472
THOMAS EDWARDS
But for Lerman it is also not something
to
be treated heavily, either; big guns
roll up only
to
fire off cupcakes, the kidder and the suffragette keep elbowing
each other aside.
Call Me Ishtar
reflects a sense of what cou ld fairly be called oppression, a
sense Lerman obviously shares with many other women. But I think that
women face a special difficulty in expressing this sense, one that black writers,
for example, may not face. Lerman's book reminds me interestingly of Ishmael
Reed's
Mumbo Jumbo,
which also relates the culture of an oppressed group
to
a body of lore drawn from mythography and comparative religion and in
which the myths invoked unexpectedly make more sense than the satiric occa–
sion requires. But if women are an oppressed group, they are not an oppressed
minority
group; in practical terms, at least, they have less to gain and more
to
lose than blacks do, and a sense of qualified oppression can create imaginative
uneasiness. Where Reed uses his mythic materials with a fine, incisive arro–
gance, Lerman seems a lillie nervous, unsure about what's "serious" and what
isn't where Reed doesn 't bother to discriminate, over-anxious to make some–
thing, preferably something dignifying, of the housewife's lot.
Virginia Woolf once remarked that "when a woman speaks to women she
shou ld have something very unpleasant up her sleeve." Rhoda Lerman finally
doesn 't, I think, but Marge Piercy makes up for her. Though she contributes to
Call Me Ish taT
an approving dust-jacket blurb about "the emergence of a con–
scious and fully developed women's culture," Piercy has a harder message for
women, and for men too. Though
Small Changes
begins in Lerman country,
with the marriage in Syracuse of Beth, blue-collar chi ld vaguely yearning for
something more than she has known,
to
Jim, a bundle of sexist fixations on
sports, cars, TV, home cooking and gelling chi ldren, it's a grindingly circum–
stantial demonstration that the task for women isn't
to
make something of the
domestic life but
to
discredit and escape it.
Beth, uneducated but capable of serious self-imaginings, runs away
to
Boston, gets a secretarial job at M.I.T., and gingerly explores the marginal
area beLween the graduate-student culture and the bohemia of street life; grad–
ually she learns that what she wants-separateness, the right to determine her
own desires, a room of one's own-is as hard
to
find there as it was back home.
Her life gets entangled with that of Miriam, who looks more like a fictional
winner-she's a "big flamboyant" girl, sensual, out-going, brilliant a t compu–
ter science, seemingly libera ted to start with. But Miriam can't stop equating
"rea lity" with being wanted by a man; she moves through intense and wearing
relationships with two sexually cha llenging but humanly closed-in Vietnam
veterans (who, Piercy suggests, have a subconscious homosexual thing going
between them ), emerging into a relatively conventional suburban,marriage
to
a young scientist whose good nature is weaker than his male chauvinism; at
the end he is drifting into an affair with his,secretary while Miriam copes with
