Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Can you describe to me what it is that links these five books?
These are all books that try to make sense of women’s place in society. Two of them are fiction, three are non-fiction, but they are all books that try to explain women’s lesser power in society. They all do it in different ways and it seems very sad to me that a lot of the issues that were debated many, many times in history have been forgotten by the present generation, which seems often to be quite illiterate. They don’t realise that feminism has been going on for 230 years and that they are following in the footsteps of so many women who looked at these issues – and men who looked at these issues, like John Stuart Mill. There is a kind of illiteracy in modern writing, as though modern writers have discovered all these issues themselves.
One of the reasons I put Adrienne Rich first is that I am aware that so many of the contemporary debates about motherhood are issues raised in Of Woman Born, a kind of memoir and history of motherhood. Adrienne Rich had three sons back in the 1950s and early 60s, and she describes her transformation from the young poet who won the Yale Younger Poets prize and launched on a career, was recognised by many important poets, into the mother of three boys, whom she had in rapid succession. She describes her feelings in a very frank way – her ambivalent feelings about her sons; her love for her sons; the difficulty of raising three small boys and writing poetry. She touches on so many of the issues that women go on debating today, and it seems sad to me that a lot of the young mommy bloggers don’t even know about her. They ought to know about it.
To my enormous shame, I haven’t read it, but I’m definitely going to. I found exactly the same. I had this huge career and then I very suddenly had two children, when I was 29 and 30, and it was just all over. The loss of status, or the self-perceived loss of status, was very difficult to deal with.
You know, people prate about how important motherhood is, but they treat mothers like shit. That is a huge hypocrisy in our culture. The other huge hypocrisy involves men making laws about women’s uteruses. I was sitting in the hospital after giving birth to my daughter, and I remember turning on the TV and seeing a Catholic priest and right-wing politician discussing abortion and how it should be outlawed, and I slung a cut-glass ashtray into the screen, I was so angry. How can people who have never gone through the process of birth try to legislate for those who have?
It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
Exactly. And after you’ve gone through a birth – in my case an emergency Caesarean, because my cervix wouldn’t dilate – I thought: Who are these assholes, telling us what we can and can’t do with our uteruses?! They don’t even have a uterus. The rage that I felt – I found that my feminism was greatly enhanced. Even now, I’m a grandmother of four, and being with those children absolutely makes me feel fierce about changing the world.
Yes. One of the things that I find frightening now is that people don’t even want to say they are feminists.
That is beginning to change, I think. I was in Copenhagen to speak on International Women’s Day on March 8th, and I had an enormous audience there! You know, women in Denmark have crèches, have a year’s maternity leave, but they perceive that women are being held back. Officially, the excuse is the mothering. In a country like that, where you have childcare and maternity leave – even there you have the perception that the revolution is unfinished.
I have been astonished myself, having had children. My mother brought me up by herself and had to work, so I never had a model of a woman who stays at home doing all the housework unpaid, and yet I ended up finding myself pretty much doing that as well as working. I am much more of an angry feminist since having my children, though I was always a feminist.
It does make it much clearer to you what women are up against, absolutely. I also found when I got to Italy on my last trip, the women in Italy were up in arms about Berlusconi because he seems to mock all their aspirations. Women in Italy are in a much worse situation than women in Denmark.
Italy is a horrible place to be a woman. I live there half the time and the lessons my daughter was learning about femininity there were not very helpful.
There is much to be done in Italy, but once again, women are on the march, and Berlusconi, we might say, by being such an asshole, is a boon to feminism. It has become clear to Italian women that they are being mocked and derided. He has prostitutes to his villa and laughs about it. You might say that he is helping Italian feminism with his behaviour.
We all know The Female Eunuch.
Yes. When I read Germaine Greer back in 1971, I was just delighted, because here, suddenly, was somebody saying all the things we felt in our bones but didn’t dare say.
Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying, is a novelist, poet, and essayist whose work helps provide women with a powerful and rational voice in forging a feminist consciousness. She has published 20 books, including eight novels, six volumes of poetry, six books of non-fiction and numerous articles in magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, The Sunday Times of London, Elle, Vogue and The New York Times Book Review.
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