2003
In 1972 I was nineteen, I was an undergraduate at a northern university, a small pale girl with inky fingers, high ambitions and a strange pain I couldn’t account for. I took my pain to the student health service, and a doctor—male, middle-aged—looked at me in a way that suggested that he’d seen my sort before. In seconds he had consulted his inner encyclopedia of aches, twinges and pangs. None, he said, corresponded to mine. It was all in my mind, perhaps? I had better have some anti-depressants.
In those days, if a young man said he had a pain, the doctors listened to his heart, took his blood pressure, examined the bit of him he was complaining about. But women patients—especially young women—were routinely suspected of casting mental distress into the form of physical symptoms. Doctors looked for anxiety and stress, for dissatisfaction and panic. What had we to panic about? We were hesitating, some of us, on the brink of a man’s world. Conflict over our roles in life—career, marriage, children?—was believed to give us all sorts of pains. Would it be lipstick and lingerie, or a life with the boys in the line of fire? No one imagined it could be both, or neither.
When the anti-depressants didn’t work, and Valium didn’t either, the GP sent me to a psychiatrist. Look here, said the shrink, regarding me tweedily from inside his tweed jacket: wasn’t all this a bit much for me, this business of studying law? If I were honest about what I really wanted in life, wouldn’t I secretly prefer a job in my mother’s dress shop?
My mother was a section head in a big-city department store, controlling twenty staff. The psychiatrist couldn’t hear this: he could only hear “dress shop.” He was invalidating, though he didn’t know it, not just my hopes in life, but my mother’s too. She’d never had a chance of a high school education. Her primary school had simply forgotten to enter her for the examinations at eleven. But what did it matter? She was only a girl. At fourteen, she was working in a cotton mill—the mill her own mother had entered at the age of twelve. At forty, she reinvented herself. She got a job on a fashion sales floor, dyed her graying hair blonde, and within months was promoted to management.
“Uneducated” doesn’t mean “unintelligent”; in my family, we knew that. But one of the most shaming moments of my mother’s life, she confessed, was the moment when she faced the application form for the saleswoman’s job. Educational qualifications? None. Zero, blank. This was why she was fiercely ambitious for me. In four generations, we’d come far. My great-grandmother couldn’t read or write. She had ten children, and all of them stayed poor throughout their lives. But here I was, ready to tussle with anyone for a share in society. So why did I feel I was being punished—pushed down the ranks again, back into the woman’s world? I was a feminist—insofar as I knew what one was. I was articulate; but somehow, every time I opened my mouth, I seemed to make my situation worse.
We’re all familiar with the sad tale of the medicalization of unhappiness: with the history of the brain-dampening wonder drugs prescribed by the million to soothe the condition of womanhood. My story fits within this larger history; even its personal, individual tributaries seem to flow into the common stream of women’s experience. My generation prided itself on control of our own fertility. “A woman’s right to choose” was the slogan of the age: to choose, that is, whether and when we had children, and by implication to choose the shape of our lives. In part, our right to choose could be guaranteed by legislation. But in a larger way, it could only be guaranteed by a society that was changing around us, feeding our aspirations instead of punishing them. My own choices, as it turned out, were sharply curtailed. Biology has determined the way I’ve lived my life, just as it did for my great-grandmother.
For the descendant of the mother of ten is the mother of—none. I didn’t, when I was nineteen, need a Valium, or a patronizing lecture on limiting my ambitions. I needed a physical examination, and someone to ask the right questions; someone to listen to me, rather than to their own prejudices. The strange pain that was no known pain was the beginning of a disease process that left me infertile by the age of twenty-seven, and which leaves me, even today, an unwilling stranger in my own body.
The moment of choice came and went without my knowing about it. What happened to me was entirely preventable, and the why of it has little to do with me, much to do with the way young women were looked at thirty years ago. They were mad bitches one and all, out for men’s jobs, wanting equality but whining for special treatment, always with some moan about the state of their insides: unreliable workers who’d be pregnant as soon as you’d trained them. When I went for job interviews, I’d be asked: “Are you going to start a family?” If only I’d known, I could have put my hand on my heart and said no.
So where do we find ourselves? The huge advances women have made in education and career choice are still undermined by an expectation that she will, when all’s said, mind the baby. And if she has no baby to mind, what is she? Is she one of those mad bitches, too mercenary to consult her female instincts? Is she a “victim” of infertility, a pitiable statistic on a waiting list? If you want to know what feminism has achieved, a good measure is our attitude to the working mother. But you should also look at how the childless woman is regarded. The biological clock is often ticking most loudly in the ears of onlookers, critics. A woman who stays childless is still an object of curiosity, misunderstanding and dislike. People want to ask, but they can’t find a tactful way. Sometimes they forget tact and ask anyway.
After my friends started to become grandmothers, I realized the time for shame was past. I am willing to talk about my life as a woman, knowing that I’ve hardly had one. Maybe doctors are better trained now, women’s health isn’t trashed so casually. I can hope that life would be better for my daughter, except, of course, that I don’t have one. The women of any family have history written on their bodies. Mostly, it’s a story of progress. But our story stops with me.