The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  “He will never satisfy you,” warned the man whom I was leaving him for.

  How could that ex-lover understand that sex wasn’t what I was looking for in marriage? Even I hadn’t yet understood. Yes, I could overpower a man by seducing him, but he could then turn around and respond to another woman’s sexuality. What I required was a man not driven by Eros, one who would see me as a prize and never, never look at another woman.

  “How did I win you?” my husband would ask again and again.

  He didn’t. I chose him. I chose him knowing that once his gaze had taken me in, he would never leave. Ours was a marriage of togetherness wherein we were mother and child, attached, wary of being apart; like the one hand caressing the other, comforting but not exciting.

  I remember being in a restaurant one night shortly after we were married. Two men sat at a table nearby, talking, smiling, looking at me. I was used to this, but then I heard one say, “Is she twenty or forty?”

  Not until I became a writer did I understand how much my looks had changed once I was married; certainly, it had to do with an unconscious reunion with my mother. Equally frightening was the awareness that in marriage I had abandoned the spirited girl I’d invented for myself to make up for my invisibility in my mother’s eyes; as a small child I found ways to get myself seen, picked up, and loved. As deftly as I had buried anxiety within my family behind the smiling mask of a charming kid, I was now burying that person I’d been all my life behind the guise of Sadie Sadie Married Lady, a very tense-looking woman indeed.

  Some women don’t require marriage to become their mothers; we look in the mirror, see little lines and a narrowing of our once full lips; we see aging that others don’t yet see, the sagging skin, the ripples in our thighs. We are only twenty-five, still young, forever Mommy’s girl and forever Mommy.

  Giving Up the Idealization of Mother/Women

  I write to free myself from nursery anger, to escape from the past so that I have more energy for love today, but when I get up from this table I will walk into the next room and before long lose myself again in one of the bewitching photos of my mother’s family romance. Not my own, for there are no photos of us as children; as I’ve mentioned, there are no pictures of my father, so I’ve adopted my mother’s family. I’ve been in love with pictures of them all my life; in these framed moments they are all very young, my beautiful grandmother whom I never knew and all of her children, my mother and her three sisters and brother. They hang on their mother’s neck like puppies, they lean against her knee in their soft white clothes tied with wide sashes, droopy bows in their hair, a nimbus of absolute tranquility around them.

  Even the tall, stern patriarch, my grandfather, sits in these idealized domestic scenes with his handsome head inclined toward the little boy in the sailor suit who sits on his knee.

  An entire day, I’ve been told, went into Bachrach’s immortalization of my family’s romance, more than thirty beautifully matted sepia-toned photographs bound in a rich caramel leather album the size of a coffee table. As a child I would turn these pages with reverence, imagining myself in each of the rooms of the large house in which they lived until my grandmother died and my grandfather lost his fortune in the Depression. While it lasted, it must have been perfect.

  But I knew it was not perfect at all. My grandmother was a resolute individual with a mind of her own. On my desk is a faded newspaper photo of her standing in an artist’s smock beside her easel, on which rests a portrait of my aunt, one of her paintings then on exhibit at a gallery in town. My aunts tell tales of spaghetti dinners in her studio with her “bohemian” friends, while downstairs my grandfather entertained the steel barons of Pittsburgh. How much they idealized her after her death I will never know, but they have never spoken a critical word of her. In a way I wish they had, just to bring her down to human scale. As for my grandfather, well, he was a womanizer, loved beautiful women, and from the sound of it, pursued and bedded them. When my grandmother died, he subsequently married only compliant women, or at least they pretended meekness.

  We are loath to abandon our family romances, and why not? Who wouldn’t prefer to believe in perfect love, familial devotion passed from generation to generation, especially now, today, when the entire world seems so fractured and untrustworthy? Intellectually we may know that there is no such thing as the “maternal instinct”; we were well into the seventies when the tough message came down that mothers do not automatically love their babies at birth; a mother’s feelings for her child hopefully grow into love over time. Nevertheless, we cling to the promise of “natural” mother love as tenaciously as we hold to the belief that a child is born loving its mother.

  Is it a contradiction, this work I do to demystify the family romance even as I wax nostalgic for an easier, sweeter time, if only in Bachrach’s lens? I don’t think so. I’ve only come to appreciate what is in the silver frames since I became a writer. It is as if in coming to terms with what really exists between my mother and myself, I have sequentially found with each book that a layer of idealization gets stripped away; I am invariably rewarded with a reality I can live with far more gratefully than the illusion.

  Now I choose to imitate only those parts of my mother that I admire, to look in the mirror and see something of her that gives me pleasure, to hear my voice on a tape recorder and recognize her laugh. I don’t want her anxious look, her all-suffering tone on the telephone. Writing has taught me that I will only be able to imitate what I love if I first give up the fantasy of perfect love and the infantile rage at her for not being perfect.

  It is all part of this business of separation, which in theory is accomplished in the first years of life, but which in fact continues all our lives long. Letting go of Mommy, abandoning the idea that we can change her, that she really loves us ideally is harder later on, but never without reward. It is why I write.

  We become our mother, we say, because we love her. Then why do we take on the characteristics of hers that we liked the least? Real love, genuine love, requires two individuals consciously choosing to care, not out of need and fear but from a sense that this “other” expands our universe rather than simply making it safe.

  Does the old adage still apply, that a man should take a good look at his future mother-in-law, for that is how his pretty young wife is going to turn out? Because women’s lives today look different, because we go to an office and our own mothers stayed at home, which implies that we dress differently, behave differently than they did, because these relatively simple things have changed, we think we will not become them. Do not underestimate the power of that first relationship. Only a daughter raised with a sense of her own identity, lovingly encouraged to find it and wear it, will grow into a woman who can look uncritically into a piece of reflecting glass. Such a woman can say to her adult beloved, “I cannot live without you,” and mean not that she would die without him but that life would be less without his dear presence.

  My grandmother, standing at her easel, was no “domestic nun,” but she wore, like all the women of the day, the stylish look of soft compliance demanded of a wife and mother; nevertheless, it must have grated. Hers is the look of attractive resignation my mother wore until recently. Did she give it up, or is it my vision of her that has changed? It is becoming a writer that has allowed me to see her as a woman and not as just my mother. Only when I learned to stop wanting the child’s idealized relationship with her could I give up the halo that protected her from my rage. She’s never looked better.

  The idealization of women no longer even remotely defines how we women live, what we do, or how we look. Women’s work today has become in large part how we look. It isn’t as though we’ve had the family romance, wherein mother alone raised the children, for a long time. We’ve only been able, literally, to afford the modern family in the past few hundred years. In this morning’s paper is a story of an infant cemetery recently unearthed in Rome. According to the archeologist at the dig, it was common practice
in ancient Rome to discard unceremoniously the bodies of dead infants, who were not considered by the ancient Romans to be “worthwhile family members and should not be lamented much if they died.”

  Three, four hundred years ago, a maternal instinct was a luxury few could afford. A family was a working unit, bent on survival, children only useful if they lived long enough to till the soil or weave the cloth. Until the seventeenth century there was literally no childhood, no concept of it, no such person as a child; the word was simply used to express kinship. “Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern,” wrote Barbara Tuchman, “none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children.”

  Children in medieval artworks were depicted as small adults, dwarfs, whose expressions and musculature were just like those of the taller, older people within the picture frame. In the real world of the Middle Ages, as soon as children were able to do without their mothers, they went immediately into the adult community.

  Because life was tenuous and death among infants and children so ordinary, adults couldn’t afford to invest them with emotion. The practice was to have as many children as possible in the hope that at least a few would survive to help support the family. The turning point was the moralization of society, beginning in the fifteenth century and conducted by churchmen, lawyers, and scholars, who taught that parents were “responsible before God for the souls, and indeed the bodies too, of their children…. The care expended on children inspired new feelings, a new emotional attitude, to which the iconography of the seventeenth century gave brilliant and insistent expression: the modern concept of the family.” Our ancestors began to look like the morally responsible people we are used to seeing in portraits of subsequent years, taking their virtuous “look” from the respected role that gave them an identity.

  Interestingly, it was the printing press, literacy, says Neil Postman, that “gave us our selves, as unique individuals, to think and talk about. And this intensified sense of self was the seed that led eventually to the flowering of childhood.” It did not happen overnight. As late as the eighteenth century, mothers still routinely abandoned their children to orphanages and farmed out their infants to wet nurses, where their chances of survival were halved. It would require the economic surge of the Industrial Revolution to pay for the modern family as we know it. Until man’s work moved from home and field into the factory and public sphere, there was no such concept as a separate domestic sphere. Only then was the idea born that a woman’s primary job was to raise children alone at home, provided for by a man whose goal it was to earn as much money as possible for housing, food, and clothing for the family. Thus was born The Good Provider, which, before long, became the widely accepted definition of “masculinity.” And you could recognize him from the appearance of his family, who “wore” his success.

  The family romance was an economic luxury. The better provider a man was, the greater the security and stature in the community his family enjoyed. A nineteenth-century man expected his “household nun,” his wife, to possess a saintliness that appeared to absolve him of the filth and corruption increasingly encountered in “big business.” The vacuity in the portraits of the women’s faces attested to their asexuality, and a certain complacency at having arrived at the only position to which a woman aspired. In some ways, the young adults in these centuries-old portraits resemble in set of chin and self-satisfaction the look of young parents in the fifties, when getting married on graduation day was a popular goal. Gone was the girlish, eager sexuality from high school photos just a year earlier, and in its place was a pretty young matron. It was what one did, how one looked, and it still is in many communities. Nor do I mean to trivialize it; in a world where women had no wealth, staying single too long was a gamble; looking “different” from all the nice young married women made a twenty-five-year-old female look in the mirror for the reassurance that she still had the looks to find a man before it was too late.

  The idealization of mother and child gave women a sense of power and community opposite men, who controlled economic power. But putting women on a pedestal performed another, not insignificant, piece of work: The Madonna was desexualized, meaning that for the simple price of forfeiting a sexual mate, a man could rest, at peace in his office, miles from home, where he was unable to keep an eye on his woman, that untrustworthy sex known to be wantonly driven by insatiable lust unless neutered. It may have meant a dreary sex partner at home, but it guaranteed free child care, a housekeeper, and, besides, there were always lustful bad women, whores to be had for exciting sex. The Bad Women of the 1950s movies—Gloria Grahame, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell come to mind—could be separated on sight from the Goody Two-shoes like June Allyson. Blood-red lipstick, pointy bras (as my mother called them), ass-tight skirts, and eyes that looked at a man as if to undress him, these were the signature looks of women who didn’t hold babies. And of course the men these women ran with, like Robert Mitchum, didn’t look like patriarchs.

  The economics of a paternalistic society dictated the structure of the family romance. The sharp division of labor separated a man from his child; after all, there was no need for a man in the nursery. Until now. Now the movement of women out of the home and into the workplace has created The New Economics, leaving a vacuum in the nursery. Women’s roles have evolved to include anything a man can do, suggesting that men’s roles might also evolve to enrich their lives and their children’s. Many women don’t have the luxury of being a Madonna, and some don’t have the inclination, though many would die rather than abandon their post to a man; somehow it signifies forfeiting the most trusted definition of what a woman is.

  And don’t assume it is just women who want to keep men out of the nursery. Unlike the dramatic entry of women into the tough, grown-up world of business, the idea of men moving into women’s traditional turf looks like abdication to many men; an army of sissy men surrendering their roles as real men, thus further weakening the trusted image of “a real man.” In a speech before fellow Republicans, the candidate for governor of Minnesota proclaimed that men have a “genetic predisposition” to be heads of the household, obviously implying that women’s “genetic predisposition” is where it has always been, caretaker of the hearth.

  In a lighter vein, but still touching a nerve, a man ponders in a magazine article titled “Samurai Father,” “Be it subtly, ostentatiously, debonairly, raucously, or downright obstreperously—a man’s gotta swagger. But I submit to you, gentlemen, that it is not physically possible to swagger with a sleeping pink papoose slung across your chest. You just can’t swagger in a Snugli.”

  The idealization of our modern family romance came to its fullest flower in the 1950s. Mother/daughter look-alike dresses captured the essence: We are as one, into which pretty portrait could be read that mother had devoted her life to her little girl who, in turn, would grow up and replay mother’s life with her little girl. It never was a healthy idea, especially for the child, who was reminded externally of what she felt inside, that she was not a unique creature but was Mommy’s double. There was a period of about twenty-five years, beginning in the seventies, when women were aggressively fixated on seeing themselves in the workplace and these symbiotic Siamese twins clothes were mothballed. They are back. Women’s magazines abound with pictures of little girls dressed to look like Mommy, or is it the woman who has tired of the demanding workplace and wants to return to looking adorable, dependent, and innocent?

  Many women have found the workplace less rewarding than they had hoped; those who are able to economically may opt to return home, but it is a new woman who enters the nursery after a stint in the workplace. She brings with her a cellular phone and a competitive muscle that obviously affects how she functions as a caretaker; the Wall Street Journal recently ran an article on returning moms who were running their car pools, PTAs, and cookie bake-offs with the same combative zeal they had shown at the office sales conference. Women are experts at competi
ng even as we say we hate the word. Whatever the look of the new nursery, it isn’t the 1950s.

  The answer to the once amusing question bandied about at exclusive all-male clubs, “What do women want?” is, clearly, “Everything.” Why then are men so silent, so seemingly unmoved by women’s growing accusations that they are responsible for all of women’s ills? Men’s best tactic seems to be to hunker down and refuse to take women on, not unlike Dagwood and Desi Arnaz opposite Blondie and Lucille Ball; in their silence men are banking on the tradition of male stoicism. The War Between The Men and The Women rages on, and no one suffers more than the children.

  I have been accused by angry Matriarchal Feminists of being too soft on men, too much in love with them and, by extension, unsympathetic to women’s hard times. I will not defend my own feminist credentials; my books speak for themselves. I do not light up for all men, but if there is a light in my window, it has been there all my life. When you grow up without a father, you never stop being hungry for a man.

  And some men never stop being hungry for a part of themselves, their feminine side that they jettisoned years ago, when the narrow definition of manhood called. Just as I learned to stifle my aggressive, outspoken side, these men smothered their “softness” with bullying tactics or silence. Fatherhood could be the opportunity for men to regain their compassionate selves. Not all men are born with the heart of a caretaker, but neither are all women. Nevertheless, we expect women automatically to become maternal once they give birth, just as we expect men to be good providers. Well, the workplace is overcrowded, and the nursery too empty. It’s time to shuffle the deck and re-deal assignments, each given to what he or she does best with the child, the first priority.