female nonexistence

I think a lot about that obliteration. Or rather that obliteration keeps
showing up. I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a
thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that she
herself did not exist, but her brothers did. Her mother did not exist, and nor
did her father’s mother. Or her mother’s father. There were no
grandmothers. Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes,
with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the
more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, greatgrandmothers,
a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.
Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four greatgrandmothers.
Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands
disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers.
Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest
down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a
linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning.
There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the
business of naming. In some cultures women keep their names, but in most
their children take the father’s name, and in the English-speaking world
until very recently, married women were addressed by their husbands’
names, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Brontë
and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman’s genealogy and
even her existence. This corresponded to English law, as Blackstone
enunciated it in 1765:
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and
consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she
performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a femme-covert . . . or
under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition
during her marriage is called her coverture. For this reason, a man cannot grant
anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose
her separate existence.
He covered her like a sheet, like a shroud, like a screen. She had no separate existence.
Veils go a long
way back. They existed in Assyria more than three thousand years ago,
when there were two kinds of women, respectable wives and widows who
had to wear veils, and prostitutes and slave girls who were forbidden to do
so. The veil was a kind of wall of privacy, the marker of a woman for one
man, a portable architecture of confinement. Less portable kinds of
architecture kept women confined to houses, to the domestic sphere of
housework and childrearing, and so out of public life and incapable of free
circulation. In so many societies, women have been confined to the house to
control their erotic energies, necessary in a patrilineal world so that fathers
could know who their sons were and construct their own lineage of begats.
In matrilinear societies, that sort of control is not so essential.
家庭主妇
According to the project Ferite a
Morte (Wounded to Death), organized by the Italian actress Serena Dandino
and her colleagues, about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men
annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call
“femicide.” Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners,
seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of
erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or
decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat
and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.
Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that
would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her
story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man,
the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is
already a victory, already a revolt.
To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your
own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers,
to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to
be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all
these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.
Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. Nonfiction has crept closer to
fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because
too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like
the future, is dark. There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully
about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a
crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of
darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us
that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting
with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the
absence of exact information.
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and
deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world,
innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth—and in our minds,
where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or
five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively,
irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a
thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that
she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get
anywhere.
It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling
along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are
trying to stop everyone who’s moving forward, and a few are marching
backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in
our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes
make a great leap, find what we didn’t know we were looking for, and yet
continue to contain contradictions for generations.
Thinking Out of the Box
What doesn’t go back in the jar or the box are ideas. And revolutions are,
most of all, made up of ideas. You can whittle away at reproductive rights,
as conservatives have in most states of the union, but you can’t convince the
majority of women that they should have no right to control their own
bodies. Practical changes follow upon changes of the heart and mind.
Sometimes legal, political, economic, environmental changes follow upon
those changes, though not always, for where power rests matters.
It’s important to note (as I have in “In Praise of the Threat” in this book),
that the very idea that marriage could extend to two people of the same
gender is only possible because feminists broke out marriage from the
hierarchical system it had been in and reinvented it as a relationship
between equals. Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many
things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, speaking of
birds coming home to roost
We have so much further to go, but looking back at how far we’ve come
can be encouraging. Domestic violence was mostly invisible and
unpunished until a heroic effort by feminists to out it and crack down on it a
few decades ago. Though it now generates a significant percentage of the
calls to police, enforcement has been crummy in most places—but the ideas
that a husband has the right to beat his wife and that it’s a private matter are
not returning anytime soon. The genies are not going back into their bottles.
And this is, really, how revolution works. Revolutions are first of all of
ideas.
The online world is full of mostly anonymous rape and death
threats for women who stick out—who, for instance, participate in online
gaming or speak up on controversial issues, or even for the woman who
recently campaigned to put women’s images on British banknotes (an
unusual case, in that many of those who threatened her were actually
tracked down and brought to justice). As the writer Caitlin Moran tweeted:
“For those who say, ‘why complain– just block?’—on a big troll day, it can
be 50 violent/rape messages an hour.”
Maybe there is a full-fledged war now, not of the sexes—the division is
not that simple, with conservative women and progressive men on different
sides—but of gender roles. It’s evidence that feminism and women continue
achieving advances that threaten and infuriate some people. Those rape and
death threats are the blunt response; the decorous version is all those
articles Faludi and N+1 cite telling women who we are and what we may
aspire to—and what we may not.
Then there are all the tabloids patrolling the bodies and private lives of
celebrity women and finding constant fault with them for being too fat, too
thin, too sexy, not sexy enough, too single, not yet breeding, missing the
chance to breed, having bred but failing to nurture adequately—and always
assuming that each one’s ambition is not to be a great actress or singer or
voice for liberty or adventurer but a wife and mother. Get back in the box,
famous ladies. (The fashion and women’s magazines devote a lot of their
space to telling you how to pursue those goals yourself, or how to
appreciate your shortcomings in relation to them.)
The new feminism is making the problems visible in new ways, perhaps
in ways that are only possible now that so much has changed.
Here is that road, maybe a thousand miles long, and the woman walking
down it isn’t at mile one. I don’t know how far she has to go, but I know
she’s not going backward, despite it all—and she’s not walking alone.
Maybe it’s countless men and women and people with more interesting
genders.
Here’s the box Pandora held and the bottles the genies were released
from; they look like prisons and coffins now. People die in this war, but the
ideas cannot be erased.