In the final part of Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, the heroine, a writer named Anna cracks up over the fearful state of things. Actually, the bleak English post-war atomic world has nothing to do with her craziness. She's simply been dumped by a heartless guy. Then Stalin suddenly dies, and Anna really loses it. She retreats to one room, papered over with newspaper articles, and stares glassily into space. You see, Stalin was her daddy-hope for fixing the world, although she always conveniently ignored his bad self when it came to those mass Soviet purges.
The Golden Notebook was, I thought at the time I read it, a life-changer and life-line. It was comforting to me that she had gone nuts, since I was nuts too. I'd married in haste, was in the repent-at-leisure stage, and sunk in a clinical depression. My German Freudian shrink told me to accommodate myself to the voman's role, give up my writing and, I guess, learn to make sourbraten. I was also too young to understand that rad-lib writer Anna, was mostly in a bad dating cycle, rather than being too-sensitive for this evil world. And so I concluded that to change anything (myself for starters and then society) I'd have to write lumpy important books and be a commie.
In fairness to my befuddled young self, there wasn't much around to support women who wanted choices other than The Big Five: wife, stewardess, librarian, teacher, or nurse. You had Little Women, The Gold Notebook, The Feminine Mystique, and The Second Sex, and the last two made me want to kill myself. Three years later I got my cum laude degree, became (yes) a teacher and a department head, enrolled in grad school, and then got a package from my dyke cousin in NYC. What tumbled out was a bunch of smearily printed pamphlets from the Red-Stocking League, including the lunatic screed from Valarie Solanis, The SCUM Manifesto. Also, around and about my little college town, women were gathering in consciousness-raising groups. The long and short of it, was that I read the smeary pamphlets, talked to other women, and began to consider my life, using my very own nascent brain.
This stuff is on my mind, since I hear Sarah Palin referred to as a feminist, and it ain't so. Either that, or the term has become so debased we need another word that comprehends the simple angry female cri du coeur for equality. Sarah, on the other hand, is one in a long line of what guys approvingly call a spunky l'il gal and, going back to 1930's musicals, spunky l'il gals have always been accepted as long as they remember to wear a face-full of make-up, and wrinkle their noses cutely. Most of us grown-up pissed-off gals recognize her for what she is, and would do about anything not to be in the same room with her.
Having lived through the torment of a choice-free pre-feminist world, and then the Second Wave of Feminism, my life has not been without fights, self-doubt, and large costs. But during those years, when the life I wanted was locked and barred from me, unscaleable as a Visigoth fortress, and defended by cruel dopes, it never occurred to me that the battle wasn't worth it.
My problem with the Sarah Palin's of the world is their blithe dismissal of history and it's costs. They are ignorant, arrogantly rejoicing in their knee-jerk world. And they sure as shit haven't paid their dues.
A Zen koan asks, What do you do when a visitor spills ashes on your Buddha statue?
Ans. You tell your visitor to clean up the mess, and get the hell out of your house.
No comments:
Post a Comment