The Female Eunuch (30 page)
ought to have proved beyond further dispute that adultery provided greater inspiration than marriage. Playwrights succeeded better than poets at establishing marriage as the
non plus ultra
of romantic love, but the real source of the marrying-and-living-happily-ever-after myth is that art-form invented to while away the vacant hours of idle wives, the love-novel.
Richardson’s
Pamela
is the source of all, but it had various founts to draw upon for its own being. The invention of printing had meant that literature was no longer the prerogative of the nobility, and developments in education under the Tudors, buttressed by the Protestant anxiety that all should be able to read the Bible,
led to the development of a market for all forms of escapist literature, many of which treated marriage as an adventure. The daughters of up-and-coming burghers learnt romance from the same sources that they learnt to use knives and forks and how to avoid farting in public. The notion of marriage as exploit first appears in stories like those told to the gentle craft of shoemakers, stories of the abduction
of princesses by humble cobblers.
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Bit by bit the archetypal story
of the winning of the nobleman by the virtuous commoner like the Fair Maid of Fressingfield was developed.
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The novels of Nashe,
Defoe and other writers of picaresque, were not proper reading for ladies. Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill were not fit heroines for the gentle sex. The pattern of the trials of
Pamela
is the pattern of
The Golden Legend
, in which virgin saints fought off all the machinations of the devil and his earthly agents to present themselves as unsullied
spouses to Christ himself in heaven.
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Pamela’s divine spouse is the
squire, and heaven is several thousand pounds a year. Richardson continued the story, but its proper ending, if the story is to corres- pond to the structure of sexual fantasy, is entry upon married life and unimaginable bliss. Richardson’s followers did not attempt to describe the indescribable. The great bulk of the novel industry has been maintained until our own age by the lending libraries, which depend largely upon the category called
romance
, escapist literature of love and marriage voraciously consumed by housewives. Now the market is contested by the cheap paperback and the cinema, women’s magazines and love comics and fotoromance. Gillian Freeman was offered work by one women’s magazine which set out her staple plot in these terms.
The girl in the story should be a secretary…the boyfriend must be elevated above her socially—he could be the son of the boss, an ad- vertising executive, a student or a serviceman…or a young doctor.
The story had to have a happy ending, there was to be no mention of religion or race, and lovemaking must be restricted to a kiss.
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The myth is still as widely dispersed as it ever was, although permissiveness is loudly argued to have made great inroads upon it. It has no demonstrable relation to what actually happens in the majority of cases but this fact itself reflects nothing upon its sway as a myth. The myth has always depended upon the riches, the handsomeness, the loveliness, the considerateness of a man in
Chances are, when a fellow asks you out for dinner, you’re someone pretty special in his life. A dinner-date means he doesn’t mind spending a wallet-full of wampum on you—and more important, a great deal of time just sitting across at table from you with nothing to do but eat and talk. And it also means he expects to be proud of you as he follows you and the head-waiter to the table.
‘Datebook’s Complete Guide to Dating’, 1960, p.115
a million. There are enough women prepared to boast of having got a man in a million to persuade other women that their failure to find a man rich enough, handsome enough, skilled enough as a lover, considerate enough, is a reflection of their inferior deserts or powers of attraction. More than half the housewives in this country work outside the home as well as inside it because their husbands do not earn enough money to support them and their children at a decent living standard. Still more know that their husbands are paunchy, short, unathletic, and snore or smell or leave their clothes lying around. A very high proportion do not find bliss in the conjugal embrace and most complain that their husbands forget the little things that count. And yet the myth is not invalidated as a myth. There is always an extenuating circumstance, the government, high taxation, or sedentary work, or illness, or perhaps a simple mistake or a failure in the individual case, which can be invoked to explain its divergence from the mythical norm. Most women who have fol- lowed in the direction indicated by the myth make an act of faith that despite
day-to-day difficulties they are happy, and keep on asserting it in the face of blatant contradiction by the facts, because to confess dis- appointment is to admit failure and abandon the effort. It never oc- curs to them to seek the cause of their unhappiness in the myth itself. The women of the lower classes have always laboured, whether as servants, factory hands or seamstresses or the servants of their own households, and we might expect that the middle-class myth did not prevail as strongly in their minds. But it is a sad fact that most working-class families are following a pattern of ‘progress’ and ‘self-improvement’ into the ranks of the middle class. In too many cases the wife’s work is treated as a stop-gap, a contribution to buying or furnishing a house, and the omnipotent husband looks forward to the day when she will be able to stay at home and have babies. They too consider even if they cannot exactly manage it that mum
ought
to be at home keeping it nice for dad and the kids. In extreme cases a husband may even object to the sight of his wife scrubbing the floor as an affront to his male romanticism. Too often his wife’s work merely supplies him with the property or the mort- gage necessary to admit him once and for all to the middle class;
behind it the myth lurks secure and unthreatened.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle- class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow. The decisions about the cost of the celebration are possibly less important than the choice of a shop whereat to place the
list
. The more class the families can pretend to the more they can exact in the way of presents at showers, kitchen teas and the like. A list placed at the most expensive store in town embeds the couple and their interlacing families in the high-consumption
bracket. The result is big business and mutual satisfaction. Harrods assures the bride that all she needs to do is ‘find the groom, we’ll do the rest’. Some stores
…when through man’s social and economic organization she became dependent, and when in consequence he began to pick and choose…women had to charm for
her life; and she not only employed the passive arts innate with her sex, but flashed forth in all the glitter that had been one of man’s accessories in courtship, but which he had dispensed with when the superiority acquired through occupational pursuits enabled him to do so.
Under new stimulation to be attractive, and with the addition of ornament to the repertory of her charms, woman has assumed an almost aggressive attitude towards courtship…
W. I. Thomas, ‘Sex and Society’, 1907, p.235
bombard girls whose engagements are announced in the newspapers with invitations to place their lists with them. One store in London turns over two or three million pounds a year in this business, mainly by manipulating the bride’s mother. The more expensive stores ex- pect a list to fetch about £500 turnover although the most expensive finds to its chagrin that only half the guests buy the wedding present
from them.
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The true pattern is already set in that it is the bride
who initiates and controls all this spectacular consumption, just as the bride’s gown and jewellery and the female guests’ attire will establish the modishness of the whole clan, just as her girlfriend es- timated her success in the marriage stakes by the size of the rock she sported when her engagement was first announced. The high consumption factor is maintained throughout by the imagery of films and plays and books about marriage, in which every household is warm and light, every wife is slim and elegant, and every husband successful.
The myth is effortlessly pervasive like the forlorn hope
It is not really surprising to hear of the number of men whose wives do not reach a satisfactory climax. As vibrators have been mentioned, may I add that it need not be the penis-shaped battery model which is difficult to ‘disguise’ if found by your children. We have a standard Pifco and this is really fantastic. I would defy
anyone to claim that his wife would not reach a magnificent climax if her clitoris were teased with one of these.
R. W. (Cheshire), Forum, Vol. 2, No. 8
of winning the pools. Any shabby overworked female reading of a millionaire’s wife in the
Sunday Times
can dream that she had ‘three children, one cook/housekeeper, one nanny, two cleaners, two gardeners, one Rolls-Royce, one Fiat, one staff car, one helicopter, country home in Cheshire, London flat in Belgravia’ and ‘my hus- band bought me a lovely little crocodile bag on chains from Gucci which goes with most things. Of course, I don’t know how much it cost. He also gave me a mink, dark brown, by Maxwell Croft, which one can practically live in…I buy my negligées and nightgowns from Fortnum’s of course. I’ve no idea how much they cost. Sometimes
my husband gives me them, which pleases me greatly…My hus- band’s awfully good at presents of jewellery.’
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It would all be spoilt
if the envious little woman reading her
Sunday Times
has a vision of the industrialist’s secretary reminding him that it was his an- niversary, and slipping out at lunchtime with a cheque to pick up a piece selected by the jeweller’s sales manager. Love seems to perish in hardship or to go underground, so that the valiant wife says ‘I know he loves me. He doesn’t say much and we’re past all that petting and stuff. But he’d never do anything to hurt me or the kids.’ It is easy to imagine that love survives in a cottage with roses round the door, or in a house in Cheshire with a cook/housekeeper, a nanny, two gardeners and two cleaners, where the lady of the house is always scented and beautiful, draped in fine stuffs from
We all know that the male instinctively looks to the woman for chastizement. It is a natural emotion born of the mother and child relationship. I am a willing partner in my husband’s recurring urge to be disciplined, not simply for the eroticism of the event but also because my endeavours in this field are amply rewarded in other ways.
I have found that my husband has an almost insatiable desire to please me, not only in sexual affairs but also in general household matters. He has assumed responsibility for the housework, shopping, washing and ironing. I have only to mention that I need a new shelf, that the oven needs cleaning or a room decorating to find it done in no time at all. I am now encouraging him to take an interest in the culinary arts.
I am convinced not only by my own experience but also from other marriages that my husband is not abnormal.
I’m sure that nine husbands out of 10, if asked by their wives if they would like to be caned, would answer yes.
(Mrs) L. B. (Essex), Forum, Vol. 2, No. 3
Fortnum’s, rested and happy in her triumphant husband’s loving arms.
But it isn’t true and it never was, and now for sure it never will be.
Mother duck, father duck and all the little baby ducks. The family, ruled over and provided for by father, suckled and nurtured by mother seems to us inherent in the natural order. While momma gorilla is breeding and nursing, poppa gorilla mounts guard over her, defending her from the perils of the wild. Even when the wild held no perils, Adam delved and Eve span and God the father was their daddy and walked with them in the twilight if they were good. When they were bad they were flung out of the garden and began a family of their own. Their sons fought as siblings will and murder came upon the world. Somewhere in the Apocrypha lurked Lilith, the destructive woman, who offered love and licentiousness and threatened the family structure. The grandsons of Adam consorted with the daughters of the flesh. The myth of the origin of the patri- archal family in the Old Testament is ambiguous: the father is vin- dictive, the mother is his vassal, the brothers enact the primal crime, murder for the love of the father, while the harlot beckons from outside the prison of domesticity. But from this source modern Christianity developed its own paradigm of the nuclear family and considered it reflected in the natural law. The structure of the state, naïvely considered as no more than a collection of families, reflects the natural principle: the king/president is a benign but just father of a huge family. The Church also acknowledged one head, a
locum tenens
for God Himself. The man was the soul, and the woman the body: the man was the mind and the woman the heart; the man was the will and the woman the passions. Boys
learnt their male role from father and girls their female role from their mother. It seems clear, simple and immutable. Father was re- sponsible for his dependants; he owned the property, transferred it to his first-born son together with his name. The chain of command from the elders to the poorest vassals was complete.
And yet what seems so essential and inevitable is utterly contin- gent. The patrilineal family depends upon the free gift by women of the right of paternity to men. Paternity is not an intrinsic relation- ship: it cannot be
The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed slavery of the wife…Within the family he is the bourgeois and his wife represents the proletariat.
Friedrich Engels, ‘The Origin of the Family’, 1943, p. 79
