They love it like they love Diana, Princess of Wales, a true reverse Cinderella story for our time. I have always liked Diana, and thought her insistence on self-determination within the straitening confines of the royal family was particularly admirable in that it did not result in random, obnoxious rebellion, but was instead about wanting to be a good mother, a good humanitarian, a good person—to be lovely and graceful in all the ways that the royals just weren’t. She beat them at their own game, all the while insisting on the dignity and generosity of the self, and of all people. When she finally got rid of Charles and got on with her life, particularly in the last couple of months, she seemed to be saying, / was wood and now I am alive. Of course I liked her! I identified with her in some strange way. But I never would have thought it would feel like a light just suddenly went out in the world when she died. I think maybe what it’s about is that someone who had such glamour and style and loveliness but was still able to radiate so much warmth and compassion and caring is rare. A woman who can master beautiful gestures that can make people feel good and loved and recognized can be more important than having a solid economy or a good government or a lot of other things that seem necessary and are necessary—but not any more so than grace and beauty and a person whose mere existence makes it possible for everyone else to dream. People loved Princess Diana, and they were right to: I mean, man cannot live on bread alone. You can train five thousand or ten thousand or a million political theorists and economists and theologians and bureaucrats, but charm and charisma and charity and the desire to put celebrity to good use: hundreds of years of training can’t teach that or invent it. Diana had this quality, and it was all of a sudden lost.
Professor Michael Adler, head of the National AIDS Trust, described her as having “the royal touch,” by which he meant almost the opposite: by being so tactile, she reminded people that you could show warmth to those afflicted with HIV. But if we put aside Diana’s public life, we basically have to see her as a woman who found herself in 1985, at just twenty-four years old, already the mother of two in a bland marriage, who decided to get out there and do something with herself, beginning with an impromptu trip to Belfast, which blossomed into a full schedule of rubbing noses with Maoris, holding the hands of AIDS patients, blowing candles with little girls, lifting children aloft in gestures of affection, freely expressing an empathy that freed her from the royal reserve.
People love these moments of women breaking free—they are our favorite human dramas. We love the breaking-free part, whether it involves convicts cutting loose from Alcatraz or Ron Kovic finally finding his way home from Vietnam or gay men coming out of the closet: the freedom to be oneself and the fight for it is a universally loved story. And we cheer on the woman who slams the door on her husband not because we hate men and not because we despise the institution of marriage and not because we want families to fall apart and not because we are romantic failures and like to see love die. People love it because we love to see human beings born—we love to see a person come alive and say / am a person, I am more than what you define and delineate me to be, I was wood and now I am alive. People love those episodes because we love life.
Which is why I cannot understand how the dead misery of the Stepford Wife lives on. Every summer, the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would have its “Bored Housewife” film festival, showcasing the movies that showed the martini-and-Valium nightmare of being a woman whose life is in the home: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Montenegro, Diary of a Mad Housewife, The Graduate, Up the Sandbox, The Stepford Wives. Most of these films date back to the seventies or earlier, but it seems amazing that even today it’s still perfectly normal in movies to show at-home wives, though that is not the norm in the world any longer, as much for necessity as anything else. Stepford Wives, Hollywood wives—and, while we’re at it, John Grisham wives. Yes indeed, the problem of the little woman behind the man or under him or anything but beside him, acting as an equal partner in an equal marriage, is such that one lawyer turned novelist deserves to be singled out for creating wife characters in book after book (and, more to the point, movie after movie) who do nothing but wear flowered sundresses and offer people lemonade when they come by the house to discuss big, important things with her big, important husband. (Why is it that dynamic actresses like Jeanne Tripplehorn and Ashley Judd agree to take these sorority sister roles?) The partnership marriage, which should be just typical in this day and age, does not emerge (Bill and Hillary have fucked it up) in popular culture, except with Mary Matalin and James Carville, which is more the rivalry as marriage.
And in movies, the two-career couple—which is, statistically, the living situation most married people find themselves in—is almost never portrayed. Honestly, I could not tell you what possessed Michael Douglas to cheat on lovely, throaty, elegant Anne Archer in Fatal Attraction, but it has occurred to me that maybe the woman ought to get a job. Volunteer work doesn’t count. Like housework, it is yet another example of the economy exploiting women to do for free what most men wouldn’t bother to do for all the money in the world. Colin Powell included. We live in a capitalist country—making a pittance as a legal-aid lawyer or a doctor at a clinic is perfectly honorable, and counts as “real” work, but if you’re not being somehow remunerated, you don’t count. “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own in 1929—and we should have understood this by now. Even going back as far as 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman could assert that when women agree to take on the work of running a household for no pay, even though they perform tasks that are absolutely essential—surely society’s most important job is to raise children—we show no real respect for them or for what they do. “The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could, and in this women are economic factors in society,” Gilman wrote in Women and Economics. “But so are horses.”
So here’s how it is: Being just a wife doesn’t work. It works for no one. Lawyers leave their wives for paralegals, doctors leave their wives for nurses. But even if they don’t, women get bored and men get bored with them. Life is tedious. There’s a reason women reacted so strongly to The Feminine Mystique so long ago, and we should not forget those lessons.
We are a nation of splitters and quitters and cheaters whose marriages have been shown to have little staying power. That the divorce rate holds steady somewhere around 50 percent is a cause for optimism. Other than Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, it is all but impossible to think of a celebrity marriage that’s lasted. Vanity Fair published a feature, “Staying Married Is the Best Revenge,” which served to point up the rarity of the eternal union. Even those famous couples that seem to mysteriously mesh—Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal and John McEnroe—even alliances and allegiances that radiated the spell of great romance—Elvis Presley and Priscilla, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh—were purely evanescent. Those Hollywood couples that have surprisingly stuck to it—Demi and Bruce, Tom and Nicole—still seem likely to part sooner or later. Often when a friend reveals a crush on a married person, I feel compelled to point out that the odds are that they will be single sooner or later, better to wait than get into the mess.
This is also the society that invented the prenuptial agreement, that wrote the plan for the marriage’s demise before it’s even started. It is the marital equivalent of our creation of the atom bomb, of our orchestration of our own extinction while every other species fights against it. But just as we also disarm and dismantle on a regular basis, the humorous aspect of these prenups is that it seems that almost none go unchallenged, every item is open to negotiation—perhaps mitigating the damage, but also in their flimsiness mirroring the very delicacy of the marriage contract that is so easily broken.
The point is: it is normal for people to love and unlove, to couple and uncouple—just as it is normal for us to rage against this sorrowful
state of affairs. The hypocrisy of it all is a falseness of the best kind—rather like the generation gap, which creates an unfortunate divide between age groups, the demonstrable facts that people born in different eras are different for their different experiences is a sign of the passage of time, a reminder of the elasticity of civilization, and surely proves that all is well in the world.
The point is, we are a nation of individuals more than we are a country of units and families and clans and couples. We are a nation of individuals that wants desperately to be a country of kinfolk, so we marry again and again, we keep at it, we try and try. I think that is to our credit. But it is for this reason that every person should not only want but most certainly needs, requires—must have—her own identity. Being a wife, being a member of any group, can no longer be assumed to be a permanent position.
History has demonstrated again and again that being a full-time wife can drive an intelligent woman nuts. When Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, left his wife of two decades for a man, many of the couple’s friends commented on how they had become estranged because she didn’t do anything, she just shopped, she got bored and she began to bore him. I have no idea how accurate these comments or assessments were—it seems to me that to change your sexual preference in your late forties is a bigger deal than just having a wife who lives in Bergdorf Goodman—but there was one smart thing that a friend of Jane Wenner (Jann’s ex) said: “A mind needs to be occupied.” Those words sum up my point pretty well. People need things to do, men and women, they need to be challenged and given a chance to dazzle. Without this, a smart person will go crazy. And when women are circumscribed into roles of wife and mother, it will always feel as if men are the ones putting them there, even though, at this point, it is really up to us to say, I am larger and smarter and better and grander and greater than the little box you have tried to shut me in.
Every time women agitate it is against an oppressiveness that is euphemized as “patriarchy” but it is really just men. And these are women who love men, who are crazy about men. The women’s movement is always about some limitation on what is understood to be the proper female role. But, in truth, women do have choices, feminism has basically worked. Most of the men I know my age really do long for partnership and equality in their relationships. It is better for everybody. And yet, there are still Stepford Wives everywhere. The world abounds with society matrons who do nothing with their lives.
But far more frightening than the matrons engaged in make-work or pretend employment are all the young women who grew up after feminism, but have not worked since the day they married. Think of all these full-time wives—Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Cari Modine, Evi Quaid, Sandy Pittman, Lilly Tartikoff, Patricia Duff Medavoy Perelman, Mercedes Bass, Carolyne Roehm (and what exactly is Trudie Styler other than Mrs. Sting?)—what has happened here? When did the obligation to be your own person, to be interesting and autonomous, leave our notion of adult womanhood?
The bridal fantasy is the most persistent, clinging and clawing prefeminist notion, and strangely, it has achieved a veneer of importance that is such that if you asked most women if you could be Marie Curie and unmarried or be any other woman married to any other man, the Nobel Prize wouldn’t stand a chance. There is something so dreamy and powerful about the idea of being a wife. And the funny thing is, most people get married, and back in the bad old days when the Brontë sisters were writing their masterpieces under the desk in the drawing room, these determined young women saw marriage as a trap, a spirit killer, a life sentence. Now, that view is no longer accurate—thanks in no small part to feminism, to birth control—but the feeling of no man will ever want me or no one will ever marry me has stepped in as the new source of dread where fear of being stuck in a miserable marriage used to loom.
It seems that feminism ought to have made being a wife as a full-time pursuit unacceptable, and yet it persists. It can be called homemaker or fund-raiser or volunteer worker, but the fact is that these are not career options men would choose. The feminist Big Tent, which tries to find a place for Paula Jones, is also trying to find a place for women who have chosen to just be married. This situation is as preposterous as a Harvard-trained attorney like Phyllis Schlafly posing as an antifeminist. What you say is not as important as what you do.
It’s kind of become the party line for young feminists to talk about wanting to be sexy and wear lipstick, to wonder if they’ll ever marry. I myself do this. But the whole thing has become sort of routine and obvious. Katie Roiphe talks about how she may be too independent at this point in life to marry. She wants to find a boyfriend who can pick up the check once in a while. Naomi Wolf talks about how she never thought she’d be so traditional in this and that way, she never knew she’d be so satisfied to be a mom, she never expected to get married in a white dress—actually she calls the color “dirty white.” While the average age of first marriage goes steadily up (for women, it was 24.5 in 1994, up over three and a half years from 20.8 in 1970), it has become fashionable once again to marry young, to get it over with, to be safe. Of course, many of these young brides will be divorced in five years and will embrace freedom. It is amazing to see smart, sassy, competent young women rushing to the altar for fear of what will happen if they don’t—there goes that Harvard-Yale study again—when what should really scare them is what will happen to them if they do, I mean, here’s the deal: We’re adults, we’re people, we’re vital and capable. We live with the consequences of our idiocy because we believe in our actions. If we live that way, we will never have to ask What if? because we’ll know we did what was right for us at that moment, and that’s all we can do. If we, as women, have not learned to embrace this philosophy—if we cannot risk never finding the right man but having the good sense to avoid the wrong ones; if our bridal dreams and Cinderella fantasies still guide us—then feminism has not nearly completed its task. Consider this: almost everybody eventually marries, and in 1995 there were 118 unmarried men aged 18–34 for every 100 single women. Basically, a third of those of us aged 25–34 have never been married—it will take some time, but we’re bound to find each other somehow. The world is big and strange and can’t be trifled with.
I know it is the common postfeminist cant to say that the idea is choice, that women can decide to work or can opt to just marry and live a life of leisure—CHOICE, CHOICE, CHOICE. But all of us who work for a living know that this is utter bullshit. All of us can completely respect a woman who takes several years off to raise children, since motherhood is a real and honorable job, and the arrangements that couples make over time to accommodate each other’s particular employment and enjoyment needs are part of fairly and gamely making their way down love’s long road. But it is a corruption and bastardization and accommodation of everything feminism stands for to say that women whose identities are defined by who they marry, women who don’t have careers and don’t know how to take care of themselves are A-OK. With feminism, women demanded certain rights, and every woman who continues to live in a man’s shadow is an affront to what few gains were made. It’s not that a woman should be a self-sufficient person; it’s that she must.
“Personally, I believe that a woman should put her family and her relationships—which are really at the root of who you are and how you relate to the world—at the top of your priority list,” said not Marilyn Quayle or Phyllis Schlafly or Bay Buchanan, but Hillary Clinton to Gail Sheehy during the 1992 campaign. “But,” she added, as the liberal caveat, “I don’t believe that I, or Barbara Bush, should tell all women that’s what they have to put first … What we have to get away from is the idea that there’s only one right choice.”
This brings me back to the conundrum of the First Lady. She cannot evade her public role, even though she has no official status. And this creates an untenable situation: As long as there is a woman occupying the White House whose civic duties are too consuming for her to take a job at a law firm on her own—you cannot serve clients when you
are expected to make goodwill missions to Africa and China as a matter of course—and she is not earning a salary for this service, something is wrong. And while I really want to be tolerant enough to say that whatever a woman wants to do is just fine, this abnegates feminist accomplishment: women really do need to be able to take care of themselves in order to be themselves.
Because I pay my own rent, no one would dare tell me what to do or how to be. Because I pay my own rent, no means no, yes means yes, and anyone who doesn’t understand this can fuck off and die. And almost inevitably, as can be proved by file cabinets full of divorce papers that are on the public record in every county courthouse in the country, women who deny themselves the rights and freedoms of paying their own rent in the beginning end up paying further down the road in a much bigger way.
I don’t know why feminism has allowed itself to be co-opted by the forces that say, It’s beautiful to be a housewife! Shopping saves! Lunch at Mortimer’s! I like doing all those things, and I feel a lot better knowing it’s my own money I’m spending and I don’t have to answer to anybody.
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