The plight of the liberated woman
Marguerite Alexander
Women, we are told at every turp.. now, have always taken the brunt end of corrupt ideologies. Our traditional defenders, the knights in shining armour and the prince charmings, stand discredited, but the void has been nicely filled by the ideologically more respectable, clamouring to have their say. It's a sad comment on how little times change that the new methods of persuasion are proving to be just as insidious as the old.
I was at a dinner party recently where all the women present had either recently produced, or were expecting, a baby. Conversation meandered along vaguely maternal channels until one of the guests confessed that an additional strain had been placed on her pregnancy by feelings of inadequacy about her sexual performance. What's more, the villain of the piece hadn't been her husband, but the midwife who ran the relaxation classet in her trendy London borough: when she was looking for nothing more out of life than to sleep, eat and get her layette together, some officious woman was telling her that she 'owed' it to herself to explore her sexual potential. Perceptibly relieved by this anecdote, the pregnant lady now felt she could safely ignore the National Childbirth Trust's breezy injunction that pregnancy was the time "to experiments with a few minor sexual perversions."
Doubtless the midwife, consciously secure in her status as a liberating force, felt justified in using all the pressure at her disposal. But the one unchanging area of female vulnerability is that women are so sensitive to what other people think. Ideological awareness has become the fastest growing leisure activity of the young middle classes but, like all the dirty work in the past, practical expression is generally delegated to the wife. We've all met the Labour-voting merchant bankers with houses in Portugal who give a new twist to the old adage that men have always been able to have their cake and eat it: it's their wives who worry about what their friends are going to think.
Women have always sought to translate ideas into style, and in these ecologically aware, con sumer-disoriented Limes, housewives all over north London are 'breaking their backs trying to squeeze a large income into a simple, functional life. Dinner party food may have lost its flurry of tasteless garnishes, but the loving respect that Elizabeth David demands we pay to natural products (is Food Lib going to be the next cause, after Children and Animals?) takes up a lot more time and mercifully absorbs money without it being too obvious, The mindless cosiness of fitted carpets and, shiny cocktail cabinets has been replaced by the noble simplicity of sanded floors and stripped furniture. The effect is austere, but like the austerity of a convent, it takes a lot of selfless rubbing to produce; and shops like Habitat are laughing all the way to the bank at the prices their customers are prepared to pay for the privilege of appearing to have spent nothing.
So far, the way is clear, but when it comes to bringing up their children women are finding themselves caught in a vicious crossfire between equally powerful ideological groups. Once upon a time, women reacted to their children by something they called instinct; encouraged them to regulate their behaviour according to adults' convenience; and bought them off with toys and sweets when both parties had had all they could take of one another. But unlike other natural products, instinct is no longer respectable because it imposes too much of a burden on the mother; discipline because it isn't a natural product and imposes too much of a burden on the child; while toys and sweets are thought not to impose 'enough of a burden on either. A mother must achieve a certain level of professional efficiency to prove that she has adopted her role from choice, not boredom or incompetence, and that she has taken to heart the dictum that every child should be a wanted one. It's too bad, if she doesn't enjoy supervising frightfully exciting things with sand and water — especially when there's a voice whispering in her other ear that she's wasting her time anyway.
It's tough on her too if her skin doesn't take too kindly to being liberated from make-up and her breasts to being liberated from bras. She knows that people ought to accept her as she is but experience, confirmed by prescribed ideological reading, tells her that very often they don't.
She knows, too, that her severest critics are still other women. Men have always seen women as their own worst enemies — masochistically heaping work on themselves and relaxing by bitching about other women — and in these liberated times, evidence seems to be bearing them out. To bitch about her friends' clothes, housekeeping and husbands has always been regarded as a women's prerogative, but now that the trendiest imperative of all is the duty a woman 'owes' to her own fulfilment, the bitching potential is almost limitless. The ideal of universal sisterhood is as far off as ever, and some of the more chilling comments one hears about women come from their friends: "Even with an au pair, she still doesn't seem to be able to do anything with her time;" "She may be nice, but she's not really interesting;" "She actually spends her free time shopping."
Women at home who have chosen not to work and who enjoy an income that gives them leisure for these neuroses, have one of the most precious freedoms of all — the freedom to organise their own time. Perhaps it's a sign that we're not ready to use that freedom that we feel obliged to clock in and out like Victorian mill-girls. From Simone de Beauvoir to Germaine Greer, Women's Lib's complaint is that men have tried to keep us in a state of permanent infancy; holding our hands to guide our faltering steps, our sisters seem bent on keeping us at school all our lives. All fashion comes home to roost, and current interpreta tions of trendy ideology are beginning to bear a suspicious resemblance to such Evelyn Home advice as that we widen our horizons by joining a carpentry class.
Marguerite Alexander, twentyeight, mother of two, graduated from Oxford five years ago, is now a freelance writer and WEA lecturer.
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