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PARTISAN REVIEW
chores is bad luck. But housework, child rearing, cleaning, keeping,
nourishing, looking after-these must be done by someone, or worse by
millions of someones day in and day out. In the home at least it would
seem "custom" has not been so much capricious as observant in finding
that women are fairly well adapted to this necessary routine. And they
must keep at it whether they like it or not.
George Orwell says somewhere that reformers hate to admit that
nobody will do the tedious, dirty work of the world except under
"some form of coercion." Mopping, ironing, peeling, feeding-it is not
absurd to call this unvarying routine
slavery,
Simone de Beauvoir's word.
But its necessity does not vanish by listing the tropical proliferation of
open and concealed forms of coercion that may be necessary to make
women do it. Bachelors are notoriously finicky, we have all observed.
The dust pile is revoltingly real.
Most men, also, are doomed to work of brutalizing monotony.
Hardly any intellectuals are willing to undertake a bit of this dreadful
work their fellow beings must do, no matter what salary, what working
conditions, what degree of "socialist dignity" might be attached to it.
If
artists could save a man from a lifetime of digging coal by digging
it themselves one hour a week, most would refuse. Some would commit
suicide. "It's not the time, it's the anticipation! It ruins the whole
week! I can't even read, much less write!"
Childbearing and housekeeping may be repetitive and even intel–
lectually stunting. Yet nothing so fills one with despair as those products
of misplaced transcendent hope, those millions of stupid books, lunatic
pamphlets, absurd editorials, dead canvases and popular songs which
have clogged up the sewers and ashcans of the modern world, repre–
senting more wretched labor, dreaming, madness, vanity and waste
of effort than one can bear to think of. There is an annihilating noth–
ingness in these undertakings by comparison with which the production
of one stupid, lazy, lying child is an event of some importance. Activity,
transcendence, project-this is an optimistic, exhilarating vocabulary.
Yet Sartre had to disown the horde of "existents" who fell to like farm
hands at the table, but were not themselves able to produce so much
as a carrot.
Are women "the equal" of men? This is an embarrassing subject.
Women are certainly phyiically inferior to men and
if
this were
not the case the whole history of the world would be different. No com–
radely socialist legislation on woman's behalf could accomplish a
mil–
lionth of what a bit more muscle tissue, gratuitously offered by nature,
might do for this "second" being.
