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DORIS LESSING
innumerable meetings, "We build the huts. We thatch the huts. We plas–
ter the huts. We plant the grain, we weed it, we harvest it, we sell it.
We bring up the children. We cook. And what are you doing, oh, my
husband? You are sitting in the beer hall, drinking it away." They have
these great ideological battles, but they are good-humored. This is pleas–
ant, compared to the bitterness we often are used to. Quite often, too,
they will dance or sing their complaints about men.
When they are lectured by feminists that they should stand up to
their husbands they are very funny about it. It is not lost on them that
these feminists are - compared to themselves - unimaginably rich, privi–
leged, protected. It is a pity ideologues cannot hear what is said about
them when they have left. Or, often, what is acted and sung about them.
It's a Jellyby phenomenon. Do you remember Dickens's character,
Mrs. Jellyby, who was always sending parcels to Nigeria or somewhere,
while her children were unfed and unclothed? This Jellyby phenomenon
is so rooted in all of us that again, it's very hard even to see it. I once
went to talk to a group of German sixth graders near Munich. What
they wanted to talk about was how they were supporting a group of
children someplace in Africa. This was at a time when all the newspapers
were full of the sufferings of their local Turkish workers. I suggested they
do something about the wives and families of their local Turkish work–
ers. It was so far from how they thought that I had to drop it. But
why? It is because in Europe we all belong to ex-colonizing countries
and we think in terms of going out and telling the natives how to live,
and we don't seem to be able to stop doing it.
I think that this particular great wave of the women's movement is
now dissipated, and there will be another one at some point. I would
like to think it will not be a spin-off from some political movement. If it
should be, we'll have exactly the same mixture as before, and that would
be a pity. I personally have more faith in unemotional, very low-key
movements - not necessarily big ones - like changing the law, changing
little things here and there, because these are things that last. Very large
emotional movements usually disappear. In fact, they nearly always disap–
pear, leaving not very much behind, because all that energy goes into
words.
The great advances in the situation of women in our time have been
the result of technology. One is birth control, because all women in our
society take for granted something that has never happened before in the
history of the world; that is, that women have control over whether
they were going to give birth. The other thing is, of course, labor sav–
ing devices, which have transformed women's lives. We do not know
what technology is going to come up with next. But I think that we
should be ready for things that are unexpected; that will challenge us to
