Fidgety Feminism

...Now that Life is gone, "I have no office to go to, no boss to tell me where to be next Tuesday, and so I shall move at my own pace away from the conventions that structured my past...

...Her journalist father spent most of his working life on the Chicago Tribune...

...A photographer shoots two rolls of film of her own abortion...

...her mother was the sort of woman who has to clean the house today because the cleaning woman is coming tomorrow, and wished nothing better for her daughter than to "settle down someday with a big, handsome, wonderful hunk of an Ivy Leaguer...

...Indeed, there is scarcely a memorable, plausibly original, adequately defined personality with something arresting to say about herself throughout Miss Howard's gallery of contemporary women—one exception is an Appalachian mother who managed to raise 12 healthy children in appalling poverty—and the problem, one suspects, lies less in her subjects or in her impeccably professional methods of inquiry than in her failure, as a writer, to shape and control the masses of material she so assiduously gathered...

...and Linda Witherill buys 500 pounds of kitty litter a week...

...Still, she quotes the woman at length on her resolve to remain single and have children, although "not yet...

...I thought I'd be doing you a favor,' he said, 'taking away one of your supposedly feminine articles, now that you're liberated.' Now isn't that ridiculous...

...and of her taste for "hard mattresses and open windows, 100-watt light bulbs, strong coffee, and Vita-baths...

...After two years of frenetic travel Miss Howard, a deadline-meeting pro to her fingertips, put her mountain of notes, and a rich vein of autobiographical memories, through the typewriter at a staggering clip...

...Republican family, in a prosperous suburb of Chicago, Miss Howard draws on her considerable reserves of nostalgia, affection and family feeling for some touching portraits of her parents, sister, uncles, cousins, aunts...

...A little seykhel would have exposed as well the folly of writing "More and more I am drawn toward stillness" at the end of a book that so loudly and fidgetingly proclaims Jane Howard's devotion to its opposite...

...Miss Howard loads the dice, however, in presenting this uneducated-lower-class sample, who naturally served "rye whiskey mixed with 7-Up and crackers covered with Kraft cheese spread...

...Noted...

...With a little seykhel—common sense—A Different Woman could have been trimmed to half its length, and thus acquired the sharpness and precision of idea, style and purpose that it desperately lacks...

...Miss Howard is oddly ignorant of Truman Capote's belief, demonstrated to perfection in his recent collection of journalism, The Dogs Bark (Random House, 419 pp., $8.95), that "reportage could be as groomed and elevated an art as any other prose form—the essay, short story, novel...

...Nor does the author's Life-bred belief in indiscriminate trivia as the hallmark of lively prose generally improve matters...

...The least of these fondly remembered shards of the past has a charming vitality that is absent from her joylessly labored reports on sex clinics, consciousness-raising groups, self-help gynecology classes, underpaid professors and lawyers, genteel Southern belles, and militantly unmarried mothers for whom a husband, it would appear, is a fate worse than death...

...Miss Howard should learn a less shopworn Yiddish word than inesluiga or mishpocha—and that word is seykhel...

...But that is hard to believe after more than 400 pages that are episodic and picaresque with a vengeance, confusing the book's intentions and garbling its text...

...Like many another smart and ambitious young person from the provinces, Miss Howard was off to seek her career-girl fortune in New York the minute she left college, and unlike many, she found it—at a price...

...But maybe you have to suffer before you can know this...

...She doesn't just ride a motorcycle but a Honda CL-350...

...In short, now that Women's Lib is no longer a novelty, is it true that "women won't ever be the same...

...Almost 20 years later, she looks back in some anguish at the lovers who drifted away, the commitments that failed to hold, the children she might have borne, the overachieving, "experience freak" busyness of a life (or Life) that yielded so little in the way of contentedness or wisdom, though the money was great...

...Furthermore, just a glance at the patchwork quilt photographed for Miss Howard's book jacket would show that such an artifact by its very nature does form a deliberately constructed pattern...

...Instead, as if her recent emancipation from the editorial confinement of Life meant the license to jettison all literary self-discipline, she fatally indulges her insatiable appetite for cuteness and twaddle: We are told the price of borscht at Barney Green-grass the Sturgeon King ($1.39), her favorite cheeses (Brie and Caerphilly), her Time Inc...

...Amid the ceaseless barrage of "vivid" information, the writer misses the lesson to be found in a remark of Martin Buber's that she quotes admiringly and then promptly forgets: A person must give up "undirected plenitude in favor of the one taut string, the one stretched beam of direction...

...It is not the scraps of cloth but the design they compose that makes the finished product an object of coherence and beauty...

...In the course of remembering what it was like to grow up during the '30s and "40s in a platitudinously square, wasp...

...What's so great about China and Russia, where everybody wears the same thing...

...employe number (3274...

...But while she's about it...

...I should like to lead a life less episodic and picaresque...

...Now my whole life is geared to being flexible and free . . . free to grow, whenever and in whatever ways may seem necessary...

...What part of any design, for example, is filled by a 12-page chapter on Linda Witherill, who shares a house in New Hampshire with 126 cats, give or take a kitten...

...That such ethnic dilettantism fills speakers of Yiddish with entirely justified exasperation has not occurred to this naturalized citizen of the largest Jewish community in the world...

...It is not reassuring to be told, in the beginning, that "this book is, by design or deliberate lack thereof, more a patchwork quilt than a balanced, definitive survey...

...What did all those plane trips, all those thousands of miles ticked off on the Hertz odometers, all that impassioned rapping bring forth...

...The result is a painstakingly candid, unpruned hop-skip-and-jump of a book, A Different Woman (Dutton, 413 pp., $7.95...

...Another recent convert to feminism complains: "This one male I knew wouldn't bring back the facial sauna I lent him...

...A Milwaukee housewife and painter, divorced by her husband after 23 years of marriage and three sons, has now learned that "when you open yourself up, a whole world opens up to you...

...Miss Howard neglects to tell us how this acrobatic stunt was managed...

...But how does she define necessity...

...Miss Howard is also excessively fond of sprinkling Yiddish words into her paragraphs, treating the language of the East European Jews like an exotic spice she picked up—at $1.39 a pound, of course—at some darling delicatessen on Delancey Street...

...Writers & Writing FIDGETY FEMINISM BY PEARL K. BELL EARLY IN 1971 Jane Howard, then a 35-year-old staff writer for Life, undertook a formidable self-assigned task: to interview a large variety of ordinary American women "in zip codes all over the country" in order to learn something about "the texture of their lives, whom and what they loved, what was on their minds, and in what ways they were like and unlike each other and the rest of us...

...What all this reveals about women, or even one woman, knows God...

...A tough Brooklyn waitress offers one of the few dissenting views on Women's Lib in the book...

...IRONICALLY, the best thing in A Different Woman?Jane Howard's fragmented autobiography, interspersed among the interviews—has only the vaguest connection with such fuzzy sociological objectives as the "texture" of women's lives, or with tendentious feminism...

...Or by a description of a foot-loose California divorcee, hitchhiking around the world with her 10-year-old daughter, who is much given to profundities like "I don't feel into heavy questions...

...The portrait sounds irritatingly synthetic, though it may very well be accurate down to the last peroxide curl...

...There's great suffering and loneliness in the upper middle class...

...They seem to be striving for a world without men, and if they get it, they're going to be sorry...

...Excuse me," says a Colorado engineer whom Miss Howard has sought out because she is suing her employers in a class-action case, "I think I'll wash my hands before I enjoy this guacamole...

...True but hardly singular...

...More reflectively, this woman admits: "I'm sort of fluctuating between what I used to be and what I am...

...Neither her book nor its representative women in fact seem as different as Miss Howard would like to think...