Lucy and Leo were
perfect children of their time: their interest in the environment and her
interest in feminism, coincided with the Pill (The cure for the population
explosion! The liberator of women!) All around the media were proclaiming a great
cultural change. It was on the covers of Time
and Newsweek, in colour
supplement photographs, whole episodes of Panorama,
Man Alive and Horizon. They had no historic perspective for
this: this was their now. 1968, hippies, the Vietnam war, the “Sexual
Revolution” had been followed by environmental awareness, the oil crisis, the
troubled economy. The words oil, Nixon and pollution cropped up in every conversation. Sometimes people mentioned (derisively of
course) Women’s Lib.
Lucy never became a feminist: she was one, probably
since birth, but was piqued into consciousness by the unequal treatment of
herself and her brother Peter. It was so
obvious. The feminist emphasis on male
oppression was naturally associated in her experience with her father’s
traditional views on women and how they should be controlled. When Lucy used a Christmas book token to buy The Female Eunuch in January 1972 Mike
immediately demanded that she should not read it and should hand it over to him “until
you are 16.” She read it anyway:
she was fascinated by the arguments about love and altruism – she looked around
for a male oppressor, but her chief sources of oppression were women: her
mother, her headmistress, her fanatical PE teacher, her dismissive art
teacher. When Leo came along he did not
seem to interfere with her freedom (or was she just being complicit in her own
oppression there?).
Some adolescent girls dream about marriage,
but it didn’t seem to fit with the peace, love and freedom doctrine Lucy had
acquired as a hippy fellow traveller: she had the loon pants, the scoopneck
t-shirts, the ethnic jewellery, but these outer decorative touches meant nothing
without the mental furniture, and Lucy had bought the whole shopful. These ideas weren’t bolt-on goodies,
fashionable bells and whistles borrowed from others’ mental processes. They
were the product of an interior alchemy which produced surprising intellectual
results. Lucy had taken the gospel-based understanding of her Catholic
upbringing, combined it with the actions of Che Guevara and the Women’s
Liberation Movement and her own personal need for freedom to create a
philosophy that embraced Jesus’s promise of life
in abundance and transmuted it into peace, love and freedom for everyone
and everything, but particularly herself.
Marriage seemed to
conflict with her desire for freedom and self-fulfillment. Joni Mitchell warbling We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall, keeping us tied and
true sounded cool and hip and non-possessive. She knew there were other
ways of living – some of the girls in her class had been passing around Margaret
Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. This was a step up from the National
Geographical as a way of discovering more about human sexuality. The book was admired for its exhilarating
descriptions of different ways in which adolescents were allowed to discover
sexual pleasure. Lucy wondered about these different modes of sexual relationship: more experimental, non-exclusive,
with monogamy a brief pause in a kaleidoscope of other possibilities. Hippy tribalism and communal living were the
closest the West came to Samoa; intellectually these were fascinating, and
clearly feminist. Not that she wanted sociable sexuality herself, she just
wanted Leo, to be his. Her romantic yearnings made her more a
surrendered wife than a sexual outlaw at that stage.
Leo is less impressed
with feminist arguments than Lucy, and Lucy begrudges giving up valuable
kissing time to tell him more about it, but one evening as they lie on cushions
on the floor, she does her best.
“Don’t you see Leo –
women’s liberation is actually everyone’s liberation. Plenty of men are oppressed by their sex
roles, just as much as women are!”
“I don’t feel
oppressed by them,” he says, “I’m happy with it.”
“But – some men, I
mean, might find it hard to be strong and tough and manly and go out and kill
animals. I would if I were a man.”
“But you’re not a
man!”
“Oh, honestly – use
your imagination – not all men want to be told they have to be fierce and
competitive and aggressive – some of them might want to be caring, co-operative
sort of people instead, they must feel uncomfortable being forced into a
masculine stereotype.”
She’s looking at him
earnestly, he doesn’t really have an answer for her, but he knows a way to end
the argument, so he just says
“I suppose so, if
you’re that type,” and then his hand wraps her breast, teasing her nipple, until
she loses interest in discussion.
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