Woman; A Conversation with Elizabeth Janeway. Part 1

Why one chain. World where

we are two hundred years and cultural opportunity. With me is Elizabeth Janeway author of many novels including girls Daisy Canyon leaving home and the third choice as well as two very well-known works of nonfiction a man's world woman's place and her most recent work between myth and morning women awakening. Welcome Elizabeth. It's nice to be here. Elizabeth in your book you talk about in between myth and morning you talk about having a little trouble with being 60. I guess we all have trouble being 60 but then we have trouble being almost any age.

My trouble is that sometimes I wake up in the morning and think I'm 31. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think I'm 110 to or after knowns even. It doesn't really trouble I don't think. I think what I meant really was part of the women's movement is that we do I believe within a generation gap. We do we are able to talk to each other across years. That's because we're working for something we have a togetherness that is an advantage to be involved in a process of activity something to be done something we are we are working for and ages is not important then what motivated you to write man's world woman's place. I guess I wanted to explore to find out I

found out by writing. I think most writers do. But I wanted to know about the great social changes of the 60s that were taking place very fast very rapidly the civil rights movement the youth movement the student movement these were all things in which people were catching up with the world of reality with what had already happened. And I wanted to understand it. I'm not young I'm not black I couldn't really write about those things with the full knowledge though I was interested and sympathetic. But what was happening to women yes that I do know about. I've worked all my life and married for a long time I have children I have grandchildren. I've done drudge work as well as career work. I think I have a sense of what it's like inside as well as outside. So are I took that part of social change to explore. That book took you six years to write. Yes I was doing some other things too. And it's

true. But I think of it really as my my second first book because writing nonfiction is different from writing fiction. You have to get along without all those wonderful things that you have in section like interesting characters and suspense and narrative and dialogue that you hope is witty and arresting At any rate. You're just talking about ideas. I got awfully charged up about those ideas and I got very excited learning to do it but of it to find out how Betty Friedan claims that when she was writing The Feminine Mystique sometimes she hid it in a closet and she wouldn't let anyone see it. And she had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to what she was saying in the book. Did you have any of those problems. Perhaps less This man's world than with my section I never let anybody see my fiction and talk nonsense because I don't know what's going to happen.

I start out with a situation in which some people are stuck there they've got a problem and they have to get out of it and the book is how they get out of it. But what they do to resolve the business at the beginning is nonfiction. It's different you're you're much more conscious of an audience. And so I didn't mind having people read in part as I was going along and and tell me if they didn't understand what I was doing I didn't want them to make suggestions about how to do it but I did want to know whether they were getting what on NAND I should say that they people when I say people I mean my husband and my younger son. So it was there was written for a male audience and a sympathetic audience an audience that I thought would understand what I was talking about without any special knowledge. I left my older son out only because he is professionally an editor and I felt that I didn't want to write for an editor

I wanted to write for general reading some time ago. Magazine I think it was in the first issue had an article about consciousness raising and clicks that people had you know sudden realization something's wrong here. Did you ever have a click. Oh yes over and over and over again all the time still. Things happen that I hadn't really seen before. How how they connect I re read. And after all how long ago could it have been that I read. First I really read Virginia Woolf's A Room With A View. Just this. One here before I went and talked about Boston College. And so much came into play. She's talking about the voice that women write in and I'm a woman writer. And all of a sudden I saw what she meant. The tone of voice which women have been writing in successful women writers have written in a male tone of voice all for

almost as long as I've been writing now it's beginning to change as she notes there were always a few people who didn't show it but. There was much harder for them to be taken seriously because they were not writing in this logical straightforward masculine I'm laying it out you know so that you can see it clearly step by step. Right now more and more women are writing out of not only out of their experience but in their own words. And voice. And it's somewhat easier for them isn't it. Yes. It's it's. Not easy yet because this is a hard thing to do. A lot of. Writing by women is thought of as being so proper you know just a soap opera novel. You know something about soap opera that's very interesting. It's

about serious questions much more than Situation Comedy is situation comedy is ridiculous from the word go the promises are ridiculous but soap operas about crises in people's lives. It's about having a sick child or a marriage break up or discovering that somebody you love is not really who you thought he was. There's some kind of betrayal and there these things happen to women all the time. Now in a silly fashion in a superficial fashion but if you look at women's experience their lives are full of this kind of thing of having something with them. All of a sudden discovering that I have been facing a deep emotional relationship on a full understanding of it nobody told them the masculine rules for what controlled it. But nobody has considered the salmon and rolls. Nobody has considered that there might be such things as feminine roles we're finding this out now.

One point which you addressed to older women. And talked about what the women what their questions might be about the women's movement. Do you think the women's movement really has something to offer older women. Yes a great deal. A great deal one thing bridging between generations. If. For instance you. Are 20 and your mother and your grandmother agree the Equal Rights Amendment would be a good thing to go through. You can talk together you can work together you can share something. And why is this hard and other circumstances. But doesn't that mean your goals were too small. And therefore some women feel that they've wasted some time or for not spending.

That's that's older women feel that the people who have committed themselves to the traditional role of course do feel that if the movement says there are to be more to life than this the movement is saying to them you've made a mistake. You've invested years in doing things that isn't really what the movement saying because the moment values women's work even even that housework you know that the people who do it describe as being just a housewife. I wouldn't say that. I think. Creation of a place in which children grow up understanding the world and being able to take part in it is an enormously important piece of work. But it doesn't do anything the people get paid for and most of us value what we do by how much we get paid. So that kind of

work is undervalued by the women's movement. But by our society other people make believe that if you are a housewife then the movement has nothing to do. Great for you. It has a sharing with other people who are other women who both work for and don't work for. A finding of values in common experience. You're not alone. There's another sort of double bond that the older woman has been discriminated against because she's a woman. And she's also discriminated against because she's older. Yes and as if you think of yourself as women have been trying to do in our society as somebody who is seen from outside. I'm not saying just a sex object but someone who is an appearance of presence rather than a doer and

activist than if if you lose your attractive appearance. You yourself feel that you are losing your value and your own confidence in your own self esteem. Begin to go down. And others which are more hierarchical than ours. Older women who belong to an upper class might have at least their class feelings to rest on. We don't even have that you know 100 years ago the leaders of society women bossy old women who said who went to the big parties or not. You know this is Potter and Chicago was better off you buy that than many women today I don't think those are important values but at least they did exist. Ours is a very fluid society and women have now to find I think. Their own values and make them

together not not alone but but with each other. And understand. That experience is important. I think it's more difficult for older women than for older men to be daring. I think it's always more difficult for women to be daring. Some young women are beginning. To have less trouble about it. Than used to be the case. I've met young women talking around colleges who are looking ahead at their lives as if they were their brothers. I don't with particularly with male values but are thinking about what they're going to do professionally as if they were looking at a life that they could control. They wanted to choose a profession that would satisfy them and bring in enough to live on. I met a young woman out at McAllister college and saying are you going to be doing. And she said Oh I'm a geologist graduate school now. Lots of

good jobs with the oil companies. Do you think it's important that the movement started addressing itself more than it has in the past to this age group of women. Yes I do. I went how much chance there is of that happening though because the rest of society is so generally prejudiced you know I can still bring people that it certainly is I think but I think women are less and we can ourselves and older women can do it as a kind of self-help. There's a great deal of that older women can contribute just to finding each other to say to each other what about us how are we going to manage as we get older what is happening to those who are not in their 60s but in their 70s or 80s couldn't we form a support group as Maggie has with the great Panthers right. Not necessarily only women but for older people what can women and sort of later middle age do about people who are really

old. And aged. There's an awful lot to be done and an awful lot that can be done and I think there will be great rewards in doing it. ELIZABETH Why do you think that a woman's own success doesn't convince her that other women aren't inferior. Well if she's bored. It's a package. The traditional role she's bought the idea that women are in Syria and she's learned to beat the game by applying man's rules and getting where she's going on her own. But she doesn't believe that I mean this. This wouldn't in itself convince anybody that other women could easily do that. And in fact it is hard. It takes a special. Thrust and determination to do it more than it's worth. Perhaps though I don't know I don't put down success. I think success is good. I hope more of those who are

successful but I hope that we don't have to learn all the men's rules in order to be successful I think. I think less and less do we have to do that. I don't think we should learn because I don't think it contributes to real success. Let's all be very hard no and not work together and not help each other. That's that's bad. In fact successful men. Unless you know they get put up with somebodies protegee very often are much more intuitive and much more aware of personal relationships the things that are feminine skills you know supposedly than most men are. A man who can make it up through a big corporate environment will very often know an awful lot about who gets on well was with this person or that person and what's going on subliminally and in a room around a conference table. These things are theoretically

feminine skills not just human skills. Did you have any trouble with your own success. No I don't think I had very much though I certainly said some silly things I guess. My first novel was was successful. I guess we all have to forgive ourselves for saying silly things from time to time. By that time I was married and I had two small boys so I had a lot else going on in my life that might have been. You know had something to do with it. You say that the women's movement hasn't really articulated very coherently its goals. Now and it seems to me that the goals are clear and I'm going to what you mean about that is that we have been alive for such a short period of time that as yet we don't know. What the goals are what. The biggest of them are they will begin to come together. We know certainly right some things are that we are working toward. There could

be no question about the importance of equal wages for work of the right to control one's life and decisions over whether and when and whether one will have children and not kind of thing they agreed upon. But the over riding significance of what this means to everybody in human lives. We're still short of understanding. We don't really know equality between men and women is going to give us because we've never had it. Do you think the goals will change drastically or do you think that maybe we can conceive of them now or do you think it's going to be something very far out. I think they're going to grow. Lead us on to new kinds of living together. Big humanist as well as being a feminist I think this is very good from then

that there will be rewards for men here that it's a little hard to even for now but the opening of the possibility of expressing and feeling their full emotions connection which is beginning in young families now are of young fathers with their children is a marvelous thing for the children as well as for the men. And you also think that women really are responsible for the women's movement you think technology and I think it is a response to the changes that have gone on in the external world for the last 200 years at least the After all people 200 years ago were living in a world that wasn't too different from had been for thousands of years most people lived on farms and families worked together.

On subsistence farms just making making their livings the little businesses that existed were often family businesses were run by mother and father and children and a couple of apprentices or something like that. But industrial revolution happened and all of a sudden. It began to be done not. Within families and by family groups but in factories by individuals hired for a particular purpose. This just cut life and work life and the rest of life was fragmented and pulled apart and we haven't really begun to cope with this yet. Another thing that the people in the movement talk about almost continuously have been since the beginning is the absence of women from history. What do you think some of the most serious repercussions have been from that. Thank thank of what we've lost we've lost the sense that women lot of

Britain the operas that women might have written the poetry that women might have written. I just reviewed a book by a professor of the classics at Hunter College Sarah Pomeroy on women in antiquity. There were no women poets. And another one whose name I've mislaid much less famous than Sappho are the only two of whom we have fragments before. I don't know. The late Middle Ages. We have a few letters that Margaret Paxton wrote in the 14th century. We have recollections of a woman in a camp who went on to the Holy Land in the late Middle Ages. Yeah it's a lot of psychic energy. Sometimes women who were rulers who inherited as rulers like Elizabeth of England were magnificent statesmen. We've always been either the wife or you know something like that

the talent the gift the energy the human right. And you can't discount that. At what point do you think a women's history would would not be significant. I don't know what you think we would reach a point. In the time you talk about it's humanism and it will automatically be part of history much more. Yes. Some of the most interesting work in women's studies is being done on history. You also made a statement in the book where you said women are a kind of selective insensitive insensitivity. Well I think that where you had to be perfectly willing once in awhile to like it. So wot. This is important to us we see the point we're going to go on doing this whether

you care about it or not. And by you I guess I mean it's a tough thing were awfully worried about whether or not we are pleasing man. We still are. More than we really ought to be because it hampers us in getting to goals that we know are important. But I think that our new image and our own needs is you know just all encompassing and I'm worried that we won't win that battle How do you feel about that. Nobody should expect to be able to do it alone. This is part of the being together I guess an era where we have the women's movement. You react rather violently to the word femininity. I react to what most people mean by it which is passivity. And pleasing. And getting things done by being charming and manipulating and that kind of thing. That doesn't mean that I don't think it's

nice for people to be charming or that I think it's wrong to be polite to other people. I do. Out of sheer human good feeling we are humans together and we get along much better if we are polite to each other and open the door for each other but I'm perfectly ready to do it for a man who has bundles in his hand in his arms. I hope you do it for me if I had bundles in my arms why do we have to link this to sex. What makes you angry about definition. The limitations the limitations. The sense that you're offering somebody a reward for doing something that hurts them. I think that's it. You're kind of the opposite side of the coin from the compliment that says Of course you think like a man. One of the things I most liked about the book that it was so positive and so hopeful and one of the things you said is that what women are doing now is

ensuring that there won't be a decline or downfall of the movement can you explain that. When my book came to be published. My publishers did a good job. But there was a certain feeling that. This was another of those women's books that came out about the time that Jimmy Grier's book would come out and after Kate Millett So there was three of them in six months or so. And there was a feeling well this really is something and this is for this year. Which meant really that it was a sad. And. Having had. You know a great deal of interest in the counterculture Now we were going to be talking about women. That's nonsense. We're talking about the fact that half the human race has discovered itself and what it has overlooked about itself and is busy making this

clear to everybody and to saying count on us from now on. Count us in. And that's I think is what's going on we've run into bad times this year not just at the executive level. There's another business that says the women's movement is middle class you know. If you will excuse me is partly due to the mass media and what people think of as being news and whether or not an executive gets fired can be news I think it's more important than GM that GM has laid off the women that say had the suit in a California court about it. Kind of thing. Has got to make clear that affirmative action is here. I think we are going to be able to tell Elizabeth we're out of time for this week. Talk about power and many other things.

Thank you for watching. Be responsible for its content and was funded by a public television station is the foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.