The Women's Room Read Free

one will object to the fact that all the men in the novel are repulsive, hollow, selfish, or wooden. Male character is less important than male centrality. In a male-centered novel, the heroine clearly needs a man; whatever her fate, the male reader does not feel threatened since he knows she could be happy if only she had the love of a good man – one very like himself. (In an interesting sidenote to this, film depictions of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth invariably show Selden as emotionally present and available – only somehow not at the moment – to Lily. This mocks the conclusion of the novel, and undermines Wharton’s point. If Selden were willing to marry Lily, she would not have to commit suicide. But filmmakers cannot bear to depict a male refusing to be a ‘hero’.)
    In fact, men are central to many women’s lives in puberty and early adulthood, when sexual identity is being explored. At this time, women are central to many men, too. But as we grow older, our work – whatever it may be – occupies most of our time andthought. ‘Love’ moves to a secondary or even tertiary position in our universe. The convention of male centrality was built into the novel, a form that emerged in a period in which man-made laws forced women into economic, political, and social dependence upon men. Women’s achievement of independence in these areas is still new, and since women continue to be expected to take total responsibility for rearing the young, independence remains a difficult and risky enterprise. The same male desire that created laws making women dependent on men appears in men’s adamant continuing refusal to accept responsibility for raising children, and often, for maintaining themselves and their living spaces – something all male animals do except man. Both acts foster the illusion of control, to which the masculine principle is dedicated. And again, forcing dependency on women serves to silence them, contains and gags radical criticism. Making men central to women’s lives serves to exalt men, to make them pivotal to all life, which they are not: millions of women and children live without men.
    But perhaps the major taboo in art, especially that created by women, is the suggestion that the male is not, by nature or desert, superior to the female. It is permissible – at least for men – to show a male as evil, ridiculous, or weak; but not to suggest that men as a class have no right to the authority or status they claim. The single belief that all world religions and nation-states share, whatever their deity or economic system, is in male domination. To challenge the assumption that men are, by nature or divinity, entitled to superiority over women is to challenge the core of almost every society in existence. Feminism challenges that core: if you believe that women are human beings who matter as much as men, you cannot accept that men are superior to women, whether morally, physically, intellectually, or politically. The Women’s Room challenges belief in male domination directly, and this challenge has led to attacks on the author as a ‘man-hater’.
    When I was asked, in 1977, what I would wish for The Women’s Room, I said I wished for a world in which no one would comprehend it because women and men had found a wayto live together in felicity. Unfortunately, despite many easements on female life in the west, the world’s ethos has moved in the opposite direction – toward more hostility between the sexes. So severe is the situation today that I can imagine a time when novels like this one will not be allowed to be published. It is therefore still brave of Virago to publish it, even after all these years.
    Marilyn French, 2006

CHAPTER ONE
    1
    Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room. She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies’ in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she