Confessions

Auberon Waugh

Woman x Two: How to Cope with a Double I-Ife Mary Kenny (S idgwick & Jaclzon Mary Kenny, as the wrapper announces, is married to the Spectator's distinguished

foreign correspondent, Mr Richard West. Her book is about the problems of women With young children who choose to pursue careers, and for some time I hesitated to

read it for fear of embarrassment. Miss Kenny, as readers of the Spectator will be

aware, pursues a highly successful career as a writer on abortion and radio topics. She also has two small children. Her concern for these women seemed to have a personal edge with I found uncomfortable.

'How does their work affect their sex lives, their family relationships, their friendships? she asks.

Well, that's her problem. My problem Was how I could meet her husband's eye if I thought he knew I knew how his wife's work was affecting their sex life. In any case, I was not sure I wanted to know. All too many Women nowadays wish to tell you about their sex life with their husbands. The great thing is to find other topics of conversation.

I need not have worried. Miss Kenny's book is an entirely delightful one full of Shrewd, pleasant insights into the natures of man and woman — 'most men don't care very much for religion' — and gentle regrets for a misspent youth. Like St Augustine of Hippo, she sees her earlier errors as an essential key to her present affirmations of belief — in Motherhood and the Family, in religious faith, love, care and duty. The bouble Life which she discusses may be seen as the conflict between work and the family, as she intends, or it may be read in an Augustinian sense, as the struggle between youthful hedonism and maturity. In the Ireland of Miss Kenny's youth, Women were kept with the pigs in a shed under the living quarters. If they did not snore at night, one might never have guessed they were there. Irish women divided sharply into those who snored and !hose who did not. Those who snore are Still among the angriest and most resentful Women in Europe', she observes, and from her earliest years resolved to be a snorer:

'Free and easy divorce was urgently needed . . . Free and easily available contraception and abortion were mandatory

• • . Ruthless social change had to be pur sued . Until I was twenty-nine I was a doctrinaire women's liberationist.'

As Mad Margaret sings in Ruddigore: I was an exceedingly odd young lady Suffering much from spleen and vapours

Clergymen thought my conduct shady My ways were strange Beyond all range And paragraphs got into all the papers.

She even believed in Wages for Housework! Then, at the age of thirty, she gave birth to her first child: 'His name is Patrick. He is my son and he changed my life.' A few days later, possibly to celebrate the event, the IRA decided to blow up some innocent people in a Guildford pub, and the new Mary West was born.

Since the birth of Patrick, she explains: 'I found sitting around in pubs boring for the first time in my life.' Her conclusion is that while some women find housework completely fulfilling, others do not. Those who wish to work are invited to contemplate what she disconcertingly calls 'support structures'. By this she means Family Life, paid help and an Ideal Husband.

There are many gems of information. Some successful career women make admirably docile wives, she avers, while others, on the other hand, do not. The worst criticism may be that her final picture is often inconclusive, not to say confused. Some people feel the urge to earn more money while others, she has discovered, are happy with comparatively little: 'Some people find that work takes their mind off sex. But some people, again, find work sexually stimulating, and some very hard-working individuals — Lloyd George, Mozart, Catherine the Great — were also sexually very active.'

Some people may find her refusal to decide one way or the other infuriating but some, again, will find it rather sweet, illustrating the tolerant, fatalistic nature which is such an endearing characteristic of her countrywomen. She reports the finding of Professor Ivor Mills, of Cambridge, that successful career women tend to develop bald heads, hairy chests and stomachs, deep voices, insanity and cancer; but she also feels bound to testify that none of the successful women she interviewed admitted to any of these problems.

Her general conclusion is that everything depends on the individual. Mary Kenny is only thirty-four — eleven years younger than

St Augustine when he wrote his Confessions. Like the Confessions, Woman x Two should not be seen as autobiography so

much as a devotional outpouring of penitence and thanksgiving. Her next work will be the crucial one. If through further inter viewing of women she can identify the heresies of modern theology as clearly as she sees the errors of her former ways, if she can accept, with St Pius X, that modernism is 'not a heresy, but the summation and essence of every heresy' then the birth of Patrick West in 1974 and the Guildford bomb outrage of the same year will prove to be pivotal moments in the history of feminine thought. If not, she will at least have given us men food for thought in the discovery that some women say one thing, others another — and there is always the possibility that they will change their minds.