Iron pen and velvet glove

Press, 11 June 1977, Page 15

Iron pen and velvet glove

Women of Iron and Velvet, By Margaret Crosland. Constable. 240 pp. Select bibliography and index. $13.10. (Reviewed by A. J. Curry) This is a book about women writers in France and the books they wrote. Francoise Giroud said in the sixties: “I do not know what women in other countries are made of. In France they are made of iron. But around the iron are all kinds of skilful decorations. The result is that when the product is a good one, she gives the impression of velvet.” Margaret Crosland has concentrated on the works of French women writers of the last hundred years, since the death of George Sand in 1876, but she has also dipped into the historical background beginning with Heloise, the first Frenchwoman known as a writer, some of whose letters to Peter Abelard survive. This is also a book about feminism, inevitably. “French women, who have always had so little legal and social freedom, have always succeeded in taking and keeping a particular kind of personal, almost secret liberation.” Margaret Crosland explores the motives which drove women to write and the strategies they employed to achieve the objectives denied to them by society and the law. It is not hard to find examples of the type of treatment that has made women all over the world burn with indignation for so long. For instance, the introduction to Napoleon’s Code Civil of 1804 contained two sentences: “Woman is given to man in order to have children. She therefore belongs to him as the fruit tree belongs to the gardener.” Fighting talk indeed, but this and other indignities in the Code Civil demonstrated an attitude so firmly entrenched that it prevented the women of France being given the vote until 1946.

Margaret Crosland has presented a most balanced picture of the literature

of Frenchwomen and the parallel story of feminism in France. She has not shrunk from pointing out the mistakes that women have made in the process of fighting for their rights, mistakes in the field of literature which have relevance in other areas as well. The undeniable fact is that women can sometimes be their own worst enemy; the emotional outpourings of women bemoaning their lot can be excessively tedious and “too many women complain about their status and too few produce work which would automatically improve it.” The near pejorative term “women’s writing” is dismissive but only too often justified, although Miss Crosland points out that this is largely due to a lack of education; it is after all a fact that in France before 1890 women were denied the right to a state secondary education and were tutored, if at all, only informally.

The notion that a woman should not he too informed, and should keep what she does know well-concealed, has its adherents even today among both men and women, and perhaps this has been the crux of the mat ter. Both sexes can be afraid of any kind of intellectual ability in women, for different reasons. Moliere's warning “If you want to be happy, don't marry a blue-stocking” was given 300 years ago but is still remembered.

Margaret Crosland has shown that the women of France, both the able and the not-so-able, have been challenging society for a very long time. As long ago as 1905 Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote: “The strange thing is that women . . . have more talent today than men.” George Sand showed women the way to professionalism in literature more than 100 years ago because she had a talent and used it to carve out a career for herself. She, and others, did an inestimable service for those who came afterwards and French women writers of today are shown in this book as having come triumphantly of age.