In the past there have been Egyptian desert tribes in which the men fought constantly and the women constantly replenished the army through childbirth. That was their function in life. And just look at the following quotation from the Talmud: “It is written. A daughter is a vain treasure to her father. From anxiety about her he does not sleep at night; during her early years lest she be seduced, in her adolescence lest she go astray, in her marriageable years lest she does not find a husband, when she is married lest she be childless, and when she is old lest she practice witchcraft.”
These concerns about our children especially our daughters still remain, though their practising witchcraft is no longer one of them. But if there ever was a cliché it is that ‘times have changed’. Our daughters are no longer content with being baby machines although women who are not happy just to be wives and mothers are still, even if secretly, regarded as pushy, driving or even phallic – and this last term is always reproachful: ‘Men,’ I read somewhere, ‘may congratulate themselves upon the productivity of their own mental wombs, but they are displeased to come upon women with mental penises.’
Indeed, Freud may have substituted penis envy for passivity as the central characteristic of the female. Freud argues that his love for Martha Bernays (who was to become his wife and bear him six children) is superior to the intellectual freedom which John Stuart Mill had suggested for her. In Freud’s letters the following is quoted: “Am I to think of my delicate, sweet girl as a competitor? After all, the encounter could only end by my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I love her, and that I will make every effort to get her out of the competitive role into the quiet, undisturbed activity of my home.”
Our children, our girls too, want more out of life than previous generations of women. Women’s complete absorption by, and cultivation of, domesticity and little else is fast disappearing. Thank goodness.
An acquaintance told me: ‘I cannot pass by the sofa without glancing at the cushions from the corner of my eye. I have to stop myself from returning to arrange them. I fight it and move on...but even then, something drags me back to the sofa to pat those cushions and in the end I simply have to obey my impluse.’ I told her that this is obsessive-compulsive behaviour and that she should control it and use her spare time more profitably.
There are still women whose main concerns are entirely confined to the unfolded beach towel, the frantic polishing of mirrors, the moving of the ashtray north, north-west. Italo Svevo, the Italian novelist of Confessions of Zeno fame, wrote of his wife Livia: “She fills her roles one after the other with perfect punctilousness. I am sure that even as a baby she must have had a certain dignity.”
Women no longer remain silent and subservient in the presence of men, shutting their mouths and chilling the beer. They want interesting lives which have a wider scope than going to the supermarket and matching their living room curtains to their cushions. (They do these things anyway but other more interesting things as well.)
Even, before our entry into Europe in May, the more adventurous children were borrowing money from the bank – a service we never had in our day – and whizzing off to see some remote part of the globe. They no longer ask for our permission, they merely inform us these days. Yes, they want to go and have a look at endless mud huts, monsoons and malaria in unprounceable parts of the world. They are not particularly interested in cutting their birthday cake in our living room. They would rather be in Machu Picchu instead, coming back to tell us that a larger proportion of our Gross Domestic Product should be going to Third world and producing some ‘hair raising’ stories and pictures. There is a great fascination with cultures other than our own. And I am thankful that my children are curious and not content with a humdrum and clichéd existence for a whole lifetime. The young one especially, would rather explore some new place than spend what little money she has on expensive clothes. This wandering about causes me sleepless nights occasionally and sometimes great anxiety, and there are months when I feel like the Loch Ness Monster, living alone, but that is the price you pay for interesting children. I would not have it otherwise. They also open new worlds to us and give us an excuse to go and see them time and money permitting.
Unlike our parents who were impervious to pleas for travelling abroad, even just up the road to Sicily or Italy, we have had to be more accepting of this way of life. In my day, you floated the idea of vamoosing to The Boot months ahead and the answer was invariably a ‘No’ at first. My father saw a conspiracy against his daughters in every niche, downwards and upwards. It took months of negotiation to even go for a day to Gozo and it was exhausting.
These days, when it comes to our children travelling, we take our courage in our hands and hope for the best. Friends whose only child trooped to Peru for a long stay tell me: ‘We try not to worry!’. And so say all of us. We receive e-mails from them (whatever would we do without e-mails when they are on the other side of the world?) and try not to think of all the dreadful things that could happen as they board ramshackle buses fit for the scrapheap, eat food of unknown provenance, and are in a situation when they might contract all kinds of diseases, sleeping in youth hostels the likes of which I would rather not imagine. I am beginning to understand my father. But then we only ever wanted to stay in Europe. We didn’t even know of the existence of Machu Picchu.
The days when women had no appreciation of anything intellectual are gone. Many of our girls today are interested in anything and everything. Mrs James Joyce objected to her husband’s waste of paper during his composition of Stephen Hero. Joyce had the impression that she found more pleasure and profit in the landlady’s hen’s laying an egg than in all his inky deposits.
Joyce himself did not always conform. He threw his own mauscript of A Portrait of the Artist into the fire and his sister pulled it out again. In gratitude he bought her a new pair of gloves.
Worse still Haydn’s wife is said to have cut up his symphonies for her hair curlers.
After the death of my husband an English friend tried to cheer me up by telling me: “ Alright he’s gone. It’s sad, very sad. But aren’t you lucky? Did you really want to stay here for the rest of your life as some of my bright female science students have done, just doing the social rounds until people are tired of you?”
The older one is now happily settled and married to a lovely young man and sometimes I tell the young one that I wish she would marry a fisherman from Marsaxlokk. ’His family would bore you to tears and you’d take to knitting....well you might finish that navy blue jumper you once started when I was 12 at last.” So let them live a little while they can.