What Do Women Want?

In Cynthia Ozick’s short story “Virility,” a talentless male poet gains fame by publishing the verses of his talented aunt under his own name. The book is entitled Virility and is accordingly praised for its “masculine” virtues: strength, power, mastery. The poet wins the homage of critics and the love of women, collects large lecture fees, and for a little while enjoys the kind of unambivalent success that is possible for men in a man’s world. When the aunt dies, the poet breaks down. In a fit of remorse, he publishes her last poems under her own name and confesses his imposture. Do critics thereby conclude that genius has no gender? Do they praise her work at last on its own merits? Of course not. “Lovely girlish verses,” the critics say; “thin, womanish perceptions.” A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet. A poem under a man’s name smells virile. Under a woman’s name, the same poem smells thin.

One of the most notable and faintly horrifying memories from my college years is of the time a distinguished critic came to my creative writing class and delivered himself of this thundering judgment: “Women can’t be writers. They don’t know blood and guts, and puking in the streets, and fucking whores, and swaggering through Pigalle at five A.M. . . .” But the most amazing thing was the response—or lack of it. It was 1961 or ’62, and we all sat there, aspiring women writers that we were, and listened to this claptrap without a word of protest. Our hands folded on our laps, our eyes modestly downcast, our hearts cast even lower than our eyes, we listened meekly—while the male voice of authority told us what women could or couldn’t write.

Things have changed since then. When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women’s studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women’s movement. Poetry meant William Butler Yeats, James Dickey, Robert Lowell. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male. Not that I didn’t get a good literary education. I did. Barnard was a miraculous place where they actually gave you a degree for losing yourself in a library with volumes of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Byron and Keats, but the whole female side of the literary heritage was something I would have to discover for myself years later, propelled by the steam generated by the women’s movement.

No critic, however distinguished, would dare say such things to a college class today, however much he might privately think them. Sexism is somewhat better hidden now, though far from eradicated. And no college class would sit listening meekly to such rubbish. That is one of the things that have happened in the years since I graduated from college, and I am proud to have been part of the process. Now, when I go to read my work at colleges, I find the students reading and discussing contemporary writing by women as if there had never been a time when a critic could say “Women can’t be writers”—even in jest. I am grateful for that change, but it has not been won without pain. Nor is it necessarily a lasting change. Like the feminists of the twenties, we could easily see the interest in female accomplishments eclipsed once again by reactionary sexism, only to have to be passionately rediscovered yet again, several decades later.

It’s ironic that the critic—the late Anatole Broyard—should have identified “blood and guts” as the quality that women writers supposedly lacked, since clearly women are the sex most in tune with the entrails of life. But we can better understand the critic’s condemnation if we remember that in the nineteenth century, women writers were denigrated for their delicacy, their excessive propriety (which supposedly precluded greatness), while in the past couple of decades they have been condemned by male critics for their impropriety—which also supposedly precludes greatness. Whatever women do or don’t do precludes greatness, in the mind of the chauvinist. We must see this sort of reasoning for what it is: prejudice.

In the beginning of the “second wave” of the women’s movement (late sixties, early seventies), there was so much blood and guts in women’s writing that one wondered if women writers ever did anything but menstruate and rage. Released from the prison of propriety, blessedly released from having to pretend meekness, gratefully in touch with our own cleansing anger, we raged and mocked and menstruated our way through whole volumes of prose and poetry. This was fine for writers who had a saving sense of irony, but in many cases the rage tended to eclipse the writing. Also, as years went by, literary feminism tended to ossify into convention. Rage became almost as compulsory to the generation of writers who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies as niceness and meekness had been to an earlier generation. Feminists proved with a vengeance that they could be as rigidly dogmatic as any other group. They did not hesitate to criticize works of art on political grounds, or to reject poems and novels for dealing with supposedly counterrevolutionary subjects.

This was unfortunate. It was also, I suppose, inevitable. Anger against the patriarchal stifling of talent had been so proscribed for so many centuries that in letting it loose, many women writers completely lost their sense of humor. Nor could anyone maintain that getting in touch with anger was unimportant. It was, in fact, a vitally important phase of women’s writing. Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness and anger that does not know its own name. Nothing is more freeing for a woman or for a woman writer than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One’s Own, many women’s books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but the spirit must then be nurtured. This is hardly easy—because women writers tend to be damned no matter what they do. If we are sweet and tender, we are damned for not being “powerful” enough (not having blood and guts), and if we rage, we are said to be “castrating,” amazonian, lacking in tenderness. It is a real dilemma. What is the authentic voice of the woman writer? Does anyone know? Does anyone know what the authentic voice of woman is? Is it sweet and low like the voice of Shakespeare’s Cordelia, or is it raging and powerful like the voice of Lady Macbeth?

The problem is, I suppose, that women have never been left alone to be themselves and to find out for themselves. Men need us so badly and are so terrified of losing us that they have used their power to imprison us—in castles of stone as long as that was possible, and in castles of myth thereafter. The myths, most of them ways of keeping us out of touch with our own strength, confused many generations of women. We were told we were weak; yet as we grew older, we increasingly knew that we were strong. We were told that men loved us for our dependency; yet as we grew older, we observed that, despite themselves, they loved us for our independence—and if they didn’t, we found we didn’t always care. We discovered that we could grow only by loving ourselves a little, and loving our strengths, and so, paradoxically, we found we could grow up only by doing the opposite of all the things our culture told us to do. We were told our charm lay in weakness, yet in order to survive, we had to be strong. We were told we were by nature indecisive, yet our survival often seemed to depend on our own decisions. We were told that certain mythic definitions of women were immutable natural laws, biological “facts,” but often our very endurance depended upon changing those supposedly unchangeable things, even upon embracing a life credo of change.

In fact, when I look back on the years since I left college and try to sum up what I have learned, it is precisely that: not to fear change, not to expect my life to be immutable. All the good things that have happened to me in the last several years have come, without exception, from a willingness to change, to risk the unknown, to do the very things I feared most. Every poem, every page of fiction I have written has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, and always with uncertainty about its reception. Every life decision I have made—from changing jobs to changing partners to changing homes—has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: Turn back, turn back; you’ll die if you venture too far.

I regard myself as a fairly typical member of the female sex. In my fears and feelings, I am just like my readers. Writing may propel me into places and situations where I wouldn’t otherwise find myself, but in the dark of night, insomniac, I think the thoughts any woman thinks. I am impatient with successful women who feel that their success has lifted them out of the ordinary stream of women’s lives. I cringe when I hear them say to their fearful, unfledged sisters: I did it against the odds. You can, too. As a writer, I feel that the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I have in common with other women, how many ways in which we all are similarly shackled. I do not write about superwomen who have transcended all conflict. I write about women who are torn, as most of us are torn, between the past and the future, between our mothers’ frustrations and the extravagant hopes we have for our daughters. I do not know what a writer would write about if all her characters were superwomen, cleansed of conflict. Conflict is the soul of literature.

I know I would not mind a world in which my daughter were free not to be a feminist, were free (if she chose to be a writer) not to write about women’s conflicts, not to assume that the accident of her gender compelled her work to have a specific creative bias. I would welcome a world in which feminism were obsolete. But I would also like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculine bias, in which phallocentric mythologies were perceived to be as bizarre as the most absurd excesses of militant feminist rhetoric, and in which consciousness had become so truly androgynous that the adjective “feminist” itself would be puzzlingly obsolete. I wish I thought our culture was heading in this direction. But it is not. After a brief flirtation with egalitarianism brought about by what has been termed the “second wave” of the women’s movement, the culture is sliding back into its habitual sexism—with, of course, some trendy new terminology.

Some radical feminists have abetted this process of backsliding by becoming quite as simplemindedly dogmatic as the most dogmatic male chauvinists, by disassociating themselves from the anchors of most women’s lives: children they love and men they learn to live with. It is unrealistic to assume that after living in families and tribes for millions of years of human evolution, women will suddenly cease being gregarious animals and become either reclusives or feminist communards. The human need for companionship and sexuality is far stronger than any intellectual theory. So the point should be not to keep women from establishing families but rather to make their position in families less that of semislaves and more that of autonomous individuals.

Where does all this leave the woman writer of our age? Usually in a quandary. As a sharp observer of her society, she cannot fail to see that it still discriminates against women (often in emotionally crippling and physically murderous ways), but as an artist she cannot allow her vision to be polluted by the ephemeral dogmas of political movements. It is simply not possible to write a good book that “proves” the essential righteousness of either lesbianism or heterosexuality, childbearing or its avoidance, man-loving or man-hating. Righteousness has, in fact, no place in literature. Of course, the keen observer of her culture will feel deeply about the oppression she sees around her, the inhumanity of man to man, of man to woman, of woman to woman, but her vision must be essentially personal, not abstractly political. Books are not written by committees—at least not good books. And the woman writer has as much right as any other artist to an essentially individual and idiosyncratic vision. If we judge her books according to their political “correctness,” we are doing her as great a disservice as if we judged them according to her looks or her behavior in the voting booth. Certainly human history is full of such judgmentalism—most of it not coming from women—but always it is antithetical to the creation of works of art.

After saying this, I must also gratefully acknowledge that the second wave of the feminist movement liberated my writing and my life. Not by supplying me with dogma, but by making it easier for me to assume that what I felt was shared by others. Literature, as we previously knew it, was the literature of the white, the affluent, the male. Female experience had been almost completely omitted. Because of the second wave, I learned to assume that my thoughts, nightmares, and daydreams were the same as my readers’. I discovered whenever I wrote about a fantasy I thought wholly private, bizarre, kinky, that thousands of other people had experienced the same private, bizarre fantasy. I have learned, in short, to trust myself.

It seems to me that having now created an entire literature of female rage, an entire literature of female introspection, women writers are beginning to enter the next phase: the phase of empathy. Without forgetting our hard-won rage, without forgetting how many puritanical voices would still like to censor our sexuality, we are starting to be free to explore the whole world of feeling in our writings—and not to be trapped forever in the phase of discovering buried anger. Anger is a strong propellant to creation, but it is hardly the only propellant. Stronger even than anger is emotional curiosity, the vehicle through which we enter into other states of being, other lives, other historical periods, other galaxies.

Curiosity is braver than rage. Exploration is a nobler calling than combat. The unknown beckons to us, singing its siren song and making our hearts pound with fear and desire. I see us entering a world where women writers no longer censor themselves for fear of criticism, but I rarely see the critics catching up. Sometimes I think the response to women’s books is still back in the age of Virility, even while a new generation of young women writers forges ahead without restraints. Literature as well as life is in the midst of an unfinished revolution. The explorers have set out to sea without life preservers. But pirates are still coming after them to board their decks and try to sink their ships. And some of these pirates, I must sadly say, are other women.