ANOTHER VOICE
Those whingeing feminists had a point after all
PETRONELLA WYATT
According to a Government report, `Social Focus', most women still feel unhappy about working; three out of four would like to return to the home. Recently, two former career women, Mrs Linda Kelsey and Mrs Maggie Usiskin, gave inter- views to the newspapers describing how they had left lop jobs' (at She magazine and HarperCollins) for family life. Mrs Usiskin told the Daily Telegraph that she was a 'nicer and happier person'. Mrs Kelsey warned against 'wanting it all'. The Nazis got it right, then: Kirche, Kiiche, Kinder (church, kitchen, babies). At this point, perhaps, I should make something clear: I am not, nor have I ever been, a supporter of feminism. This column believes that most feminists were whingers with bad legs. There is, moreover, some- thing suspect about words that finish in `ism'. Most 'isms', with the exception of capitalism, make the error of ignoring indi- viduality. Communism failed because it laid down that everyone must think and want the same things. Communism and feminism, one might argue, have much in common.
In its early, let us say, Leninist phase, feminism required all women to revolt on the grounds that they were repressed (men being the capitalists). Miss Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch was its mani- festo. Then there was a sort of Khrushchev interlude, led by Mrs Shirley Conran. Women were still compelled to have careers, but they were, discreetly, permitted families. This was eventually followed by the Gorbachev era. The old assumptions began to be questioned. Miss Greer embraced celibacy, though the unkind sug- gested this was because she was too old to embrace men. Now we have entered a Yeltsin period. Everything has collapsed including the feminists.
This does not mean, however, that what the feminists said, in toto, was wrong Just as the theory of pure communism con- tained some benevolent and pertinent points. In the same way, not everything claimed for conservatism is always right.
Among conservatives it is a legacy of Christianity, for instance, that worldly baubles are immoral, ephemeral and there- fore ultimately sterile. The pursuit of family love, on the other hand, is both lasting and morally worthwhile.
It is the opposite, in fact, which is often true. The failure of love to provide women with satisfaction is one of the most deep- seated causes of the discontent that is prevalent in our age. The single woman is able nowadays, provided she is not below average in intelligence and attractiveness, to enjoy a thoroughly agreeable life as long as she controls the desire to fall in love and have children. If she is unable to do so, however, she will, like Mrs Kelsey and Mrs Usiskin, feel compelled at some point to give up her career.
This is not necessarily a Good Thing either for herself or for those around her. I doubt for instance whether Mrs Usiskin will be 'happier' for long. Family life not only reduces a woman's independence but ties her to the house, where she is forced to perform a thousand minor tasks unworthy of her ability. Weighed down by a mass of trivial detail, she is fortunate if she does not lose all her charm and most of her intelli- gence. Too often such women become wearisome to their lovers, husbands or chil- dren. This is the most pernicious of all the injustices they have to suffer; that in conse- quence of doing their duty by their families they lose their affection, whereas if they had neglected them and remained gay and charming they would probably have remained loved.
There is, moreover, a widespread delu- sion that there is a sort of natural virtue about the housewife, as 18th-century Romantics believed of the 'noble savage', or 20th-century communists of the urban proletariat. Because housewives 'do their duty' by their family they are seen as pos- sessing a superior morality. Or, as conser- vatives would have it, the housewife is deli- cate and dainty with a unique kind of femininity that might be rubbed off by con- tact with the executive world; she has ideals which might be dimmed by contact with the `rat-race'.
There is an equally silly corollary to this. Being so virtuous she must, therefore, to `Tempting Branson is a bit risky.' borrow from the vocabulary of our old friend Mrs Usiskin, be exceptionally 'nice', or at least more so than career women. Most of the housewives I have known, how- ever, are about as amiable as Caligula. They have Freon refrigerating their blood- stream. The woman who is conventionally called self-sacrificing is, in the great majori- ty of cases, exceptionally selfish towards her family and friends, largely as a compen- sation for lost opportunities. She is short- tempered, bored and frustrated. Where she is good-natured, lacking interests outside the home, she possesses only a sort of moronic serenity.
But, oh, you say, any miseries suffered by the housewife are surely redeemed by the power of love? But what is love, after all? There is no greater folly than being roman- tic about romance. Much of what is called love is as evanescent as steam. It is vain and shallow, a mere reflection of self-love, and a weak, impermanent reflection of it, at that. The family cannot mitigate the harsh effects of its selfishness; children, after all, leave home with as great a frequency as husbands.
If working women feel they cannot have it all, perhaps they should consider giving up the night-job. Even the dullest career is less painful to most people than household drudgery. The satisfaction to be derived from success in a professional enterprise is one of the greatest that life has to offer. Shakespeare says of his verses to a friend: `So long as men can breathe and eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.' One cannot help suspecting, howev- er, that the sonnets he wrote to his friend were even more satisfying than the friend himself.
Few of us, of course, have genius. But there are many careers at which a person of only average intelligence may prosper. Good work gives one the most solid moral reasons for thinking well of oneself. It bestows self-respect, without which con- tentment is scarcely possible. It bestows financial security, as opposed to depen- dence (whoever said that money can't buy happiness never owned a cheque book). Most importantly, the achievement of satis- faction involves a consistent purpose. And a consistent purpose is found mainly in a career. Those whingeing feminists had a point after all. `L'homme, c'est rien — l'oeu- vre, c'est tout,' as Flaubert wrote to George Sand.
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