by Laura Cude
“What an earthquake this book was. It wasn’t the story of my generation of feminists, but it was the story of the generation that made everything possible for us,” reads the beginning of Linda Grant’s quote on the back of the current Virago edition of The Women’s Room, by Marilyn French. On paper, French’s colossal novel isn’t the story of Grant’s generation, being set in 1950’s America in the “married with children” households of Mira Ward and the women whom she befriends throughout her adult life. I can’t speak for Linda Grant’s generation, but apart from a few archaic references and sayings here and there, the similarities between the female characters in the book to my female peers is astonishing. My generation seem to be offering themselves up for marriage and kids just as easily as Mira et al. If you overhead some of the conversations with my friends, you would think women’s liberation had never happened. And of course, in some ways which I am noticing every day, it hasn’t.
On a recent trip to the pub with a relationship obsessed friend (let’s call her Emma), I was told all about how her sister was engaged to some guy who apparently is a millionaire. What exactly it is he does, I don’t know, and my friend didn’t seem to know either, perhaps satisfied with that fact alone. Emma grew animated as she described her older sister’s engagement ring, fantasized over the extravagance of the wedding and a five star honeymoon which she has imagined will follow. Her excitement reached it’s peak when she informed me that her future brother in law has “rich friends,” and therefore meant there was potential for the same fairytale ending to happen to her. “I might even meet one at the wedding,” she squealed.
Emma is training to be a teacher. She adores kids and her job and is fully committed to it. I am completely stumped as to what would make a girl like her long to gain financial security from a man when she is, in every way possible, capable of providing that for herself. She is not the kind, I would think, that would likely sacrifice a career which she enjoys and has worked so hard for to stay at home and fulfil the role of a doting housewife. It’s as though some young women want the rich hot shot, even if they are independent themselves, because in some old fashioned way, they still want to feel looked after, and perhaps, more horrifically, want to feel “kept.”
As I changed the subject to more feminist friendly matters, I noticed Emma’s eyes linger over my shoulder repetitively. At first I thought she’d noticed someone she fancied, but as her eye contact with me decreased to about a second in length at every interval, I had to take a look behind me to find out what, or who, was so attention grabbing. I was surprised to spot a young couple a few tables back, holding hands and kissing. You know the sort—the couple who’ve been together long enough to no longer feel awkward, but not enough to have the “where is this going?” look on their faces.
“Is that who you’ve been staring at?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she dreamily replied. “I really want a boyfriend,” she added before explaining how she aims to be married at twenty-five. When questioned, she had no logical reason for this, except that “that’s the age I always imagined I would get married.”
What are you meant to say to that? I find myself, regrettably, for the sake of the ease of conversation, just nodding, smiling and agreeing with the notion. I felt like I could be talking to Natalie, Adele or Bliss (who happens to have been a school teacher until she got married) from French’s novel, before they had met their so called Mr. Right.
Even before you have reached the halfway point of The Women‘s Room, innumerable marriages have ended and affairs been had, even within the friendship group. Is this what Emma and those like her have to look forward to? It’s like marriage is still being seen as a means to the most important end: to security and happiness. But how can they expect to achieve that when it’s less about who you marry, and more about when?
By all means, if two people want to make the commitment for the right reasons, then they should get married. There are just so many members of my generation who resign themselves to the idea of being someone’s wife because they still believe in the fairytale ending. They’re in love with the pomp and clichéd romance of it all: the dress, the venue, the ring, the attention. If only their parents had chosen The Women’s Room as their bedtime story, instead of that darn Cinderella.
Laura Cude is twenty-one years old and from a dead beat town called Leatherhead which is located in Old Blighty. She left Kingston College last year with three A grade A levels, and three university acceptances. She turned them all down in favour of practical work experience, which is what bought her to Her Circle originally as a blog coordinator for The Writer’s Life, and now as the writer of inContext. She is a music enthusiast and keen writer, using song composition and screenplays as her weapons of choice. Combining her interests in feminism, existentialism and pop culture, she aims to make inContext a revealing and energetic exploration of the politics in
feminist literature and the 21st century.
About Laura Cude
