His Little Women by Judith Rossner

Author:Judith Rossner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

BOOK

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“Women who grasp the male point of view more than momentarily are not feminists.”

Ti-Grace Atkinson

THE LEGACY OF my trip to Los Angeles was a determination not only to do FRemale’s legal business but to take both the magazine and feminism more seriously than I had before, I was, of course, late in this determination. The seminal events of the Women’s Movement had occurred during the time I was in school, in love and in Atlanta. From the vantage points of school and love, those events had felt remote if not irrelevant; in Atlanta, they gained importance in my mind in proportion to my inability to make use of them in everyday life. With my return to New York it had become clear that the movement had effected real changes in the way some Americans lived, but there was no way as yet to calculate the effect of those changes. Not the important ones, anyway.

Coming from a Southern town where courtly manners were still very much the male mode, I was shocked almost to tears the first time a man pushed me aside to get a cab I’d hailed. Coming from circumstances in which I hadn’t had to fight to go to a good school or, once I left the South, to get a job, I didn’t have the visceral reaction some women did to male tactics spawned by anger at the new competition. Even now, as I allowed myself to identify more fully than I had before with the movement’s reasonable aims, I felt obliged to hold aside some portion of my brain that would allow me later to say I’d never thought it was a solution to all the problems of the world, just to some of the more obvious ones. But for the first time, I was certain of what to answer when asked whether I was a feminist. And I was pleased to be able to tell women I met that I was the lawyer for FRemale.

It was supposed to be the first time in history that the way you’d been in the past didn’t matter, didn’t tell people who you really were. History, after all, had been made by and for men. What counted now, in the tense Feminist Present, was where you’d been standing five minutes after the call to the barricades. To hesitate even briefly to call oneself a feminist was an unforgivable, not to say a crucially revealing act. What it revealed was that words, distinctions, the play of light, were more important than liberation. (The notion that political-rhetorical enslavement was as real as, if less painful than, the other kinds remained foreign, or at least superfluous.)

Because I had gone to law school before the rush hour, I was presumed to have been standing early on the barricades. The notion that I had been standing there looking for my father did not, happily, enter anyone’s mind.

Twice a week, at the end of my workday, I would walk from my office on

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