Growing up
Willis, Ellen
Growing up BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT: PIECES OF A DECADE by Ellen Willis Alfred A. Knopf. 317 pp. $12.95. FLOWERS OF EMPTINESS by Sally Belfrage Dial Press. 240 pp. $10.95. Though it can take...
...For Belfrage, her two friends who stayed in India "are no longer friends...
...Yet both came astonishingly close to giving up their lives to patriarchal religions that seemed to offer certainty and an end to their restless quests...
...Unlike her friends who remain with the guru, Belfrage does return to her old life of worldly involvement, to her children, to her writing, to her uncertainties and analytical skepticism...
...They are witty but not frivolous, searching but not solipsistic, skeptical but not cynical, committed (to their continued search) but not fanatic...
...Both are probing, perceptive women with a worldly-wise distrust of being taken in by easy answers...
...Of the various women who chronicled their odysseys, two especially articulate writers have just produced books which could serve as archetypes for their sex and generation...
...Willis and Belfrage came from unusual backgrounds: Willis's father was a liberal Jewish police officer in New York, and Belfrage's father was a leftist who exiled himself from the United States...
...Sons (and even daughters) of middle-class and working-class families became writers, radicals, wanderers, seekers, joiners, organizers (also boozers and suicides...
...I am grateful that they wrote these delightful books, that they were able to learn from the rabbi and guru, and that they did not succumb to them...
...She has two children from a marriage which seems to be only half-abandoned when her journal begins: its outcome is unclear, and when she goes to India with her friends Dinah and Judith, the children are left with her separated spouse...
...for Belfrage, the cult of an Indian guru...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a peace activist and free-lance writer in Haver-ford, Pennsylvania...
...At the end of her voyage to India, Belfrage becomes, to her own surprise, a "sannyasin" with a new sense of herself and a new Indian name bestowed by the guru...
...But she is gradually absorbed, as Belfrage was in the Indian ashram, by the serene and self-contained world of her brother's Orthodox community in Jerusalem...
...Women activists were not immune to this reaction, but they were not through with their own rebellion, which increasing numbers of women came to believe was the real revolution of our time...
...In refusing to lose themselves (or "find" themselves) in the cloistered worlds of the guru or the rabbi, Willis and Belfrage regretfully find themselves cut off from those who had been closest to them...
...Though their reasons are never really explained, one gathers they had to do with a growing feminist awareness and an unwillingness to subordinate themselves and their writing to traditional wife and mother roles...
...Paradoxically, both return—Willis to New York, Belfrage to London— with a great sense of clarity and happiness about their lives, a feeling that they are choosing to be who and what they are...
...Willis's encounter with Orthodox Judaism is remarkably similar...
...I have dwelled on the parallel quests of these two women because they are the aspects of their experiences I found most intriguing, but I have not given a full picture of their books...
...So it happened: In the counterculture conflagration of the 1960s and the feminist revolution, many strong, perceptive women writers and leaders were forged...
...The relative prosperity and restabilization of the postwar 1950s paved the way for masses of young Americans who "came of age" in the 1960s to pursue these quests more freely and on a larger scale than any previous generation...
...In my relationships," Willis writes, "I had found it hard to draw the essential line between the power men have over women and the power all lovers have over each other...
...These frank, incisive essays trace Willis's growth from a bright, opinionated rock fan and rebel to a probing explorer of feminism and sexuality, of abortion and morality and radicalism, of the family and her own Jewishness...
...Willis had felt her brother to be her "male mirror image...
...Their splits also had something to do with the unrest of the era, with the general "quest for self," and with sorting out the generic from the personal...
...Though it can take a lifetime, breaking away from family and seeking one's own identity, one's own perception of reality, and finally a new stability in another family (or movement, or set of beliefs) is generally what growing up is about...
...Ellen Willis (Beginning to See the Light) and Sally Belfrage (Flowers of Emptiness) experienced the 1960s in different ways and places, but they share a searching honesty, a sense of irony and humor, a feminist consciousness, and a quest for "reality...
...Belfrage seems more open to trying things without having to be totally convinced...
...In Flowers of Emptiness, Belfrage's Indian pilgrimage is an extended counterpart of Willis's journey to Jerusalem...
...It was in music, specifically in rock and roll, that Willis claims to have found her first liberation...
...Willis clearly feels guilt and ambivalence, uncertain that she could devote her life both to good writing and to raising good children...
...Clearly the affluent have been freer to do so than the poor, and men have been freer to do so than women...
...Although many young people were still limited by income and environment, more were crowding into the colleges, marching for civil rights, questioning authority, and finally resisting the draft and the Vietnam war...
...For Willis this possibility was Orthodox Judaism...
...Next Year in Jerusalem," written in 1976, is the most self-searching essay...
...In both cases the admired fathers come through more clearly than the mothers...
...when she left Jerusalem, she felt estranged...
...Like the guru who insisted on Belfrage's acceptance of his brand of enlightenment, the rabbi pressed Willis to accept religious commitment...
...At least this is true for those who have had the leisure to explore these phases more or less freely...
...Both writers start out sounding more flip and detached than they finally reveal themselves to be...
...Rock lyrics and rhythms expressed her strong rebellious feelings and enabled her to express those feelings in writing about rock...
...By the end of that decade, when antiwar demonstrations had swept away both old concepts and the old administration, considerable numbers of this "Vietnam" generation were already beginning to drop acid, drop out, burn out, and yearn for a tranquillity, serenity, stability, and even authority that the Vietnam war had knocked out from under them...
...Beginning to See the Light is a compelling collection of essays Willis wrote from the middle 1960s through the late 1970s...
...Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were only the media-lit tips of the iceberg: Mary Daly, Deidre English, Barbara Ehrenreich, Marge Piercy, and others attacked the old system, the old authorities, even the old New Left, and proclaimed women's determination to find or become themselves, not appendages of men...
...She undertakes her trip to Jerusalem, where her younger brother is studying to be a rabbi, with the built-in safety measure that she will return and write about it...
...Both women married young but left their marriages...
...The 1920s and 1930s gave hints of the broadening base of this youthful quest...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
