DORIS LESSING
Women's Q uests
The women's movement since the sixties has developed in a way that
exactly mirrors traditional male attitudes.
It
is as if we have a pattern
burned into our brains and we can't move outside it. I've been thinking
recently about why on the whole (and I think most people would agree)
the women's movement has not fulfilled its potential. It burst on the
scene with enormous energy all over Europe and in America. Yet the
energy dissipated and frittered away, and what has actually been achieved
is this: that in all the European countries and America and Canada mid–
dle class women who were probably young in the sixties and are now
middle aged have done rather well. They have good jobs, usually in cul–
tural things like television and radio, newspapers, and so on. This is also
true in countries where women have an extremely bad time, like Japan.
In today's Japan there are very few women in public life, much fewer
than anywhere in the West, and when they are, it's nearly always in cul–
tural things. So, all that great explosion of energy has ended up with a
very narrow section of the female population doing better than it did
before.
Three categories of women have been particularly ignored by the
women's movement. Women at home, as we know, have been always
undervalued or taken for granted by society, and when the new feminist
movement decided to take no notice of women at home, they were
doing only what has always been done. Weare now in the situation
where a woman will come up to me and say, overcome with embarrass–
ment, undervaluing herself most terribly, "of course, I'm only a house–
wife." When you start talking to her, you might find that she has six
children. But as far as she's concerned, she is nothing because she's only a
housewife.
It
is a very great criticism of the women's movement that they
allowed this state of affairs to go on and did absolutely nothing for these
women at home who, I think, probably feel even worse about
themselves than they did before.
It
is quite tragic that women should
consider themselves "only housewives."
A
friend who manages one of the big branches of the National
Westminster Bank in London, says that though it is the policy of the
bank to try and get women into executive positions, they can't do it.
Only
a very few women want to take the opportunities offered, such as
Editor's Note: This essay is a shortened version of a talk given at the 92nd Street
Y,
New
York City, on
February
4,
1991.
