Joan Didion on the Women’s Movement

In the While Album, Joan Didion explores the The Women’s Movement and its collective aspirations.  She starts the story by informing us that just because she is a woman does not in fact mean that she relates.  She writes that the resurrgence of the women’s movement of her time is not quite as revolutionary as was believed.

That was a very pretty image, the idle ladies sitting in the gazebo murmuring lasciate ogni speranza, but it depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for “fulfillment,” or “self-expression,” a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and capable of engendering only the most pro forma benevolent interest. In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this  Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women’s movement would have seemed to have any interest at all.  … One oppressed class after another has seemed to finally miss the point.  The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. (109-110)

These women were not interested in social reform and changing the injust rules of the game they just want to be on the team.  They want to be allowed to play rather than change. They missed their opportunity to unite with other minority groups and truly revolutionize systems. 

…they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of “brotherhood.” (110)

It seemed very New England, this febrile and cerebral passion.  The solemn a priori idealism in the guise of radical materialism somehow bespoke old-fashioned self-reliance and prudent sacrifice. (111)

 The new feminist ideolists were re-evaluating  female characters within our literary canon, “the whole body of ‘sexist’ Western literature.” (111)

Other literary analysts devised ways to salvage other books: Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady  need no longer be the victim of her own idealism.  She could be, instead, the victim of a sexist society, … The narrator of Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps could be seen as “enslaved because she persists in looking for her identity in a man”. (111-112)

 The idea that fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology.  They had invented a class; now they had only to make that class conscious(112)

 It would have been pointless even to speak of whether one considered these women “right” or “wrong”, meaningless to dwell upon the obvious, upon the coarsening of moral imagination to which such social idealism so often leads. (112)

To those of us who remain committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism. (113)

(These woman’s movment) It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s grave and awesome recognition of woman’s role as “the Other” to the notion that the first step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman’s marriage contract (“wife strips beds, husband remakes them”) a document reproduced in Ms., but it was toward just such trivialization that the women’s movement seemed to be heading. (113)

Didion acknowledges that in the beginning the movement required such trivialness in order to strick a chord of recognition in women however missing the point means their “discoveries could be of no use at all if one refused to perceive the larger point, failed to make the inductive leap from the personal to the political.” (114) This is the precise argument made 40 years earlier when Woolf  demanded “give her a room of her own and five hundred a year” (Woolf 123). “That five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself” (Woolf 139)