Clear Classics 46.
My first feminist book was Marcia Seligson’s The Eternal Bliss Machine (1974) which I first came across in Limerick City Library sometime around 1976 (when I was 16). The subtitle of the book, the American way of wedding, is a nod to Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963). I’d never heard of Seligson before (and I haven’t heard of her since) but I was enchanted by her persuasive writing and I still pick up her book the odd time to enjoy the swing with which she writes. She describes (among many, many other things) the machinery that swings into action the minute a couple gets engaged – the bridal magazines, the bridal gowns, the wedding planners reducing mothers of the brides (and brides) to tears. She explores many different kinds of wedding from the big Texan blowout with nearly a thousand guests that is over in two hours, to the utterly over-the-top Jewish (Reformed) wedding where no expense is spared and there is colossal, biblical waste, recalling the twelve baskets of leftovers after the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. This is not to be confused with the Orthodox Jewish wedding where all the hatted men are in one room and all the wigged women in the other and the male dancing is fierce and furious and the signing of a document as important as the vows taken under the chuppah. But she argues that even this unusual wedding has more meaning, more heart to it than the ‘white bread and upper-crust’ WASP wedding, small and simple and ‘nice’, with every emotion bred out of it. Details from this book have stayed in my head over the years – the bridal magazine advertising household goods: ‘The things that matter. Like your stainless.’ (steel). The cheap venues where an old lightbulb wrapped in fabric is used ( in a Jewish wedding) for the groom to stamp on. The way bridal-gown designers have to use extra-tough fabric for Polish and Greek weddings where the dancing is particularly vigorous. The rooms and rooms full of gifts for couples that might divorce in a few years. (And these are in addition to the bridal shower gifts). The mountaintop ‘simple’ barefoot wedding that costs more than the blowout the Italian father has been saving for since his daughter’s birth. This book is feminist in every way, most importantly, in its exposure of the exploitation of gender and class anxieties by ruthless business interests. But it also questions the need, if not for marriage, for weddings in the first place – while also having a soft spot for the ‘vulgar’ excesses of the sentimental ‘ethnic’ or working-class family. Like feminism, it is full of contradictions.
Advertising also comes in for severe criticism in Betty Friedan’sThe Feminine Mystique (1963) which I found in O’Gorman’s bookshop in Galway when I was about 19. Friedan describes a phenomenon she calls ‘The Problem With No Name’, the neurosis she diagnosed in the married women of her generation who are encouraged to live totally and utterly for and through their husbands and children. As a young adult relishing the new freedom of living away from home and looking with pity and horror at young mothers not working outside the home (few did, in the late 1970s), I swallowed her argument whole at the time. Through elegantly-written, well-researched chapters she builds a thesis that the post-war consumer culture depended upon people who were devoted full-time to buying things for the house, and that educational institutions, psychological trends and popular culture all promoted a domestic destiny as the pinnacle of female ambition. Her book also criticised (brilliantly), Freud’s view of female sexuality, which was a daring thing to do in the early 1960s. Looking through my tattered copy now, I see the scrawled comments of my friend: ‘Bull crap Betty, you are using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house’ and I wrote as many question marks and ‘come on’s as I did ticks and underlinings. (We really read actively in those days!) The central flaw in her book is that she never confronts the fact that babies and children can’t look after themselves, and that houses quickly sink into squalor if they are not regularly cleaned and maintained. So who is going to do the work? Underpaid working-class/African-American women? Immigrants? Or, as she just stops short of suggesting at one stage, ‘mentally retarded’ girls trained in institutions? (She never suggests equal participation by men in housework/childcare, by the way). I agree with much of what Friedan says about the dangers (for women) of obsession with houses and families – I remember with horror some hover-mothers from the schoolgate – but she doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of non-middle-class non-white wives and mothers who would consider it a luxury to be able to work in their own houses and tend their own children as opposed to other women’s. And her thesis, predicated as it is on the husband who goes out to work and comes home from work, breaks down completely when it comes to farm women and other ‘work-from-home’ businesses in which women play a key role.
I hadn’t a clue who Nora Ephron was when I found her book of collected journalism, Crazy Salad (1975) in O’Mahony’s in Limerick in 1978, and I still enjoy it. There was a lot in it I didn’t understand then and barely do now, about people like Bernice Gera, and Barbara Mandel, and Rose Mary Woods, and the Democratic Convention in Miami, and never having heard of the pornographic film Deep Throat I didn’t appreciate what a lone voice Ephron was in insisting that Linda Lovelace cannot, despite her protestations to the contrary, have enjoyed acting in it. (Ephron was right, as borne out by Lovelace’s memoir which appeared in 1980). But how I loved her wry humour at never having been beautiful (‘A Few Words About Breasts’ and ‘On Never Having Been A Prom Queen’), and, having read Rona Jaffe’s amazing The Best Of Everything (which I discussed in an earlier blog) I appreciated her references to it in her review of a really weird book called The Girls In The Office. I didn’t know what consciousness-raising was and I am glad I missed out on it, because as Ephron describes it, it was savagery dressed up as support; group therapy carried out by untrained people. In ‘Vaginal Politics’ she pines for the days when an evening with the girls meant bridge, instead of using a mirror to see what your cervix looks like, but in fairness, goes on to draw attention to the horrific insensitivity and downright cruelty of much conventional gynaecological and obstetric practice, the unethical experiments carried out, and the horrific cost of females being kept in ignorance. Her essay on Dorothy Parker sent me to The Penguin Dorothy Parker and her take-down of vaginal deodorants (yes, they were a thing back then, imagine) is hilarious. And her discussion of what must have been one of the first reality-TV shows, the filming of the Loud family, uncovers the fundamental problem with this kind of show – the element of fantasy in it for which the ‘actors’ pay dearly in their real lives. Ephron had her faults and blind spots. Her derision of the Pillsbury Bake-Off contestants was uncomfortable to read and it was only when I found out years later that she was actually an enthusiastic cook herself – she even wrote a cookbook – that I realised how rooted in food-snobbery it was. Her review of Jan (previously James) Morris’s story of her gender reassignment, Conundrum, was unnecessarily cruel – I even thought so at the time. But overall, this is a brilliant collection, which insists on independent thought and often swims against the stream even of feminist opinion of her day.
These books were part of my formation, for better and for worse. Seligson taught me that rituals don’t have to be managed and prescribed for us by interest groups and big business, but it also gave me a distrust of frivolity that made me judge other women’s embrace of it. Let’s face it, women who have hugely elaborate weddings mostly do so for the fun of it – nobody is forcing them. (And the kind of jaw-dropping wedding extravaganzas Seligson described for America 50 years ago are now the norm in Ireland.) While Friedan gave a very important warning against propping all one’s emotional weight on husband and kids (necessary advice even for a woman who worked outside the home), her dismissal of domesticity was blinkered and short-sighted in ways too numerous to mention. Ephron taught me to question the prevailing consensus, even when it appears to coincide with my own values, and her irreverence was just what I needed. Her cruelty I disregarded, so I can’t think of any ill-effects from reading her.
These three writers were Jewish. Did their slight-cultural-outsider non-WASP origins give them a slanted way of looking at the world that attracted an Irishwoman caught between culturally-imperialist Anglocentrism and traditional Irish Catholicism?
Bibliography:
Marcia Seligson, The Eternal Bliss Machine: the American way of wedding (New York: Morrow 1973 and London: Hutchinson 1974).I found a second-hand copy of it in 1982 and pounced on it.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (N.Y: W.W.Norton 1963: London: Victor Gollancz 1963 and Penguin 1967). Still well worth a read, if only for its insistence on the importance of individual females being free to develop in their own way and at their own pace. And the writing is clear and sparkling, unlike more recent feminist academic discourse which is unreadable to all but the initiated.
Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad (N.Y: Knopf 1975). The title is a quotation from W.B.Yeats. It is the American edition I bought in Ireland; I don’t think it was published over here. My copy with its blue cover is falling to bits and I scribbled a (very bad) recipe for beef curry on the inside back cover sometime in 1980. By the way, Ephron wrote the screenplay for the film When Harry Met Sally and many other films too, and the sisters to whom she dedicates Crazy Salad, Delia, Hallie and Amy, are also very talented writers. Their parents were also Hollywood screenwriters and Ephron writes about them in I Remember Nothing and other reflections (London: Doubleday 2011).
Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (N.Y: Simon & Schuster 1963; London: Quartet 1981.) The British edition was the one I read. I thought it was brilliant when I read it at 22, and it is well-written, but a few years later a friend alerted me to its cultural insensitivity and hard-heartedness (all those Mitfords were as hard as nails), so I’ve quite gone off it. All cultures have different rituals for dealing with death and undertakers/funeral directors, who have a hard job at the best of times, have to make a living. A useful corrective to Mitford is a book by Irish-American funeral director Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking:life studies from the dismal trade (London: Vintage 1998).
Linda Lovelace, with Mike McGrady, Ordeal (N.Y: Citadel 1980). I read this in 1983-84 in a British paperback, I can’t remember the publisher and I think Linda had a different surname (Marciano? would that be right?) – I got these publication details off a website – but it was a shocking, enlightening read, and should be republished for a generation where pornography has become normalised and all-too-easily accessible.
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