Female Roles
Female Roles WOMEN: A World Report Oxford University Press. 376 pp. $18.95. She rises at 3 a.m., pounds yam, walks miles in search of wood and water. She works all day in the fields hoeing,...
...Wanting to avoid "just another piece of international voyeurism—of the rich world ogling at the poor," the book's makers had rich and poor countries trade writers...
...Certainly, even in rich countries women suffer real hardship, however much it is screened by the general affluence...
...When a stranger asks her the greatest pleasure of her life, she replies, "Sleep...
...And who do you think wants her now...
...A woman who complains is a bad woman...
...But he must notice it...
...The family life and moral codes that imprison Mexican women and deprive them of sexual pleasure may also warm their hearts...
...One exchange recorded by Brekke sums up the lives of many of the world's women...
...Mexico's Elena Poniatowska, writing on Australia, comes the closest...
...He doesn't know that I'm ill...
...the woman replied...
...Here I was, working from dawn to dark at fever pitch, just taking care of one baby and keeping a two-room apartment in reasonable order...
...I'm sick as a dog every time I'm pregnant, sick the whole nine months...
...On the contrary, the woman told Brekke...
...And when the child arrives—I've no milk for it...
...Maybe the writers confronted so much already written, so much organized feminism, that they found it harder to get down to the daily business of women's lives...
...Still, uneven as it is, Women is a provocative book, and I hope we don't have to wait for another U.N...
...Talking to a thirty-two-year-old woman with nine children, she asked, "Why have you had so many...
...The reports of women's lives in the rich countries do not tug at the sympathies like those of the poor countries...
...It is almost as if they can do what they please because no one cares what they do...
...Surely, she says to herself, the sexual knowledge of the Australian woman is a good thing—yet for all this apparent openness, there is a lack of frankness: Many of the women she interviewed would not let her use their names...
...Do you think I wanted them all...
...A sick woman is also a bad woman," she told Brekke...
...More than the other essayists, she gives this dilemma personal urgency: "For a Latin like me," she writes, "for whom sex is secretive, intimate, and sinful (and not frantic, garish, and noisy), all this was a shock and I felt as if I had suddenly missed life, missed love and could not go back...
...Decade for Women to read others like it...
...Reading the book in the early weeks of my baby's life, I shifted uneasily in my chair...
...Nor do the writers begin to unravel the complex social and psychological webs that trap affluent Western women...
...She works all day in the fields hoeing, weeding, harvesting...
...But doesn't your husband understand that you shouldn't be pregnant so often when it makes you so ill...
...The American contributors included Germaine Greer, Debbie Taylor, Angela Davis, and Marilyn French...
...Their accounts make up the last two-thirds of the book, following a useful summary of facts and figures defining the state of the world's women...
...She had a friend who aborted three times, and then her husband sent her away...
...And I had running hot and cold water, a gas stove, an electric refrigerator, a washer and dryer in the basement, a diaper service, a supermarket ten minutes away, and a car to get there...
...I particularly liked American Marilyn French's account of India and Norwegian Toril Brekke's account of Kenya...
...None of the other writers does so well at confronting the moral and cultural complexity of the various subjects...
...Each essayist was asked to focus on one aspect of women's lives—family, work, education, sex, politics—but the subjects tend to get mixed up...
...I had, further, no husband to beat me and get me pregnant again before I got this baby out of diapers...
...that hardship does not emerge in these reports in any memorable way...
...Carol Polsgrove (Carol Polsgrove, a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, grew up in West Africa...
...Some of the writers do spellbind with details of daily life...
...African women do not complain, at least to their husbands...
...She is one of the women of the world, as presented in Women: A World Report, prepared for the Nairobi conference marking the end of the United Nations' Decade for Women...
...Perhaps I should have a nice cup of 'lost-time' tea ..., go back to sleep and dream about Australian kangaroos' flying penises, or better still, count the sheep and have the wool willingly pulled over my eyes...
...Then, too, there is something cold, something lonely about Australian women's sexual lives...
...Five writers from rich countries reported on five poor countries, and five writers from poor countries reported on rich countries...
...Poniatowska cannot decide whether to envy Australian women or feel sorry for them...
...Her exploration of women's sexual lives in a consumer culture clearly discomfited her...
...At its best, such a plan would produce a double vision...
...Alas, few of the writers manage to do that...
...Filtering what she sees through her own consciousness, the writer would give us a feel for both the culture she comes from and the culture she is writing about...
...She comes home and prepares dinner for her husband and the nine children she has had in nine years, or those that have survived...
...Women was designed to illuminate just such contrasts...
Vol. 50 • August 1986 • No. 8
