Excerpt
IntroductionFor a while there I wrote about women. I started in 1972, when the women’s movement was in a period of frenzied activity, and I stopped in 1974, when it had moved into what we liked to call a period of consolidation. I wrote about women once a month, and then put it together as Crazy Salad. The title of the collection comes from some lines in a Yeats poem: “It’s certain that fine women eat / a crazy salad with their meat / whereby the horn of plenty is undone.” In the original edition of this book, I left the last line off. It seemed more hopeful, more playful, punchier really without that last grim image. Whereby the horn of plenty is undone. I’m not sure now what instinct prompted me to want to seem so optimistic, since I can see just from rereading these pieces that I had almost no grounds for being so; I’m also not sure why I wanted to absolve women from the full dose of counterproductiveness Yeats was describing, since I had spent two years reporting on women and, on some level, writing about it every month. Still, change seemed so inevitable, so inexorable. Things were bound to move along. Time marches on. That something else might turn out to be true—that the operative bromide for change where women were concerned might instead be in the plus-ça-change area—seemed quite unlikely to me.
These days I find that I constantly have to remind myself that change for American women began in Seneca Falls in 1848; I have to remind myself of this since so much of what happened in the early 1970s seems undone, and so much of what ought to have happened since simply hasn’t. In those days, we honestly believed for a few minutes that all it would take to change the world was the will to change it. We (women) would change—and they (men) would have to change too. Abracadabra. I remember sitting on the beach in the summer of 1972 with my first husband and drawing up a list of household duties and dividing them up again in a more equitable fashion. I had read about doing this in a women’s movement pamphlet. The politics of housework, I think it was called. The personal is political, I think it said. Revolution begins at home. The author of the article about redistributing household duties said that she and her husband had drawn up a schedule, and she reprinted it in the pamphlet. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she made the bed. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, he made the bed. On Sunday no one made the bed. A year later I was divorced from my first husband, and the author of that article was divorced from hers. Presumably we both ended up making our beds seven days a week. So much for revolution.
We got divorced and we got tired. Women were still being paid less than men for the same work, but never mind.
I often wonder how we could have been so simpleminded about how hard it is to bring about the least little change—but then I often wonder about a lot of things. I wonder when we are going to stop wanting it to be easy—and when we’re going to stop whining when it’s not. I wonder when we’re going to stop wanting it both ways: demanding the options and then complaining about the difficulty of the choices; making the choice and then blaming others for it; claiming to be heroines but demanding the prerogatives of victims. I also wonder if we’re ever going to give up the greatest luxury we have as women—the alibi of our sex. Obviously, I don’t know the answer to any of this; but in the meantime, I continue to be drawn to the crazy salad, to the mistakes, the contradictions, the counterproductiveness, the glorious mess of it all.
Anyway, for a while there I wrote a column about women. And then I wrote a column about the press—which was collected as Scribble Scribble. I had a chance as a columnist to use a set of muscles I had never used as a newspaper reporter or magazine writer; I wound up comfortable with the essay form and oddly grateful for the discipline it imposes. Most of the articles published here first appeared in Esquire magazine. Some of them I believe as sincerely as I did the day I finished writing them, and some are written by someone I used to be. Some of them seem dated—which is inevitable with magazine pieces; some of them that seem dated nonetheless have a kind of quaint historical value.
Enough. Here they are.
New York
November, 1983