PARTISAN REVIEW
147
OUT FROM UNDER
WOMAN'S ESTATE.
By
Juliet Mitchell.
I have found it difficult to come to terms with Juliet
Mitchell's book,
Woman's Estate,
and
I
think I know why. It is not
only that I am not English, a Marxist, or a Freudian, as she is, and
therefore lack her conviction that an economic analysis or even a psy–
choanalytic one will prove corrective to the social ills of women. For
Mitchell believes we must provide a theory, a "scientific socialist anal–
ysis," of the oppression of women in order to overcome it. It is also
that I am at deep odds with that cast of her mind, that urge to theory
which chills me in its constrictions.
It
is also a far more difficult book to read than it need be, or
ought to be. What it being said is often persuasive, even exciting, yet
so clumsily written, so rigid in its rhetoric that it makes me sleepy.
Mitchell's self-consciousness when confronting untheoretical material
(always marked by a rash of ellipses ) makes me distrust her. My
hunch is that he need to be taken seriously had deadened her prose.
And I might have put her book down had the following conversation
not occurred at breakfast.
My husband and I are sitting at a table with our daughter and
son, aged five and seven. The children want to go for a sail after
breakfast. But we cannot go: I am writing and my husband has begun
to paint the house. Who is boss, our son asks? Why can't he decide
whether we go or not? Who does he think is boss, my husband asks?
He says the father is. Why do you say that? Because the father makes
the money, says our daughter. But in our family the mother makes
money too, my husband says, and why does it have to be money that
decides who is boss? My son replies that otherwise there would be no
sailboat - adding quickly that even if men aren't always the boss, they
do run the trains. My daughter says why can't girls run trains; why
aren't there things only girls can do, if there are things only boys can
do. My husband and I say two very different things at once. I say that
all people must work at something they can do and do well. My hus–
band says only girls can have babies.
We had been talking as a family about authority and the ability
to produce income: a woman's work and not her capacity to reproduce.
We had not been defining men as fathers or even as husbands. But
suddenly biology became the exclusive or ultimate definition of women.
Why is it the limitation of women, in terms of their work, when it is
