feminish

Housework bothers me. But not because it is of itself bothersome - I’ve had some of the calmest moments of my life holding a broom, feeling my body sway backwards and forwards, settling into the unendingness of it… knowing millions of people world-over are, in the same moment, sweeping their mud-floors, their front door-step, their kitchen lino. In those moments I’ve noticed the pointlessness of it (”this dust will sure-as-anything be here again next week”; “gees, how many thousands of hours have my ancestors spent just sweeping - and what have they got to show for it? Where are they all now? Dead!” etc.). And somehow by touching this endless pointlessness of it through time and space, it’s actually become quite soothing to do it: “I do this because it is part of surviving. And I survive in the same way my ancestors survived, and my fellow-humans survive. I do this so I can live in a clear space. So I can respect these three rooms where I live, so they can help me to be happy, and so I don’t cringe at dust when I put my feet on the wooden tongue-and-groove slats every morning. I wouldn’t want to pay someone to do this for me because it’s one of my few chances (chopping wood/ carrying water not forthcoming at the minute) to engage in the fundamental work of staying alive - and connect to my basic human condition.”

No, housework bothers me because girls do it and guys (more often than not) don’t (Beloved Patterner excluded).

When I was younger, the boys got the wood in and we girls tidied up. They made their beds, sure, but it was the two daughters who ‘put the wash in’ and helped fold socks in front of Blind Date on a Saturday night. I remember being strangely confused that my little bro had to be shown how to use the washing machine age 16 - how on earth had he got away with not knowing?

But it’s not his fault - it’s just how the cookie’s been crumbling for, well, a few hundred generations.

And the recipe for this particular girls-tidy/boys-carry crumbly cookie is complicated. It’s about society’s gender roles, it’s about women-at-home, it’s (perhaps) about psychological predispositions to multi-tasking, and it’s about our particular home-drilling by Mum. It’s about what we read and think; and what, as children, what was said to us - and read to us. And this is all changing.

I remember once, in a dusty corner of the University Library desperately avoiding finals revision, I fell into flicking through yellowing periodicals around me - and found a feminist children’s story in Signs magazine. I read it all and it was great: Girl has adventures home-alone; Mum gets in late at night; Girl clears up naughty mess quickly, but she’s not caught because Mum’s still snogging the current boyfriend in the car. I thought, Wow! If only I’d had that as a child: Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson (and Ronald Dahl for a bit of a shake-up) don’t exactly a liberated woman make.

This all came to me today because I’d heard that the Famous Five books have been revised so that the boys do some housework. My first reaction was, Fantastic! My second was, What does the Daily Mail think?

Row faster, George! The PC meddlers are chasing us!
Neither the Famous Five nor the Secret Seven are any longer permitted to pursue their adventures without hindrance from the PC zealots. Julian and Dick are now required to do the housework with the girls. Already, Mary and Jill of the Adventurous Four have been ‘updated’ to Pippa and Zoe. It can only be a matter of time before the stop-at-home, cake-baking mummies of Blyton’s fiction will be sent out to work in shipyards as crane drivers while the daddies have to relinquish their City jobs and become house-husbands.

The logic is priceless Mail:
1. Boy picks up broom
ergo
2. Mother must drive a shipyard crane
ergo
3. World order has collapsed and palpable madness undermines All That’s Good.
ergo
4. Boys mustn’t sweep.

You gotta laugh, if only because things have already changed. The cookie’s crumbling differently because the dough mix ain’t the same, and the Daily Mail doesn’t matter (that much - though it matters a darn sight more than it should).

So Thank God I’m an 80’s child not a 50’s housewife… and that twentysomething blokes don’t think us twentysomething girls are crazy for insisting on ‘taking it in turns’ (though I have a niggling feeling that my twentysomething bloke was read feminist children’s books as a child).

It’s dusk. An hour ago I leapt out of the car to check out the garage door - more demolished by the mason than we’d anticipated. After a day working my mind through feminist philosophy, I was suddenly worrying about grey cement and stones being not quite in the right place.

And then - bam! It’s arrived. I knocked it on my head, rubbed the silky smooth finish on my cheek and bashed it and boshed it to see how real it is. I shouted out loud and hit the front with my index finger - It’s real. It’s here. She’s really done it. A real proper, sassy, nails book. Allegra you rock.

So I stood, wedged between the cement mixer and the steel props, in the fading light, ravishing the black-on-white. I flew through the introduction - impatient to know the final Pitch… (there’s been a lot of proofs since Allegra and I chewed life and politics for 4 hours at the improbably patient -we only had coffee and cake- Story cafe)

It’s great. Telling it straight on these leaves of tree-pulp, bound by glue, matt-glossed with plastic…. Fearlessly stating to the anonymous reader exactly how-it-was - to be young, idealistic and political in 2003. The girl’s frank, honest and direct. The War Question was a tricky unspoken one between us, after that Saturday in February, raised only when there was safety in numbers (I remember a ranshackle collective of two-dozen party apparatchiks, young journalists and think tank interns grappling with the whole hog one late weekday evening, perched on Spitalfields Market vegetable pallets in the attic).

It’s true that the Disagreement motivated each of us and we’re each still playing out the logical conclusions of our position. I tried to make it to Iraq in the relative-peace of Winter 2003/4 (to interview the women excluded from the ‘democratic’ state-forming and capture as much DV footage as I could) but the insurgency exploded in Basra. I was forced to channel my determined, frustrated courage elsewhere. It ended up as persistent, outspoken principled opposition to war by men-in-suits - those within my Westminster newsroom and beyond. Meanwhile Allegra stuck to her guns, kept reading and asking questions, learnt Arabic, and saved her unpaid leave for the less dangerous corners of the Middle East. I saved mine for six months in retreat in a Zen monastery in France, with no newspapers and no politics.

I reasoned that if I have ideals this strong, about war or feminism or politics (and I got pretty worked up on behalf of the women in Iraq in spring 2004), I want to see them clearly - to know my inconsistencies, my anger, my frustration, and go beyond them to manifest myself in a way that’s more raw, more honest, more deep.

Which is why you can find me here, in a remote village among pierres taillees and bellowed shouts across the place (France are playing Portugal in the World Cup Semis), living out my pacifism and thinking out my feminism. And I’m fondly proud of my awesome friend Allegra, for living out her ideals and thinking out her thoughts on the dusty streets of Beirut and the in clatter of the political metropolis - and for realising the fruits of her quest in print. I’m sure that integrity and honesty - and fearless idealism - are where it’s at.

re: “A 15-year-old boy is being prosecuted in connection with the case of a girl who fell pregnant at the age of 11.” ( c/o Online)

Apart from anything else, it sat oddly with me that the journalist said the 11year old ‘fell’ pregnant. In one sense, there seems to be a mildness to it - like ‘oops, I fell pregnant’, like tripping over a pavement. The phrase missed the concrete causal event - she had sex. But there’s also so much more to saying she ‘fell pregnant’: as though she tumbled(!), or fell-down, or fell-ill. And then all I could think of was Eve and The Fall. (But felt less outraged when I thought of falling-in-love).

In any case:

Under “fall” as a verb, the OED classifies “fall in love” with some other phrases, such as “fall asleep” and “fall into laughter.” The definition for that sense of “fall” is “To pass suddenly, accidentally, or in the course of events, into a certain condition.” ‘Fall’ here did not originally have the present sense of dropping from a higher state to a lower, but of passing suddenly from one state to another. It’s from the Indo European root, phol which does mean literally “to fall” but also “to happen”.

(I wonder whether feminist linguists agree…)