Of Mothers and Sisters
ROIPHE, ANNE RICHARDSON
Of Mothers and Sisters_ The Female Eunuch By Germaine Greer McGraw-Hill. 349 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Anne Richardson Roiphe Author, "Up the Sandbox" GERMAINE GREER is a charming, spunky,...
...Mothering is not smothering, not just Mrs...
...Although I feel we must explore all the alternatives, I am not certain if going back to the tribe is a step forward...
...Ideally, the man and woman have set up house together out of love and tenderness and desire for each other...
...How the matrons of middle America will recoil in horror at the mention of tasting menstrual blood (I was shocked, too, but I shouldn't have been...
...If we do that, the next generation will be even more isolated, psychotic and vicious than today's...
...Reviewed by Anne Richardson Roiphe Author, "Up the Sandbox" GERMAINE GREER is a charming, spunky, honest woman...
...Most women will reach toward one man in hopes of building a temple in which they can eat, drink, copulate, propagate, guard the light of their love, and age together...
...Her numerous arguments against the nuclear family are not novel, but they do describe its failures accurately...
...Despite discussing menstruation and its meaning for women at great length, Germaine Greer fails to give equal time—or, in fact, any time?to pregnancy...
...Depriving me of my young would be no liberation...
...Natural childbirth methods now allow many women to control their labor contractions and to consciously push the baby's head through the vagina as both parents watch...
...Yet this single impertinent "Y" does make a difference in biological reality—a reality that does not shape itself to social fashion...
...Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Betty Friedan and others have already opened the Pandora's box of woman's misery...
...Still, there are certain gratifications and exhilarating adventures that even the most burdened reader of Family Circle or Redbook is privy to, and I am anxious that the lifestyles we may adopt not destroy or abort the few known good things we already have...
...What is so desirable about an eight-month-old on a ladder I don't know...
...But these do not spoil the extraordinary wonder of creating life...
...Many of this Englishwoman's views are fairly common in this country...
...But we have to remember that historically we all lived in tribal communes and emerged eagerly to seize our individuality and privacy...
...Children do not need less love and attention but more, of the right kind...
...Now, although I am a sister in arms, I have some major quarrels about the direction of Germaine Greer's campaign...
...Germaine Greer has earned her doctorate in Shakespeare...
...She speaks gaily of children bringing themselves up, not needing to be brought up...
...This is not, as Germaine Greer describes it, a sordid search for security...
...She does not support the institution of marriage, and graphically describes the boredom, malfunction and dwarfing of spirit that often occur as husband and wife structure their lives around security...
...When at four-and-a-half months the baby kicks, a woman knows she is at the heart of the mystery...
...I am concerned that in our desire not to be slaves we do not sever loving connections to each other and to the next generation...
...For Germaine Greer is a sexual person who has understood that the vagina is a source of pleasure and pride, and she wants her sisters to share her sensuality of body and spirit...
...The drudgery, the guilt, the restrictions on personal freedom increase with the poundage of the infant sucking at the breast...
...the woman maintains the home and the young...
...Delivering the baby, however, is only the beginning...
...As almost any woman can tell you, there is something more, something exciting behind the everyday nurturing of the child...
...While I do not believe in the moralistic injunction that women should have babies because that's what they're made for, etc., I do believe that women should not be made to feel enslaved or inferior for wanting to enjoy and fulfill their biological potential...
...It may be ambitious, but so is writing a book...
...What a strange way to look upon a life of shared responsibility...
...that is surely an achievement of worth and dignity...
...I believe children can receive the love, support and guidance they need while the mother balances her maternal interests with other personal and intellectual ones...
...In the chapter devoted to the body, Germaine Greer minimizes the male-female differences by attributing them all to one microscopic "Y" chromosome...
...Reading The Female Eunuch, which makes so little of motherhood, I thought about myself as a mother...
...I am not saying women should spend their lives pregnant and rinsing diapers, repressing their energies in martyrdom to their children...
...She states that some 19 million English housewives are working without a salary—unpaid slave laborers...
...Unlike her, though, I accept a long love relationship as a possibility for most people...
...It reeks of life, and Germaine Greer cannot ignore it without peril to the very fullness of experience she is trying so hard to achieve...
...My feeling for my children may be narcissistic, but so is writing a book...
...Nursing is another female function Germaine Greer ignores...
...I remember the months I had a baby sleeping, nursing at my breast as an especially warm and peaceful time...
...But Germaine Greer, while complaining much the same complaints, fairly sings with the joy that love and work can bring to the liberated woman...
...Yet as a mother I have experienced the danger, fear, occasional despair, and overflowing love that involves me intimately with another life...
...for television sets and lawn-mowers...
...That experience is an important part of me...
...I am not one who sees motherhood in pastels of pink and blue...
...I suspect I am similar to most others —my involvement with the physical and emotional well-being of my children is intense and sometimes terrifying, a grand passion of its own sort...
...The man brings home money that buys food, clothing and shelter...
...This event, announcing death and age as it announces the next generation, is glory...
...I think tenderness, compassion and bonds of deep affection can exist with vital sex and real desire...
...For my husband and me it would have been a deprivation, not a liberation, to miss those moments...
...Endless articles on the bliss awaiting the bride in the white gown and the raptures of baby care have so romanticized the relationship between mother and child that the woman who has bought the whole package can only feel cheated...
...Her energy, female energy, is strong and free and, like the center-forward on the field-hockey team, she urges us all on to victory...
...Our nuclear-family isolation is painful, and maybe a commune would supply some of the answers...
...I think it is dangerous to go from caring so much about the child that the needs of the mother are ignored to ignoring the child for the supposed benefit of the mother...
...She pushes them to renounce passivity, to exorcise crippling romantic illusions, and to reject plastic images of femininity...
...How my mother (who thought I should hold my virginity as bait for a desirable male) would have cringed to read this book...
...I agree with Germaine Greer that if men share more of the woman's work so that women may share in the man's pleasures and burdens, both will benefit...
...Certainly, pregnancy is not all serenity...
...It is particularly important in the inner space of the woman, the origin of life...
...Germaine Greer runs like a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta through the linguistic and other comedies and tragedies of cunt-hatred, ending with a fierce kind of hope in a new tomorrow when all our daughters—yes, yours too, Tricia Nixon—may dance like Isadora Duncan beside the moonlit Parthenon...
...I admire her direct style, and enjoy her pleasure in words and ideas...
...My second major disagreement with the author has to do with monogamy...
...She achieves a vital fusion of intellect and passion in her book that places it among the best of Feminist literature—neither a cold tract, cataloguing male abuses, nor a fervid call for revenge on mankind...
...The woman's work may be the more restricting, and she may lose some of her intellect and energy in this arrangement—as will a man in a dull job...
...In the event of her own maternity, she says, she would purchase a house in the country for herself and many others, where the father might visit the child and she might or might not admit to being the womb mother, but responsibility for the child's needs would be corporate...
...Only exceptionally strong, individualistic women do not need or want familiar arms around them in their different nights...
...It is the fundamental stuff that moves most of us closer in bed...
...Portnoy and her Alex...
...But the woman who has taught her child not to bash in the head of his brother has also achieved something, and the woman who might accomplish both would be doubly enriched...
...If she is free of the need for lasting love, she must at least see that most of the world cannot follow her...
...Germaine Greer reports an experiment in which children raised without a specific mother and given complete freedom climbed ladders at the age of eight months...
...there are nauseous months and tired months, aches in the back and legs, bulging veins and hernias...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 10
