A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays

Four Decades of Feminist Writing

Alix Kates Shulman

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781453250136
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A provocative collection of essays by one of the foremost thinkers of second-wave feminism
In a career spanning four decades, Alix Kates Shulman has written on issues ranging from marriage, sex, and divorce to religious identity, age, and family devotion. Throughout her diverse body of work runs a staunch advocacy of equal rights and social justice. Beginning with her provocative essay "A Marriage Agreement, " written in 1969, and continuing through to the heartrending "Caring for an Ill Spouse, and Other Caregivers, " written in 2011, this collection provides a window into the social movements that defined an era. Witty, stirring, and poignant, A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays illustrates how each generation, in Shulman's words, "can do no more than add its bit to the endless river of consciousness and change."

SEX

The War in the Back Seat

THE REVIVAL OF THE 1940s and 1950s is upon us. That Middle-American time of my youth is gaining its place in our historical imagination. Movies, essays, stories, novels, and the sheer passage of time have already begun transforming that era from banal to exotic. The record is being filled not only with nostalgia but with critical insight, as writing men of wit try to pin down those days. Nevertheless, something crucial is missing from the record. For the reality being recorded about that era is essentially a male reality, the experience male experience. And until the female side is acknowledged and recorded, the era cannot even begin to emerge in perspective.

Richard Schickel, in a recent essay entitled “Growing Up in the Forties,” tries to elucidate the factors that shaped Middle-American adolescence. After discussing sports (baseball and football, activities from which the female sex was barred) as “Middle America’s only universal metaphor,” he goes on to describe with regret those painful scenes in the back seats of parked cars where sex was meted out piecemeal. “The curve of a breast briefly explored by two sly fingers making their way . . . through some interstice in a girl’s clothing,” runs his plaintive lament—“oh, God, was this to be all, forever?” It is a lament endlessly repeated in most of the documents about those times. Gilbert Sorrentino’s story “The Moon in Its Flight,” Dan Wakefield’s Going All the Way, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Philip Roth’s When She Was Good, the screen’s recent Summer of ’42, Carnal Knowledge, and The Last Picture Show—however widely they may vary in tone, intent, subtlety, and success, all portray a monolithic male experience in which the War, movies, athletics, and the burden of sex denied emerge as the shaping forces of adolescent life, and girls, when presented at all, are the “problem.”

The settings of my memories are frequently the same. Growing up in Ohio in the 1940s, I too was affected by those irresistible forces. Girls sat in the same movie theaters, attended the same football games, struggled in the back seats of the same parked cars. But the view from the bleachers is very different from the one on the field; and whether we gave in or held out in those parked cars, we had more fearsome concerns than simply making out. We were concerned with survival.

Our experience was no less important, our feelings no less urgent. Yet for some reason, only male versions have been recorded. Well, it certainly won’t be the first time we were left out of the chronicles. Even back then it was the boys who delivered the graduation speeches; boys who got their pictures in the paper for football, win or lose; boys who, claiming the American privilege of free speech, spread slanderous things about us to boost their ratings. And the girls? The girls, when we were not simply ignored, were too often driven against our will to some dark lonely street where we were badgered or sweet-talked into going one step further than intended, and afterwards were frightened into silence. Only now are we beginning to speak.

WELL, THEN—WHAT WAS IT LIKE out there in a white middle-class suburban girl’s Ohio in the cold decade between 1942 when I turned ten and 1952 when I turned twenty? What were we doing after school while the luckier boys were in varsity practice and the others were fielding high flies bounced off their garages? What were we feeling as we sat captive in our bedrooms waiting for our myriad pin curls to dry, the Hit Parade playing in the background? What forces, comparable in magnitude and significance to the War and Athletics, shaped our emerging consciousness and thus our destiny? What was it like among the bobby-soxers? In the bleachers? In the passenger seat of those borrowed cars in which boys drove us around and all too soon ruined everything by trying to feel us up?

In the early years of that decade we got together after school in each other’s houses to talk about movie stars and play Monopoly, or to dress up in our mothers’ clothes, jewelry, high heels, and lipstick, pretending we were seventeen going out on dates. If I couldn’t ignore the sounds with which my brother filled up our house—his roar in the winter, his baseball games blasting on the radio in the summer—I tried to drown them out with my records of Frank Sinatra, over whom I “swooned”—my sexual initiation.

By the middle of the decade, wearing by then my own ruby lipstick, I got together with my friends in larger groups (“clubs,” we called them in junior high, finding “sorority” too pretentious, though we gave our clubs Greek letter names), where we practiced for our futures by dancing among ourselves to the latest Big Band releases, leading and following by turns, and sometimes even practiced kissing.

After school I hung around the drugstore sipping nickel pop, or, sitting entranced in a listening booth of the local record store, tried to determine whose version of a recent hit was the best one out. I doodled certain initials on my notebooks, passed compromising notes in study hall, consulted a Ouija Board about chancy matters, whispered, knitted argyle sox in class for a constantly changing secret someone until the teacher made me stop.

In the evenings when my radio programs were over, my share of the dishes done, my homework finished, my hair set in pin curls for the night, I confided in each of my girl friends on the telephone until my parents exploded. When I was sure nothing more could happen that day, I spilled my surging feelings to my five-year lockup diary, the very form of which led directly into the future. And once in bed, I would not surrender to sleep until the last possible moment, but listened to the radio I kept beside my pillow, memorizing the lyrics of every love song, the inflections of every vocalist, and the arrangements of every instrumental. Living for music and love.

Some of us were happy in love, more of us were sad—but in either case we lived for the next climactic installment of our own true romance, be it a rumor, a look, a word, or an actual date. It might come unexpectedly in a corridor between classes, or by careful design on a weekend—at the Saturday afternoon picture show, at our occasional Saturday night pajama parties, or at our mixers following school basketball or football games. Even if we loved no boy at all, we might fake it or boost a friend’s romance in order to have material on which to base a whole new week’s conspiracy and something to enter in our tear-smeared diaries. In lean times, we dedicated songs on the radio, through the medium of snickering disc jockeys, to unsuspecting boys. (“Our songs,” we called them, though we listened alone.)

On Friday nights, boys or no, we attended our club meetings wearing each other’s borrowed sweaters over Peter-Pan-collared dickies and pleated-all-round skirts in specified combinations (pink and maroon, baby blue and royal, cherry and white for a start), shod in saddle shoes or penny loafers. Brands mattered. Some of us kept our bobby sox up with colorless nail polish; others, ignoring our mothers’ warnings about cutting off our blood circulation, kept them up with rubber bands. Sitting on the floor in one another’s living rooms (with our hair still in pin curls, to be combed out only moments before the meeting ended and the boys arrived), we planned “affairs”—hayrides, sleighrides, movie parties, turnabout dances—to which we might legitimately invite the boys. Glorious 1944 and 1948: the leap years of my youth.

Oh, those clothes! We tried them on for hours in department stores, we changed our outfits repeatedly before each date. In the only novel I have seen by a woman covering approximately that era, Patricia Dizenzo’s An American Girl, some of the most evocative passages are those in which the narrator describes the clothes.

If I had the money I would have bought a royal blue wool jumper . . . a maroon skirt to wear with a white sweater, a black and white plaid pleated wool skirt to wear with a long-sleeved red sweater, a black watch-plaid skirt to wear with a white or navy sweater, a gray wool straight skirt to wear with . . .

And more, more. I remember Teddy Bear coats, the New Look, White Shoulders perfume, pointy Whirlpool bras (not infrequently improved with cotton stuffing), Ipana smiles, eyelash curlers. We had to sharpen our wits and reward our bodies with something, we who never knew the joy of football!

And can there really have been nothing more for us than clothes, dancing, music, boys?

Alas, there really was nothing more. Little else was permitted. Just as the boys practiced tackling and developed game plans to prepare them, as Schickel says, for “the wins and losses of life, especially the former,” we prepared for the only thinkable future available to us: marriage. Even the vocational counselors who took over Heights High School two days per semester hinted that the kind of secretarial position we ought to apply for—legal stenographer, dental assistant, executive secretary—should be keyed, respectively, to the kind of husband we hoped to nab; unless we were so unimprovably plain that we needed some more permanent vocation to “fall back on”—in which case, if we were “college caliber,” we were urged to train as teachers, librarians, nurses, or dieticians.

In my own brief, sheltered life I had already seen how far one could go as a secretary. Ever ambitious, I had gone from band secretary (handing out the music) to homeroom secretary (handing out homework) to nurse’s aid (handing out hall passes) to running for the highest female office in the school: school secretary. When I lost, I ended my secretarial career.

We did sometimes go out for drama, for glee club, for art, for debating, piano, class politics, or even cheerleading (to this day I have yet to hear of a cheerleader scholarship to college); but the life they prepared us for was marriage, which was the sum of what, for most of us, life consisted. As in later years when men may have positions and families while women have only families, so in high school boys had football and love while we had only love. When we cheered, we cheered the boys: whatever hobby we cultivated, it too led ultimately down the aisle.

By the end of the decade we were openly and frankly discussing the subject with all its pitfalls and implications. What kind of husband did one want? What kind of wedding? How many children? How many bridesmaids? And trickiest of all—the part that gave us the heebie-jeebies—how in the world to snare one? For it was common knowledge that boys (who, with snowballs in winter and dunkings in summer, gave daily evidence of despising us) sought to avoid, or at least postpone, marriage as eagerly as we sought to achieve it. It was no secret. The entire culture conspired to show that life was a battle of the sexes: them against us. We knew, of course, that the boys would marry eventually: the question was, Could we get them to marry us? As Schickel observes, “It never occurred to us that there was some link between these [pinup] photos and the girls in school or the girls we passed in the streets,” and that fact was readily apparent. How get them to notice us without ruining our chances by putting out? Wakefield succinctly captures the predominant male attitude toward marriage, at least as it was expressed by Middle American boys: “With the talk of marriage his prick had gone soft” (the very talk that held some promise of arousing us). Or, again: “Shit, he wouldn’t get married. He was getting laid all over Chi.” Such an attitude was simply impossible for a girl. In other places and other years a girl might manage to use sex to get a spouse (in The Last Picture Show, for example), but never, never to escape from one.

To snag a man. It was for that final, apocalyptic maneuver that I, like my sisters, wound up before the three-way mirror (as limiting as blinders and confining as a cage) practicing batting my eyes like Hedy Lamarr, flashing a smile like Betty Grable, wringing my hands like June Allyson, and night after night, equipped with comb, a glass of water for dipping, rubber-tipped bobby pins and metal clips, and a large triangular hairnet, setting my hair according to the instructions in every new issue of Seventeen magazine. As it was impossible for us to make our mark upon the world (except, eventually, through offspring), we had nowhere to make it but on ourselves. The mark to make and how to make it was all spelled out for us in every document of female adolescence: if our faces were round, we set our pin curls in one direction; if our jaws were square we set them in another. But no matter how we started out, if we studied the magazines and the movies and each other carefully enough, we could come up with the perfect formula for enhancing our assets.

Back in the early days, I confess, I wanted more. I remember pledging my daily allegiance to our 48-star flag with such ardor that my voice quavered and brought me ridicule. When the War started, I collected old newspapers and flattened tin cans with as much enthusiasm as my brother. And as a young teen-ager, I dreamed of getting a factory job—as much for the daring and glamour of it as for productivity and patriotism. But by that time my parents had only to convince me that, despite Veronica Lake and Rosie the Riveter, nice girls didn’t work in factories (even though nice boys did) to induce me to abandon the ambition. Just as nice girls didn’t wear too-tight skirts, or stockings to school, or their hair upswept.

In fact, the older we got, the longer grew the list of inviting things that nice girls didn’t do. (Nice Girl?, with Deanna Durbin, was the first adult movie I ever saw. And though I didn’t understand it at the time, I accepted the fact that the phrase “nice girl” would always be followed by a question mark.) Nice girls didn’t smoke on the street. Nice girls didn’t kiss on the first date. Nice girls didn’t lead on the dance floor. Nice girls didn’t curse (or allow cursing in their presence). Except to ask an opening question about sports, nice girls didn’t take the initiative in conversation. Nice girls didn’t show they were smart, speak out of turn, laugh at risqué jokes, hang around the football field or the pool hall, go unaccompanied to bowling alleys, dance halls, movies, beaches, skating rinks—anywhere, really, except to two or three specified restaurants. Nice girls didn’t wear their heels the wrong height, their sweaters without slips, the wrong kind of bras, their hair the wrong style. Nice girls didn’t talk to boys to whom they hadn’t been introduced, clinch too long with boys to whom they had, and more important still, talk to girls who weren’t nice girls.

With such a list of prohibitions—and plenty more coming up behind—who wouldn’t want to light out like Huck and every other red-blooded American boy for the territories? Or at least go off on a weekend tear? But unfortunately, nice girls didn’t do that either. Nice girls didn’t even stay out after midnight unchaperoned.

And if we did? If, out of some adventurous spirit or sexual desire that managed to survive the poison of our puberty, we did break the rules—what happened then? We risked nothing less than our futures. A few lucky ones (I have met two or three), finding boys they could trust, actually managed to have good sex—a miracle, considering how dangerous a game they played. But for the rest of us, even the possibility of good sex disappeared before the specter of what we might be losing. For we risked losing the one asset that kept us listed on the Big Boar...