Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (17 page)

But maybe it’s a mistake to start with self-defense. The statements cited above are largely denials and disavowals, statements of
I am not
rather than
I am, and this is how it is
. And yet, in order for those women to publicly respond to the narratives about their lives, they had to have public lives in the first place—possible, in part, because the world had changed around them. Brace yourself, Reader. For I am about to un-ironically utter the phrase “consciousness-raising.”

It’s a weird little term, isn’t it? It makes you feel square and older than you thought you were, like going to the mall to pick out a sensible pantsuit. It has the unmistakable fug of the ’70s all over it: Just saying the phrase aloud seems to
summon an air of un-ironic goddess-invoking, and handwritten cookbooks with a lot of material about lentils, and spelling it
womyn
, with the “y.” I always hear the tender, acoustic strains of womyn’s folk music in my head when I say it; I also, for some reason, envision handmade quilts. Which is all to say that “consciousness-raising,” as a concept or feminist tactic, has largely been relegated to that quilt-infested realm of the feminine and quaint: It seems to derive from, and chiefly appertain to, a world where young radicals were not yet worldly or jaded enough to be automatically creeped out by communes.

And yet, it is not so. “Consciousness-raising” was not only a powerful radical strategy, it’s perhaps the most relevant and enduring legacy of second-wave feminism. Beginning in the late 1960s, in radical feminist collectives such as the New York Radical Women and Redstockings, women began to sit down with each other, and take turns honestly answering each other’s questions. Here, from a 1971 guide to starting your own group, were some of the questions:

• Why did you marry the man you did? (or date the man you do?)

• What was your first sex experience?

• Do you pretend to have an orgasm?

• Have you had an abortion?

• What do you feel about lesbianism? What do you know about it?

I think that last question may be my favorite, simply because it sounds so very “have you heard of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” And, indeed, one of the many benefits of second-wave feminism was that it allowed and encouraged women to undertake independent study upon that matter. But then, perhaps most crucially, there was this one:

• What is a “nice girl”? Were you a “nice girl”?

This was the question that the feminist movement generally, and the consciousness-raising groups specifically, were out to answer. Not simply how to make the world better for women, but who women actually
were
: What they thought, what they felt, what they went through, and how very far it deviated from the established patriarchal script.

For some women, the project was purely pragmatic. In her essay on consciousness-raising, for example, Kathie Sarachild mentions the struggle over how to establish women’s intelligence. One colleague wanted to find the proof in studies, summon up the necessary facts and figures. But for Sarachild, that was a lost cause:
“For every scientific study we quote, the opposition can find their scientific studies to quote … We know from our own experience that women play dumb for men because, if we’re too smart, men won’t like us. I know, because I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. Therefore, we can simply deduce that women are smarter than men are aware of[.]”

We know how to prioritize what social-justice types call “lived experience” now, and so it’s easy to forget how radical these statements really were. There were precedents—critics were quick to point out that consciousness-raising was suspiciously similar to the Maoist practice of “speaking bitterness”—but, in a world where women were mostly encouraged to focus on relationships with men, and to say mostly what those men wanted to hear, the mere fact of women talking to one another uninhibitedly, and regarding themselves and each other as credible sources on important subjects, was immensely strange. Feminist approaches like Sarachild’s put forth a new methodology
—we know from our own experience; I know, because I’ve done it
—which rejected science, medicine, philosophy, and most of literature in order to argue that the only real “authorities” on womanhood were women. And not “special,” accomplished, or even particularly educated women: In this paradigm, women gained “expert” status simply by being female.

That was it. That was all it took to have more expertise than, say, Sigmund Freud. If you were a woman, and your experience suggested that Freud was wrong about vaginal orgasms—he thought you’d start having them once you accepted your role as a woman—and if you could talk to enough women whose orgasms suggested likewise, well, then,
Freud was fucking wrong
. And that was that. One of the leading theories of human sexuality, demolished in a few hours, simply by virtue of the fact that you’d talked about your sex life.

Advocates of consciousness-raising were quick to point out that their methodology was not unscientific. (
“Our meetings were called coffee klatches, hen parties or bitch sessions,” Sarachild writes. “We responded by saying, ‘Yes, bitch, sisters, bitch.’ ”) The preferred procedure, for most groups, was to give each woman present the chance to answer a question, before moving on to the next question or discussion, and to remain (if at all possible) non-judgmental. This wasn’t for sisterly, kumbaya-singing reasons—women in these radical groups wound up hating each other as often as anyone else—but for the purpose of producing accurate data. You didn’t want to know how any particular woman felt, but how many women felt the same way, and you didn’t want to shut anyone down, because it would interfere with the flow of information.

And yet, the very nature of that intimacy could not help but open doors for particular and individual women. The best way forward for women, according to consciousness-raising, was to speak: bluntly, explicitly, very personally, and in the presence of someone who could hear you. You had to drop all the hiding, all the insecurity, and just claim your own narrative in your own words. It not only changed the agenda of the movement; it changed the participants’ ideas of themselves.

“As a movement woman, I’ve been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing, and in general pretty much in control of my own life,” wrote Carol Hanisch,
in her own landmark essay on the topic (it’s entitled “The Personal Is Political,” and yes, that phrase stuck around).
“It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.”

And while the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s rejected the idea that what they were doing was a form of “therapy,” they also felt clear on what the consequences of
not
doing it would be:
“In the absence of feminist activity,” Cathy Levine wrote in her defense of consciousness-raising, “women take tranquilizers, go insane, and commit suicide.”

Despite all the talk of collectivity, that is one strikingly specific vision. And it likely has its roots in one or two very specific stories, about what a woman’s oppression looked like, and where it might lead. Before the 1970s, before the formation of the radical collectives, before consciousness-raising, there was simply the consciousness, recorded on paper, of the former Mrs. Ted Hughes.

•

Anatomy of a Trainwreck

SYLVIA PLATH

The story of Sylvia Plath begins with her death. She committed suicide in the winter of 1963, shortly after writing
the best work of her life. By the time those books were published—
Ariel
, in 1965;
The Bell Jar
, first released under her own name in 1971—she had been gone for years. She couldn’t speak for the work, or explain it, or defend it. Perhaps most crucially, she could not make any decisions as to where, how, or in what form it was published. This was where the fight began.

The eruption of Plath into the American public consciousness can most likely be traced to the publication of “Daddy” in
Time
magazine, in 1966. She was already a well-regarded literary figure, especially after
Ariel
, but
Time
made her a star. Next to the poem, and a selection of photos, they described how
“a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven.” Then, in heavy-breathing prose,
Time
promised “a strange and terrible poem she had written in her last sick slide toward suicide,” calling Plath a “dragon who in her last months of life breathed a river of bile across the literary landscape.”

Within the space of a few paragraphs,
Time
magazine had managed to transform Sylvia Plath from Betty Crocker into Godzilla. But then there was the poem itself. The rough beast that stomped its way toward Tokyo to be born: “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” it declaimed, in lurching, inexorable rhythm, and racked up the body count from there:
“A man in black with a Meinkampf look / and a love of the rack and the screw / and I said, I do, I do … If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two.”

She didn’t sound like a pretty young homemaker. “Daddy” was like an electrical line that snapped and landed on the family driveway. It hissed and writhed and gave off beautiful sparks, and trying to grab it with bare hands would end you. “Daddy” seethed; it threatened. It was decisively not a delicate, feminine utterance of melancholy, not the work of some flower-garlanded Ophelia floating passively downstream. Plath sounded angry enough to kill
somebody
, to be certain, but—in “Daddy,” anyway—she wasn’t on that list.

So who was? Not just Dad: The vampire husband, the torturous screw, the Meinkampf looker? What did he
do
?

It wasn’t idle curiosity. Plath died six days before Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
was first published. The
Time
article was published in the same year as Valerie Solanas’s first essay. By 1968, two years after “Daddy’s” appearance in
Time
, the New York Radical Women would be marching on the Miss America pageant; that same year, dissidents who found Friedan and her NOW organization too conservative would converge with Valerie, and make her shooting of Andy into a
cause célèbre
. Plath had released a poem of rage against husbands and fathers—a poem that identified husbands and fathers with brutality, with violence, with
oppression
—at precisely the moment that American women were ready to rage against the sexist men in their lives.

And Sylvia had an advantage: Unlike Valerie, she was not living on the margins. She had published a book before
her death, had studied with Robert Lowell, had given readings for the BBC, was a “real” writer with real credentials. “Confessional” writing itself was even a respected form, albeit one practiced largely by men like Lowell. Being white, straight, middle-class, a housewife, a mother, a good girl from a good college: All of these made her seem “representative” (at least, according to one very limiting definition of “representative”—which, to be fair, was the definition plenty of second-wave feminists used) and made her death seem like more than an isolated tragedy or an aberration in the pattern. And so, the groundswell of female anger underneath Sylvia, and the ways she resembled the American ideal, turned “Daddy” from a poem into an anthem.

And when the details became clear—that Plath’s husband was a poet named Ted Hughes; that he had cheated on her while she was nursing their infant son; that she had kicked him out; that, because she had died before the divorce was finalized, and left no will, he controlled the publication of her work and received the profits from it—well, that anger had a very convenient place to go.

“I accuse / Ted Hughes,” wrote Robin Morgan, in her poem “The Arraignment.” Specifically, she accused him of wife-beating and murder. As out-of-line as these accusations seem now, with five intervening decades of proof against them, Morgan also wrote a few things that were harder to deny. Namely, that Hughes was making
“a mint / by becoming Plath’s posthumous editor.”

Hughes threatened to sue. All copies of the offending book,
Monster
, were eventually pulled from Great Britain. This, it turned out, was where the rage against Hughes really originated: He kept a choke hold on any public utterance about Plath. If a friend published a two-part memoir of Plath’s final days in the
Observer
, Hughes would make sure the second part got pulled. If a biographer wanted to quote her substantially, her estate—Hughes and his sister Olwyn, who disliked Plath in life and didn’t get any fonder of her after death—would dictate Hughes-friendly rewrites before giving permission. And the people forbidden by Hughes to publish material about Sylvia Plath included, crucially, Sylvia Plath herself.
Ariel
came out—but Hughes had changed the order of poems and omitted some “personally aggressive” ones. Her journals were released—but Hughes admitted to burning or losing the ones from the last months of her life, and the edited versions were full of [OMISSION] marks.
The Bell Jar
was published—but Plath’s second novel, about a woman facing the dissolution of her marriage, managed to get “lost” as well, one more glaring [OMISSION] in what had come to be a highly suspicious list.

Hughes was not evil. He grieved Plath, and suffered greatly: Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he left Plath, committed suicide herself a few years later, and killed their daughter as well. And, in all the censoring he did, he may have genuinely been trying to protect Sylvia’s reputation. When her unedited journals were published, in 1999, it
turned out the most suspicious [OMISSION] marks weren’t hiding confessions of Hughes’s brutality, as many initially suspected; they were hiding Plath’s complaints about Ted’s personal hygiene. He hadn’t beaten her, he just didn’t want the world to know how rarely he showered.