Tell Me a Riddle (42 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 167
tently, and women's grievances were recognized as real. It is certainly true, as Olsen recalls today, that on ''those things that come particularly to the fore through consciousnessraising, having to do with sexuality, with rape, and most of all with what I call maintenance of life, the bearing and rearing of the young," the circles of the Left were little better than those of society as a wholein spite of a body of theory on housework and the frequent bandying about of Lenin's observations on its degrading nature. And Olsen is in accord with Peggy Dennis, married for years to party leader Eugene Dennis, on the "explicit, deliberate and reprehensible sexism" of the party's leadership.
38
Yet Olsen also knew party women who brought their own husbands up for trial on charges of male chauvinism, one of them herself a party activist whose husband refused to help with childcare; he was removed from his leadership position when her charges were upheld. She remembers seeing women in the party, women like herself, grow in their capacities and rise to positions of leadership; she herself helped set up, after much debate about the pros and cons of autonomous women's formations, a separate Women's Division of the Warehouse Union to which Jack Olsen belonged, establishing thereby a whole secondary leadership of women. This process of women's coming to strength and voice was to have been central to
Yonnondio,
and if, paradoxically, her own activism in the Left helped prevent her from finishing the novel, her experience in that milieu nevertheless gave her, too, a sense of confidence and worth essential to both her political work and her writing.
She wanted, moreover, to pay tribute to, to memorialize, the women she knew on the Left: women like her YCL comrades and especially immigrant women like her own motherstrong women, political women, but sometimes also women defeated by their long existence in a patriarchal world. Sometime in 1938 she wrote in her journal:
To write the history of that whole generation of exiled revolutionaries, the kurelians and croations, the bundists and the poles; and the women, the foreign women, the mothers of six and seven ... the housewives whose Zetkin and Curie and
 
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Bronte hearts went into kitchen and laundries and the patching of old socks; and those who did not speak the language of their children, who had no bridge . . . to make themselves understood.
Tell Me a Riddle
is dedicated to two such women, and its central character, Eva, is a vividly drawn composite of several; Eva, a passionate socialist organizer and orator in her youth, who is silenced by years of poverty and tending to others' needs, only to find her voice and vision again when she is dying. The publications of the Left in the thirties are full of tributes to women like Mother Bloor, Clara Zetkin, Krupskaya; in a way,
Yonnondio
and
Tell Me a Riddle
are both extensions and demystifications of such portrayals, renderings of the essentially heroic lives which circumstances did not allow to blossom into public deeds, art, and fame.
Second, the theoretical analysis of crucial aspects of women's experience was encouraged by articles, lectures, party publications devoted solely to women's issues, and study groups on the Woman Question. Olsen herself taught a class on the Woman Question at YCL headquarters on San Francisco's Haight Street. A self-styled feminist even then, she had read not only Marxist theory, but also works from the suffragist movement like the
History of Woman Suffrage
and the
Woman's Bible,
and she invited suffragists to her class to talk about their own experiences in the nineteenth-century woman's movement, establishing a sense of the history and continuity of women's struggles.
Theory about the Woman Question undoubtedly helped to shape her own thinking about women's issues. Communist Party theory on women, like its practice, certainly had weaknesses. Most arose from the fact that gender was not identified as a fundamental social category like class. Thus, working-class women could be viewed as suffering essentially the same oppressions as their husbands, directly if they were workers, by extension if they were wives. Consequently, they would presumably benefit from the same measures. Analysis tended to focus on women in the paid labor force; and although housework did receive a substantial amount of critical attention, few analysts, except perhaps in special women's columns
 
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or special women's publications like the
Woman Worker,
suggested seriously that men should share equal responsibility for it, although many arguednot strongly enough, according to Olsenfor its collectivization.
39
The socialist writers of the earlier years of the century tended to be fuller in their analyses of sexuality and ''life styles" than the Communist party in the thirties, which generally avoided such discussions, failing to link political revolution and sexual freedom as Agnes Smedley had at the close of the twenties.
Yonnondio
is far more reticent than
Daughter of Earth
on this subject. Although it includes the painfully explicit rape of wife by husband, and although it is better than a history book at raising issues of women's health,
Yonnondio
is largely silent about women's sexuality per seeven though this is a topic which Olsen speaks of freely in her early poems and sometimes in her journals. That silence may well have something to do with the rather puritanical and conservative attitudes of the Communist party on sexuality throughout the 1930s.
40
Still, in no other segment of American society at that time were there such extensive discussions about the sources of women's oppression and the means for alleviating it. A recent article by Robert Shaffer, "Women and the Communist Party, USA, 1930-1940," provides a useful summary of the nature of women's status and roles in the Communist party, its theory about the oppression of women, its publications and organizations designed to counteract such oppression, its involvement in mass work among women and around women's issues, and its views on the family and sexuality. He concludes that "despite its important weaknesses, the CP's work among women in the 1930s was sufficiently extensive, consistent, and theoretically valuable to be considered an important part of the struggle for women's liberation in the United States."
41
Shaffer discusses two books by communist women published in the 1930s that were important contributions to the analysis of women's issues. The first, by Grace Hutchins, focused on
Women Who Workthat
is, women in the paid work force; according to Shaffer, it underplays male chauvinism and sometimes blames women for their own oppression, but it also scrupulously documents the conditions of working
 
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women and formulates important demands to better them. The second book, written in 1939 by Mary Inman, takes a position reflecting the less sectarian consciousness of the Popular Front Years. Inman argues that all women are oppressed, not just working-class women, and that one of the symptoms of this oppression is their isolation in their homes; that working-class men sometimes oppress their wives; and that housework must be viewed as productive laborpositions rejected by the party's East Coast leadership, but supported in the West, where
People's World
was published and read. She also discusses how girls are conditioned to a ''manufactured femininity" by childrearing practices and the mass media.
42
Inman eventually left the party over the controversy her book engendered, but clearly the ideas it expressed had some currency and support in Left Circles at least on the West Coast.
In many ways,
Yonnondio
anticipates in fiction Inman's theoretical formulations. The conditioning of children to accept limiting sex roles is an important theme in
Yonnondio.
One thinks, for example, of the children's games that so cruelly inhibit the preadolescent Mazie, or of the favorite text"the Movies, selected"of twelve-year-old Jinella, who with Mazie as partner plays a vamp from
Sheik of Araby, Broken Blossoms, Slave of Love, She Stopped at Nothing, The Fast Life,
and
The Easiest Way
(127-28), her imaginative capacity absurdly channeled by her exposure to these films, her only escape from her real life as Gertrude Skolnick. Even Anna, full of her own repressed longings, imparts the lessons of sex roles to her children. "Boys get to do that," she tells Benjy wistfully, talking of travel by trains and boats, "not girls" (113). And when Mazie asks her, "Why is it always me that has to help? How come Will gets to play?" Anna can only answer, "Willie's a boy" (142). Olsen, then, suggests throughout
Yonnondio
that both women and men are circumstanced to certain social roles, and that these roles, while placing impossible burdens of responsibility on working-class men, constrict the lives of women in particularly damaging ways.
Olsen understands and portrays the double oppression of working-class women in other ways as well. Anna's spirit is almost broken by her physical illness-"woman troubles"connected with pregnancy and childbirth and compounded by
 
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inadequate medical care. Her apparent apathy and incompetence make her a target of her husband's rage; he strikes out at and violates her because he has no other accessible target for his frustrations and fears, until her miscarriage forces him to a pained awareness and reawakened love. Few other American novels, perhaps none outside the radical tradition of which
Yonnondio
is a part, reveal so starkly the destructive interactions of class and sex under patriarchal capitalism.
In
Yonnondio,
as in Olsen's other work, the family itself has a contradictory function, at once a source of strength and love, and a battleground between women and men in a system exploiting both. This, of course, is a profoundly Marxian vision; it was Marx and Engels who wrote in the
Communist Manifesto:
''The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder."
43
The vision of the family in
Yonnondio
is formed both by Olsen's own experience and by her familiarity from childhood on with socialist ideas.
Another aspect of that vision is Olsen's treatment of the relationship between housework and paid labor in
Yonnondio.
One of the novel's crucial structural principles is the juxtaposition of men's (and women's) work in the paid labor force and women's work in the homeespecially in the final chapter, which shifts back and forth between Anna's canning at home, as she tends to the demands of her older children and juggles Baby Bess on her hip, and the hellish speedup of the packing plant where Jim works. The overwhelming heat, prelude to the great droughts and dust storms of the thirties, becomes a common bond of suffering. There is nothing redeeming about the brutal and exploitative labor at the plant; Anna at least is engaged in production of goods the family will use and in caring for children whom she loves through her exhaustion. Olsen makes it clear that both forms of work are essential, and that the degrading conditions of both have the same systemic causes. If she is finally unable in
Yonnondio
to suggest a systemic solution, her instincts were perhaps more historically accurate than those of other Marxists writing in the same period.

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