The Goddess that Failed
CURRIE, SUSIE
The Goddess that Failed Feminism reaches the end of the road. BY SUSIE CURRIE You who come of a younger and happier generation ... may not .A. know what I mean by the Angel in the House," wrote...
...Dish they do—redundantly at times, since everyone, including editor Cathi Hanauer, seems to be a harried writer or editor living in New York or California...
...Sometimes it seemed that feminism was the only thing that mattered to me in my life," writes Angier, echoing a recurring theme...
...Huh...
...Why would you need anything else...
...She was immensely charming...
...This sounds like masculin-ism...
...Why would you need to be a writer...
...Aristotle's definition of love is to will the good of another...
...The book stands as an unwitting testimony to traditional courtship and marriage...
...Or another, also using a pen name, who admiringly lists her fulltime mom's endless, varied job description . . . then belittles her for fulfilling it without question...
...Self-described crank Natalie Angier writes that her four-year-old daughter, after listening to her tirade about President Bush refusing to fund international abortions, drew a picture of Mom crying with a thought balloon containing a dead person...
...That, of course, is what the Angel is all about...
...For some, anger is a way of life...
...But depictions of their own lives, littered as they are with broken, confused, temporary, and dissolved relationships (not to mention the stratospheric stress levels in a double-income family with small children), make June Cleaver's lot look very good indeed...
...Does anyone who isn't a Womyn's Studies major really believe that one anymore, when brides hold on to their surnames, careers, and separate bank accounts...
...As a parent, she wishes for a bracelet that says "WWMBD" (What Would Mrs...
...If there was chicken, she took the leg...
...Hyde as our employed sisters...
...We meet her, in several incarnations, in The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage...
...It is we, after all, who are in the Susie Currie is a writer living in Hyattsville, Maryland...
...In fact, when I picked up the book, I was looking for some reassurance that I was not the only mother sometimes to find herself hoarse by dinnertime, and not from a chest cold...
...Sex columnist Sarah Miller admits that although her articles made her sex/love life sound like "some wild amusement park ride," it was actually "the source of pain and endless disappointment...
...Many have, notably Sylvia Plath (a 1993 biography of her is subtitled "Killing the Angel in the House...
...Another credits feminism with "deepening [her] understanding of [herself] as a person born into the wrong sex...
...I mention race because the author does...
...Someone once said that the husband is the head of the household, but the wife is the neck...
...Elissa Schap-pell's "Crossing the Line in the Sand" is a gem...
...Brady Do...
...She sacrificed herself daily...
...I'm not sure whether it's a compliment or an oversight that my cohort, full-time moms, was ignored here...
...Now, she wants to be another head, and in so assimilating the masculine virtues, she discards the feminine ones that are necessary for family and society...
...I found it in a few of the essays...
...Marriage as a tool of the patriarchy...
...The figure in the balloon was Bush: "You're wishing that he was dead...
...asked the single, childless, renowned Welty...
...And to be honest, it wasn't making my life very happy...
...But my new career always seemed to me at least as important as my husband's...
...She was intensely sympathetic...
...She excelled in the difficult arts of family life...
...It's being a bitch that's easy...
...we seem to be at least as likely to morph into Mr...
...Still, many women continue to follow in their footsteps...
...Repeatedly...
...She was utterly unselfish...
...Often, though, the writers are surprisingly clear-eyed about what the mindset has cost them...
...I, too, was a magazine writer in my past life, the one before I could recite "Goodnight Moon...
...Another woman has such a liberating, grown-up sex life with a married man (among other genders) that she ends up living at home with her parents and her biracial baby...
...When did we get the idea that for men and women to be equal, they had to be interchangeable...
...know what I mean by the Angel in the House," wrote Virginia Woolf...
...Of course, it's hard to embrace motherhood when you resent your gender...
...Was it really that she never had a mind or wish of her own, or that she had the self-mastery to realize that what she wanted to do was not necessarily what she ought to do...
...Sharing an address with a series of underemployed strangers is not, as it turns out, all that fulfilling...
...She describes her own family's approach to anger: "We drowned it in cocktails, or ate it with chocolate frosting, or left the room and let it starve...
...The essayists, for the most part, sneer at their apron-wearing, Stroganoff-making, housewife moms (although one piece is grudgingly titled, in part, "Why I Hate That My Mother Was Right...
...Woolf, though, went on to issue the Angel's death warrant, advising aspiring writers to sacrifice her to the muse...
...Ellen Gilchrist's piece recalls introducing her three young sons to one of her Millsaps College professors, Eudo-ra Welty, during a chance meeting on campus...
...Lockstep feminism rears its head more than once...
...Sounds like an ideal housemate to me...
...True feminism, to my mind, is one that celebrates what Pope John Paul II calls the "feminine genius," and this extends (but is not limited) to biology...
...One essayist remembers realizing at a tender age that the fairer sex was actually considered "inferior to boys and men in nearly every way that counted...
...Yikes...
...She has never had the kind of boyfriend who would pick her up at the airport, not even the one she moved in with two weeks after their first date...
...Considering the end both writers met (suicide), one might conclude that theirs was not exactly the path to utopia...
...Many contradict themselves, like the woman who celebrates having an open marriage . . . but uses a pseudonym and, on her husband's tryst nights, waits up all night watching B movies in his dirty socks until he returns...
...But happier...
...Or at least she used to be...
...house most...
...Mom's reaction was to give the girl a hug "after laughing with surprise, not to mention maternal pride in an offspring's cleverness...
...Ah, but once the Angel is gone, someone else steps in...
...If there was a draft, she sat in it—in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others...
...Paying the bills is a necessary evil, but molding the next generation of ballerinas and firemen is an awesome responsibility—and privilege...
...Hanauer and her sisters are part of the younger generation Woolf was addressing, and they've followed her advice, weeding charm, selflessness, and sacrifice out of their lives at every turn...
Vol. 8 • February 2003 • No. 20
