1A Life of One’s Own

THE SCOURGE OF WOMEN’S INDEPENDENCE


“Hi, Gloria. I’m so excited to finally get to talk to you…”

One day, in March 1990, on CNN, Larry King is hosting Gloria Steinem, the American feminist superstar. A member of the TV audience calls from Cleveland, Ohio. Her tone is warm; we assume this is a fan. But we soon realize this is not the case. “I really believe that your movement was a total failure…” the silky voice goes on. “You are one of the primary causes of the downfall of our beautiful American family and society today. A couple of questions. I’d like to know if you’re married … If you have children.” Twice, an unruffled Steinem gallantly replies, “No.” Interrupted by the presenter, who diplomatically attempts to sum up her case, the anonymous avenger looses her final bombshell: “I have said for the last fifteen years that Gloria Steinem should rot in hell.”1

A journalist who, in the early 1970s, became an ardent defender of women’s rights, Gloria Steinem has always offered her critics a good run for their money. First, her beauty and her many lovers give the lie to the old chestnut that feminist protest only masks the bitterness and frustration of plain Janes whom no man has done the honor of rescuing from the shelf. What’s more, the full and dynamic life Steinem has led and leads today, a whirlwind of travels and new vistas, of activism and writing, of love and friendship, seriously complicates the picture for those who believe a woman’s life means nothing without partnership and motherhood. To a journalist who asked why she wasn’t married, Steinem gave the justly celebrated reply: “I can’t mate in captivity.”

She departed from this rule at the age of sixty-six, so that her companion at the time—David Bale, a South African—could obtain his green card and remain in the US. She married Bale in Oklahoma, at the house of her friend Wilma Mankiller, a Native American leader and activist, in a Cherokee ceremony, followed by a “wonderful breakfast.” She wore her “best jeans” for the occasion.2 Her husband died of cancer three years later. “Some people still assume that, because we got legally married, he was the love of my life—and I was his,” Steinem confided, years later, to the journalist Rebecca Traister, who was investigating the history of single women in the US. “That’s such a misunderstanding of human uniqueness. He had been married twice before and he had wonderful grown children. I had been happily in love with men who are still my friends and chosen family. Some people have one partner for life, but most don’t—and each of our loves is crucial and unique.”3

Up to the end of the 1960s, as Traister reminds us, American feminism was dominated by Betty Friedan’s approach. The author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) and an outspoken critic of the ideal of the housewife, Friedan spoke up for “women who wanted equality, but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children.”4 Critiques of marriage itself only surfaced in the feminist movement later on, with the birth of the fight for gay rights and with lesbians’ increased visibility. But, even then, it seemed unthinkable for many activists that a woman could be heterosexual and not wish to marry; “at least until Gloria came along.”5 Thanks to Steinem and a few others, in 1973, Newsweek observed that it was “finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.”7 By the end of the decade, the divorce rate had exploded, reaching almost 50 percent.

On Welfare, Fraudsters and Free Spirits

We must be clear that, once again, white American feminists seem to have been reinventing the wheel. On the one hand, descended from slaves, black American women had never been subject to the domestic ideal denounced by Friedan. They proudly owned their status as workers, as the lawyer Sadie Alexander (in 1921, the first African-American woman to achieve a PhD in economics) theorized in the 1930s.8 And this pride in independence was part of a long tradition of political and community engagement. The formidable Annette Richter, for example, has also lived essentially single and without children, and unquestionably deserves to become just as well known as Steinem, who is the same age as her. After a brilliant university career, Richter spent her whole professional life within the government at Washington, while also leading the semi-secret black women’s mutual aid organization that her great-great-grandmother founded in 1867, while the latter was still a slave.9 Further, because of the deterioration in their economic position after the Second World War, African-American women became much less likely to marry, and began to have children, outside marriage, much earlier than white women. In 1965, this won them a reproof from the then assistant secretary of state for labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who accused them of endangering “the patriarchal structure” of American society.10

With the advent of Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, conservative discourse created the reviled figure of the “welfare queen,” who could be black or white, although the racist connotations were clear when this term was used of black women. For ten years, the President himself peddled the unfounded story of one of these “queens,” who, he shamelessly insisted, used “80 names, 30 addresses and 12 Social Security cards,” thanks to which, he claimed, “Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”11 In short, the normalized denunciation of social spongers and fraudsters—a political tack also familiar in France—was now specifically applicable to women too. During his 1994 gubernatorial campaign for Florida, Jeb Bush opined that women receiving welfare assistance would do better to “get their life together and find a husband.”12 In Ariel Gore’s novel We Were Witches (2017), set in early 1990s California, the heroine (also called Ariel), a young (white) single mother, makes the mistake of confiding to her new neighbor, in the suburb she’s just moved to, that she’s living on food stamps. On learning this, the neighbor’s husband shows up to insult her from the street—and steals her welfare check from her letterbox. Ariel moves house in a panic the day that, arriving home with her daughter, she finds a doll pinned to the front door, daubed in red with the words: “Die, welfare slut.”13 In 2017, a Michigan court carried out a paternity test for an eight-year-old child born of a rape; without consulting any of those involved, it awarded joint parental authority and rights to visit to the rapist, whose name it also added to the child’s birth certificate and to whom it gave the victim’s address. The young mother commented: “I was receiving about $260 a month in food stamps for me and my son, and health insurance for him. I guess they were trying to see how to get some of the money back.”14 A woman must have a master, even if he’s the man who kidnapped and assaulted her when she was twelve.

Robert Rector, one of the architects of the disastrous 1996 US social care reform, led by Bill Clinton, which tore apart a safety net already riddled with large holes, was still talking in 2012 about marriage as the “strongest anti-poverty weapon.”15 This, Traister argues, amounts to topsy-turvy thinking: “If politicians are concerned about dropping marriage rates, they should increase welfare benefits. It’s that simple”—for we’re more inclined to get married when we have a minimum of economic security. And, “if they’re concerned about poverty rates? They should increase welfare benefits.”16 Moreover, she comments, even if unmarried women truly wanted a “hubby state,” what would be so scandalous about that, when white men “and especially married wealthy white men” have long benefited from the support of a “wifey state” to ensure their independence by means of grants, loans and tax reductions?17 But the idea that women are sovereign individuals, not mere appendages, still has a long way to go before it becomes the accepted norm—and not only among conservative politicians.

In 1971, Gloria Steinem co-founded the feminist monthly Ms. Magazine. Not “Miss” or “Mrs,” but “Ms,” an exact female equivalent of Mr—a title that reveals nothing of the holder’s matrimonial status. The word was invented in 1961 by Sheila Michaels, a civil-rights activist. She had the idea upon spotting a typo on a letter addressed to her housemate. She herself had never been a “father’s property,” for her parents had not married, and she didn’t intend to find a husband, and she was looking for a term to express this. At the time, many girls were marrying at eighteen and Michaels was twenty-two: being a “Miss” meant being “left on the shelf.” For ten years, she introduced herself as “Ms,” putting up with the laughter and the jibes. Then, a friend of Steinem who’d heard of her idea passed it on to the magazine’s founders, who were yet to settle on its name. By adopting “Ms,” they at last brought the new word into common parlance—and it became a great success. That year, Bella Abzug, a Congressional Representative for the state of New York, passed a law authorizing the use of “Ms” on federal forms. Unexpectedly questioned about this in a 1972 television interview, Richard Nixon answered with a brief irritable laugh that he was “a little old-fashioned,” preferring to stick with Miss or Mrs.18 In a secret recording from the White House after the show, Nixon can be heard muttering to his adviser Henry Kissinger: “For shit’s sake, how many people really have read Gloria Steinem and give one shit about that?” In 2007, tracing the history of the word, Guardian journalist Eve Kay recalled her own pride the day she opened her first bank account as a “Ms”: “I was my own person with my own identity and Ms. summed that up better than any other title. It was a small symbolic step—I knew it didn’t mean that women were equal, but it was important to at least announce to the world my intent to be free.” And Kay encouraged her readers to follow suit: “Choose Miss and you are condemned to childish immaturity. Choose Mrs. and be condemned as some guy’s chattel. Choose Ms. and you become an adult woman in charge of your whole life.”19

When, in France, forty long years after Nixon’s comment, the feminist organizations Osez le féminisme! (“Dare to be a feminist!”) and the Chiennes de garde (“Bitches on guard”) eventually put this question on the table with their campaign “‘Mademoiselle,’ la case en trop” (“Miss: a tick-box too far”), which called for the elimination of the “Miss” option on administrative forms, the move was seen as the nth nutty fad from feminists with too much time on their hands. The reactions ranged from sighs of nostalgia to eulogies on the murder of gallantry à la française by these harpies, and dyspeptic exhortations to campaign on “more serious subjects.” “At first, we thought it was a joke,” Alix Girod de l’Ain mocked in a column in Elle magazine.20 She recalled the honorary and rare usage of “Mademoiselle” for famous actresses who’ve had no long connection to a single man: “We must defend mademoiselle because of Mademoiselle Jeanne Moreau, Mademoiselle Catherine Deneuve and Mademoiselle Isabelle Adjani.” From this stance, she insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that making “Madame” the only option—French doesn’t yet have any third term equivalent to Ms—amounted to addressing all women as if they were married: “Would this mean, for these feminists, that it’s better—more respectable—to be officially married off?”—which of course was not the intention of the organizations behind the campaign. That said, it rapidly emerged that her real concern was for Mademoiselle’s youthful connotations: “We must save mademoiselle because, when the greengrocer on Rue Cadet uses it for me, I’m not taken in, but I get a notion that my basil may be mine for free.” (Girod de l’Ain was forgetting that, as it happens, the big guns of the feminist dictatorship were trained only on bureaucratic forms, and so did not necessarily pose a threat to her free basil.) She concluded by calling instead for the addition of a new box to tick: “Pcsse”—in defense of “our inalienable right to be princesses.”

Dispiriting as this is, Girod de l’Ain’s piece at least reveals the degree to which women are conditioned to value their infantilization and to derive their sense of self-worth from their objectification—or at least French women do, for, that year too, Canadian Marie Claire was assuring us that, in Quebec, “the term reveals such archaic thinking that calling a woman ‘mademoiselle’ will guarantee you a slap in response.”21

Adventuress: No Role Model for a Lady

While this realm is not exclusively hers, the single woman embodies female independence in its most obvious and visible form. This makes her a magnet for reactionary hate, but it also makes her an intimidating figure for a substantial number of other women. The gender-divided labor model that still constrains us has significant psychological consequences. Nothing in the way most girls are educated encourages them to believe in their own strength and abilities, nor to cultivate and value their independence. They are taught not only to consider partnership and family the foundations of their personal achievements, but also to look on themselves as delicate and helpless, and to seek emotional security at all costs, such that their admiration for intrepid female adventurers remains purely notional and without impact on their own lives. In 2017, one reader of the Cut, an American online magazine for modern women, posted a cry for help: “Tell me not to get married!” Aged twenty, she had lost her mother two and a half years earlier. Her father was preparing to remarry and to sell the family home, and her two sisters were already married—one with children, the other hoping for them. On her forthcoming trip back home, she faced having to share a bedroom with her father’s new nine-year-old stepdaughter—and found the prospect depressing. She had no boyfriend, but, although aware that this state of mind might lead to bad decisions, she was obsessed by the feeling that she too should get married. In the Cut’s response to the piece, journalist Heather Havrilesky emphasized the disadvantage girls can suffer on facing the turmoil of adult life, due to the way they are socialized:

Boys are encouraged to map out their adult trajectory in the most adventurous manner possible. Conquering the world all alone is the most romantic path possible for a guy, and he can only pray that some lady doesn’t slow him down along the way, thereby ruining everything. But for women, the romance of forging out into the world is painted as pathetic and dreary if there’s no dude there. […] And Jesus, does it take hard work to reinvent the world outside those narrow conventions!22

This doesn’t mean a man can’t suffer from emotional insecurity or loneliness, but at least men are not surrounded by a culture of exemplars that exacerbates—or even creates—these miserable situations. On the contrary: our culture looks after its men. Even the introverted, awkward geek has had his revenge, becoming the Prometheus of the contemporary world, garlanded with money and success. As one interviewee in Charlotte Debest’s book, Le choix d’une vie sans enfant, explained, “in male culture there is no Princess Charming, no fabulous wedding with glorious suits.”23 Whereas women learn to dream of “romance” rather than “love,” in line with a distinction established by Steinem. She writes: “The more patriarchal and gender-polarized a culture is, the more addicted to romance.” Instead of developing a full palette of human qualities, we make do with the restricted range of those considered either masculine or feminine, and then seek fulfillment by means of a partner, in superficial relationships pursued in the manner of an addiction. And this substantially disadvantages women: “Since most human qualities are labeled ‘masculine,’ and only a few are ‘feminine’—and even those are marginalized […]—women have an even greater need to project life-giving parts of themselves onto another human being” (emphasis in the original).24

In this context, independent women arouse skepticism in all fields. Sociologist Érika Flahault shows how this skepticism has been expressed in France since the appearance, in the early twentieth century, of single women living alone—where they would once have been “taken in by relations, by their extended family or local community in almost every case.”25 She disinters journalist Maurice de Waleffe’s observation from 1927:

A man is never alone, short of being shipwrecked like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island: when he turns lighthouse-keeper, shepherd or anchorite, it’s because he feels like it; the mood is upon him. And we should admire him, for a soul’s greatness is measured by the wealth of its inner life, and a man must be fiendishly rich in that to sustain himself solo. But you will never see a woman choose such greatness. Gentler because they are weaker, they have a greater need than we do for society.26

And, in a widely read book from 1967, André Soubiran, a doctor, reflected: “One wonders whether feminine psychology can accommodate freedom and the absence of men’s domination as well as we imagine.”27

We must not underestimate our need for examples—whether shared by the majority or drawn from a counterculture—that support us, even if only subconsciously, that provide meaning, impetus, resonance and depth to our life choices. We need to discern a pattern beneath the trajectory of women’s lives, in order to motivate, support and legitimize our choices, to weave others’ lives into our own and make their presence, their approbation felt. Having come to prominence with the second feminist wave, a few films of the 1970s have played this role for independent women. In Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979), for example, Judy Davis plays Sybylla Melvyn, a young woman in nineteenth-century Australia who is pulled to and fro between her mother’s rich family and the poverty of her father’s farm. Imaginative, joyous and wild about art, Sybylla rebels against the idea of marrying. She finds love in the figure of a rich childhood friend. When, after various peripeteia, he asks her to marry him, she refuses, painfully: “I can’t lose myself in somebody else’s life when I haven’t lived my own, yet.” She confides that she wants to be a writer: “I’ve got to do it now. And I’ve got to do it alone.” In the last scene, she completes a manuscript. On the point of sending it to her publisher, she savors her happiness, leaning on a gatepost, facing into the golden sunlight.

A happy ending involving neither man nor love: this is so exceptional that even I, who chose the film looking for precisely this, was a little horrified. Watching the scene in which Sybylla rejects her suitor, a part of me understood (she tells him: “The last thing I want is to be a wife, out in the bush, having a baby every year”), but another part could not help wanting to shout, “Come on, girl, are you sure?” At the time the film is set, refusing marriage implies the entire renunciation of a partnership, yet this would cease to be the case as time went on: “Fuck marriage, not men,” urged a tract handed out at the 1969 Congress to Unite Women, in New York.29 This lends a tragic dimension to Sybylla’s decision, but also allows her to take a radical stance: yes, a woman too may choose above all to pursue her vocation.

“Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead,” sighs Isadora Wing, heroine of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying, which explores this female damnation through all its ramifications. A young poet, Wing flees her second husband in order to follow another man she has fallen hard for. She describes the uncontainable yearning that fills her after five years of marriage: “Those longings to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head, to discover whether you could manage to survive in a cabin in the woods without going mad”; but she also feels waves of nostalgia and tenderness for her husband: “If I lost him, I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name.”30 This tension between our need for security in love and our need for freedom is largely common to men and women; this is what makes exclusive relationships both so desirable and so problematic. But Wing realizes that, as a woman, she is poorly equipped for independence, even when she really needs it. She fears her courage may not be equal to her ambitions. She would like to care less about love, to be able to concentrate on her work and her books, to fashion herself through them just as a man would, but she sees that her writing is still fundamentally about seeking love. She’s afraid she might never enjoy her freedom without a taint of guilt. Her clinically unstable first husband had tried to throw himself out of a window and to take her with him, yet, even after this, she can’t entirely accept having left him: “I chose me. My guilt about this haunts me still.”31 She realizes she “simply couldn’t imagine [her]self without a man”: “without one, I felt lost as a dog without a master; rootless, faceless, undefined.”32 And yet, the marriages that play out around her are mostly appalling: the question isn’t, “When did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right?”33 It seems that single people dream only of marriage, while the married dream of nothing but escape.

“The dictionary defines ‘adventurer’ as ‘a person who has, enjoys or seeks adventures,’ but ‘adventuress’ is ‘a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position,’” Gloria Steinem points out.34 Thanks to her very unconventional upbringing, she escaped the conditioning which compels most girls to seek security: her father always refused formal employment and earned a living in a multitude of jobs, such as itinerant secondhand dealing, and he brought the whole family on the road with him, so that Steinem was more often to be found reading on the back seat of their car than attending school. Indeed, she only attended school regularly from the age of twelve. Her father had such a “fear of the siren song of home,” she recalls, that if they found they’d left something behind, even having only just set out, he preferred to buy the missing things than turn back.35 From the age of six, when she needed clothes, he would give her money and wait for her in the car while she chose what she fancied; there resulted “such satisfying purchases as a grown-up ladies’ red hat, Easter shoes that came with a live rabbit and a cowgirl jacket with fringe.”36 In other words, Steinem’s father left her free to define who she wanted to be. Later, always looking ahead to the next plane flight, she reproduced her beloved father’s way of life. The day that the company, which she’d been working for remotely, asked her to come into the office two days a week, she “quit, bought an ice cream cone and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.”37 Her apartment had long been a jumble of cardboard boxes and suitcases, and it was only in her fifties that she developed some sense of homemaking: after months of “nesting—shopping for such things as sheets and candles with a pleasure that bordered on orgasmic,”38 she discovered that feeling happy at home actually sharpened her taste for travel, and vice versa. But, whatever the reasons, sheets and candles have never been high on her agenda. She did not start out by learning how to be “like a girl” (she tells how, as a child, when a man went to kiss her on the cheek, she bit him39), and this has likely served her very well.


Copyright © 2018 by Mona Chollet. Copyright © 2022 by Sophie R. Lewis. Copyright © 2022 by Carmen Maria Machado