Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Read online

  Just as everybody was about to crack, there came an ecstatic letter announcing that she had been delivered of a child. The purpose behind all this disruptive secrecy was what I call the “O-lan Syndrome,” after Pearl Buck’s heroine in The Good Earth, who dropped her baby in the birth bucket and went immediately back to work in the rice paddy. The editor wanted to hold herself forth as a Superwoman who could have a baby without—are you ready? —disrupting her career. It didn’t wash; the eerie sensation that she had vanished into a cave made it less like The Good Earth than The Blue Lagoon.

  Even when nothing serious goes wrong, the practitioners of Mother’s Own feminism can be maddening to work with. Take the editor with a five-year-old son whom she was raising according to the precepts of the “Free Children” section of Ms. magazine. She wanted him to imbibe the idea that women have a right to careers, so she took manuscripts home with her and edited them while he watched so he would grow up to respect women as equals. When I got my manuscript back, I found that she had drawn little smile button faces in the margins whenever she came to something she liked, and little sad faces with down-turned mouths and teardrops whenever she came to something she wanted me to change. It was like getting a letter from Patricia Schroeder.

  It never stops. I used to think it was safe to work with post-menopausal married women whose children were grown—until I got sidetracked by a lawyer in her late fifties who was two months late with an option contract because she was planning her daughter’s wedding. That did it: I told my agent to see to it that I worked with men, spinsters, and childless widows only. Pseudo-feminists won’t like that one bit, but as Patrick Henry used to say, “If this be treason, then tough titty.”

  My prejudice (read postjudice) against married women was illustrated to perfection in the September 8, 1986 issue of Newsweek. When TWA flight attendants were fired after their unsuccessful strike, Victoria Frankovich, president of the Independent Federation of Flight Attendants, was widely believed to have mismanaged the negotiations with TWA boss Carl Icahn. Frankovich’s critics faulted her “for not attending a meeting last summer where both the pilots and the mechanics agreed to Icahn’s terms. Instead she presided over her husband’s class reunion at their Los Angeles home.” Newsweek quotes Icahn: “I begged her to come to that meeting. If she had shown up, she could have made a deal.”

  It sounds enough like the career matron shenanigans I have encountered to be entirely believable. Mrs. Frankovich’s decision to play hostess for her husband instead of attending a vital meeting is a workplace version of the notorious social trick that women have traditionally pulled on each other, the trick that every feminist screed and consciousness-raising group for the last twenty-five years has deplored: breaking an engagement with a girlfriend at the last minute when a man calls for a date.

  If married women are going to do things like this, a boycott might knock some sense into their heads. Employers who have had all they can stand of wife-and-mother feminism should take a leaf from me and practice preferential hiring of spinsters—on the q.t., of course; one must find ways to get around the strictures of a free country. Think of the advantages: employers would get credit for hiring a woman, yet she would have a lifestyle identical to that of male employees from pre-fathering days. She would arrive at the office with no thoughts of babysitters and day care centers dancing like rancid sugarplums in her head, she could put in as much overtime as needed on the shortest notice, and there would never be any spills or vomit on the brief or manuscript she took home.

  If this suggestion catches on, I’ll dance at an editor’s wedding.

  The reason I can “do what I do” is because I’ve never married. He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

  It’s time America admitted that old maids give all women a good name. Take the matter of credit ratings. During the seventies, “single” became a pejorative; it can mean just about anything and usually does. An old maid and a divorcee with three children to support are both “single,” but the financial resemblance ends there. Instead of going to obsessive lengths to help women conceal their marital status under the muzzy blanket of Ms., feminists should have encouraged the inclusion of spinster on forms and applications. It would have pulled up women’s overall credit rating and eliminated some of the automatic discrimination against them as a group caused by the bill-paying problems of liberated divorcees.

  The same point applies to auto insurance rates. Old maids look at the road, not at what Jason did to Debbie’s dress. It would be one small step for common sense if insurance companies discriminated in favor of women who do not drive with children in the car. Actuarials being by definition the heart and soul of discrimination, however, our pseudo-feminists have already succeeded in nagging one state, Montana, into adopting a unisex risk-factoring law. The Big Sky now prohibits “discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status in the issuance or operation of insurance policies,” according to the November 1987 Phyllis Schlafly Report—whose author is even less likely to champion old maids than are the pseudo-feminists.

  Even as I write this, I am having a fight with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Virginia over the astronomical premiums they have been charging me. They have qualified me for “Healthy Virginian” reduced rates, but I told them I would rather have old maid rates and suggested they contemplate Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation, “Hell is other people,” while they figure my stress risk. If that doesn’t work, I will tell them to pay a visit to Old Maid Gardens and contemplate the tombstones.

  Susan B. Anthony 1820—1906

  Anna Dickinson 1842—1932

  Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell 1821—1910

  Dr. Mary Olive Hunt 1819—1908

  Clara Barton 1821—1912

  Dorothea Dix 1802—1886

  Sarah Grimké 1792—1873

  Mary Moody Emerson 1774—1863

  Sarah Fuller 1836—1927

  Harriet Smith 1818—1905

  Abigail F. Spear 1833—1927

  Sarah E. Doyle 1830—1922

  Elizabeth Spear 1842—1934

  Elizabeth Peabody 1804—1894

  Laura Clay 1849—1941

  Sarah M. Peale 1800—1895

  Elizabeth Sturgiss 1788—1873

  A certain teacher and activist is little known today outside feminist history circles, but she is the undisputed star of Old Maid Gardens. Here she is, that perennial unplucked flower of reform politics … .

  Emily Howland 1827-1929

  By God, that’s what you call a good set of bowels. Have you ever noticed that there are no old maids in Correctol and Ex-Lax commercials? They beam the message that women are three times more likely than men to suffer from constipation, yet the sufferers portrayed in these minidramas are always matrons and their married daughters, who discuss the problem and conclude that it comes from “doing so much for others”—an unconscious gem of truth-in-advertising hinting that marriage and motherhood are the ties that bind.

  Spinsterhood is Nature’s Own feminism, the only kind that works, but the vast majority of women would rather explode than admit it. Reviving old maid jokes might help to change their minds. Far from being sexist, as the pseudo-feminists claim, these jokes indicate a much greater degree of real independence than anything enjoyed by today’s beset practitioners of Having It All.

  Before going to bed, the old maid of song and story spent half an hour locking the doors and windows of a house she occupied alone. It sounds like a big house. She also had plenty of privacy in the asparagus patch where she played leapfrog without benefit of masturbation workshops, so she must have owned a good deal of land as well. Her ability to hire “hired men” was limitless, and when she begged them to marry her she always rattled off a tempting list of livestock to make them forget her lack of physical charms. The “feminization of poverty” is nowhere in evidence in these jokes, whose message is the valuable reminder that emotional deprivation (if such it be) has its compensations
.

  In my many rereadings of Gone With the Wind I never did identify with Scarlett, and the Tarleton twins long ago lost their charm for me. Now my favorite character is India Wilkes:

  The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely on her shoulders now … . Her pale lashless eyes looked directly and uncompromisingly upon the world and her thin lips were ever set in haughty tightness. There was an air of dignity and pride about her now that, oddly enough, became her better than the determined girlish sweetness of her days at Twelve Oaks.

  As this passage indicates, people like old maids more than they realize. It’s especially true of men, who have been brought up to value renunciation for the sake of higher purposes. This bleak male outlook has been condemned by pseudo-feminists, but Richard Lovelace’s “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more” is the unhumanized man at his best. Men are not very good at loving, but they are experts at admiring and respecting; the woman who goes after their admiration and respect will often come out better than she who goes after their love.

  Of all the benefits of spinsterhood, the greatest is carte blanche. Once a woman is called “that crazy old maid” she can get away with anything.

  5

  FROM CAPTAIN MARVEL TO CAPTAIN VALIUM

  Sometimes I think there is a conspiracy to drive American men insane. The November 30, 1981 issue of Newsweek contained a Lifestyle article about the joys of single parenting called “A New Kind of Life With Father,” and another called “An Epidemic of Incest”—in the same issue.

  During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs. Any man reading that issue of Newsweek would be entirely justified in following the advice in the Camel cigarettes “Where a Man Belongs” ad that shows a drifter, his duffel bag beside him, frantically pumping his way out of town on a railroad handcar in pursuit of the womanless world of vagabondism.

  If he did, he would promptly run into the “feminization of poverty.” The world of the down-and-out used to be an exclusively masculine society, but now those colorful denizens of male despair, the Bowery bum and the rail-riding hobo, have been replaced by the bag lady and the welfare mother. Women have even taken over Skid Row.

  Life for the American man is like life with the governess in The Turn of the Screw; there are some good days, but sooner or later something awful happens and he’s in the soup again.

  The Iranian hostage crisis, coming as it did at the end of the decade of feminism, created an unparalleled crisis in American manhood. For the first time, a head of state cast open aspersions on the masculinity of an American president, thereby emasculating all American men. Pakistan’s General Zia, an Alpha male if ever there was one, advised Jimmy Carter to “act like the president of a superpower,” while an Asian diplomat at the United Nations sneered, “America is like your wife, always around for another beating.”

  Our pundits took up their scalpels, consulting, so it seemed, Roget’s listings under feminine to describe the Carter personality. Robert Thompson called him “the Mona Lisa.” George Will used hysteria, shrillness, and frenzy. William Safire produced unrestrained restraint, self-flagellating, unprecedented weakness, acquiescing, and caving in. Jack Anderson used wavering, waffling, rhetorical tsk-tsks, pusillanimous, obsequious, hesitancy, and wishy-washy. But the most frequently used word was impotent.

  Joseph Kraft’s prediction, “a disgust is building and Carter will pay,” echoed Lamartine’s reference to the “revolution of contempt” of 1848, when the French overthrew the Carter-like King Louis Philippe, who so abhorred symbols of power that he removed the fleurs-de-lis from the Palais Royal and referred to himself as the “Citizen King.”

  We got rid of the helpless Carter, but as things turned out it was just another turn of the screw. Far from ending, the masculinity crisis worsened during the Reagan years, whose most revealing visual metaphor was the crestfallen face of Eugene Hasenfus, the hunk with hurt feelings, emerging from the jungle looking like a macho poor soul.

  From Edwin Meese’s pouty mouth and wounded eyes to Robert McFarlane’s suicide attempt with pills instead of a gun, the stand-tall administration gave off a pervasive sense of emasculation. Sometimes it spilled over into effeminacy. The favorite political buzzword of the eighties, “mean-spirited,” has a definite hiss to it and cannot be uttered without an accompanying sniff. The endless stream of retractions and clarifications that poured forth from the Reaganites recalled sorority house upheavals. Girlish double emphasis flew fast and furious as reporters grilled the stand-tall clarifier on what he really said, while he insisted that he never said such a thing and tried to explain what he really meant.

  The feminization of poverty is just one aspect of a larger feminization of America. Pressure groups are increasingly pushing us toward government by nagging and cajolery; the slightest slip of the tongue by a politician brings forth shrill demands for apologies that brush perilously close to “If you don’t take it back, I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live!”

  Politicians of both parties are in a race to prove that they have an acceptable supply of female traits. They boast incessantly about their “caring ‘n’ compassion”—the “’n’ factor” having been beatified in “women ‘n’ children,” “blacks ‘n’ Hispanics,” “education ‘n’ awareness.” If their boasts are convincing, audiences will cheer them—not with whistles or clenched fists but by waving a pointed index finger in the air like a henpecker in full throttle.

  Logic, long cherished by men as the premier male trait, came under fire during the Bork hearings, when female “feeling” became the order of the day. Bork was too “detached” and “objective” to be a judge, said his opponents; he must be seen as “seeming to care” if he wanted to be on the Supreme Court.

  The feminization of America reached apogee in the political conventions of 1988 when the nominees for the most demanding job in the world boasted about how much time they spend with their families. That longstanding butt of male jokes and cartoons, the Family Man, was having a heyday. There were children all over the place, making speeches about Daddy, nominating Daddy, hugging Daddy, while the television cameras panned over the smoke-free room picking out mother-delegates with babes in arms. At the end, we got a ceremony that will surely produce a new word for American English: the “Familee,” wherein the candidate rounds up every relative he can lay hands on and drags them up on the platform to play with balloons.

  Watching the 1988 conventions and listening to the maudlin tributes to the Family Man, I recalled a very different tribute delivered more than sixty years ago. When Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was working on a farm during his summer vacation, another boy said to him, “If my father were president, I wouldn’t work on a farm.” Young Coolidge replied, “If my father were your father you would.”

  For once, I wished I were married to a presidential candidate so I could grab the microphone at the Familee and say: “The children are scared to death of him—all he has to do is look at them.”

  One of the worst problems the American man has to deal with is the American woman’s love affair with reification.

  To reify means to regard as material or concrete that which is not. It’s a natural mental process that everyone indulges in from time to time. Longing for electricity on a primitive oil-lit chicken ranch in The Egg and I, Betty MacDonald came to think of kilowatts as peppercorns.

  The vitamin has been reified. A chemical intangible originally defined as a unit of nutritive value, it was long ago reified into a pill. Now it is a pill; no one except a few precise scientists defines it as anything else. Once the vitamin became a pill, it became “real” according to the precepts of American Cartesianism: “I swallow it, therefore it is.” The same thing has happened to the calorie, which That Cosmo Girl thinks of as a grinning demon with human capacities for sabotage and betrayal.

  These examples of reification are harmless enough. The trouble starts
when we get into deeper areas of human relationships.

  When Freudianism crossed the ocean and made ego a household word, the male ego took shape in the American woman’s mind as a large gaseous bubble ever in danger of deflation from a stray pin. Teeth and a digestive system were added when women’s magazines started running articles about the “care and feeding” of it. Gradually the flesh became Word, so to speak, as the female subconscious turned men into their own egos. Men picked up the idea and ran with it, proudly staking their claim to abnegation by saying, in effect, “Mon ego, c’est moi.”

  The reification of marriage reveals the American woman in all her sexless vainglory. The wildly popular Ladies Home Journal column called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” triggers instant visions of a passenger named Marriage singing “Nearer, My God, To Thee” on the deck of the Titanic.

  In From Housewife to Heretic, former Mormon goodwife Sonia Johnson said that her husband left her because “he was tired of working on our marriage.” It gets better. In an interview with Nancy Reagan, Eleanor Harris Howard asked, “How does one keep a marriage lastingly happy?” Mrs. Reagan replied, “Any marriage has to be worked on. It takes nourishing—you can’t just let it lie there.”

  Think about that. The American woman’s concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping bag without air, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping—what the magazines call “breathing life into your marriage.” Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo’s ghost, a quasi-living entity that prevents the couple from ever being alone together until, as with the Johnsons, the reified marriage comes between them and they get a divorce.