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By MARGE PIERCY By the time I was twelve, I promised myself never to marry. Looking at the lives of married women around me in the working class neighborhood of Detroit where I grew up, I could see brutality, tedium, frustration and misery of all shades and types. It looked to me as if a woman put her head into a halter when she married, and I wanted to be free. The few working single women I knew were pitied by the wives, but I thought they had a better deal going. They were far more independent, although in those years many still lived at home. They dressed better, talked more boldly, carried themselves with a confidence that some of the married women acquired when their men were away at war, but lost when the husbands came home. Who has not experienced dealing with a woman known only as part of a couple, a nice woman, sure, but rather meek and self effacing? Bland, even. Then her husband goes out of town and you have lunch with her: suddenly she’s alive. She has opinions, she tells raunchy jokes; she laughs spontaneously. She’s an animal let out of a cage. Often women lose more than their names; they may lose their ambitions, their power, sometimes even their personalities. I don’t think a lot of marriage as an institution, but in some ways it is a convenient compromise between comfort and pleasure. Yet as it turns out, from twenty-one to the present, I have been married three times. I have been in my present and, I hope, last marriage for twenty-two years. Being sexually active at a time when girls were not supposed to experiment, by the time I hit twenty-one, I was scared for myself. My first husband was a French physicist, a Jew who had spent the war mostly in Switzerland as a young child separated from his parents. He was and probably still is a gentle and kindly man, but he had a very rigid idea of what marriage should be. He was unable to take me seriously as a writer, a woman with a central agenda equivalent to his. He took for granted that I would always put his needs, his desires, his pleasures before my own. I had assumed, since I had been writing seriously already when we married and had won several prizes for my work including the money on which I went to Europe with him, that he would understand how important writing was to me. But I realized by the second year of marriage, my poetry and fiction would always seem a hobby to him, something to fit in on the side once I had carried out my myriad duties as a proper French housewife. This was not a compromise I could wedge myself into. I began to have dreams in which I was dying. We could not communicate about sex roles; he simply kept saying that was how things had to be. I left. I walked out with my typewriter, my books, my few clothes and moved into a rooming house. My second husband was a systems analyst. He was much less conventional and more accepting of my writing and offered, after our second year together, to give me five years of support to establish myself as a novelist and poet. By the time we got together, I had decided I did not want to have children; he agreed. It did not take another five years for me to begin to make a living by writing, but it did take four. By that time he had insisted we have an open relationship – he wanted to be free to pursue affairs with other women. It was a time of great sexual freedom and experimentation... |
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| Copyright 2005 Marge Piercy | ||||||
