Silences (11 page)

And the results?

Productivity:
books of all manner and kind. My own crude sampling, having to be made without benefit of research assistants, secretary, studies (nobody’s made them), or computer (to feed the entire
Books in Print
and
Contemporary Authors
into, for instance) indicates that at present four to five books are published by men to every one by a woman.
^**

Comparative earnings: no authoritative figures available.

Achievement: as gauged by what supposedly designates it: appearance in twentieth-century literature courses, required reading lists, textbooks, quality anthologies, the year’s best, the decade’s best, the fifty years’ best, consideration by critics or in current reviews—
one woman writer for every twelve men
(8 percent women, 92 percent men). For a week or two, make your own survey whenever you
pick up an anthology, course bibliography, quality magazine or quarterly, book review section, book of criticism.

What weights my figures so heavily toward the one-out-of-twelve ratio are twentieth-century literature course offerings, and writers decreed worthy of critical attention in books and articles. Otherwise my percentage figures would have come closer to one out of seven.

But it would
not matter if the ratio had been one out of six or five. Any figure but one to one would insist on query: Why? What, not true for men but
only for women,
makes this enormous difference? (Thus, class—economic circumstance—and color, those other traditional silencers of humanity, can be relevant only in the special ways that they affect the half of their numbers who are women.)

Why are so many
more women silenced than men? Why, when
women do write (one out of four or five works published) is so little of their writing known, taught, accorded recognition? What is the nature of the critical judgments made throughout that (along with the factors different in women’s lives) steadily reduce the ratio from one out of three in anthologies of student work, to one out of seventeen in course
offerings.

This talk, originally intended to center on the writing, the achievement of women writers in our century, became instead these queryings. Yet—in a way sadder, angrier, prouder—it still centers on the writing, the achievement
.
^*

One woman writer of achievement for every twelve men writers so ranked. Is this proof again—and in this so much more favorable century—of women’s innately inferior
capacity for creative achievement?

Only a few months ago (June 1971), during a Radcliffe sponsored panel on “Women’s Liberation, Myth or Reality,” Diana Trilling, asking why it is that women

            
have not made even a fraction of the intellectual, scientific or artistic-cultural contributions which men have made

came again to the traditional conclusion that

            
it is not enough
to blame women’s place in culture or culture itself, because that leaves certain fundamental questions unanswered . . . necessarily raises the question of the biological aspects of the problem.

Biology: that difference.
^**
Evidently unknown to or dismissed by her and the others who share her conclusion, are the centuries of prehistory during which biology did not deny equal contribution; and
the other determining difference—not
biology—between male and female in the centuries after; the
differing past of women
—that should be part of every human consciousness, certainly every woman’s consciousness (in the way that the 400 years of bondage, colonialism, the slave passage, are to black humans).

Work first:

            
Within our bodies we bore the race. Through us it was shaped, fed
and clothed. . . . Labour more toilsome and unending than that of man was ours. . . . No work was too hard, no labour too strenuous to exclude us.
^*

True for most women in most of the world still.

Unclean; taboo. The Devil’s Gateway. The three steps behind; the girl babies drowned in the river; the baby strapped to the back. Buried alive with the lord, burned alive on the funeral pyre, burned
as witch at the stake. Stoned to death for adultery. Beaten, raped. Bartered. Bought and sold. Concubinage, prostitution, white slavery. The hunt, the sexual prey, “I am a lost creature, O the poor Clarissa.” Purdah, the veil of Islam, domestic confinement. Illiterate. Denied vision. Excluded, excluded, excluded from council, ritual, activity, learning, language, when there was neither biological
nor economic reason to be excluded.

Religion, when all believed. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. May thy wife’s womb never cease from bearing. Neither was the man created for the woman but the woman for the man. Let the woman learn in silence and in all subjection. Contrary to biological birth fact: Adam’s rib. The Jewish male morning prayer: thank God I was not born a woman. Silence
in holy places, seated apart, or not permitted entrance at all; castration of boys because women too profane to sing in church.

And for the comparative handful of women born into the privileged class; being, not doing; man does, woman is; to you the world says work, to us it says seem. God is thy law, thou mine. Isolated. Cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d; the private sphere. Bound feet: corseted, cosseted,
bedecked; denied one’s body. Powerlessness.
Fear of rape, male strength. Fear of aging. Subject to Fear of expressing capacities. Soft attractive graces; the mirror to magnify man. Marriage as property arrangement. The vices of slaves:
^*
dissembling, flattering, manipulating, appeasing.

Bolstering. Vicarious living, infantilization, trivialization. Parasitism, individualism, madness. Shut up,
you’re only a girl. O Elizabeth, why couldn’t you have been born a boy? For twentieth-century woman: roles, discontinuities, part-self, part-time; conflict; imposed “guilt”; “a man can give full energy to his profession, a woman cannot.”

            
How is it that women have not made a fraction of the intellectual, scientific, or artistic-cultural contributions that men have made?

Only in the
context of this punitive difference in circumstance, in history, between the sexes; this past, hidden or evident, that
(though objectively obsolete—yes, even the toil and the compulsory childbearing obsolete)
continues so terribly, so determiningly to live on, only in this context can the question be answered or my subject here today—the women writer in our century: one out of twelve—be understood.

How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we assume), circumstances, time, development of craft—but beyond that: how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one’s right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one’s own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born
into a class that breeds such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman.

The leeching of belief, of will, the damaging of capacity begin so early. Sparse indeed is the literature on the way of denial to small girl children of the development of their endowment as born
human: active, vigorous bodies; exercise of the power to do, to make, to investigate, to invent, to conquer obstacles,
to resist violations of the self; to think, create, choose; to attain community, confidence in self. Little has been written on the harms of instilling constant concern with appearance; the need to please, to support; the training in acceptance, deferring. Little has been added in our century to George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
on the effect of the differing treatment—”climate of expectation”—for
boys and for girls.

But it is there if one knows how to read for it, and indelibly there in the resulting damage. One—out of twelve.

In the vulnerable girl years, unlike their sisters in the previous century, women writers go to college.
^*
The kind of experience it may be for them is stunningly documented in Elaine Showalter’s pioneering “Women and the Literary Curriculum.”
^**
Freshman texts in
which women have little place, if at all; language itself, all achievement, anything to do with the human in male terms—
Man in Crises, The Individual and His World.
Three hundred thirteen male writers taught; seventeen women writers: That classic of adolescent rebellion,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
and sagas (male) of the quest for identity (but then Erikson, the father of the concept,
propounds that identity concerns girls only insofar as making themselves into attractive beings for the right kind of man).
†
Most,
not all,
of the predominantly male literature studied, written by men whose understandings are not universal, but restrictively male (as Mary Ellmann, Kate Millett, and Dolores
Schmidt have pointed out); in our time more and more surface, hostile, one-dimensional in
portraying women.

In a writer’s young years, susceptibility to the vision and style of the great is extreme. Add the aspiration-denying implication, consciously felt or not (although reinforced daily by one’s professors and reading) that (as Virginia Woolf noted years ago) women writers, women’s experience, and literature written by women are by definition minor. (Mailer will not grant even the
minor: “the one thing a writer has to have is balls.”) No wonder that Showalter observes:

            
Women [students] are estranged from their own experience and unable to perceive its shape and authenticity, in part because they do not see it mirrored and given resonance in literature. . . . They are expected to identify with masculine experience, which is presented as the human one, and have
no faith in the validity of their own perceptions and experiences, rarely seeing them confirmed in literature, or accepted in criticism . . . [They] notoriously lack the happy confidence, the exuberant sense of the value of their individual observations which enables young men to risk making fools of themselves for the sake of an idea.

Harms difficult to work through. Nevertheless, some young
women (others are already lost) maintain their ardent intention to write—fed indeed by the very glories of some of this literature that puts them down.

But other invisible worms are finding out the bed of crimson joy.
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Self-doubt; seriousness, also questioned by the hours agonizing over appearance; concentration shredded into attracting, being attractive; the absorbing real need and love for
working with words felt as hypocritical self-delusion (“I’m not truly dedicated”),
for what seems (and is) esteemed is being attractive to men. High aim, and accomplishment toward it, discounted by the prevalent attitude that, as girls will probably marry (attitudes not applied to boys who will probably marry), writing is no more than an attainment of a dowry to be spent later according the needs
and circumstances within the true vocation: husband and family. The growing acceptance that going on will threaten other needs, to love and be loved; (“a woman has to sacrifice all claims to femininity and family to be a writer”).
^*

And the agony—peculiarly mid-century, escaped by their sisters of pre-Freudian, pre-Jungian times—that “creation and femininity are incompatible.”
^**
Anaïs Nin’s words.

            
The aggressive act of creation; the guilt for creating. I did not want to rival man; to steal man’s creation, his thunder. I must protect them, not outshine them.
†

The acceptance—against one’s experienced reality—of the sexist notion that the act of creation is not as inherently natural to a woman as to a man, but rooted instead in unnatural aggression, rivalry, envy, or thwarted
sexuality.

And in all the usual college teaching—the English, history, psychology, sociology courses—little to help that young woman understand the source or nature of this inexplicable draining self-doubt, loss of aspiration, of confidence.

It is all there in the extreme in Plath’s
Bell Jar
—that (inadequate)
‡
portrait of the artist as young woman (significantly, one of the few that we have)—from
the precarious sense of vocation to the paralyzing conviction that (in a sense different from what she wrote years later)

              
Perfection is terrible. It cannot have children.

              
It tamps the womb.

And indeed, in our century as in the last, until very recently almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless women: Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Gertrude Stein,
Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Isak Dinesen, Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, Henry Handel Richardson, Susan Glaspell, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Eudora Welty, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Christina Stead, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, May Sarton, Josephine Herbst,
Jessamyn West, Janet Frame, Lillian Smith, Iris Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates, Hannah Green, Lorraine Hansberry.

Most never questioned, or at least accepted (a few sanctified) this different condition for achievement, not imposed on men writers. Few asked the fundamental human equality question regarding it that Elizabeth Mann Borghese, Thomas Mann’s daughter, asked when she was eighteen and sent
to a psychiatrist for help in getting over an unhappy love affair (revealing also a working ambition to become a great musician although “women cannot be great musicians”). “You must choose between your art and fulfillment as a woman,” the analyst told her, “between music and family life.” “Why?” she asked. “Why must I choose? No one said to Toscanini or to Bach or my father that they must choose
between their art and personal, family life; fulfillment as a man. . . . Injustice everywhere.” Not where it is free choice. But where it is forced because of the circumstances for the sex into which one is born—a choice men of the same class do not have to make in order to do their work—that is not choice, that is a coercive working of sexist oppression.
^*