A Difficult Woman (50 page)

To Hellman, “career” women, as the postwar world defined them and as the new women's movement of the late sixties and early seventies proposed to empower them, did not automatically harbor the kinds of values necessary to political progress. Career women who adopted the aggressive strategies and power-grabbing mentality of successful men would only emulate their politics. And while she understood that wealth ruled the world, she believed that most real wealth was inherited from husbands and fathers rather than earned, so it was folly to assume that women with careers would exercise significant amounts of power. In her view only a broad education, one not oriented toward a particular career, could lead women and men to decide how to live their lives and to define their own values. “Pick yourself a few decent standards and stick by them,” she advised one audience.”
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Despite her skepticism,
An Unfinished Woman
spoke directly to the lives of the young women then marching. Its depiction of a sexually free, politically engaged, and economically successful life, a life filled with love and friendship, with courage and determination, resonated with a generation of young women in search of models. In direct and clipped prose,
less reminiscence than an evocation of self, Hellman recalled a life lived not by the standards of her mother's generation or those of the postwar young, but by those whom she so frequently called “my generation.” These standards, as she remembered them, were rooted in integrity and honesty, in a lack of pretense and an absence of sentimentality. “My generation,” she would say repeatedly, “didn't emulate the standards of their mothers; they chose to go their own ways.” Rejecting conventional modes of being, Hellman painted herself, as one reviewer noted, as “impatient with ‘lady stuff' … attracted towards dangerous places and brave intelligent men.”
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Lillian shrugged off the adulation. She did not believe that women's liberation could or should be a matter only or primarily of sexual freedom. In the series of tours and interviews and invitations that followed the publication of
An Unfinished Woman
and then, four years later,
Pentimento
, Lillian expressed her impatience with what she thought of as the diversionary tactics of the current women's liberation movement. They had taken their eyes off “the problems implicit in our capitalist society.”
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Middle-class white mothers had failed to teach their daughters values like courage, loyalty and integrity, warning them that these were “unfeminine, unfashionable qualities,” inconsistent with “the qualities that will get you a husband.”
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The result, she argued, was a generation of women without real values. From these generalizations she exempted black women and poor women, who, since they had always needed to work, had developed more substantial characters. The educated white woman, in her eyes, bore responsibility for women's bad name.

These views undermined Hellman's position in the women's movement. In 1972, in the heady moments of women's liberation, Hellman moderated a panel on the “condition of women today.” Panel members—seven distinguished women writers, novelists, and critics—had been invited by Hiram Haydn, editor of the
American Scholar
, to record a conversation that he later published in the pages of the journal. The exchange began with a question originally suggested by Hannah Arendt: “What will we lose if we win?”
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The debate, which took place in mid-May, was sometimes heated and often acerbic. In it, Hellman revealed her sense of what being a woman meant to her. Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with her life, she argued that the most significant issue for women was economic independence. Nothing mattered, she repeatedly asserted to panelists who generally disagreed with her, as much as good jobs for women. “Equal
wages, equal opportunities” seemed to her the crucial issues. When another panelist sought to override these concerns, telling her, “That goes without saying,” Hellman replied sharply, “I'm afraid it doesn't go without saying. I think one of the troubles with women's liberation is that it has not touched women of the so-called lower classes, deprived classes. It's really been a movement of intellectuals and well-heeled middle-class ladies. It's too bad.” Challenged by African-American novelist Alice Walker to explain why black women, who had historically earned their own livings, nevertheless remained sweet and compliant to their men, Hellman replied that such behavior “pays better.” Nor did she credit cultural issues with paving the way to change. Dismissing impatiently the significance of “who takes out the garbage and who takes care of the children,” deriding the debate over whether women should or should not burn their brassieres, she returned insistently to the idea that “the liberation of people comes about through economic equality. Men could not put women down if women were truly equal.”
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Hellman repeated this theme endlessly, offering herself as the archetype of the successful woman who had achieved renown and a substantial fortune on her own merits. “It seems to me a question of what dignity is about,” she told that 1972 audience, and dignity in her mind involved “economic equality, spiritual equality,” the capacity to meld a satisfying personal life with fulfilling wage work. Dignity manifested itself in a refusal to idealize marriage and motherhood. That made her insufficiently womanly to some, and decidedly masculine to others. Perhaps she was something of a throwback, for even as she drew on the models of the twenties to flout the gender assumptions of the seventies, she insisted that she was merely following the conventions of the most interesting people of her generation. “Enlarging the norms is good for everybody,” said Elizabeth Janeway, who hoped for a broader conception of what a woman could be.
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Lillian Hellman agreed. She had, she thought, done her bit to do just that.

In some respects, Lillian was repeating what she had always said: she hoped women might acquire what she variously called self-respect or dignity. She believed women could achieve these only if they had the possibility of earning their own livings. Lack of economic independence produced ugly emotions and despicable acts, as she had written in two of her best plays. Regina of
The Little Foxes
challenged her brothers, took the life of her husband, and risked the love of her daughter to acquire control of family resources. The two aging sisters in
Toys in the Attic
remained so
invested in the love of their younger brother that when his newfound success threatened to reduce his dependence on them, they sabotaged him rather than allow him to reverse roles. Nobody was better at drawing the portraits of women who, like those in her mother's family led frustrated lives that revolved around the desire to have, to keep, and to construct something of their own; nobody was better at articulating the sense that women's traditional economic dependence undermined their capacity to be unselfishly loving; nobody better captured the ambivalence of women whose emotional dependence was forged in their inability to control their own money.

To the goal of a women's movement that could produce self-respecting women and free them from the internal pressures and tensions of pretense and self-abnegation, Hellman remained faithful even as her own fame and wealth grew. Despite her consistent vanity—she carefully cut and dyed her hair, dressed modishly, and wore perfume daily—she ridiculed the attention paid to issues of language, insisting on being addressed as Miss Hellman rather than the clumsy
Ms.
She preferred to be published by general literary publishing houses and magazines rather than those dedicated to “militant feminist publications,” but she would settle for publication by such houses over no publication at all.
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She turned a deaf ear to pleas to lend her name or her funds to feminist causes. Nor did she particularly identify, as a writer, with women's issues. Rather, as she told a series of graduating college students, she hoped that young women would “speak out for the benefit of others” and wished for them that they “have something to do with making the country what it must and ought to be.”
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For Hellman, the important symbiosis, the tension that called young women to act, was between work and politics rather than between money and love. In the spring of 1975, she gave a commencement address at Barnard, which she later published in the editorial pages of the
New York Times
and then republished in the college issue of
Mademoiselle
magazine. In the various drafts of this address she connected the threads of her concern with what women would become. The world ahead of them, she told the graduates, was a troubled one, and America was filled with people who misused power to make it worse. But these graduating women had a responsibility to connect their book learning with what was happening in the world. America would grow better only if they undertook the responsibility of examining their lives and their goals. To do that, they first needed to make a living. “How can there ever be liberation of women,” she asked,
“unless they can earn a living?” Ibsen's Nora, she noted, “having slammed the door and opened it for women's liberation,” was embraced by students but not really recognized for what she did or couldn't do. What happened to Nora after she slammed the door? she asked. And then answered her own question: “The talk of brassieres or no brassieres, who washes the dinner pots, whether you are a sex object … has very little meaning unless the woman who slams the door can buy herself dinner and get out of a winter wind.”
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To Hellman, who had managed to do far more than get out of a winter wind, the lessons of women's freedom were clear. Hellman hoped that a women's movement would be a means to an end—the end being a more engaged and politically informed community of citizens. She wanted to eliminate boundaries imposed by class and wealth in order to assure the personal and cultural freedom that could lead women to make a better world. And she made no secret of her contempt for women who used wealth conspicuously or wastefully.
My Mother, My Father and Me
, her last attempt at writing for the theater, mocked the aridity of a 1950s family whose life focused on the meaningless consumption of a vapid mother and the empty goals of her purposeless teenage son. The lesson of these shortcomings was hard to miss: if she was going to argue for real values, she would have to put her own on the line. And her own commitments were laid out in the books that brought her a second chance at celebrity. All her life she fought for decency, self-respect, and dignity that could be achieved only by self-support and political engagement in the struggle for a better world.

Small wonder, then, that for all that she was idolized by the young feminists of the 1970s, Hellman could not fully identify with the modern version of women's liberation. In that 1972 panel, Elizabeth Janeway and Carolyn Heilbrun among others tried to tell her that questions of life's meaning and purpose, of socialization and self-confidence, could not be disentangled from those of economic opportunity and freedom to choose jobs. Hellman thought otherwise. By herself, through hard work and talent, she had achieved money, status, and fame in her lifetime and by her own hand. She was a self-made woman. Her capacity to live freely—her sexual liberation, her personal freedom—rested on the economic foundation she built for herself. Young women, she thought, could choose to emulate her unorthodox lifestyle—to emulate her capacity “to walk out if somebody insults me”—only if they were economically independent. But the younger
generation of women reserved their adulation for her style. They admired her brash and outspoken stance, her ability to smoke and to swear and above all her courage in living by her own rules of personal conduct. “I was so bored. I got so nasty,” she told an interviewer about that famous panel. “Nobody seemed to be talking about economics.”
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Even as she became popular among young women of the 1970s, she did not call herself a feminist. When, in 1976, interviewer Barbara Walters asked her how, in the face of her skepticism about women's liberation, she accounted for her status as something of a “cult figure,” Lillian replied, only half tongue in cheek, “It is probably due to the fact that I lived with a man so very long without marrying him.” “Do you think they say she really did it when nobody else dared to?” Walters asked. Lillian replied, “Well, you know the younger generation always thinks that nobody did anything before they did it … I wish it were something more solid.” Walters pursued the issue, asking Hellman how she felt about “women's lib.” Lillian replied, “I think it is an excellent theory,” and continued, “It certainly should be fought for, probably on any ground one can fight it.” But she punctuated each assent with a qualifier: “I wish they'd get more on economic equality than who wears what brassiere,” she added. And again, “I don't think it can be fought for in the foolish ground.”
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Still, Walters would not let go. How was it, she asked, that she didn't identify with women's liberation, “even though you would be perhaps one of the heroines of it”? Hellman responded: “I stayed out of it because I realized I would get into arguments over it; I once conducted a forum on it with very intelligent and educated ladies and I was so in disagreement with most of them I thought I'd better not do this again.”
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She did not, after that 1972 debate, get into any more fights with adherents of women's liberation, but she did stick to her guns and in so doing earned the veneration of a generation with whom she had declared herself at odds. For years after that 1972 forum, she told whoever would listen that she had been misunderstood then and that she continued to be misunderstood. “I don't have to tell you how deeply I believe in women's liberation,” she told interviewer Bill Moyers.
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But in the same breath, she repeated her assertion that “it all comes down to whether or not you can support yourself as well as a man can support himself—whether there's enough money to make certain decisions for yourself, rather than a dependence.”
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Hellman clearly met this test. She placed the demands of women's liberation in the context of the life she had shaped for herself and found them wanting. She never stopped admiring the spirit and gumption of the
young women who acted in the name of women's liberation, and she never stopped hoping to convince them that economic independence was their best hope for expanded personal rights and freedom—and that this in turn would lead to the better world that she had so long envisioned. “I'm with the movement in theory,” she said. “Most of its goals are excellent, although I'm uncomfortable with some of the slogans. Wearing or not wearing a bra is terribly unimportant. It's being able to buy that bra yourself—that's important.”
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If Hellman could not admit to being a feminist by the standards of the seventies, she was certainly one by her own.