Sari Wilson

Reviews & Essays

The S/I Conflict

Maxine #2, 1996

The Second Sex. By Simone de Beauvoir. Bantam Books. 705 pp. $1.25 (1970 edition)

Vindication. By Frances Sherwood. Penguin. 435 pp. $10.95.

True North: A Memoir. By Jill Ker Conway. Vintage. 250 pp. $12.00.

Ever wonder where kids will fit in? One part of you craves one (or more), and another part can't see a time when you'll be smart/happy/accomplished/famous enough to have another life dependent on you. I call this the species v. individual (S/I) conflict. You can call it anything you want, but it won't go away. Us "modern women" precariously straddle our biological imperative and our personal ambitions in a particularly complex way I don't think men quite understand. Thirty years old isn't too far off for me and I'm acutely aware of the S/I drama approaching a new intensity. Very disquieting. Hardly unique, however, as I was recently reminded by three vastly different books.

In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are the potential bearers of more than one kind of fruit. She asserts that women, just like men, can transcend their biological imperatives, making art and living by ideas. It is perhaps not surprising that de Beauvoir's encounters with the female reproductive system are less than pleasant.

It is during her periods that she feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing; it is indeed the prey of a stubborn and foreign life which each month constructs and then tears down a cradle within it; each month all things are made ready for the child and then absorbed into the crimson flow. Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself.

To de Beauvoir, it is clearly an either/or proposition: a woman's creative and intellectual goals stand in direct conflict with her body's biological dictates to make babies. To cave into the need for children is to submit to nature's destiny, to the call of the species, which saps the mind of its will to "transcendence," to freedom.

Vindication (1993), by Frances Sherwood, is a "fictionalized biography" of Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneer feminist credo, "A Vindication of the Right of Women," made eloquent arguments for the extension of the demands of the French revolution to include women. Although Sherwood disengages herself from the tyrannies of biographical fact by allowing Wollstonecraft to take on a life of her own, it is clear that the themes that she plays with are true to the time. Vindication is most worth a read for its eagerness to delve into the inevitable contradictions of a woman so at odds with her time. Here we have a banner-holding feminist grandmother finding pleasure as a bottom in an S&M relationship. This is in a way, reassuring. I mean, if Mary is licking the boots of some American bounty hunter just a year after she wrote her masterpiece on the enforced servitude of women, well, then there's hope for me — for all of us — yet! More to the point, these contradictions play themselves out on the reproductive front as well. The arrival of Wollstonecraft's first child (a girl) and the departure of the father (the bounty hunter), leaves her a poor, single mother in London, trying to make a living as a writer while the baby wails in the corner of the room. At one point, Mary hurls the offending creature against the wall, knocking it cold. Not nurturing behavior, certainly, but somehow understandable. Sherwood's Mary is, metaphorically speaking, the product of a complex historical moment in which the high-minded rhetoric of the enlightenment co-existed with the daily brutalities of life, especially where women and the poor were concerned. The ironic resolution of Wollstonecraft's S/I conflict (and a very tacky ending, I must say) comes when she is felled by the reproductive system de Beauvoir so fears: she dies, not yet forty, after giving birth a second time. And this not long after she finally finds a man who is her intellectual equal — the anarchist philosopher William Godwin — and willing to jointly bear the responsibilities of being a parent. As an interesting footnote, it seems likely that Mary Wollstonecraft's motherless daughter, who later became Mary Shelly, inherited some of her mother's S/I struggle, for she wrote Frankenstein while she was pregnant.

Even in Jill Ker Conway's True North (1994), a stalwartly high-minded memoir of a "life of ideas," a baby's squall and the smell of dirty diapers lurks below the surface. Or rather, the absence of these. Conway, an Australian historian who left her country to get a Ph.D. at Harvard and later became president of Smith College, tells of the critical moment when the pain of discovering her infertility was replaced by the energy and resolve she needed to launch a long and successful academic career:

At thirty-three, I saw myself as a scholar. Thirty-three might seem late for such a discovery, but a woman develops her sense of her working self on a different time trajectory from that of a man. Because society defines children as a woman's prime responsibility, she needs to clarify what her reproductive life will be, and whether she is to be single or a member a partnership. She may be working to the limit of her capacity throughout her twenties, but when her inner discussion of these subjects arrives at a firm resolution, her working self blossoms, and she enters a highly productive stage of life.

Food for thought, no?

©1996 Sari Wilson

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