by Nora Ephron
“They say it’s worse to be ugly,” Shulman writes. “I think it must only be different. If you’re pretty, you are subject to one set of assaults; if you’re plain you are subject to another. Pretty, you may have more men to choose from, but you have more anxiety too, knowing your looks, which really have nothing to do with you, will disappear. Pretty girls have few friends. Kicked out of mankind in elementary school, and then kicked out of womankind in junior high, pretty girls have a lower birthrate and a higher mortality. It is the beauties like Marilyn Monroe who swallow twenty-five Nembutals on a Saturday night and kill themselves in their thirties.”
Now I could take that paragraph one sentence at a time and pick nits (What about the pretty girls who have friends? What has Marilyn Monroe’s death to do with all this? What does it mean to say that pretty girls have a lower birthrate—that they have fewer children or that there are less of them than there are of us?), but I prefer to say simply that it won’t wash. There isn’t an ugly girl in America who wouldn’t exchange her problems for the problems of being beautiful; I don’t believe there’s a beautiful girl anywhere who would honestly prefer not to be. “They say it’s worse to be ugly,” Alix Shulman writes. Yes, they do say that. And they’re right. It’s also worse to be poor, worse to be orphaned, worse to be fat. Not just different from rich, familied, and thin—actually worse. (I am a little puzzled as to why Ms. Shulman uses the words “plain” and “ugly” interchangeably; the difference between plain and ugly is as vast as the one between plain and pretty. As William Raspberry pointed out in a recent Washington Post column, ugly women are the most overlooked victims of discrimination in America.)
The point of all this is not about beauty—I hope I have made it clear that I don’t know enough about beauty to make a point—but about divisions. I am separated from Alix Shulman and am in fact almost unable to judge her work because she is obsessed with being beautiful and I am obsessed with not being beautiful. We might as well be on separate sides altogether. And what makes me sad about the women’s movement in general is my own inability, and that of so many other women, to get across such gulfs, to join hands, to unite on anything.
The women’s liberation movement at this point in history makes the American Communist Party of the 1930s look like a monolith. I have been to meetings where the animosity between the gay and straight women was so strong and so unpleasant that I could not bear to be in the room. That is the most dramatic division in the movement, and one that has considerably slowed its forward momentum; but there are so many others. There is acrimony between the single and married women, working women and housewives, childless women and mothers. I have even heard a woman defend her affection for cooking to an incredulous group who believed that to cook at all—much less to like it—was to swallow the worst sort of cultural conditioning. Once I tried to explain to a fellow feminist why I liked wearing makeup; she replied by explaining why she does not. Neither of us understood a word the other said.
Every so often, I turn on the television and see one of the movement leaders being asked some idiot question like, “Isn’t the women’s movement in favor of all women abandoning their children and going off to work?” (I can hear David Susskind asking it now.) The leader usually replies that the movement isn’t in favor of all women doing anything; what the movement is about, she says, is options. She is right, of course. At its best, that is exactly what the movement is about. But it just doesn’t work out that way. Because the hardest thing for us to accept is the right to those options. I hear myself saying those words: What this movement is about is options. I say it to friends who are frustrated, or housebound, or guilty, or child-laden, and what I am really thinking is, If you really got it together, the option you would choose is mine.
I would like to be able to leap across the gulf that divides me from Alix Shulman. After all, her experience is not totally foreign to me: once I had a date with someone who thought I was beautiful. He talked all night, while I—who spent years developing my conversational ability to compensate for my looks (my life has been spent in compensation)—said nothing. At the end of the evening, he made a pass at me, and I was insulted. So I understand. I recognize that people who are beautiful have problems. But so do people who get upset stomachs from raw onions, and men with blue-orange color blindness, and left-handed persons everywhere. I just can’t get into it; what interests me these days tends to have more to do with the problems of women who were not prom queens in high school. I’m sorry about this—my point of view is not fair to Alix Shulman, or to my friend who thinks she is losing her looks, or to me, or to the movement. But that’s where it is. I’m working on it. Like all things about liberation, sisterhood is difficult.
August, 1972
The Girls in the Office
I have not looked at The Best of Everything since I first bought it—in paperback—ten years ago, but I have a perverse fondness for it. In case you somehow missed it, The Best of Everything was a novel by Rona Jaffe about the lives of four, or was it five, single women in New York; it was pretty good trash, as trash goes, which is not why I am fond of it. I liked it because it seemed to me that it caught perfectly the awful essence of being a single woman in a big city. False pregnancies. Real pregnancies. Abortions. Cads. Dark bars with married men. Rampant masochism. I remember particularly a sequence in the book where one of the girls, rejected by a lover, goes completely bonkers and begins spending all her time spying on him, poking through his garbage for discarded love letters and old potato peelings; ultimately, as I recall, she falls from his fire escape to her death. The story seemed to me only barely exaggerated from what I was seeing around me, and, I am sorry to say, doing myself.
I was, naturally, single when I read the novel, unhappily single, mired in the Dorothy Parker telephone-call syndrome (“Please, God, let him telephone me now.… I’ll count five hundred by fives, and if he hasn’t called me then, I will know God isn’t going to help me, ever again. That will be the sign. Five, ten, fifteen …”) and well aware of its hopeless banality. It occurred to me as I read The Best of Everything that it would be practically impossible to write an accurate novel about the quality of life for single women in New York without writing a B novel, for the simple reason that life for single women in New York is a B novel. Even Dorothy Parker’s short story about the phone call, horribly accurate—a classic, even—belongs in the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine.
I like to think that things have changed since my early years in New York. A lot has happened in the world, clearly. The women’s movement, birth-control pills, legalized abortions in New York—life ought to have changed in some way. I want very much to believe this; like many married women, I have managed to romanticize my single years beyond recognition and I spend a lot of time daydreaming about what it would have been like to be single knowing then what I know now—or simply what it would be like to be single again.
In any event, I have just read a book that is enough to make me stop daydreaming for at least a week or two. Actually it’s not a good book, or even a book in any real sense, but a series of tape-recorded interviews with fifteen single women who all work in the same New York office (Time-Life, thinly disguised). It is called The Girls in the Office (Simon & Schuster) and it has an incredibly old-fashioned, Best of Everything, trash epic quality: it is full of dreadful cartoon people who seem straight out of every junky fifties novel—the difference being, of course, that The Girls in the Office is nonfiction, real, an honest-to-God case of life imitating trash. Its author, Jack Olsen, has not really written anything; he has instead been content merely to edit the tapes, neaten up the interviews, give them snappy endings, reconstruct them to the point where they seem too pat, too slick, too much, maybe not even true. But they are true, I’m afraid. Bizarre and weird, but true. And because they are, the book, in its sleazy, slapdash, pseudo-sociological way, is fascinating—both for what it says about the women as for the men in their lives.
The women in The Girls in t
he Office range from twenty-four to fifty years old and all of them live alone in Manhattan, surrounded and—as they testify—tormented by exhibitionists, flashers, rapists, muggers, goosers, breathers, feelers, and Peeping Toms. Almost none of them has an executive-level job, and none seems to have ambitions toward anything higher. Their competitiveness is directed solely toward other women; their energies are spent scrambling for little favors and petty advances within the lower realm of the company reserved for women only. That men are responsible for keeping them down does not seem to have occurred to them; in any case, they are not interested in getting up from under. What they are looking for is a husband. In the meantime, they want not a better slot but a comfortable niche, the warm feeling of working in a nice, big, air-conditioned, wall-to-wall carpeted office full of friendly faces and office parties. The office becomes their world, the employees their surrogate family. As one of the women explains: “[We’re] producing a product in close conjunction with brilliant men, just as married couples produce children.” The men—most of them married—dominate it all, flirt with them, date them, seduce them, string them along, and manage to convince them that all of it is worth it to spend time with such extraordinary creatures. “You have to learn quickly that the super-talented, super-creative geniuses in our company are different from other men,” says one of the women in the book. Says another: “The hotshots at The Company [are] so glamorous. How could I get interested in a fifth assistant teller at a bank in the Bronx, when the man in the next cubicle at the office has just got back from Hong Kong?”
The parade of married men who traipse through these women’s apartments turns their lives into parodies of Back Street. The women wait, year after year, for the men to leave their wives. They never do. Year after year of one or two nights a week, furtive lunches, nooners at midtown hotels, tacky confrontations with their wives. Even the girls who manage to avoid the married men make a mess of their lives. A few become tough in a way that is simply inhumane: “I learned how to turn the men’s lust against them. I’d pretend to be interested in one of them and I’d get him to talk to me for three hours and let him think he was making a great successful pass, and then I’d turn around and leave!” The rest manage to come up with relationships with single men that are quite as demeaning and unhealthy as those with married men. One woman Olsen calls Jayne Gouldtharpe has an affair for a year with an insurance man whose idea of rebellion is to throw egg yolks at the wall. After a year or so of what Nichols and May used to call proximity but no relating, he comes over for dinner one night. “We were taking a shower together,” Jayne recalls, “and he said, ‘You know, all we ever talk about is you. I have problems too.…’
“ ‘What do you mean?’
“ ‘Well, I’m going to Italy tomorrow for a long visit, and my big problem is how to tell you that this is the last time we’ll ever be together.’ ”
After two days of misery, Jayne takes a week off from work, flies to Rome with no idea of where her lover is staying, and spends seven days looking for him. She returns to New York, only to find that he had never intended to go to Italy in the first place. “He was a sadist dealing with a masochist,” she concludes, “and the ultimate bit of sadism was to stand in my shower naked and tell me that we were through.”
There is another woman in the book Olsen calls Gloria Rolstin, who falls in love with an executive named Tom Lantini. (Names are not Olsen’s strong point.) Lantini is divorced and lives with his invalid mother in a town house downtown. Within a few months, he has moved Gloria in as an ersatz nurse’s aide: she changes his mother’s clothes, takes her to the bathroom, cleans up after her, feeds her medicine, plays honeymoon bridge—“And the old lady barely able to tell what was trump!” All the while, she sleeps alone on a couch downstairs while Tom and his mother sleep in adjoining bedrooms above.
The affair between Gloria and Tom, such as it is, lasts seven years, the last three or four punctuated by a long series of physical brawls—“He cut my nose. I sprained his wrist. He blackened my eye. I pulled out about five square inches of his curls.… He smashed me so hard on the side of my head that he knocked me down, and my ear was ripped open from his ring.…” And so forth. The acts of violence become so commonplace in this book that at one point, when one Vanessa Van Durant is locked in her apartment by her boyfriend and beaten and buggered for two weeks, I found myself shrugging and thinking, Ah, yes, the old lock-her-in-the-apartment-and-beat-her-and-bugger-her routine. What is most frightening about all these fights is not just their frequency but that the women accept it as a matter of course, and even blame themselves for it. “I’ll get a little pushy or a little whiny,” one explains, “and a man will haul off and smack me. It’s usually my own fault.” I’m a masochist, he’s a sadist; I drove him to it; it’s as simple as that. It is, of course nowhere near as simple as that. I don’t pretend to be able to provide an answer as to why these women put up with what they do, but some of it has to do with a society structured in such a way as to make women believe that to be with a man—any man, on whatever terms—is better than being alone. Only one of the women sees the women’s movement as providing any relevance to her situation. The rest want nothing to do with it. Says one: “I endorse the economic side of Women’s Lib completely, but I don’t go around marching or burning my bra, because I think things like that only tend to emasculate men, and the New York male has already been emasculated beyond recognition.”
The men in this book are in every way as pathetic as the women they victimize. I could give example after example. There is a chronically impotent married man who attempts to seduce several of the women in this book and always insists the problem has merely to do with too much liquor. (“Foreplay is fine for about an hour,” says one of the women who becomes involved with him, “but when it goes on for a month, that’s a pretty good sign something’s very wrong.”) There is an executive, Peter-principled into a job he cannot handle, who hangs on and spends his time whacking off while dictating letters to his secretary. There is another man who becomes so disturbed when his girl breaks off their affair that he sends her a hot-pepper explosive in the mail, telephones her all night and hangs up, substitutes Drano for salt in her salt shakers, and slips a vial of acid into her loafers which burns her toes.
One of the themes the women return to frequently in The Girls in the Office is their belief that men are just little boys, infants with “hang-ups in their brains like spider webs.” I have heard this theme song so many times from so many women; and every time I hear it, I recoil. It is, quite obviously, a profoundly anti-male remark; it is also, I’m afraid, partly true. Saying it’s so gets us nowhere, though. The unhappy corollary to the fact that a lot of men are just little boys is the fact that so many women put up with it—cater to it, in fact, mother them, bolster their egos by subjugating their own—and feed right into the real problem, which is not that men are little boys but that men don’t like women very much, can’t deal with their demands, their sexuality, their equality. The role of a corporation like Time-Life in this—which underlines the pattern by delivering to each male employee a secretary or researcher he can dominate—would make an interesting book. The lives of fifteen single women in New York would also make an interesting book someday. This one isn’t it.
September, 1972
Reunion
A boy and a girl are taking a shower together in the bathroom. How to explain the significance of it? It is a Friday night in June, the first night of the tenth reunion of the Class of 1962 of Wellesley College, and a member of my class has just returned from the bathroom with the news. A boy and a girl are taking a shower together. No one can believe it. Ten years and look at the changes. Ten years ago, we were allowed men in the rooms on Sunday afternoons only, on the condition the door be left fourteen inches ajar. One Sunday during my freshman year, a girl in my dormitory went into her room with a date and not only closed the door but put a sock on it. (The sock—I feel silly remembering nonsense like this, but I d
o—was a Wellesley signal meaning “Do Not Disturb.”) Three hours later, she and the boy emerged and she was wearing a different outfit. No one could believe it. We were that young. Today boys on exchange programs from MIT and Dartmouth live alongside the girls, the dormitory doors lock, and some of the women in my class—as you can see from the following excerpt from one letter to our tenth-reunion record book—have been through some changes themselves:
“In the past five years I have (1) had two children and two abortions, (2) moved seriously into politics, working up to more responsible positions on bigger campaigns, (3) surrendered myself to what I finally acknowledged was my lifework—the women’s revolution, (4) left my husband and children to seek my fortune and on the way (5) fallen desperately, madly, totally in love with a beautiful man and am sharing a life with him in Cambridge near Harvard Square where we’re completely incredibly happy doing the work we love and having amazing life adventures.”
I went back to my reunion at Wellesley to write about it. I’m doing a column, that’s why I’m going, I said to New York friends who were amazed that I would want anything to do with such an event. I want to see what happened, I said—to my class, to the college. (I didn’t say that I wanted my class and the college to see what had happened to me, but that of course was part of it, too.) A few years ago, Wellesley went through a long reappraisal before rejecting coeducation and reaffirming its commitment to educating women; that interested me. Also, I wondered how my class, almost half of which has two or more children, was dealing with what was happening to women today. On Friday evening, when my classmate and I arrived at the dormitory that was our class headquarters, we bumped into two Wellesley juniors. One of them asked straight off if we wanted to see their women’s liberation bulletin board. They took us down the corridor to a cork board full of clippings, told us of their battle to have a full-time gynecologist on campus, and suddenly it became important for us to let them know we were not what they thought. We were not those alumnae who came back to Wellesley because it was the best time of their lives; we were not those cardigan-sweatered, Lilly Pulitzered matrons or Junior League members or League of Women Voters volunteers; we were not about to be baited by their bulletin board. We’re not Them. I didn’t come to reunion because I wanted to. I’m here to write about it. Understand?
