Out came a thought and then another...

When it comes to celebrating This Day and That Day, I am a skeptic. Why bother with labels I’ve always felt. But that doesn’t stop me from walking around the house with a huge grin on my birthday, as if I were the one who said, let there be light. And that doesn’t stop me from wishing other women on March eighth either. But toss the label feminist at me and I’ll start looking wary. Tell me I don’t care about women or their rights and you might hear a lecture on how you cannot understand women, much less accept them as they are without your concealed smirk. Didn’t I mention the problem with labels?

As I am writing this post, I am wondering why I am trying to explain that I have a problem with labels. Isn’t this whole explaining deal the deep pit into which women fall all the time? We are women, we have the right to exist, we don’t like being looked at, we love our babies, we hate doing the dishes, we feel like the doormat, we want equal opportunity...on and on we try and explain while all that gets heard is we need attention. Yes, that is what we need, attention. So that you can see that we are not doing all that okay and that we are not okay about all that. But who is this you now? The man? The one who has to get saddled with the label because he doesn’t fit into the ‘we’? And why are we still seeking his acknowledgement of our existence, his approval of our conduct?

For centuries, most of the world has been shaped by the Paters, who found it very convenient, by virtue of collective indolence, and easy, by virtue of physical strength, to continue with the ancient nomadic order where the male remained the hunter and the female, the gatherer. Successive inheritance of the old order meant that the male belief in his superiority was strengthened (learning by example) and the female belief in her secondary status was strengthened. In addition, the female also passed on to her daughters, the angst that arose from not understanding why she could not do as she wished and why the male always chose for her. Centuries later, even in an urban setting where the few barriers that need to be broken are glass, the woman is still playing out that angst in ways that even she cannot understand. Her writing would be a good example, as Virginia Woolf points out, when talking about Charlotte Bronte, in A Room of One’s Own, ‘[Bronte] had more genius in her than Jane Austen’ but let her books be ‘deformed and twisted’ because ‘she will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.’

A few pages later in that same book, Woolf wonders why the famous four of the nineteenth century, The Brontë sisters, George Eliot and Jane Austen, wrote novels instead of say poetry or plays:

But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with very few exceptions, all novels? The original impulse was to poetry. The ‘supreme head of song’ was a poetess. Both in France and in England the women poets precede the women novelists. Moreover, I thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a’ room so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle class, ‘I asked; and with the fact, which Miss Emily Davies a little later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middleclass family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting–room between them? If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting–room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,—”women never have an half hour . . . that they can call their own”—she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. ‘How she was able to effect all this’, her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting–room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting–paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting–room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle–class Woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot’s capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. They wrote novels, however;

Women and writing aside, what about women and history? The few who made it to the largely androgenic history of the ages did so because they landed up performing masculine activities like ruling or toppling empires and nations. History is a narrative of power, of which the average female was but a receptor for centuries. In Austen’s Northanger Abbey, there is an oft quoted snippet of a conversation where Catherine Morland replies to the remark:

"Yes, I am fond of history."

"I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome:"

While we are at the quoting and digging of the past, let us also take a peek at women and art. Germaine Greer (source: The Penguin Book of Art Writing), in an answer to the question why there were few major women painters, said:

The reason is simply that you cannot make great artists out of egos that have been damaged, with wills that are defective, with libidos that have been driven out of reach and energy diverted into neurotic channels.

The background prepared by centuries of conditioning is dying a slow death, both in the seemingly exaggerated angst of women and in the seemingly nonchalant response of men. We do not always understand that we inherit some of the roles we play. That is why labels like feminism and chauvinism are scary because they hammer you into other narrow holes without quite meaning to. That is why I wonder if Women’s Day must be explained.

I’ve been writing this post since morning, with several casual interruptions, some welcome and some necessary. Among the welcome ones were the number of women friends of mine who called and asked, where is your usual Women’s Day email dear? I thought I’ll see it the first thing this morning. And I answered how I was still struggling to write something, not quite sure what it is that I wanted to say and why. It is early evening already and I can see three pages lined up, explaining while questioning the very act. I think it will take us some more years to stop giving reasons, to stop seeing ourselves in relation to others while loudly claiming otherwise. Meanwhile, we will write and say Happy Women’s Day still wondering why you need a reason to be kind.

Posted by Echo/Lavanya on Thursday, March 08, 2007 at 5:29 PM | Permalink