Once my mother knelt on my small brother’s chest and beat his face with her fists in front of my father and was threatened with violent retaliation, the only instance of my father’s rising to her bait that I can recall. My brother was three years old at the time.

  Much wifely frigidity is the withdrawal of a pleasure as punishment, although this is never admitted. Likewise the exaggeration of illnesses, to the point of valetudinarianism and hypochondria, is often motivated by continual reproach and not organic at all. The subtler form is that which keeps the little woman on her feet through all the vicissitudes of illness, so that everybody feels guilty and never more so than when they feel most irritated by the not so subtle martyrdom she compels them to witness. The withdrawal or rationing of sexual favours is an important weapon in the expression of resentment of the male. It is true that even in reasonably elevated strata of English society (for example, among the wives of some of my colleagues) sex is granted to the husband as a reward for something accomplished or as a consolation for some setback. The blackmail is that there is nothing in it for her, so that her husband feels both bestial and grateful when she allows him the use of his conjugal hole. Nowadays this kind of parleying is frequently conducted in the guise of a birth-control drama, where the wife finds herself unable to bear any form of contraception, even claiming that she finds no pleasure in intercourse unless there is the possibility of issue, or forcing the husband to suffer coitus interruptus. When it eventually fails, she can claim that he betrayed her because he is a selfish beast. The variations on this theme are legion. In every case the woman herself is also the loser, but as she has no conception of how she could gain by a different attitude that is not significant in her motivation. She is out to get him.

  While a wife may be fondly understood to spur her husband on to greater efforts by her observation of what the Joneses have that they have not, the main reason for pointing out what the Joneses have in the first place is to contrast that with what they have got, thereby stressing the husband’s inadequacy. Such a wife goads her husband on to the foreseeable finale of a coronary and a long widowhood, which is somehow not what she wanted at all, because she has never been given an opportunity to understand her own motives for hastening her spouse to his death. This is another aspect of that jealousy of a man’s life outside the home, which in extreme cases provokes a wife to badger her husband into giving up a work he loves and which he does very well, for something tedious but lucrative which will keep the family abreast of the Joneses. The Rosamund syndrome, for George Eliot has produced the paradigm in the case of Lydgate’s disastrous marriage to that spoiled darling,1 is the most extreme form of female jealousy of the problem-centred male life, which gives rise to such unforgettable dialogue as ‘You love that silly Stradivarius better than you love me’ and so forth. The complementary figure is that equally common one of the wife who gave up her Stradivarius to make a good wife to her husband, to whom everybody is too polite to point out that she would have made a lousy violinist anyway. The cheaper form is the listing of the enormously successful men she might have married, or the blanket reproach, ‘I’ve given you the best years of my life!’ Men are often led to believe that women’s motives for this kind of provoking behaviour are merely acquisitive: in fact the motivation is more often the simpler one, resentment, which inspires a need to prove the husband inadequate, or morally inferior, or both. Any allies can be and are used in the fight. Doctors, analysts, girl friends, even the secretary or the boss, as well as the children, can all be enlisted in the hounding of the husband. The efficacy of the process cannot be construed as a female victory, but simply as the sour fruits of unrecognized revenge.

  A far better account of the miserable destructiveness of womankind is made by Charles M. Schultz in his characterization of Lucy van Pelt in the brilliant saga of Peanuts. Lucy’s constant nagging anxiety, her imperviousness to all suffering
but her own, her ruthless aggravation of Charlie Brown’s inadequacy fears, her self-righteousness, her jealousy of Linus’s blanket, her utter incomprehension of Schroeder’s music together with her grotesque attempts to vamp him, her crabbiness, her fuss-budgetry, the diabolical intensity of her housekeeping, her inability to smile except maliciously, her effect upon Charlie Brown’s ill-fated baseball team, it’s all there and any woman who cannot recognize, however dimly, her own image in that unhappy little face, has not yet understood the gravity of her situation. Nevertheless, Schultz’s portrait of the embattled female is incomplete. To complement Lucy’s destructiveness we need the fuller statement of Strindberg’s about the mortal combat of the sexes, in The Dance of Death, as well as Ibsen’s more oblique statements in plays like Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. A battle which is fought through inauthenticity and hypocrisy by concealed blows and mutual treachery looks very much like a game, and Eric Berne described some of the most superficial of the tactics that women adopt in his justly celebrated The Games People Play, but any woman who reads his Section 7, ‘Marital Games’, could very swiftly add a score or more of other infighting techniques which he has omitted. The last comment on the whole gigantic mesh of manipulation which characterizes most of our relationships, but most of all those between the sexes, from father and daughter, to dated and dater, and husband and wife, and mother and son, is most fittingly expressed in Berne’s words. ‘Many games are played most intensely by disturbed people; generally speaking, the more disturbed they are, the harder they play.’ The alternative to game-playing, to the defensive process which is the game of war, is what every woman must now seek for herself, autonomy.

  For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behaviour, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their solution in popular techniques of special action, such as ‘togetherness’. This may mean that there is no hope for the human race, but there is hope for individual members of it.2

  Rebellion

  There have always been women who rebelled against their role in society. The most notorious are the witches, the women who withdrew from ‘normal’ human intercourse to commune with their pets or familiars, making a living somehow by exploiting their own knowledge of herbal medicine and the credulity of the peasantry, and perhaps indulging in the mysticism of other possibilities, magic white or black, perhaps Satanism. Careful reading of the depositions at witch trials reveals that some of the women were persecuted in the horrible fashion reserved for witches because they were troublemakers inciting the villagers to subversion or open rebellion. One of the punishments, the ducking stool, was the most primitive form of punitive psychotherapy, corresponding to shock treatment of today’s melancholic or recalcitrant females.

  There was a woman known to be so bold

  That she was noted for a common scold;

  And on a time, it seems, she wrong’d her Betters

  Who sent her unto Prison, bound in Fetters:

  The Day of her Arraignment being come,

  Before grave elders, this then was her Doom:

  She should be ducked over head and ears,

  In a deep Pond, before her Overseers.

  Thrice was she under Water, yet not fainted,

  Not yet for aught that I could see, was daunted;

  For, when with Water she was covered,

  She clapped her hands together o’er her head,

  To signify that then she could not talk,

  But yet she would be sure her hands should walk;

  She had no power, but yet she had a will,

  That if she could, she would have scolded still:

  For after that, when they did her up-hale

  Fiercely against them all then did she rail

  This proves some women void of reasonable Wit;

  Which if they had, then would they soon submit.1

  The invalid conclusion to this tale is typical of male arrogance; the refusal to consider the content of her grievance is characteristic still of conservative accounts of the attempts of women to take action themselves in the hope of changing their condition. The charge of penis envy, or frustration, or perversion, is no more respectable than the anonymous author’s assumption that his heroine is void of reasonable wit. We will know a good deal more about the history of feminism when we learn to read between the lines in cases of witchburning and other forms of female persecution. Many female heretics, such as the members of the Family of Love, had joined the sect precisely because they offered new scope for female self-determination.2 The phenomenon of female gossipry, which entailed cooperation to gull husbands and enrich their wives as well as to procure adultery and abortions, certainly had its feminist elements, and there is evidence that educated women throughout the ages were particularly loath to submit to male sovereignty: as now, it was most frequently the education that was found at fault, and not the male sovereignty.

  Much lesbianism, especially of the transvestite kind, may be understood as revolt against the limitations of the female role of passivity, hypocrisy and indirect action, as well as rejection of the brutality and mechanicalness of male sexual passion. All forms of lesbianism involve an invention of an alternative way of life, even if the male—female polarity survives in the relationship to the degree that there is butch and bitch within it. Dildoes are not used by butch lesbians however. The prevalence of tribadism as the principal lesbian mode of lovemaking argues the relative unimportance of the masculine fantasy in the relationship. However, such sexual deviations have been treated with so much lecherous curiosity and violent insult that most lesbians are unable to make of their choice of an alternative anything like a political gesture. The operations of relentlessly induced guilt and shame cause the lesbian to conceal her condition, and to mis-state her own situation as a result of a congenital blight or the mistakes of her parents. It is true that her inability to play the accepted role in society probably results from a failure in conditioning, but that is not itself a disqualification from the ability to choose lesbianism in an honourable, clear-eyed fashion, rejecting shame and inferiority feelings as a matter of principle, whether such feelings exist or not. The lesbian might as well claim that she had no other acceptable course to follow and become the apologist of her own way of life. Unfortunately, too often she is as blinded by spurious notions of normality as her critics are.

  The women who are most conscious of the disabilities which afflict women are those who are educated to the point of demanding and deserving the same kind of advancement as men. In the higher education establishments in which women are segregated there is a curious air of constipated revolt. Most women teachers are not married and do not have any very significant intercourse with the opposite sex. Their students sometimes suspect them of sexual relationships with each other, and certainly there is an intensity in their personal relationships which would argue some degree of thwarted attraction or affection, although I would maintain that the extreme repressions practised by such women on themselves in other respects indicate impotence in this regard. When a group of girl students presented a rather churlishly expressed list of grievances to the principal of a women’s college in which I had the misfortune to be immured for a whole year before I could escape, she and her cronies clung together in her Hollywood-interior lodge, refusing to deal with the matters expressed in the petition, except to complain that they had wanted us to be so happy and we had hurt them. It is a kind of female rebellion to eschew cosmetics and the business of attraction, and some of these establishment rebels certainly cultivated respectable slatternliness to an impressive degree. Gentility went by the board as well. One such eminent lady, whose bloated form in a red knitted bathing suit had been known to drive every vestige of colour from a male don’s
cheek, was famous for farting and belching at table, and I once saw her put a meringue which she had shot on to the floor back on her plate and eat it with complete unconcern. Rather than concede some sort of genetic imbalance in these gifted women I should claim that their braying voices and shattering footsteps were deliberate reactions against feminine murmuring and pussy-footing. They were helped by the existence of an acceptable British stereotype of the aristocratic country-woman, who is a good sport and more capable with a plough or a snaffle bit than many a man. Only a small proportion of the girls in their charge emulated them, for most of them were still coming through the last stages of puberty, and developing along more orthodox feminine lines despite their mistresses’ attempts to keep them playing hockey and beating the men’s marks at the end of the year.