This post is far too long and I don’t really expect anyone to read the whole of it. But what the heck? Publish and be dammed!
Questions of love, chivalry, feminism and the links between these three have much exercised James lately,
here,
here and
here, so here is my inadequate two-centesimi’s worth on these matters:
First of all, let us remember that throughout history, there would have been no change without those who were willing to be strident, to break the law for what they believed in and even to risk their lives for it. Feminism, in winning the freedoms and rights that women in western countries now enjoy, was and is a necessary movement, for once freedoms have been won, they have to be protected.
As I have commented on James’s site, I am old enough to remember when a woman doing exactly the same job as a man was automatically paid less and I can remember when a single woman, however much she earned, could not obtain a mortgage in Britain. I can also remember finding it difficult to get lodgings because I didn’t have a “nice fiancé” [the landladies, presumably, thought that therefore hundreds of men would be trooping in and out of the place at all hours - if only!] and I can remember even having invitations withdrawn because I didn’t have a partner to accompany me to the parties or events.
A man, when he receives a letter or fills in a form, does not thereby proclaim his marital status to the world: a woman, until the advent of the “Ms” title in English-speaking countries, did. And make no mistake: marital status mattered. There were women who, if they received bad service, would threaten, “Oh, I’ll get my husband to deal with you” - as if they were incapable of standing up for themselves – and often, in times gone by, this utterance achieved the desired result. When I was teaching in secondary education, I could never understand why, at school speech days, the guest speaker 's wife would receive a bouquet of flowers from the Head. What had this woman done but come along and sit there? She obviously did not have a job if she could be there on a Wednesday afternoon; yet she got this bouquet just for being someone’s wife. I have never had any time for women who obtain their social status from men. [It is perhaps worth mentioning that in Italy you become
signora and in France you become
madame at a certain point: neither title is an indication of marital status.]
So yes, I am a feminist, in that I wish to receive the same remuneration as a man for what I do, provided that the work is truly the same, and in that I desire rights and freedoms which are really the rights and freedoms of all humanity. Where it all goes wrong, I believe, is when we say, “Ok, we’ve got those so now let’s get more rights and freedoms than men have.” I have never, for instance, gone along with the “wages for housework” idea for none of its proponents ever stopped to consider that single women have to do it as well, and certainly nobody was going to reward us. And, however “hard” running a home might be, it cannot, just cannot, be compared with competing in the ruthless, target-setting environment that is the world of work today. Whilst I’m on this topic, I should also say that I do not believe that the State should pay for pre-school child care or that women who are pregnant or who have young children should be exempt from shift work. If you take the job, you do the job, especially if you want equality!
Sometimes I do wonder if I have ended up in the wrong “bit” of life, though, and I imagine that I would have enjoyed keeping house, having children and cooking for someone. But would it have been enough? Victorian women [middle class and above] were so bored that they just took to their beds with their opium. And literature is full of exasperating, interfering or misguided female characters who would have been so much happier and fulfilled if they had only had a job:
Emma Woodhouse would certainly have saved herself and others a lot of heartache had she been able to use her talents to run a matrimonial agency; status-obsessed
Mrs Bennet definitely needed something to take her out of herself; and silly
Dora Copperfield might have been a calmer and more interesting wife if she had been trained for something – she might even have lived, as might
Richardson's Clarissa had she had more experience of meeting men and seen through Lovelace . But the character who takes the biscuit for exasperating modern readers has to be “
Patient Griselda” who first appears in
Boccaccio [Decameron, x. x ]. If ever a husband needed a whack around the head with a frying pan, it was Griselda’s, and if ever a woman needed contraception, an education and an interest outside the home, it was she!
As in literature so it has been in history: unsatisfied women in unhappy marriages from time immemorial, often with no outlet for their abilities or emotions before the last century. Contrary to what the adverts of the late 1950s and early 60s would have us believe, with their images of housewives dancing around because their “composition floors” had polished up nicely, many women resented being “just the little wife” again after making such a contribution to war work and certainly no one wanted to be a maid any more after WW2. A maid was unnecessary, anyway, as suddenly, in the west at any rate, all sorts of machines and gadgets were available which made housework easier [a process which had begun in Victorian times, only then it was still the domestic staff, not the mistress of the house, who used them]. So the appliances gave women more time on their hands but something else had enabled them to
choose to work too: At last women could control their own fertility. In 2004 availability of contraception won the title of the most influential event to impact on women’s lives in a
BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour debate.
With the acquisition of power in the workplace came a whole bunch of accusations for women: they were said to be neglecting their families, selfish and, most often , “unfeminine” or “mannish”. Was it not always so?
Elizabeth I was deemed, by some, to be a man, for no other reason that I can find than that she refused to marry. Yet you do not need a PhD in psychology to figure out that if your father had murdered your mother, you might be a little wary of men. The TV programme
Spitting Image always portrayed
Margaret Thatcher in a man’s suit, because a woman who had won and retained power just had to be “acting like a man”. Now I am no defender of that lady and it quite worries me that a generation has now grown up who don’t remember the harshness of her regime and the misery she wrought. But Thatcher’s real genius was not in “acting like a man” ; it was in in manipulating the language: “We spend more than we earn”, she would preach, making the national debt sound for all the world as if you’d bought a 1lb of potatoes on the slate at the corner shop. Then “
You” [meaning politicians] “have to do this and
you have to do that” – not “
one” any more – a use of “familiar” language similar to
Mussolini's insistence on the use of the voi form for the polite "you". If you can control language, you can control everything! Ok, Margaret Thatcher did give the nation the shake-up that it partially needed and we will certainly never be the same again, but surely you would concur that banging on about credit when you have never had to use it because your husband is a millionaire and making political principles sound like housewifely platitudes is, shall we say, a bit rich? Thatcher was no ordinary housewife and she was not a self-made woman. Her marriage gave her the economic freedom to pursue her ambitions.
With liberation, too, there appeared, briefly in the 1970s and 80s what I call the “dungaree brigade” as in, “Oh, I can strip the walls / plumb in a new bathroom / build a house from scratch. I just put on my son’s / husband’s dungarees and get on with it”. Now I am not of a practical nature so these women made me feel seriously inadequate. And they forgot that they had men to do the heavy work and access to a tool shed. Nothing annoys me so much as women who profess to be independent in this way but never, in reality, have to lift anything heavier than a kettle! Now I’ve decided I don’t want to strip the walls / plumb in a bathroom, etc., even if I could.
So where does all this leave us on "love, feminism, chivalry and everything” ? I once loved a man who was rather like
Mr Rochester: he didn’t have a mad wife locked in the garret and he didn’t attempt bigamy but he was self-centred yet madly attractive in the way that Rochester is. But when does Rochester become human and when does Jane love him most? When he is blinded and vulnerable, indicating that not only do we all need someone; we also need to be needed: I think that, because of the demands of our era, both men and women sadly spend a lot of time pretending to be strong and that we do not.
"It’s not every day we are needed”, says Vladimir in
Waiting for Godot.
Romantic love, let us remember, is an invention. It was a convention which began in the courts of
Eleanor of Aquitaine. [Blame the French!] The songs of the troubadours were perhaps a release for more unhappy , aristocratic women. [I don’t suppose the peasants had much time to indulge such fantasies, for that is what they were.] An invention it may be, but we
know about it now. And that means that we will go on searching for it, taking risks for it and even, in some cases, killing for it. This is nowhere better illustrated than in
Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and the beach Romeos who await the naïve compliment-starved British girls in continental resorts worked it out long ago, cerebrally challenged though some of them may be. Whatever age a woman is, a Frenchman, Spaniard or Italian will always notice what she is wearing, her perfume , her hair and comment on it. Why an educated Anglo-Saxon male cannot do so is beyond me. Such a compliment lifts your heart, makes your day , makes you feel alive, for goodness sake!
A couple of weeks back
Tom Paine wrote a post suggesting that people end up on their own because they look for perfection in a partner and I got in a strop about it because I think there are many more reasons why one might remain single, among them just pure bad luck. Maybe “real” as opposed to “romantic” love is what is left when the “scales drop from our eyes” and we see that the person we love is a fallible human being, just like ourselves. If, at that stage, we can still respect, talk to and – yes, love – the object of our dreams then we are very lucky.
