Posts Tagged Cyril Connolly
Hoping Tomorrow Happens
Posted by mirandainnes in General Rant on January 30, 2011
This is the best possible time to be a woman.
In some places.
I hoped to find friends on moving to Italy, but I didn’t expect to find such a shoal of supportive, intelligent, funny, adventurous, positive women. They’re dealing with all the usual stuff that afflicts people on the brink of getting a bus pass — widowhood, errant partners, poverty, illness, grumpy hips, being pulverised between ancient parents and melodramatic progeny — but they make it an absolute priority to gather together and talk, share, cook, laugh, drink. 20 women can confidently arrange an event, men optional, and bask like cats on a radiator in the warmth of each other’s presence.
I’m comparing my privileged freedom to the constraints imposed on my mother’s generation, for whom financial independence was still a chimera. She got a double first at Cambridge, but my father’s career took precedence. She had jobs wherever they fetched up, by definition temporary, ephemeral, chosen to dovetail conveniently into his life.
It would never have occurred to her to invite a coven of mates over for an evening of talk and laughter. She didn’t have them, for a start, partly because of her hauteur, and partly because of their peripatetic life, packing up and going wherever his career threw them: Peking, Nanking, Shanghai, Amoy, Hongkong, the Philippines, Brentwood. (Brentwood? They were so innocent, didn’t know about Essex).
For her generation, other women always threatened to become The Other Woman. There was too much at stake — livelihood, spending habits, status — to let them get too close.
When my sons were small I once got the sour metallic taste of belonging to a man. I don’t blame him, who’d happily volunteer to support another able-bodied adult? But when he said ‘when you make the money, you can make the decisions’, I did make a decision. I chose penurious independence. Laughable, in the eyes of my male employer at Natmags who paid little and expected much, difficult and frightening at times for me and my boys, but a source of self-knowledge and strength to me. I’m not in any way heroic, but I do know who I am. Who are you if you’re defined by your relationship to someone or something else?
A generation ago, your man was not only your Beloved and all that, he was survival. Even if you had a stellar education, talent, and energy, you were still one of his belongings and did as he directed. Cyril Connolly blamed the pram in the hall, the rampant tares of domesticity, among the enemies of promise, meaning of course masculine promise. How much more so for women, for whom babies represent a career hiatus at a crucial juncture, or a source of guilt if they are cared for by a minder. I’ve seen the milky trail of infant puke on the left shoulder, the mask of grief on the face of the deputy editor at Country Living, after leaving her distraught baby in the hands of a nanny.
Felix Dennis said ‘the reason why we’re (men) all so bad-tempered now, Miranda, is that there’s nowhere left to explore.’ His notion was that we could make a bit more space and invent a spot of healthy extreme sport by decamping to the moon, ‘not as physical bodies, Miranda, but as holograms,’ to which I smiled politely and chomped on the Cadbury’s miniature swiss roll that the 74th richest man in the UK served as the grand finale to our lunch of British Rail sarnies. But he’s right — that is how this planet feels now — in the uncaring possession of angry and insanely powerful men who trample about in the slurry they’ve created, looking for a fight. Rampaging around the nursery, smashing each other’s toys.
The dislike and suspicion of women for each other is a myth that men have gratefully exploited. It is called ‘divide and rule’. Given independence and self-respect, women love each other’s company. Contrary to the myth, they work brilliantly together. Anyone who has gone through the pain and hassle of giving birth is more disposed to cooperate with and support other people than to fight them. It is precisely this easy, natural attraction and ability to be open and share experience with other women that is so threatening for men. Having bullied their way to the apex of the pyramid, it is alarming to look down and see the foundations rumbling, the worker ants moving off where they will, congregating convivially with each other, refusing to follow orders.
But the fabulous, feisty women of my acquaintance dance on very thin ice: we co-exist in a time when in some places it is customary to stone a woman to death, justifying this psychotic combination of cowardice and cruelty with the slightest hint of a suspicion. Or where the casual immolation of wives and widows for financial gain is unofficially condoned.
Women are built to work for peace and healing — most women, of course there are exceptions. Women are the custodians of the future. Women are viscerally compelled to ponder the world of their grandchildren: every female foetus has all her eggs four months after conception.
Astounding fact: Your grandmother carried you as an embryonic dot within the growing body of your mother for five months.
It feels to me as though we’re living in a scary age of divergence — just as the gap between rich and poor is widening, so is the gap between men and women. What could be more alarming and call for more stringent strictures than the possibility of women doing it for themselves?
But what women do for themselves and everyone else is provide the social glue that connects people to each other — remember birthdays, invent reasons to bond, share feelings and experiences, find common ground. Necessary for the future of the planet. Long may it continue.