Authors: Joyce Maynard
Outside my window there were marchers, chanters, rallies, bed sheet banners with messages
(SCREW NXON).
There was no single big group, though; instead, a dozen straggly and uncompelling ones, like groups of wandering Christmas carolers in March. Bad enough that the redundancy of this doubtful outcry had weakened it. More than that, it weakened in retrospect the really forceful and well executed statements made back in the sixties. Better to have stayed inside, maybe, and left to the imagination how many people cared. We would have pictured grander crowds.
I am suspicious-natured. I look for the lowest motives, aware of what they are as only one who feels them herself can be aware. So when I saw the Haiphong demonstrators, reruns of 1969, it seemed to me (because that’s what
my
motives might have been) that what they were involved in was nostalgia—lots of “remember how it was in Washington?… the flowers in the National Guardsmen’s guns, the candlelight, the dead soldiers’ names, handcuffs locked to the White House gate …” It was an attempt to perform again a gesture that can have real impact only once. (To kill a man in self-defense takes just one well-aimed bullet. Firing again and again alters the spirit of the act.) Those straggly April marches, the petitions and demands for strikes, seemed only to remind us all of how the last great demonstrations, May Day 1969 and the November moratorium, had failed to bring about a change. Now they seemed founded not in disappointment that the country had failed to do the good things we hoped it would, but based, instead, on bitterness—there was an I-told-you-so-ish feeling surrounding what was going on, as if the actions of that spring only confirmed what we’d expected all along—the worst. Demonstrators on the lookout for injustice and brutality found it, of course, responding with a cry of “Pigs” before the provocation had even come, like too-well-rehearsed actors who give their lines before they get their cues. New Haven atrocities were traded like baseball cards and marbles (“How many times did they hit you?” “Well, I got arrested …”) while Vietnam, it seemed to me, got mentioned very little. It was a time for vanity and demagoguery and political power struggles and legitimized cowboys and Indians, and I didn’t like it, most of all because it put in an unfair light the people who were genuinely and, still rarer, selflessly distressed about the war.
Girls of my generation (I should call them women, I know, but old, pre-liberation habits linger on) are often asked for their opinions on Women’s Lib (the abbreviation is, in itself, the beginning of a diminution of the cause), and one predictable answer, read off with a seemly giggle, is that every girl likes to have doors opened for her on dates. Or she can launch into a Rights of Women talk about the prostitution of marriage and the chauvinism of the media.
Most likely, though, she’ll nervously, cautiously seat herself on the fence, legs crossed demurely at the ankle, chin out to show she is no southern belle, and torn between the desire to save her cake and the desire to eat it now, she’ll say that yes, she’s all for equal rights and equal pay, and day care centers are fine for some people, and TV commercials—though they certainly don’t influence
her—
are a disgrace, but she doesn’t care for the movement’s
style—
those women are too loud and coarse, they come on too strong, they have no sense of humor, they intimidate and antagonize the very people they’re trying to convert—other women. She doesn’t like the bitterness she sees so often among feminists. (Why is it that, like nuns, they’re often so plain? Sour grapes, she’ll say.) She
likes
men. She
wants
to get married and have children—she’s for (the old cliché)
human
liberation.
It’s an easy out, that line—incontestable. Is anyone in favor of unequal jobs and unequal pay? Feminists would regard the fence sitter as a sellout and a traitor, and I guess they’d see me that way too. Because, while I’m conscious of the cliché, that is—to a great extent—how I feel. I do not feel inferior or unliberated, and while I recognize that there are women who do, women (for whom the movement does a great service) whose image of themselves needs to be changed, and that even those of us who
feel
equal to men may not get equal treatment, the truth is that the methods of the feminist movement turn me off. Sexist that, in some ways, I might be called, I think first of looks, and am aware of what it is about Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem that appeals to me. Almost certainly they would reject the idea that their function is to give to the movement glamour, but much of their importance to the movement comes, unquestionably, from the slim, stylish, graceful-moving image they project. (Gloria Steinem can liberate as only someone on the other side of prison bars can unlock a door.) Women who are attracted to her use the same set of standards I use, when I find myself unattracted to them—they like her looks as I dislike theirs; they want to be associated with her style and poise as I want to disassociate myself from their stylelessness—from women too old to go blue-jeaned and braless, from the tousled haired and the tensely scrawny and the ones whose eyes bear the look of frustration and anger that have more than memories of unfair pay behind them. Women with “Vaginal Politics” buttons pinned to the zippers on their jeans; women who call me
sister,
who speak, in locker-room, army-barracks lingo of being “fucked over by the crappy shit” men hand them. I feel my privacy intruded upon with orgasm and sex-object talk.
The actions of large groups, when they assemble, frighten me a bit. United we stand, divided we fall—I know that. But the effects crowds have on the people in them are often dangerous and deceptive. When individuals join in affection and good feeling (as at a folk music concert) the atmosphere of warmth (while it may be illusory and deceptive) seems healthy. But people in crowds stir each other up to a point where good sense is suspended by too much strong feeling in too-close quarters, too much chanting and foot-stomping and hand-clapping. I think of the football game I went to once, where the wild, touchdown-crazed crowds made the wooden stands we sat on creak and then crumble. Films of Hitler in action, of the Rolling Stones at Altamont—the analogies I make are rash and perhaps unfair to a movement that unquestionably does good. But it is, nonetheless, a movement held together by shared negative feeling, a sisterhood of bitterness and sometimes hate.
I grew up wanting to have babies. I reject what would be the feminist attitude that TV and baby dolls and the male-dominated American culture brainwashed me. I
did
play with baby dolls and watch TV (and am appalled now, watching old reruns, to see the notions of A Woman’s Place they uniformly presented), but it wasn’t those things that gave me my dreams of motherhood, and what sexist notions they exposed me to I think I rejected. (Desi’s tyranny over Lucy, and her sly wheedling always seemed—more than anything else—dumb.) I wanted to have children (and, if I’d been a boy, I’d have felt the same way) not because I had a low opinion of myself and considered myself good for nothing else or because my own mother presented an oppressed housewife image in our family (which she never did) but just because I like kids.
But something new seems to be happening. Friends of mine announce now that they don’t intend to marry or that, if they do, they won’t have children. Often they are children of divorced parents or parents who, they tell me casually, don’t like each other much. It all seems strange and sad and unromantic, this lack of faith in families and permanence, the short-attention-span notion of finding lifelong companionship a bore and any kind of ties and restrictions a slur on that sixties ideal we grew up with, that what mattered more than anything else was
freedom.
It was a time when discipline and even simple regimen seemed unfashionable. When we wrote at school, we were encouraged to forget about grammar and concern ourselves with free self-expression—maybe not to write at all, but instead to nonverbally communicate.
At home we were not spanked or given heavy chores, most of us. And by some obscure route I think all that has brought us around to doubts about families and order in general. We are suspicious of anything that seems too rigid, anything that seems to endanger the carefree, don’t-think-ahead life. It has been said, and it’s true, that the future seems too uncertain for us to make plans, that the specter of The Bomb and ecological disaster hangs over us. The feeling many of us have about marriage and children comes from a kind of Peter Pan feeling about Youth—a stage of life so glamorized in our time that we no longer eagerly anticipate being grown-ups (as teen-agers used to, when growing up meant escaping the strict rule of parents). Now it is Youth, not adults, who wield the power. Getting married and having children means that, if you are not old, at least you are no longer young.
T
HE WORDS
AMBITIOUS, UP-AND-COMING
, go-getting
used to be the highest compliment awarded to a bright young man just starting out on his career. Back in those days, the label
businessman
held no unfortunate connotations, no ring of war-mongering or conservatism or pollution. The future may have been uncertain, but it was certainly considered, anyway, and the goals were clear: a good marriage, a good job, a good income—that was a good life.
My generation’s definition of The Good Life is harder to arrive at. Our plans for the future are vague, because so many of us don’t believe in planning, because we don’t quite believe in the future. Perhaps we make too much of growing up with tension, from as far back as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the fact is that the tension of the sixties put us in a kind of suspension. There were always fallout shelter signs, always secret servicemen and always, when the words “we interrupt this program to bring you …” flashed on the screen, the possibility of an assassination. When a plane flies low I wonder (just for a second)—is it the Russians? The Chinese?
So we don’t plan. We make a thing of spontaneity and informality. (Parties just
happen;
couples hang around together—no more going on dates.) Looking ahead to the future, planning, and pushing are seen as uncool (“take it easy … no sweat”), aggressive.
It’s impossible not to wonder where the young hip kids of today will be twenty years from now. Their parents say they’ll settle down (“We were wild in our day too …”) and some of them will—some will later join their parents’ establishment world just as, for now, they’ve joined a group that is itself a kind of establishment. But there’s another group, involved in much more than a fad, and their futures are less easy to predict. They’ve passed beyond faddishness, beyond the extreme activism of the late sixties and arrived at a calm isolationist position—free not just from the old establishment ambitions and the corporate tycoon style, but from the aggressiveness of the radical tycoon. The best thing to be, for them isn’t go-getting or up-and-coming, but cool. Broad social conscience has been replaced by personal responsibility, and if they plan at all, their plans will be to get away. The new movement is away from the old group forms of moratorium crowds and huge rock concerts and communes. Young doctors who once joined the Peace Corps are turning more and more to small-town private practices, Harvard scholars are dropping out to study auto mechanics or farming. Everybody wants to buy land in Oregon and Vermont. If we have any ambition at all now, it is not so much the drive to get ahead as it is the drive to get away.
When my friends and I were little, we had big plans. I would be a famous actress and singer, dancing on the side. I would paint my own sets and compose my own music, writing the script and the lyrics and reviewing the performance for the New York
Times.
I would marry and have three children (they don’t allow us dreams like that any more) and we would live, rich and famous, (donating lots to charity, of course, and periodically adopting orphans), in a house we designed ourselves. When I was older I had visions of good works. I saw myself in South American rain forests and African deserts, feeding the hungry and healing the sick with an obsessive selflessness, I see now, that was as selfish, in the end, as my first plans for stardom.
Now my goal is simpler. I want to be happy. And I want comfort—nice clothes, a nice house, good music and good food, and the feeling that I’m doing some little thing that matters. I’ll vote and I’ll give to charity, but I won’t give myself. I feel a sudden desire to buy land—not a lot, not as a business investment, but just a small plot of earth so that whatever they do to the country I’ll have a place where I can go—a kind of fallout shelter, I guess. As some people prepare for their old age, so I prepare for my twenties. A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet—retirement sounds tempting.
I’m almost twenty now—two decades gone. I know now that I will never be a ballerina. That’s not because of any conscious choice, because of anything I’ve done, but because of what’s been neglected. It isn’t that I ever longed to be one, but the knowledge scares me, that I can’t—there’s nothing, absolutely nothing I can do about it. I am too old to be a violin prodigy, or to learn championship chess; I’m closer to Ophelia now than Juliet. The word
woman
embarrasses me a little. (Why is that? Some leftover scrap of unliberation, that
boys
are
men,
while I remain, and will till I am fifty, always a
girl.
)
Once, I guess, youth was a handicap and coming of age an exciting, horizon-broadening time for long pants and freedom. For us, today, youth—while it lasts—is a time we greedily hold onto, a fashionable, glorified age when, if we don’t quite
swing
, at least we’re told that’s what we do, that these are the best years of our lives—it’s all downhill from here.
But I’m basically an optimist. Somehow, no matter what the latest population figures say, I feel everything will work out—just like on TV. I may doubt man’s fundamental goodness, but I believe in his power to survive. I say, sometimes, that I wonder if we’ll be around in thirty years, but then I forget myself and speak of “when I’m fifty.…” Death has touched me now—from Vietnam and Biafra and a car accident that makes me buckle my seat belt—but like negative numbers and the sound of a dog whistle (too high-pitched for human ears), it’s not a concept I can comprehend.