Getting a jump on Women's Equality Day, August 26, 2022, I pondered the progress of celebrating women in literature. Amanda Gorman has set a new standard in poetry and joins the ranks of Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and even back to Sappho.
In 2007 one of my icons was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: Doris Lessing. The New York Times reported that “moments after the announcement, the literary world embarked on a time-honored post-Nobel tradition: assessing – and sometimes sniffing at – the work of the prize-winner: Another literary icon weighed in. Harold Bloom*, Yale professor and a literary critic we loved to hate, damned Ms. Lessing with faint praise when he said: “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable.” But then he went on to say the award was a case of “pure political correctness.”
Bloom’s statement underlines what has been at the root of frustration and the despair of women across all disciplines, women who have striven for excellence and, in fact, have shown genius, only to be debunked or patronized by their male counterparts. Certainly, in the sisterhood of women writers this has been the case. Writing in the large, dark shadow of husband Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath felt undermined to the point of her taking her own life. Similarly, Virginia Woolf put stones in her pockets and waded into the river Ouze in 1941. I am sure there was a man behind it. In the opening chapter of Woof’s novel, A Room of One’s Own, she wrote: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction – and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unresolved.”
The thing is, Mr. Bloom, political correctness is meant to do away with stereotypes in the vernacular, but in fact, stereotypes are too easy, too convenient to simply dismiss. Stereotypes are the doctrine of history, the lines in the sand in the power struggle between the sexes. Moreover, stereotypes and labels provide a safe haven, because males are often unpredictable to women; and women are a mystery to men.
Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, right? Men are sort of warlike, hot and prickly and women are sugar and spice and all about Eros, isn’t it? So, when a man acts out, women might be thinking, “What planet is he from?”
Jeremy Clarkson, an editorialist for The Independent newspaper in England, wrote, “Men are a lost cause, and we’re proud of it! It’s a known fact that when given directions, men hear the first word and then shut down. When the Romans invaded England, they went home to celebrate and didn’t come back for 80 years. Why? Because they couldn’t find it… Being a man, I am unwilling to pull over and ask someone for directions, because this would imply, they are somehow cleverer than me.” Women, we have all been there. Sitting silently in the front seat, willing the male driver to just roll down the window and ask directions. Channeling the man to “Please, pull into the gas station, pleeeeze.” Never happen
Furthermore, in terms of the relativity of time, there is a huge disparity between the genders. The stereotypical portrayal to prove this scientific fact is the cartoon of the man tapping his toe and looking at his watch, as his wife/girlfriend/mother is putting the finishing touches on her makeup or, God forbid, trying on shoes.
Science has proven that men and women do not view time in the same way. Women think there is way more time in the universe than men do. Men seem more acutely sensitive to the dwindling supply of time and exhibit the typical behavior of the species to signal this sensitivity: the jingling of the keys.
Sweeping generalizations? Standard stereotypes.
It was a given that women, especially in those decades prior to the late 1960’s were defined by their husbands. They required support from the man of the house and the trade-off was perhaps that the woman participated in allowing her own feelings of worth to take a back seat to the male ego. The role of homemaker was devalued. And now even a politically correct moniker of Domestic Engineer somehow rankles.
When the Civil Rights Movement pricked the consciousness of the nation in the 60’s, women were also clamouring for equality. Equal Pay for equal work was a revolutionary concept. A concept that has still not taken hold, I might add.
Then something happened in the early seventies. It was a sort of watershed moment that went almost unnoticed – a mere ripple after the tidal wave of change that crashed the shores of American in the 60’s. All of a sudden, the garden neighborhoods that had once been turning like the wheels of a large pram, went still.
But I am getting ahead of myself. In the mid-60’s contemporaries and I were moving from our single-sex prep school, to single sex women’s colleges to earn our M-R-S. The engagement ring on the finger at graduation was our mark of success. We had been schooled in the Cinderella Myth and firmly believed that our prince on a white charger would set us up in a house with the picket fence, a couple of kids and a crock pot.
We would gain a sort of status, step into the assigned role, and be satisfied. I was living my fairytale. With a copy of Joy of Cooking and Dr. Spock things were turning out just as I had been promised. The house, the dog, the little girl and the baby boy. I had done a great job and had gotten it just right. If only Martha Stewart could have seen me then!
Then along came Richard Nixon, who spoiled everything. Mothers with babies no longer met on the neighborhood sidewalks to exchange pleasantries, recipes and light gossip. The neighborhood became a ghost town. The economy had shifted and it would take two incomes to pay a mortgage; gasoline prices had risen to the point where the petrol stations had to retool their pumps to accommodate the possibility of gas costing more than, wait for it, 99 cents! Can you imagine?! The country was war-weary and moving toward isolationism. The love-ins and demonstrations were no longer the top left hand column stories in the papers. The economists held our collective attention, and I held my breath.
One day the unspoken it happened: my prince came home and rather brutally, to my mind, exclaimed: You’re going back to work. You have to start pulling your own weight.
Since then, we have come a long way, baby! Childcare options have improved. Women have broken through the glass ceiling in the business world. I was fortunate that I could go back to university and change my business degree – really, it was glorified secretarial training – to a degree in Literature. Now I could pull my own weight and still be there for my children: I became a teacher.
Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize for Literature, writes books that tell of women’s frustration with the traditional roles, the stereotyped expectations of men. She identifies deeply with the feminist movement. Her work, along with Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, have provided models for my own personal essays and poetry. Because buried under my Cinderella self, I knew I was a writer.
Joan Didion claims: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself on other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even hostile act.” Well, that is the other interesting thing about stereotypes, women are not supposed to be aggressive or hostile. We are the nurturers, the menders, the props.
So is this why Bloom took a potshot at Lessing? Did her assertive woman’s voice rattle his very male cage?
When we recognize that a woman is assertive, she is labelled aggressive, even shrill or worse. When Lady Macbeth delivers her passionate speech, “Come you Spirits…Unsex me here, / And fill me… with direst cruelty”, and when she urges her husband, whom she believes is “too full of the milk of human kindness”, to kill, he offers: “Bring forth male children only! For thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males.” It’s that stereotype again.
Traditionally, women are not meant to focus on the “I”. We are meant to put ourselves second. We are meant to sacrifice for our families. We are meant to be the “weaker sex”, the retiring, gentlewoman. If we are too demanding in our bid for the “I”, we are labelled “High Maintenance.”
But there have been some women who could work it in the man’s realm. Queen Elizabeth, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, although the men in her cabinet did wonder if she really was, indeed, a woman or simply a man in a dress. They dubbed her the Iron Lady. The Iron Maiden was, of course, the name of a particularly cruel form of medieval torture. So, kudos to Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, and Mette Frederiksen, to name a few of the women leaders in our time. And a special shout out to the many women of letters whose voices join our cry to be heard.
* Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, died at age 89 on October 14, 2019
