150
NANCY
MILFORD
have misread her, Mitchell does not accept, or even pay lip service to
the "creativity" involved within this physiological self. Why
is
crea–
tivity, or even action, limited to thinking, writing, and political the–
orizing? And to what else are we to be confined, if not to the species?
Are we less limited, less confined if we deny or defy our physiological
self; or are we limited in yet another way? I suggest that there is
something of unalterable value in woman's experience: the very cyclical
motion of her body makes her life marked by upheaval, change, and
discharge. I am not willing to say that she is made more vulnerable
because of it, but that it is instead a source of potential strength; change
need not stun her or threaten her, for she is in constant flux. Her
interior territory is not only a protective construct, a sort of psychologi–
cal metaphor of her sex, for it is from within it that she is capable of
nourishing and sustaining and conserving life itself. At the very least
its presence gives us options men do not possess.
And are these qualities which may be called womanly ' ,of any
less moment to a society than those M;itchell implies are to take their
place? Why is the literary heritage of woman made up of letters and
diaries and journals? Pl.re we aware of ourselves and the world around
us in any less potent a way than men are, or in another and equally
valuable a way? Even gestation is not only the province of the mother,
I
but equally the provjnce of that person who develops (according to
Webster) "a plan in the mind." Who conserves more, the historian,
the biographer, the teacher, or the mother? Are these therefore inactive,
uncreative arts? I am not trying to be poetical about bodily functions;
I am suggesting another dimension in which our endowment may 'be
explored.
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'
l
In the end wh<lit Mitchell is after seems modest: the right of
women to earn a living wage, the more important right to equal work
rather than service jobs which are really only extensions of their family
roles. She is not after the abolition of the family. She wants free oral
contraception, the abolition of illegitimacy, which will separate mar–
riage from parenthood. Why, she asks, must there be only the mother
as "nurse," why "only one institutionalized form of inter-sexual or
inter-generational relationship?" She wants a plural range of institu–
tions: "Couples - of the same or of different sexes - living together or
not living together, long term unions with or without children, single
parents - male or female - bringing up children, children socialized
by conventional rather than biological parents, extended kin groups,
etc. - all these could be encompassed in a range of institutions which
match the free invention and variety of men and women." For
Mitchell it is capitalism that has evolved the notion of family that
