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A friend from the Village Voice suggested I share more stuff I wrote in the past, so here goes, with of course commentary from now.
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The other night, Richard and I watched the movie Three Days of the Condor (1975), starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. The screenplay is based on the 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady. Richard said, “I wonder what happened to the other three days?” I said, “No one could spend six days with Faye Dunaway.”
In the movie, she's liquid and beautiful, a woman taken hostage by Redford, who’s on the run from assassins. They’ve murdered all the people he works with in an outfit that does research for the CIA—Redford was getting lunch. Max Von Sydow plays a pillar of granite with a machine gun, who coldly mows down targets for pay. Redford is fun to watch, with his blond wedges of hair flying and his eyes evading everyone. It's easy to forget how much fun it is to watch him as an actor. I don't know why.
Suddenly I said to Richard, “I once interviewed Max Von Sydow. I was very young, and I can't believe he talked to me.” I found the piece in my files. It ran in the Village Voice in the issue of October 17, 1977. There’s a photo of Von Sydow, standing in front of Sardi's, by James Hamilton. You would know he’d taken the picture just by looking at it.
Von Sydow was in New York, performing in The Night of the Tribades, by Swedish playwright and novelist Per Olov Enquist. The play is about Strindberg, his wife Siri Von Essen (played by Bibi Andersson), and her lover Marie Caroline David (played by Eileen Atkins). It's a feminist play, I tell the reader. Reading the piece now, I'm astonished by the way I push Enquist and Von Sydow to talk about their personal lives, noting at times their discomfort. I’m saying, in effect, you, you men who are critical of Strindberg’s famous contempt for women, how different from Strindberg are you in the ways you live your lives? I'm too stupid and in my own world headlong to relent, a trait I recognize in myself still, and although I don't find it admirable, it makes the conversations dramatic. Something of the zeitgeist of confrontation sparks the exchanges to life. Another person could have made them just as lively in a different way, and if I become her, I'll let you know.
When I was searching for the Tribades piece, I found another one I’d written a few months earlier. It was published in the Voice (June 6, 1977) and was called “Against the Tide: Women of the Winter Hamptons,” with photographs by Carrie Boretz. At the time, I was living with a man named Robert Myrstad, and we’d moved out of the city for a few years to live in rental houses in East Hampton. I thought it would be interesting to explore ways women in Suffolk County got on in their lives, apart from summer tourism, and see where I might fit in. I wrote about two options available to women in the same week: a meeting organized by Total Woman, where women were instructed on how to cater to their husbands, and a meeting organized by a chapter of NOW, the National Organization of Women, where women expressed their dissatisfactions to the only gynecological practice available in an expanse of 60 miles.
When I reread the piece a little while ago, I was astonished by its continued relevance. How can that be? (Dear future, oy.) I felt a desire to share the way feminism was always in me. How I was writing through it, even if I wasn’t writing directly about it. The same way I do now.
When I started writing for the Voice, around 1974 and 1975, I had already been a feminist for 8 years. I had jumped into the women’s movement as soon as I got a whiff of its ideas. I got more than a whiff from Kate Millett, who was my teacher at Barnard College. So when I came to the Voice, this way of sensing the world was something I could offer the paper. And because there were lots of other women there and many men, too—many of my editors were men and were completely down with my sense of things—because there were lots of other feminists at the paper, we could track the counter culture at the same time we were making the counter culture.
Women of the Winter Hamptons
Most men and women who remain in the East End of Suffolk County, after Labor Day, were born there. They are farmers, bay men and bay women, and laborers attached to the tourist economy. There are also a small number of teachers, health workers, social workers, and lawyers. When the summer people leave, the population shrinks to a quarter of its tourist-season size. In the winter, the East End is one of the least populated areas of New York State. From West Hampton Beach to Montauk, the Hampton townships sprawl across a 50-mile chunk of land that is mainly rural in appearance and character.
Every day, the women in the townships gather in supermarkets. Sad-faced women with three kids in tow. Old women who buy two slices of ham at the deli counter. Urbanites like me, who can’t get over how wide the aisles are. We take note of each other. Outside the markets, gathering takes effort. People live far apart. Rural life is isolating.
During a week in May, Hampton women get a choice of two ways to assemble. Total Woman, Inc., presents a series of lectures at the Gold Crest Manor in Southampton. On another day, a few miles down the road at Southampton College, NOW invites one of the four male gynecologists, who service the entire East End, to meet his patients face to face.
Total Woman, Inc. is the creation of Marabel Morgan, entrepreneur and author of the bestsellers The Total Woman (1973) and Total Joy (1976). Sidebar from Wikipedia: The Total Woman, a self-help book for married women, sold over 500,000 copies within the first year, making it the most successful non-fiction book in the USA in 1974. Overall, it sold more than ten million copies. Grounded in evangelical Christianity, it taught that “A Total Woman caters to her man's special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex or sports,” and is perhaps best remembered for instructing wives to greet their man at the front door wearing sexy outfits; suggestions included “a cowgirl or a showgirl.” “It's only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him,” Morgan wrote.
Total Woman, Inc. is a floating school, a combination revival meeting and ladies’ club improvement lecture that materializes anywhere there are 50 or so paying bodies. The women who show up in Southampton range in age from 20 to 60 and have shelled out $15 to hear what Joyce Davidson has to say. In the main, Joyce is addressing the wives of the men who fix the plumbing in summer houses and the men who supply Stuart’s fish market with clams. A lot of the wives here are also clamming, cleaning, repairing, selling, typing, and waiting tables.
They’ve come wanting help with their lives. When they get a chance to speak, they complain of feeling lonely, overworked, disorganized, and unloved. During a discussion of communication between husbands and wives, a 50-year-old woman with curly hair—she has quoted from Fiddler on the Roof—asks, “What do you do with a man who doesn’t say anything to you for weeks?” Another woman who is younger and very neatly dressed says—with uncertainty and evident pain, “How can I correct myself? I have this habit of saying the wrong things to my husband.” Her example: When her husband urged her to quit her job and stay home, she said, “But I have to work. You can’t afford to support me in the manner I’ve accustomed myself to.”
She gives off a Mary Hartman vibe. She wants definite solutions for her confusion. It occurs to me the women here could have gone either way—toward feminism or this. They’ve come looking for a little solace, a little affection, a little kindness. Total Woman tells them not to seek these things in themselves or in one another. It says the answer is marriage. It says this to women who, in reality, expect nothing from their husbands and fail even when they shoulder all the effort of making the relationship work. You might think these women would be ripe for feminism, but feminism, they’ve been taught, divides women even further from their men. Sidebar: It probably does, but these women don’t see that as a relief, and they can’t afford what it would mean economically.
After the first day’s lectures, I speak with a group of Southampton women who know each other. I tell them I’m writing an article, and they tell me why they’ve come. “I don’t want my husband going out drinking after work,” says a serious woman who looks like Grace Kelly. “I used to meet him at his bar, so I could be with him, but my God, do you know what a few beers cost? You could buy a whole bottle of whiskey for the price. Of course, he doesn’t think drinking at home is the same thing.”
“What part of your husband’s body are you going to admire?” I ask a tall woman, quoting a homework assignment Joyce has given us. We all laugh, and then the tall woman says, almost to herself, “It’s like brainwashing, isn’t it?” She looks up, remembering I’m an outsider and says, “You’ll probably write I said that.”
Joyce has said Total Woman will put “the sizzle back into marriages.” Joyce has a Farrah Fawcett smile, and the women want to believe her. She and her husband, Harper, live in Miami and have dinners often with Marabel and her husband, Charlie. “Sex,” says Joyce, “is as pure and as clean as eating cottage cheese.”
She means sex in marriage. Outside of marriage, sex is not like eating cottage cheese. (Praise Zeus.) Sex is practically guaranteed if you greet your husband at the door in a garter belt. Sure, everyone knows about Total Woman’s emphasis on carefully engineered spontaneous sex. What you learn in one of these lectures is that the word total stands for total dependency. Women are urged to abandon personal judgment and to quit jobs and a life outside the home.
Total Woman teaches self-denial, self-sacrifice, and self-abasement. Joyce frequently underscores the difference between the sexes with comments like, “A woman’s most important sex organ is her brain, a man’s is his eyes.” She notes authorities that aren’t named. This for example: “A psychiatrist has said, ‘Better a wrong decision by the head of the household than a right decision by the wife’.” (Probably not just one psychiatrist, what do you bet?)
Joyce urges women to lie. She knows no one really believes this crap. It’s a performance, the way most religious ritual is also performance. Wives must pretend to like the idea of going on a camping trip or sitting home and watching football on the tube. If you don’t believe it’s true, you can read about it in the Bible. She says women must ask for things “like a little girl would.” It’s okay to object if your husband “puts you down in front of other people.” Women who suppress anger become “frigid.” But how women are supposed to express anger isn’t specified. Joyce says, “A Total Woman must pardon the unpardonable” things that husbands do.
“Does that include wife-beating?” I ask after one session. “Probably not,” says Joyce with some hesitation. She stops smiling and says, “Total Woman is for normal people.” When I ask why she doesn’t advise women not to accept physical abuse from their husbands, she says, “You’re nit-picking.”
Here is Joyce, out on the road, working for money. Isn’t that hypocritical? She admits to having conflicts about work with her husband. He was against her coming on this trip. Still, to the women she lectures, she says, “Quit your jobs and do with less.” If women don’t work, their dependency is guaranteed. A woman about 50 with blond-gray hair raises her hand and says, “What do you do if your husband isn’t working? If he’s in a rut? If you’re the sole support of your family? I have a business, what should I do?”
“Give up the business and go home,” says Joyce, without missing a beat. “Give him an incentive to work for you. You have taken his role, robbed him of his initiative. Give up the business.”
“No,” some women behind me gasp. There are other protests. A minister’s wife objects to having to “crave her husband’s body.” Another woman laughs at the idea a man is expressing love when he pays for the groceries. There’s spirit in the group. The women want to share their experiences with each other—you know, like in consciousness raising—but Joyce cuts them off. “A Total Woman,” she says, “never talks to a girlfriend on the phone after 6 p.m.”
Most of the women here have not been touched by feminism, even if they think they hate it. East End NOW is two and a half years old and has 100 members, but these are politically conservative parts. Suffolk County backed Nixon solidly in every election. Notices advertising NOW events are torn out of shop windows hours after they are posted. Feminist activities are seldom mentioned in local papers, and the weekly Suffolk Life recently published a long and angry anti-ERA editorial.
East End NOW is nonetheless hopeful. The program I attend is the organization’s second on women’s health care, and the invited guest, who doesn’t grasp he’s a target, is Dr. Fear—this is his real name! Seventy-five women show up. Ninety percent of them are patients of Dr. Fear’s four-member medical corporation.
“I feel like a lion coming into the den,” Dr. Fear says. “No, we’re the lions,” a woman shouts out, “and you’re coming into our den.” He laughs. He thinks he’s been amusing. That’s pretty much the way communication goes for the night. “For every woman here,” says a woman sitting next to me, “there is another woman home, wishing she could be here to confront him.”
The subject of voluntary hysterectomies comes up. According to the American Cancer Society, there is a 10-times greater risk of mortality for a woman in one of these surgeries than there is from cancer of the uterus or the cervix. Dr. Fear brushes off the objections. A woman in the audience says, “If I complained of a chronic running nose, I would be appalled if a doctor suggested I have it removed.”
“A nose is a totally different kind of organ,” says Dr. Fear. “You obviously do not know what painful and traumatic menses some women experience,” he says, believing he’s silenced the issue.
Next comes the issue of unnecessary Caesarian deliveries. Dr. Fear says Southampton Hospital performs the same number per year as the national average. “Well,” says a woman—and she’s nervous speaking to the man who delivered her baby—“maybe I just happen to know all the women who make up the percentage, but just about every one of my friends has had a section in the past three or four years.”
The women believe unnecessary sections are performed to end long labors and thus long hours for the doctors. Dr. Fear says not so. But the numbers are staring everyone in the face: there are four gynecologists, one hospital, and 60 or so miles of women to treat. Dr. Fear might as well be called Dr. Wall. He has no idea how to speak to women who are sitting up and facing him. Several women complain they’re not allotted time for conferences during examinations. Dr. Fear smiles and leans back slightly, as if he’s put his feet up on an invisible desk and says, “I’d like nothing better than to smoke a pipe and chat with you women, but there just isn’t enough time.”
“Hire another doctor,” the women say. Dr. Fear says, “There aren’t enough births to support another practice.”
“Hire nurse/midwives and physicians’ assistants,” the women say, “for routine tests and procedures in the office.” “No,” says, Dr. Fear, “my patients say they want doctors.” “We’re your patients,” come back a large group in the audience. “Well,” he says, “you’re not typical. You women are NOW.”
I speak with some of the organizers after the event. One woman, who has recently had a C-section, admits it didn’t go the way she’d hoped. She says, “We wanted to tell him how we felt. He thought we’d invited him here to teach us.” (Note to the future: Oy, when have you heard this one before?) I ask why the women were so polite when he was being patronizing. As analogies, throughout his remarks, he used the phrases, “marked-down dress” and “hairdresser costs.”
She says, East End women are still tentative about confronting a gynecologist with their anger, but they felt it, believe me they felt it. There isn’t really much choice here, you know.”
One of the women at the meeting informs the group the New York state senate will vote this week on a bill, SL 81, that will grant legal rights to the fertilized egg. This bill has already been passed in seven states. In terms of women’s rights, this bill is likely the most retrograde piece of legislation to appear in 20 years. (Dear future. Oy.) It’s explained that most of the legislators in Nassau and Suffolk counties are behind it, and it’s decided we’ll write letters and send telegrams to representatives, urging they vote against the motion.
At the end of the meeting, I join East End Now. The group has made a commitment to spend the summer boosting ERA and raising money for the upcoming fight over the amendment in the Illinois senate. In the Hamptons, people meet for political reasons with people they’d probably not know in the city. The members are every age. Some don’t yet use the word “woman” in everyday speech. Others are former members of New York radical feminists. The majority of NOW’s members, I learn, come from the same economic and educational backgrounds as the women who attend Total Woman. There’s no way to generalize about the choices the Hamptons women make. Something just clicks, at some time for some women, and feminism is yes, of course.
Dear Kate, xxL
So many subjects ... so little time!
1) "No one could spend six days with Faye Dunaway.” Well, how about six weeks? I was on a film set with her in London some of that time, but I got daily reports from my then husband, Ken Howard. He, Dick VanDyke, & Dunaway we're making "The Country Girl." Even the costumer, Donald Brooks, was ready to kill her. I will sum up Dunaway with a remark made at a presser for the movie. Ken Howard was asked, "How would you describe Ms. Dunaway?" Without even thinking, he said, "Late." She arrived, almost every day, two hours after her call time. This is Monroe level insecurity.
Van Dyke and Howard knew how to eat her lunch, however, and they did.
The film was shot with three cameras - in a truck (like the old comedy shows.) It wasn't just hit your mark, look at the red light, and say your lines. She did not know where the red light WAS. VanDyke was the master; Ken Howard was no master, but he'd done enough three camera work to be comfortable. Poor Faye ... she had no *idea* which camera was picking her up. (Hard to scene steal that way.)
2) The mention of "Mary Hartman" caught my eye, as well. She and I went to college together. Well, Louise Lasser, who played her, and I did. She could have been playing herself.
I realize this is a rather lengthy post to someone else's column, but it is called "Everything is Personal," no?
Total Woman was such a self righteous, insulting piece of bs. It was a grifter’s dream. Tell woman to stay home, don’t work, make a pe*** the center of your life. However, it was fine for the women telling you that to go out and sell that piece of garbage book thus making money off women’s misery.