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DORIS LESSING
special courses, classes, and so on. When questioned, it becomes very
clear that they see their time in the bank as a temporary thing - they will
get married and have children. This is how they see their future. This is a
choice made by women quite deliberately and should be respected when
they do.
Another category of women has been not only neglected, but has
been totally overlooked. Nothing was ever said about that class of
women who have always - in America and in Europe - been housewives
and mothers, who are probably quite well-off, who might or might not
have a part-time job, and who do a great deal of charity work. One
would think that the feminists would have approved of them because
they are extremely hard-working women and accomplish a great deal.
Now, these women literally were not noticed. The reason is, of course,
that they tend to be conservative or non-political. Therefore, to the
movement of the nineteen-sixties, they were quite simply beyond the pale
because their politics were wrong, and this was a very political move–
ment. Now, of all the opportunities that we missed (I'm including my–
self), I think that was the worst because these women tend to have lines
out into every section of the infrastructure - into politics, local govern–
ment, law, and funding.
I have yet to meet a woman who is not a feminist. I don't mean the
rampaging kind of feminist or the intellectual feminist or the political
feminist, but every woman knows that women get a bad deal. These
women, properly integrated into the movement, could have completely
transformed that movement. I think now that the time has gone.
The third category of overlooked women are the working women
in every country. Their lives have not been affected in the slightest by the
nineteen-sixties movement. It will be recalled that there was a rather
ghastly miners' strike in England, which went on for over a year. The
women for the first time in their lives were out organizing food
distribution, soup kitchens, and other supportive activities. A lot of
them were saying that it was the first time in their lives that they had
ever taken events into their hands and they had felt transformed by it.
But why did it have to wait for a miners' strike? Why did the feminists
not see these working women as people who could perhaps have
benefitted from superior information? What the middle class has in every
country is superior information. We know how to make things work -
for us, usually.
According to the traditional view of women, we're not fit for hard
work - not the real work of the world. We tend to be weak, emo–
tional, hysterical. We need protection. We can't think logically. We
can't paint, write, compose. Virginia Woolf said of her character Lily
Briscoe in
To the Lighthouse
that before she picked up her paintbrush and
