As was the case with Thelma and Louise, The Women’s Room was denounced as a ‘comic-strip psychodrama.’ But who was being caricatured? Like Thelma and Louise, it was not the representation of the women that incensed the pundits; it was the novel’s portrayal of suburban men. French marginalized the male characters, pushed the husbands to the periphery of her story. And so, they come off flat, cartoonish. But the truth is, from the perspective of the fifties-era isolated suburban housewives, men really were at the periphery; they were the shadows, not the substance, of their daily lives. The men were often strangers to their wives and children; they left early and they came home late – and few in the household knew exactly what happened between the time they got dropped off at the train station and the time they returned for dinner and a snooze by the TV. Most suburban women ranged across a feminized and juvenilized landscape, populated by mothers, toddlers, and female grade school teachers. Especially for women and men of this period who married early – for they had married earlier than any other generation – their mate was often someone they barely knew from the start, a half-made-up figure woven from teen romance fantasies and social mythologies. French intentionally portrayed the men as ‘stick figures’ – her words – as she observes in The Women’s Room, men and women who are polarized, men and women who are conforming to narrowly defined sex roles do come to view each other as two-dimensional after a while. ‘So maybe the problem is just that we don’t know each other very well, men and women,’ Mira says. ‘Maybe we need each other too much to be able to know each other. But the truth is, I don’t think men knew Norm [Mira’s husband] any better than I did … He bought an image and it was all he bought and now it’s all he has, and he is going round and round in it, living in it the way children live in daydreams.’
The final grievance lodged against The Women’s Room was the most erroneous – and, regrettably for us, it remains erroneous to this day. French’s portrait was deemed outdated. She was accused of grousing about a bygone era, when male society and male institutions still treated women as inferiors, sex objects and nursemaids. ‘The Women’s Room is a wax museum of male-oppressor villains,’ Newsweek opined at the time of the novel’s publication. Clearly, with battery by male ‘loved ones’ – then and now – the leading form of injury for women in America, with women still shouldering the vast proportion of the childcare and household duties, with women still making much less than men in the same jobs, with only a tiny single-digit percentage of women wielding any sort of formal political leadership in the country, French’s portrait of an inequitable society is hardly quaint. With sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape at plague-like proportions in the nineties, these male villains hardly belong to a wax museum. If only they did. In fact, as a recidivist reader of The Women’s Room in 1992, I was impressed, and distressed, most by the novel’s awful relevance to our times. I had hoped for signs of outmodedness, but the same damn problems French identifies are still with us: the failure of men to take part in the life of the home, the absence of women from the halls of public power, the male culture’s insistence that women would be happier if they ‘just went home,’ the ignoring and demeaning and silencing of women’s voices in the schools and the courts and the offices and the national discourse, the general lack of respect for women’s needs and demands, the wilful inability of men in power to ‘get it’ when women speak up, and on and on. While a social revolution has occurred in the dreams and aspirations and attitudes of women, no equivalent transformation has taken place in the hearts and minds of men. Notwithstanding the rise of the men’s movement and the tendency of Yuppie lawyers to beat drums in the woods on weekends, men still don’t seem to know, or want to know, much more about the inner world of Norm – or Mira. They know only that their sex seems more lost and confused than ever – and that the feminists, somehow, are to blame.
While there is much that is relevant: to today’s woman in The Women’s Room, it seems to me that modern man in confusion over ‘what women want’ might profit even more from a reading of French’s novel. Male readers will find that French’s feminist characters, like feminists in real life, aren’t hell-bent on black magic, child-burnings or emasculations. All her heroines are asking for is an equal footing. The Women’s Room is not a rant against the breadwinning man or a glorification of the female suburban saint. Its message is far more fundamental and, consequently, far more incendiary. As Val puts it during one of the women’s discussions, ‘The simple truth – that men are only equal – can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb.’
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