FOR THE past few years I have been corresponding with a friend from Boston who has moved with her husband and children to live in Florence, Italy. “Is the women’s liberation movement serious?’ ” she asks me. Serious? I see, in my mind’s eye, their large, bare, beautiful rooms in Florence, the nobly cold stone floors, the balconies warmed by the noonday sun even in January. Yes, I answer, yes. I think it is quite serious. It is not a fad like doing the twist, nor is it exactly a protest like the student movement, flaring up, dying down, changing tactics, growing older.
I send off my thoughts with a feeling of absurdity, of saying something tedious and ideological, something just a little rigid and grim. Even now we find it hard to suppress the romantic conviction that certain old European cultures, such as the French and Italian, have a practical, humane wisdom and worldliness that impugn our own puritanical flirtations with the ideal.
No, it is not so much that I think in this way but that I imagine my friend, living among the olive trees on the hillside, the black and white stripes of marble façades, feels strongly that human patterns are tough, old, tenacious. She wonders whether this should be a cause for despair or for thanksgiving. Doesn’t Italy say: Look, we have all been driven from the Garden, man and woman alike. That we must understand first.
Why do I feel defensive? The subject of men and women is impossible. It is both brutally large and maddeningly vague. We may ask all the questions we like and we are not guaranteed an answer. History often simply fails us and certain matters of justice and goodness echo forever, never coming to rest. Too many women have lived for too long in history and the contingencies of existence are too pressing and various to allow for generalization. It is, as Chaucer said, “like trying to catch the wind in a net.”
Particular women—every crime and virtue have been theirs! Turgenev’s mother liked to flog the serfs. In Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude he tells of a seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana, who was born an intellectual as one is born with long legs. She wrote, “Two little girls were playing with a top in my presence, and I had hardly seen the movement and figure when I began to consider, with this insanity of mine, the easy motu of spherical forms. . . .”
“Do you remember J—?” my Florentine friend writes. “She used to chuckle and say, ‘Well, one thing is sure. Men and women ain’t the same.’ ” For some reason this vexes me. It seems firm if somewhat too common ground and I begin to question it. Not the same? How little we know of the feelings of others. I can never know what it is like to wake up each morning as a man. Perhaps there are fundamental, fascinating, peculiar differences in the sheer perception of things, in the way reality and possibility present themselves. How can we know? We do not even know what it is like to be another of our own sex and in the end much about ourselves bewilders and persists beyond our control.
Here, in America, the days for many men and women are much alike. This is especially true for those men who share most in what we think of as the rewards of life, of success. Love, ambition, fear, power, frustration, money: these preoccupations know no boundaries and there is a likeness to the marks they make upon the character. If we were not driven by similar impulses and desires, we could not create poems and fictions and movies. On the other hand, “concerns” are not necessarily all of “consciousness.”
“Is the whole thing just a whim, a choice, a defiance?” I am asked. I think of the Italian women in black, of their labors, their endurance. The poorer ones seem to know grief and patience of an exalted kind. The strong lines of their faces, the courtesies that have been bred into their bones in the effort to survive—are they a reproach to us here with our concern about powers and privileges? Some view it in that way, believe that agitation among women is a diversion, an indulgence growing out of prosperity, permissiveness.
I believe the breakdown of marriage is the historical source of the women’s movement. In America the shattering seems more drastic and more dramatic than in other countries and thus the intensity of the desire for new standards, new ways of coping is naturally more acute here than elsewhere. Liberation, self-knowledge, self-reliance, training, planning—these are a sort of private investment, a savings account that acknowledges the shakiness of marriage, the shortening of family ties. In the deepest meaning of life everyone is responsible for himself and it is an illusion to imagine the pure self can ever be lived by and through anyone else. Still, we can hardly expect many to address themselves to the problem of the ultimate, the essence. To be alone, broke, with all or a part of the money to be earned, with the children to be raised, educated, supported—this is the mirror more and more women look into.
Are we so different here in America from the never-resting Florentine working women in their shops, with their market baskets, at the counters? “I think back,” I write my friend, “to the clerks in Woolworth’s, to old women and younger ones I remember in my hometown who had worked in stores for many decades, standing up day in and day out. Why are they not the objects of our sentiment, our purest respect? Perhaps we have never looked closely enough at them, at each other, at ourselves.”
•
Matters between men and women will be greatly affected by the fact that we will be living longer and longer. This is a circumstance we cannot even begin to take in—longer and longer with fewer children. Will your daughter marry and live in contentment for nearly sixty years with the young man she chose just after college? Will your son be pleased to sign up for all these decades as a meal ticket, a lover, a source of life for a girl he met in his twenties? And if not, will he want to be paying alimony at seventy to a woman he left forty years ago?
To speak only from the woman’s view, it is a fact that breakage does not accommodate us; separations, severances do not often take place in an atmosphere of equity. One of the hidden, brutal facts few like to think about is that young women are often fond of men older than themselves. These young women offer themselves as a substitute, a change, a renewal, and give little thought to the past the man has had, to his wife and children. Only growing older herself will teach her of the inequities of romantic life.
But this is not what the women’s movement is about. It is not meant to be an ideological haven for abandoned wives. Many of its most active members are young, unmarried, or still married. Equality in society, independence of the inner life—the early life as well as the later—sense of self: these can mean many things. The meaning and urgency, however, cannot rest upon mere assertion. Ideas flower in the heart of necessity. They arrive to define changes that have already occurred, but cannot be dealt with. It is simply too uncomfortable to think, to question without the press of personal or historical need.
Longer lives, fewer children, more divorces. A terrible rain of real woe and incapacity and helplessness falls down upon many women who hadn’t counted on economic and emotional disasters. Nothing is more pitiful than an older woman thrown into “freedom,” lying like some wounded dragon in a paralysis of rage and embittered nostalgia.
•
At the present time the loosening of contracts is painful to many. The rules are not known. What are we owed by the people in our lives and what do we owe to them? The happiest and most admirable person may be one who feels he has no claim upon another except what may be voluntarily assumed. This is, perhaps, the ideal of the younger women in the liberation movement. But it seems a heavy charge to put upon frail and greedy human beings. We are not saints. Resentment is a common, if corroding, condition. With women resentment often arises out of a sudden, piercing cry that all they have felt and sacrificed is somehow not constantly foremost in the minds of those they have felt and sacrificed for. This cry represents an intolerable vulnerability. It represents the shock of learning that society does not any longer fully stand behind assertions of ownership between people, sanctity of contract, demands for static combinations immune to chance and withering.
“Who will do the dishes?” my friend in Italy asked me. We know who is doing them there—a kind, courageous, destitute “woman of the people.” And on this so much of the sweetness of life for the well-to-do in Europe rests. Not just on the mere work and performance either but on human kindness born of poverty and resignation, the wild flowers that bloom in harsh soil.
Here the dishes are a joke, the joke. But jokes mean something and we laugh all the harder at those that strike at a point of intractable ordinariness. Housework and the care of children are peculiarly difficult to think about. It is wrong to imagine they are produced by simple demand. Men have less power here than they believe. Houses are dirty or neat according to something deeply graven on each person’s character. So much of it is a self-propelled activity serving one’s own needs and having to do with extension of oneself onto things and settings. A genuine and capable care of children cannot be ordered either. Anyone who has lived among neighbors knows all about the part played by the will and character of a particular woman in her assumption of these “natural” obligations. The poor dishes in the sink—emblematic, menacing, inert, and yet chosen for this high ideological role—perhaps have never been as cheerfully dispatched as we imagined. They have always been an obstruction and some women have moved toward them with grim and rapid resolution; others have procrastinated, idled, sighed, and finally faced them as one of the paltry vexations of life, one among, oh, so many others. The dishes are, like everything else, subject to “altered expectations.”
The solution of Italy—the Italy of our dreams, not theirs, is gone forever. A country of madonnas and widows and no divorce and incomparable infidelities, of servants and mistresses. It is deep in the dreamlife of men, an infinitely beautiful accommodation. Yes, I write back again, the women’s movement has meaning. Don’t we all know that domestic relations are history itself and that they start as a response and end as a challenge? Or so I see it.
1972