Still afraid of Virginia Woolf
March 7, 2003
It seems the latest reason to keep women out of the
workforce is a lack of sex, writes Pamela Bone.
In a scene in the film Far From Heaven, four middle-class American
women are sitting around a table, talking about sex. It's 1957. One says her husband
insists on it only once a week, and the others say
she's lucky. One knows of a woman whose husband wants it every night. It
is understood that, for women, sex is a burden. But they do love talking about
it.
It was like that. Some time around then, a neighbour
for whom I was baby-sitting told me she and her husband had given up sex for
Lent (don't ask me why she needed to convey this to a 15-year-old
non-Catholic). As a sacrifice? I asked. "Believe
me, it's no sacrifice for the woman," she snapped.
Of course women liked sex, which is why they devoured romance novels and
true-confessions magazines. They just didn't like it with their husbands. This
is doubtless a huge generalisation, and there may
have been many couples in the 1950s who had blissfully
happy sex lives. However, the correct attitude was that women should be
thankful if their husbands didn't "bother" them much.
Julianne Moore, who stars in Far From Heaven, plays another unhappy
1950s housewife in The Hours, a film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's
novel of the same name. This draws from the novel Mrs
Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, and is the story of a day in the life of three
women living in different eras. In both films the 1950s wives, however unhappy,
are loyal, loving and placatory.
It was not like that. I knew those 1950s wives; they were my mother, my
aunts, my friends' mothers. And they were as
sarcastic, as scornful, as contemptuous of their
husbands as only women who are without power can be. Why wouldn't they, being
just as smart as their husbands but expected to be subservient to them?
The release of The Hours has prompted not only new arguments about
the merits of Woolf's novels but new attacks on her character. Her writing is
"inept, ugly, fatuous and revoltingly self-indulgent", and Woolf
herself "poisoningly snobbish", wrote
Philip Hensher in The Age. "A
thoroughgoing philistine of the most revolutionary and destructive type, quite
prepared to bring the temple crashing down about her ears, that her grudges
might be paid back," wrote Theodore Dalrymple in
the American City Journal.
Virginia Woolf did come from a privileged, literary background, but still
was constrained by the role society decreed for women and denied the education
her brothers had. She hated being prosperous and comfortable.
"Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class; we
are weaker than the women of the working class," she wrote. Women writers
had to do their thinking "while they stirred the pot, while they rocked
the cradle", she mourned, which prompted one female critic to retort that
Woolf would not know which end of the cradle to stir.
Perhaps Woolf was right in thinking working-class women were stronger.
Certainly it's a mistake to think that before feminism all women lived lives of
quiet desperation. Those I remember were mainly cheerful, stoic, making the
best of things. Yet there is barely a woman around today who would want to swap
her life for her mother's.
It's amazing that 62 years after her death some people are still afraid of Virginia
Woolf. Amazing that so many years after women started breaking out of their
narrowly defined roles, conservatives are still chip-chipping away, trying to
prove it was all a big mistake. British sociologist Catherine Hakim and her
Australian acolytes try to make a big feminist argument by stating the obvious:
that some women prefer to be at home with children, some are career-focused and
some - the vast majority - want a balance of the two. Allowing for a bit more
conditioning, it's likely nearly as many men would want the same.
The latest reason women should not be having careers is that they are not
having enough sex (which means their partners are not getting enough sex, a
complaint 1950s husbands might have sympathised
with).
Sleep is the new sex, according to several new books on the phenomenon. The
message is that when one partner stops working - now guess which partner that
is most likely to be - the couple start having sex more often, and this
restores romance, rather than mere collegiality, to the marriage.
The truth is that today's egalitarian marriages are happier than those
1950s marriages. Surveys in the 1960s found married women, and single men, had
the poorest physical and mental health. Today married women and men report
similar happiness levels, with partnered people in general being happier than unpartnered.
If couples are too tired to have as much sex as they (both) want, that is
an argument for women and men to spend fewer hours in the paid workforce. By a
great coincidence, this is what the early feminists, in their idealism,
envisaged. The good news is that with a quarter of the working population now
"downshifting" in some way, it may at last be starting to happen.
Happy International Women's
Day. I fear we need it for a while yet.
Información sacada de: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/07/1046826528770.html
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