Sour puss
Caroline Moorehead
Taking it Like a Woman Ann Oakley (Jonathan Cape £7.95)
Instead of marrying Jean-Paul Sartre, at the start of their relationship, Simone de Beauvoir left Paris and went to work in Marseilles, writing later that what she chose was the 'hardest course for me at that mo- ment in order to safeguard the future'. Ann Oakley, in her autobiography, singles out the story with special approval, remarking that such respect and love of self is extreme- ly rare in women, for most, in fact, impossi- ble to achieve. Taking it Like a Woman is an account of her own search for that par- ticular kind of regard of self, her own evolution into feminism, and 'putting women first.'
Ann Oakley was the only child of the well respected social historian Richard Titmuss. Her West London childhood of the Fifties Seems to have been remarkable more for the intensity of self-analysis she brought to it than for any untoward event. Outwardly, she went to school, enjoyed the company of her parents' Fabian friends (it is disconcert- ing sometimes to find these figures, tidy names out of Edwardian history, still very Much alive and around), joined CND and ,engaged in youthful flirtations. Inwardly, however, a symbol of the 'contradictory forces and attitudes that made up the inter- action between my parents' and 'witness' to tern, she struggled with an 'unformed elliptic intuition that the real human world as it was presented to me was not a world in which I would find it at all easy to live.'
And indeed, she did not. Adolescence proved so fragmented by these contradic- tions that she went into analysis; Oxford University so programmed, so 'empty' an achievement without a husband that she Married; motherhood so frustrating that it was survived only with pills. Each of life's Predictable events — conception, child- birth, marriage, the housework — came a ccompanied by sensations too overwhelm- Mg and oppressive to be handled. It is sometimes a little as if she were taking her temperature every few hours to measure not sickness but her quotient of dissatisfaction. In fairness, though, it must be said that Ann Oakley has suffered more than the average quota of human ills: in the Seven- ties, she had two mishandled miscarriages, and, very shortly after the birth of her third child, cancer of the tongue. But why was it all so singularly bleak? The recurring theme of the book is that women are sentenced to live in a world made for and run by men, that 'marriage for women is almost always a mistake' in that families are 'nothing other than the
idolatry of duty', that married women `without paid work are the unhappiest peo- ple in the world' and that 'women in Britain in the 1980s are still subject to the awful soul-destroying of their lives in terms which are not theirs.' This realisation, in the early years admittedly unrecognised, has marked and soured her entire life.
In reformulating these arguments, many of which are of course perfectly valid, Ann Oakley is doing no more than repeating the theses put forward by the feminist writers and sociologists of the Sixties and Seven- ties, whose work she frequently quotes. What is different perhaps is that Ann Oakley herself is a child of the feminist years, that she grew up in a world where such thinking was no longer very radical but everyday currency. The tenets of feminism, when she encountered them, sustained her, she admits, particularly the welcome discovery when she joined a women's group that she was not alone in her confusion. But why did it all come as such a surprise? And why does it exclude everything else?
When a publisher rejected her first novel, written at the age of 22 after she had come down from Oxford, he warmly praised her 'absence of overstressing and purple passages' and the readability of her work. These qualities have not left her. After almost 15 years of writing books that blend sociology and feminism, Ann Oakley has retained a crisp, perceptive style and an ability to make both the unusual and the mundane occurences of routine existence lively and interesting, particularly when she keeps to the narrative of her life and does not wander into open letters to her children, full of apology and confession, or into passages dressed up as faction about love affairs and suicide attempts. (Why does she do this; because fiction is more palatable than fact?)
On the surface, Ann Oakley's message is one of hope. Her own life, though indeed contradictory, is apparently stable: she is still married to the man she married at 20 and writes affectionately of her three children. 'Life' she concludes in the closing paragraph of the book, 'is worth living. Not because there is nothing else, but because of what we each may give one another; pain, joy, anguish, peace... In our hearts we understand everything. We understand it's the struggle that counts.' The words may sound right. But by page 204 they are somewhat irrelevant. The cumulative effect of Taking it Like a Woman is a depressing one. It may be depressing because so much has been said and written and thought about the condi- tion of women in the last 20 years and so lit- tle has changed in the way that articulate, thinking women like Ann Oakley now view their existence; or, more simply, it may be depressing because few lives are ever placed beneath this microscope of humourless self- appraisal and that such stark dissection is, by its very nature, boring.
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