Meade - Bitching

Marion Meade

FOREWORD

In the spring of 1970 rebellion was in the air, and I a freelance writer, wife, and mother of a two-year-old daughterwent searching for the revolution. But joining one of the activist groups that called itself the Womens Liberation Movement did not come easily, as it turned out. Redstockings, for instance, was not listed in the phone book. The National Organization for Women was. For several months I attended meetings in a church basement, with nicely-dressed women in mini-skirts and listened to sober speeches about equal pay for equal work. NOW struck me as too timid, however. What I regarded as more appropriately bellicose was the New York Radical Feminists, with its studious hippies and unfussy neighborhood brigades. While trying to locate the group, I kept busy attending the Congress to Unite Women, reading all the clunky feminist journals, joining a sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal offices.

Then, one night in June, I found myself in a living room on Manhattans Upper West Side. Ten or so women settled themselves in a rough circle. Then we began going around the room, each of us looking back and reporting on some experience from our lives, the ones that struck us as demeaning, unfair, or just plain enraging. Bearing a large quantity of suppressed rage, I felt right at home. I observed that these strangers were not going to judge, argue, or challenge. There was no discussion either. When one person finished, the next would begin speaking on the designated topic. As I soon learned, there was a name for this method of sharing experiences. Consciousness-raising, it was called. It could be loud, scary, savage, and vulgar, but never boring and always heartfelt.

Each Tuesday night that scorching summer I would leave my baby with a sitter or my husband and go off to somebodys apartment. Each week the women went around the room. Yes, there was plenty of bitterness, along with a surprising amount of laughter (which was of course often bitchy). Time magazine, in August, featured a cover story on Womens Lib and Kate Millett whose book Sexual Politics had become a best-seller. The author, as Time put it, was a brilliant misfit in a mans world.

Mans world indeed.

That year 1970 brought forth eruptions of female protest, both political and personal, as women served notice that they would not play by male rules anymore. It seemed that everywhere I went women were eager to talk about their experiences. They complained, moaned, cursed, laughed, and cried. Memories without end began to unroll.

It was a time for slogans.

The personal is political, we said.

Sisterhood is powerful, insisted another slogan.

What should be done about men? Could they be educated, perhaps rehabilitated? Should hard-core resisters of reform be treated like kulaks, enemies of the revolution relegated to the dustbin of history?

Shortly thereafter, I began to record some of the acid conversations I was hearing. A few of the women considered themselves feminists, but most did not. No matter because the streams of discontent sounded pretty much the same. Their ages ranged from around 5 to mid-80s. They were children, students, unmarried women, wives, divorcees, widows, all of them major-league complainers about crummy jobs, failed relationships, frustrated ambitions, wasted lives. Most moving were the elderly women, who looked back with supersad rancor:

What has bothered me, remarked a widow in her 70s, is that everything exciting was off-limits. It was like window-shopping, strolling by and looking and your mouth watering but you could never stop and buy anything. Oftentimes I think my whole life has been spent just passing by.

Bitching was published in 1973.

The response to my book was predictable: it was not exactly popular with men, or with those women who claimed to be satisfied with the status quo.

Transformation of society does not come easily. Yet it did come, and sooner than we could have imagined. Some 40 years later, we live in quite a different world, not yet scrubbed of sexism by any means but considerably altered.

What became of these women who spilled their grievances so freely? They went on to teach school, open restaurants, make films, see patients. Some are mothers and grandmothers, others struggle with the uncertainties of age, poor health, and savings depleted by inflation. A couple are deceased now.

Bitching is a womans book: biography plus history plus memoir. Here are the life stories of a few dozen women and the way they were before Womens Liberation.

Marion Meade

June 2011

New York City

FOR LITTLE DARLING

who has the good sense to deny everything

TO MANKIND, WITH LOVE

The sun splashed liberal gold through the foliage, over the red cement floor, and over the ladies. They had been here since lunchtime, and would remain until sunset, talking, talking incessantly, their tongues mercifully let off the leash.

Doris Lessing, "Martha Quest"

When women get together, they talk about all sorts of things, but their juiciest topic is, and always has been, men. Unlike the male sex, women have few problems confiding in each other about their intimate relationships. They habitually spill their inner feelings. Over the back fence, on the telephone, in kaffeeklatsches, at the beauty parlor, in official and unofficial consciousness-raising sessions, women spit out their troubles, bitches, experiences, and rage. They speak about how to con, conquer, and above all, simply exist in the same world with men.

The current resurgence of feminism has made woman-talk a more profound and perilous pastime than ever because once a woman begins to question her own life, the next person she automatically starts to challenge is the male chauvinist nearest and dearest.

Women disclose their deepest thoughts about men to other women because:

1. They're not as emotionally constipated as men.

2. Misery needs company.

3. Who else have they got to talk to? Surely not men.

Men have never had the fuzziest idea of what women are all about. Or what it's like to be a woman. Or what women really think. Mostly, this is because they're afraid to ask. They suspect that if they do find out, it's not something they'd appreciate hearing. And they are absolutely correct. It is far safer to assume that women are inherently mysterious persons who desire only petting and idolatry, or to coyly speculate, as Freud did, "What do women want?"

But God knows men are not entirely to blame. Womankind learned early on to shut up around them. The shrewd woman knows better than to fully reveal her true feelings on important matters. From experience, she knows that candor is not the best policy, that it, in fact, can be fatal. For a woman, honesty toward a man is a luxury to be indulged in only in time of stress, or when she no longer wants the man, or when he already has one foot out the door. That's why, after a relationship breaks up, it's invariably the man who complains what a bitch his beloved turned out to be once she showed her true colors. One reason Women's Liberation petrifies men is that, for the first time in their lives, they are hearing women say publicly exactly the things they've been revealing to each other privately for centuries.

Since women have always found it impossible to be frank with men, they have subsisted by playing games. Not fun-and-games games, but serious games of sexual politics which are nothing less than a means of survival. From the beginning, women recognized that male supremacy is baloney. At the same time, they understood the dangers of coming right out and saying so. In their daily confrontations and skirmishes with men, they get along by playing woman-man games which, though they may amount to guerrilla tactics, have proved effective nonetheless. By this point, the survival devices are so ingrained in female behavior that women often are unaware of them. Although they may seem to play instinctively, gameswomanship is learned. If they don't figure out the rules for themselves, there are plenty of how-to sources, beginning with mother.