Women talk about duty

Press, 7 June 1980, Page 17

Women talk about duty

Dutiful Daughters. Edited by Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham. Penguin, 1979. 396 pp. $4.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Joan Curry.)

Fourteen women let their hair down to provide’ the material for this book. They talk about their lives and what it is like to be the women they are, ana in the process they let air and light into' some dusty old corners. By talking about themselves they help to dispel some of the myths and halftruths which have surrounded women for too long. Does a book like this serve any useful pupose? I think so. The editors point out that “the women’s movement has shown that shared individual experience is an important part of the social discovery of a common condition.” And again: “Once we can perceive tvhat is common to women, change and transformation become possible and the cycle of gujlt and personal recrimination can be broken.” The experience common to the women interviewed for this book is duty. They have simply done what was expected of them, bound by their duty as daughters, wives, mother, ■workers and social beings. If they felt uncomfortable or unhappy they kept their doubts to themselves, convinced

they were out of step with the world. Now women are beginning to talk, in private and in public. Sometimessuch talk is excessively tedious, bogged down in a sludge of grievances. Women run the risk of. talking too much and achieving too little. But -without freely shared knowledge .it is still possible for, a young woman to remark bitterly: that “motherhood is the best-kept secret in the world. You never see . a TV programme where the woman’s house is all in a mess,” -And for another, in labour, not to know where her baby was coming from. . - . Indeed the interviewers were made aware over and Over again that “it is, in fact, the advent of children - into their marriages which causes by far the greatest tensions in these women’s lives and forces them into: states. Of nervous irritation and sometimes near breakdown.” Most mothers know the feeling, but it is still antisocial to admit it. It is easy to feel that there are greater injustices to be fought in this world than the cause of - women. But the battle must be .fought anyway, if only to give women the confidence to say that “there’s nothing wrong with me, but there’s something wrong with the situation I’m . in,” and maybe even to change it.