abortion learns that the doctor has performed abortions on many single women the lawyer knows—in fact, he’s assisted married women and, as it turns out, most of the women in the town. It soon becomes clear that the local women have for years secretly helped one another to terminate pregnancies, passing thedoctor’s information around like contraband. One member of this underground network is the lawyer’s wife, who may have had an abortion and, like all others in her spy circle, without telling her husband . The thought of abortions was awful enough. * But worse almost was the thought of women plotting together to control their fertility. The lawyer, played by Tyrone Power, Sr., seems about to break down. To comfort himself, he declares that if women pose such “a danger to mankind,” they will be monitored. Male spies will be turned on the crazy female spies, and they will stop them! And their antisocial insanity.
Single women in particular were often written off as crazy. “Their talkativeness, violation of conventions of feminine speech, and insistence on self-expression…. [that] was the kind of behaviour…that led to their being labeled ‘mad,’” writes scholar Elaine Showalter. Although it was impossible to prove, it was often said that single women in the late nineteenth century made up more than half the population of mental institutions.
By the 1960s, when critic Elizabeth Janeway revisited female collectivity, incessant chattering and potential madness no longer seemed to be the issue. The problem, as she saw it, lay in the social distancing of “unwanted unloved tribe(s),” whether single women, homosexuals, or any excluded group. Stuck together in a quarantined state, group members began to “externalize” or project their self-hatred onto outsiders. And the same dynamic would often work inside the group itself. In this self-loathing and paranoia she foresaw the spread of internal anarchy and betrayal.
The Women, George Cukor’s 1939 film version of the Clare Boothe Luce play, more enjoyably makes the same point. True, the characters technically are married, but we never see the husbands; the women act as though the men don’t exist and spend their days wandering from home to store to spa in a state of heavily subsidized singledom. With little to do, without connection to the larger world, they live to gossip and to plot against one another. The Women, both as play and film, turns verbal sparring into a spectator sport, a fur-draped “pardon me ” teacup kind of wrestling match with destructive results. The idea of manless women turning on one another, proving that these women are vile and imbecilic, has endless appeal. Both Wendy Wasserstein and Julia Roberts have attempted to revive the play, and a campy new version debuted on Broadway in the fall of 2001.
LIVES OF THE LONE RANGERS
Let’s briefly examine the lives of three nineteenth-century single women—Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, and, with special emphasis, Florence Nightingale. They are all members of that traditional grade-school book-report list of famous women, the one that includes Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Marie Curie, and Helen Keller, who was for years presented as the consummate female role model (deaf, dumb, and blind but through intensely hard work making the most of it). Each of these women had to wait miserably at home before starting her career at about age thirty. And all struggled for years with intense frustration, guilt, and heavy bouts of depression.
Florence Nightingale will live always on record as history’s greatest and bravest nurse, as well as one of history’s most effective medical reformers. But the brave “Lady of the Lamp,” unlikely heroine of the Crimean War and England’s most celebrated medical statistician, spent much of her life until age thirty-three battling her mother. Frances Nightingale was a rich, socially prominent woman who expected her daughters, Parthenope and the younger,
Single women in particular were often written off as crazy. “Their talkativeness, violation of conventions of feminine speech, and insistence on self-expression…. [that] was the kind of behaviour…that led to their being labeled ‘mad,’” writes scholar Elaine Showalter. Although it was impossible to prove, it was often said that single women in the late nineteenth century made up more than half the population of mental institutions.
By the 1960s, when critic Elizabeth Janeway revisited female collectivity, incessant chattering and potential madness no longer seemed to be the issue. The problem, as she saw it, lay in the social distancing of “unwanted unloved tribe(s),” whether single women, homosexuals, or any excluded group. Stuck together in a quarantined state, group members began to “externalize” or project their self-hatred onto outsiders. And the same dynamic would often work inside the group itself. In this self-loathing and paranoia she foresaw the spread of internal anarchy and betrayal.
The Women, George Cukor’s 1939 film version of the Clare Boothe Luce play, more enjoyably makes the same point. True, the characters technically are married, but we never see the husbands; the women act as though the men don’t exist and spend their days wandering from home to store to spa in a state of heavily subsidized singledom. With little to do, without connection to the larger world, they live to gossip and to plot against one another. The Women, both as play and film, turns verbal sparring into a spectator sport, a fur-draped “pardon me ” teacup kind of wrestling match with destructive results. The idea of manless women turning on one another, proving that these women are vile and imbecilic, has endless appeal. Both Wendy Wasserstein and Julia Roberts have attempted to revive the play, and a campy new version debuted on Broadway in the fall of 2001.
LIVES OF THE LONE RANGERS
Let’s briefly examine the lives of three nineteenth-century single women—Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, and, with special emphasis, Florence Nightingale. They are all members of that traditional grade-school book-report list of famous women, the one that includes Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Marie Curie, and Helen Keller, who was for years presented as the consummate female role model (deaf, dumb, and blind but through intensely hard work making the most of it). Each of these women had to wait miserably at home before starting her career at about age thirty. And all struggled for years with intense frustration, guilt, and heavy bouts of depression.
Florence Nightingale will live always on record as history’s greatest and bravest nurse, as well as one of history’s most effective medical reformers. But the brave “Lady of the Lamp,” unlikely heroine of the Crimean War and England’s most celebrated medical statistician, spent much of her life until age thirty-three battling her mother. Frances Nightingale was a rich, socially prominent woman who expected her daughters, Parthenope and the younger,
Similar Books
