16
DORIS LESSING
say: "I support their aims but I don't like their shrill voices and
their nasty ill-mannered ways." This is an inevitable and easily
recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must
expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy
what has been won for thm. I don't think that Women's Libera–
tion will change much though - not because there is anything
wrong with its aims, but because it is already clear that the whole
world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are
living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get
through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small
and quaint.
But this novel was not a trumpet for Women's Liberation. It
described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment.
It
put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking,
feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very
ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being on
the theme of "she is unfeminine," "she is a man-hater." This par–
ticular reflex seems indestructible. Men - and many women - said
that the suffragettes were defeminized, masculine, brutalized. There
is no record I have read of any society anywhere when women
demanded more than nature offers them that does not also describe
this reaction from men - and some women. A lot of women were
angry about
The Golden Notebook.
What women will say to other
women, grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping
or what they make clear in their masochism, is often the last thing
they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards
they are because they have been semislaves for so long. The number
of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, ex–
perience with a man they are in love with is still small. Most women
will still run like little dogs with stones thrown at them when a man
says, "You are unfeminine, aggressive, you are unmanning me."
It
is my belief that any woman who marries, or takes seriously in any
way at all, a man who uses this threat, deserves everything she gets.
For such a man is a bully, does not know anything about the world
he lives in, or about its history - men and women have taken infinite
numbers of roles in the past, and do now, in different societies. So he
is ignorant, or fearful about being out of step - a coward.... I write
all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a
