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| Why feminism is worth fighting for |
I spent last summer driving back and forth to Maine for Sagan’s immunizations, and working on the new house. The move was in September--a whole year ago now--and the walls and windows remain unfinished and the house itself is a work in progress. Also, and we may be the only family in New England to have consciously made this decision, we are living without internet. The discussion continues to be whether or not there is a way to get internet (including smart phones) that would not involve having life taken over by it—and I can’t think of a way.
So I am living without it, like the Amish. It makes it difficult to maintain a blog, although I’ve been intending to since Sagan’s birth. In order to put these words on paper, and then onscreen, I must close myself in a room with earplugs, and harden my heart to the banging on the door, and somehow find a way toward a creative self.
My last adventure was attending all three days of the “International Fiction Now” conference at Brown University, a 50-minute drive from Wareham, just for the gorgeous pleasure of hearing sentences strung together. It was a celebration of the work of Robert Coover, to whom I can’t help but refer now as “Bob.” It was a stunning assortment of writers. And also rather misogynist.
One of the things that happened in my two-year hiatus, in addition to me birthing a daughter, was the #metoo movement, to which I listened, enrapt. (When one does not have internet, one listens to the radio during all waking hours. As if one lived in 1944.) Having a child makes you realize the inequities between men and women like nothing else. I was struck by Robert Coover’s story the final night. Yes, it was absurdist. Yes, experimental. It’s more or less a story as a joke, a story as a concept—but like so many of his stories there’s much more going on, and underneath the surface is a wife cooking and cleaning and raising children for a man, a man she has sex with in the moonlight, a man for whom she toils. And I kept finding these women at the edges of the conference. The wife at the end of Jonathan Baumbach’s story “Baby,” who announces to the author of the story—busy writing his collection of short stories with a one-year-old baby as main character—that lunch is ready. Were I so lucky as to have someone announce that lunch were ready for me. Dorcas Palmer in Marlon James’s reading from “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Even the beautiful younger women, in their sixties, or seventies, accompanying the decrepit male writers who read at the conference, in their eighties and nineties. These women, most second or third wives, were the ones doing the child-rearing, the dishes, the laundry while their male partners wrote. I thought this, as I thought of my own daughter at home.
In absolute numbers the percentage of women writers reading at the conference, in the sessions I attended, was 38 percent—11 men to seven women. It reminded me of this interview I heard on NPR: “If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50. And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.” —Our Feminized Society
[the quote is from Geena Davis, and her Institute on Gender in Media--lots of great stuff in her interview, and at the Institute's Research page]
Even that doesn’t represent the truth of it, because 100 percent of the late-night sessions—the key evening speakers, the elder statesmen of the conference—were men: Ben Marcus, TC Boyle, Bill Kennedy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and of course, Bob Coover. The women, even such impressive names as Edwidge Dandicat and Siri Hustvedt, were relegated to the afternoons. And the highest percentage of women was in the first-night session, with six readers—four women, two men. Six readers crammed into one session that went late into the night, at a smaller venue, with each reader given less time.
As the New Yorker so succinctly puts it:
So I am living without it, like the Amish. It makes it difficult to maintain a blog, although I’ve been intending to since Sagan’s birth. In order to put these words on paper, and then onscreen, I must close myself in a room with earplugs, and harden my heart to the banging on the door, and somehow find a way toward a creative self.
My last adventure was attending all three days of the “International Fiction Now” conference at Brown University, a 50-minute drive from Wareham, just for the gorgeous pleasure of hearing sentences strung together. It was a celebration of the work of Robert Coover, to whom I can’t help but refer now as “Bob.” It was a stunning assortment of writers. And also rather misogynist.
One of the things that happened in my two-year hiatus, in addition to me birthing a daughter, was the #metoo movement, to which I listened, enrapt. (When one does not have internet, one listens to the radio during all waking hours. As if one lived in 1944.) Having a child makes you realize the inequities between men and women like nothing else. I was struck by Robert Coover’s story the final night. Yes, it was absurdist. Yes, experimental. It’s more or less a story as a joke, a story as a concept—but like so many of his stories there’s much more going on, and underneath the surface is a wife cooking and cleaning and raising children for a man, a man she has sex with in the moonlight, a man for whom she toils. And I kept finding these women at the edges of the conference. The wife at the end of Jonathan Baumbach’s story “Baby,” who announces to the author of the story—busy writing his collection of short stories with a one-year-old baby as main character—that lunch is ready. Were I so lucky as to have someone announce that lunch were ready for me. Dorcas Palmer in Marlon James’s reading from “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Even the beautiful younger women, in their sixties, or seventies, accompanying the decrepit male writers who read at the conference, in their eighties and nineties. These women, most second or third wives, were the ones doing the child-rearing, the dishes, the laundry while their male partners wrote. I thought this, as I thought of my own daughter at home.
In absolute numbers the percentage of women writers reading at the conference, in the sessions I attended, was 38 percent—11 men to seven women. It reminded me of this interview I heard on NPR: “If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50. And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.” —Our Feminized Society
[the quote is from Geena Davis, and her Institute on Gender in Media--lots of great stuff in her interview, and at the Institute's Research page]
Even that doesn’t represent the truth of it, because 100 percent of the late-night sessions—the key evening speakers, the elder statesmen of the conference—were men: Ben Marcus, TC Boyle, Bill Kennedy, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and of course, Bob Coover. The women, even such impressive names as Edwidge Dandicat and Siri Hustvedt, were relegated to the afternoons. And the highest percentage of women was in the first-night session, with six readers—four women, two men. Six readers crammed into one session that went late into the night, at a smaller venue, with each reader given less time.
As the New Yorker so succinctly puts it:
But the balance is so hard. Especially now that I understand the
visceral tug of motherhood. I mean that literally: I feel it in my
viscera.
Most of it is the sheer pleasure of mothering. It’s pleasurable. The oxytocins bursts after childbirth and during nursing—the largest injection of the love and happiness hormone that human beings ever experience. I understand why women keep doing it.
“Joy has been the great surprise of motherhood.” —Karen Russell, "Orange World," @NewYorker [again] #karenrussell #orangeworld
From the novel “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti:
“On the one hand, the joy of children. On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose? The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do. The doing is what seems hard. The having seems marvelous.”Spoiler alert: she decides not to have kids. Spoiler alert: and still has time to write a novel.
My main feeling after hearing “Orange World” by Karen Russell was jealousy. She, too, had a “geriatric pregnancy.” Her discussion of breastfeeding and the joy of having a child into your late thirties can only be autobiographical. So I assume, without having the time or inclination to google. But she took that time and wrote it, used it to make this exquisite, violent, crepuscular story.
I’ve been doing some spectacular reading though. During the course of Sagan’s incubation and infancy, I read all seven volumes of Proust. If we named her after the Princesse de Sagan, then I knew I must read the entirety of “In Search of Lost Time." That is the gift Sagan gave me by being born, the gift that K. gave me by originally suggesting we name her after the astrophysicist—that now I have become acquainted with these other Sagans, too. The ultimate aristocrats for Marcel Proust, and the nom de plume of Francoise Sagan.
My favorite Frenchism within "In Search of Lost Time"—he spends a lot of pages describing aspects and vernacular of the French language, some of the funniest parts, if you're acquainted with French—was how Francoise, the housekeeper and a much more important character than you’d expect—called the Princesse de Sagan “la Sagante.”
La Sagante. That’s my daughter all over.
Francoise—another woman who hangs around doing the cooking and cleaning for a man that writes. Or doesn’t write, but sits and broods about writing. (Not dissimilarly to Coover’s main character.) She dusts his pages. And rearranges them.
As does Francoise Sagan—her book Bonjour Tristesse stunned me. Somehow also she rearranges Proust’s story and retells it, all those hundreds of thousands of words in 100 slim pages. How is it that more people don’t read this book, or talk about it? Or know about it? Because it was written by a nineteen-year-old girl? It strikes me that there are so many teenaged girl heroines because it’s not until later in life that women get beaten down by being told what they are not to do. Joan of Arc, Francoise Sagan. Albertine.
I am writing about misogyny in a blog post I will never publish because I am afraid of a misogynist backlash. What will Bob Coover think? What will Rick Moody think? What will William Kennedy think? Will any of them ever read my novel in which a nineteen-year-old girl is beaten by her boyfriend? Is it misogynist that I have written this scene? Or is it misogynist that we don’t have more novels in which this ubiquitous violence is explored, discussed? Two women die every week at the hands of their domestic partners. Not in the US, in Britain. In the US it’s four a day. And it isn’t even news. When was the last time you heard a story about domestic violence on TV? Or are you too busy watching puppy videos?
My daughter makes me want to be a better feminist. I want this violence not to touch her. I want discrimination and self-doubt not to hamstring her as it has hamstrung me. Most men, and many women, still claim such discrimination doesn’t exist. Yet I see how already it affects her. How all of the characters in Winnie the Pooh (save Kanga, the mother--natch) and Sesame Street are male. How people respond strangely when she collects spiders, or spends half an hour staring at a bulldozer—and respond gushingly when she kisses a stuffed animal. I see how my friends with boy children are embarrassed when their sons clutch at baby dolls. Children aren’t stupid. Millennia of evolution have caused them to be exquisitely sensitive to our every nonverbal, subconscious response.
Girl children know. I know. You know. They know.
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