PLANNING AHEAD IS A measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.
I remember finding this calm insight in some sociological text, and feeling instant recognition. Yes, of course, our sense of time was partly a function of power—or the lack of it. It rang true even in the entirely economic sense the writer had in mind. “The guys who own the factories hand them down to their sons and great-grandsons,” I remember a boy in my high school saying bitterly. “On this side of town, we just plan for Saturday night.”
But it also seemed equally true of most of the women I knew—including myself—regardless of the class we supposedly belonged to. Though I had left my factory-working neighborhood, gone to college, become a journalist, and become middle class, I still felt that I couldn’t plan ahead. I had to be flexible—first, so that I could be ready to get on a plane for any writing assignment (even though the male writers I knew planned books and other long-term projects), and then so that I could adapt to the career and priorities of an eventual husband and children (even though I was leading a rewarding life without either). Among the results of this uncertainty were a stunning lack of career planning, and such smaller penalties as no savings, no insurance, and an apartment that lacked basic pieces of furniture.
On the other hand, I had friends who were married to men whose long-term career plans were compatible with their own, yet still lived their lives in day-to-day response to any possible needs of their husbands and children. Moreover, the one male colleague who shared or even understood this sense of powerlessness was a successful black journalist and literary critic who admitted that, even after twenty years, he planned only one assignment at a time, and couldn’t forget his dependence on the approval of white editors.
Clearly there is more to this fear of the future than a conventional definition of class can explain. There is also caste: the unchangeable marks of sex and race that bring a whole constellation of cultural injunctions against power, even the limited power of controlling one’s own life.
We haven’t yet examined time-sense and future planning as functions of discrimination, but we have begun to struggle with them, consciously or not. As a movement, women have become painfully conscious of too much reaction and living from one emergency to the next, with too little initiative and planned action of our own; hence many of our losses to a much smaller but more entrenched and consistent right wing.
Though the cultural habit of living in the present and glazing over the future goes deep, we’ve begun to challenge the cultural punishment awaiting the “pushy” and “selfish” women (and the “uppity” minority men) who try to break through it and control their own lives.
Even so, feminist writers and theorists tend to avoid the future by lavishing all our analytical abilities on what’s wrong with the present, or on revisions of history and critiques of the influential male thinkers of the past. The big, original, and certainly courageous books of this wave of feminism have been more diagnostic than prescriptive. We need pragmatic planners and visionary futurists, but can we think of even one feminist five-year-plan? Perhaps the closest we have come is visionary architecture or feminist science fiction, but they generally avoid the practical steps of how to get from here to there.
Obviously, many of us need to extend our time-sense—to have the courage to plan for the future, even while most of us are struggling to keep our heads above water in the present. But this does not mean a flat-out imitation of the culturally masculine habit of planning ahead, living in the future, and thus living a deferred life. It doesn’t mean the sacrifice of spontaneous action and sensitive awareness of the present that comes from long years of career education with little intrusion of reality, from corporate pressure to work now for the sake of a reward after retirement, or, least logical of all, from patriarchal religions that expect obedience now in return for a reward after death.
In fact, the ability to live in the present, to tolerate uncertainty, and to remain open, spontaneous, and flexible—all these are culturally female qualities that men need but have often been denied. As usual, both halves of the polarized masculine-feminine division need to learn from each other. If men spent more time raising small children, for instance, they would be forced to develop more patience and flexibility. If women had more power in the planning of natural resources and other long-term processes—or even in the planning of our own work and reproductive lives—we would have more sense of controlling the future.
An obsession with reacting to the present, feminine-style, or with controlling and living in the future, masculine-style, are both wasteful of time.
And time is all there is.
—1980