Moms and womanhood
From Mrs Margaret Pryce Sir: As a woman, I have even more to say about Jan Morris than Mr Abse (April 27), and not so much from moral indignation as from a sense of pity. How she misunderstands woman's nature! It was the words 'white' and 'clean' which she used to describe her new-found 'womanhood' which really turned me off. They are so particularly unrealistic that one can only think that Jan Morris lives in a complete cloudcuckoo land.
Ever since the repulsive fact of menstruation was sprung upon me as an unsuspecting thirteen-year-old child — this was before the permissive era — and when I found out that in many cultures this state has been considered 'unclean,' I have felt that women are excruciatingly disadvantaged as 'human beings,' that is in the expression of our mental and spiritual natures. Is it not a fact that only as nuns, by denying their womanhood, were women permitted to worship the deity unreservedly, and that in a culture which has raised motherhood to a spiritual condition — in the Virgin Mary? But this was done by creating un unrealistic, magical situation — the Immaculate Conception. It is, of course, also true that this concept denies value to male sexuality, but I do not think that this idea has permeated our society to the degree that the 'Virgin Mary' image has. There are vastly more images of the Virgin around than of ascetic male saints.
The facts of procreation are, of course, ludicrous and messy, and the messiness is, in a large measure, dealt out to us women. When, later, I had children — four including twins — I found the messiness almost all-pervading, and the spiritual consolations few and far between. The state of pregnancy is cow-like, not spiritual, by which I mean that the transcendent look often apparent on a pregnant woman's face usually means that she is listening to some very physical interior happening. There are certainly moments of fulfilment in the act of nursing, but these are counterbalanced by the heaviness of the breasts, the constant leaking of milk, the pain of cracked nipples and breast abscesses. With the best will in the world I cannot see any of these typical woman situations as spiritual, or as clean and white.
I have now reached the time when, by Jan Morris's reckoning, I should be a 'kind, intelligent, sexless woman past her menopause.' How far from the truth can you get? Becoming older does not change anything. As. Simone de Beauvoir so rightly says in her book on her mother, it is one of the supreme ironies of life that even at eighty a women's sexual apparatus is more often than not in perfect working order. What a grim, macabre thought — this so important hole still perfectly lubricated and ready for action, while the rest of the body is the antidote to desire.
These are the real facts of womanhood. That women transcend them at all is astonishing, Dr Johnson's saying about the dog walking on his hind legs was truer than he knew. I believe that it is for these things that many men despise us. I myself envy men their clean white bodies, straight and beautiful, unhampered by the clunk-click of breasts and oscillating buttocks, and their freedom from the degrading and inescapable monthly cycle of hormonal imbalance which leaves many of us depressed and unable to rely on our own good sense. It is tor these reasons that we are exhorted day and night to jack up our appendages with various mechanical devices, to spray our orifices and make them more acceptable to the male, to hide our menstrual periods even from our nearest and dearest, and to pretend that childbirth doesn't often hurt like hell.
The whole scene was blown wide open for me when 1 was lying on the labour table with my legs widely separated and up in the air, just about to give birth to twins — a prospect that scared me out of my skin. At this moment the anaesthetist, a man, sitting by my head, said, "Didn't we meet at so-and-so's cocktail party on Saturday?" I don't think I have ever recovered from this experience. I now know that men are different from us — like the rich, only more so — and that never us twain shall meet. May I leave this thought with Jan Morris, even though I have not the faintest hope that it will change her misconceptions.
Margaret Pr_vce 103 High Street, Weston, Bath
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