The Women's Room by Marilyn French Read Free Book Online

something that was not good. It swam in pinkish purple waters in the lower part of her brain, and she kept trying to lift herself out of it, to use the other part. Bored as she was doing the reading demanded in school – Silas Marner, Julius Caesar, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens – she realized that this reading was higher, whatever that meant. Good literature, whather teachers would call good literature, was not involved with the world. To be involved with the world is lower than not to be. The world is a cesspool, flesh is base, spirit and mind are exalted. A descent into the world of matter was like bathing a clean body in a muddy pool. It might perhaps be forgiven in the name of experience, but only if one learned from it and returned to the higher world. And it was clear that women never did this. Only the inferior sex did it. Oh, a few bad women did it too, but they never returned to the world of spirit and mind. Women were always pure and true and clean, like Cordelia and Marina and Jane Eyre. And they were always virgins, too, at least until they got married. What could sex be like, that having it was enough to damn you forever to the cesspool? She wanted to be good and pure and true like them, but she didn’t want to have the bad things happen to her that happened to them. She would try not to descend to the cesspool, but on the other hand, she was sinking in it day by day. She found some girlfriends; she even found herself whispering and giggling with them. She did not know how it happened. For a while, she resisted the magazines they read but eventually borrowed and finally even bought them. Seventeen was full of advice to girls about clothes, hairdos, makeup, and boys.
    They read The Taming of the Shrew in English class; she got The Fountainhead for Christmas, and read it again. She tried to read Nietzsche again and found that he said women were liars, calculating, out to dominate the male. He said you should take a whip when you go to woman. What did he mean? Her mother did dominate her father, but her mother was not a liar. Mira lied, but only to get out of going to school. Still, it was impossible not to respect Nietzsche; he was smarter than even the men teachers, much smarter than Mr Woodiefield, her father’s boss, who had come with his fat wife to dinner one night and Mira’s mother had said afterward how smart he was. But why should Nietzsche say carry a whip? Mira’s father liked her mother to dominate him. He liked her. Whenever he grumbled and grouched, it was at Mira, not at her mother. Kate was his dog, his horse, Petruchio said; the teacher said that was the way it used to be. But when they were at the Mittlows’ for dinner, fat gross Mr Mittlow would bark ‘Milk!’ at his wife, and even though she was just as tall as he and pretty fat herself, she would jump up from the table and run for a pitcher of milk. And sometimes they would hear screaming at night and Mrs Ward whispered to Mira that Mr Willis beat his wife. She also told her that the German butcher who lived across the street with only his daughter, would chain her to the bed when he wantedto go out drinking at night, and when he came back, he would beat her. Mira didn’t ask how her mother knew this.
    And since she had begun to buy magazines, she let her eyes wander among them on the rack and she saw, even though she immediately averted her eyes, that a lot of them had pictures of women in black underwear on them, or women chained up and naked and a man standing over them with a whip. In the movies too, these things happened. Not just the ones at the Emporium, the theater she and her friends were not allowed to go to, although there were pictures like that in the cases outside, but even in regular movies, sometimes the hero would spank the heroine, who before that was fresh and talked back, like Mira herself. He would come bursting through a door and pull her over his knee and she would yell, but after that she would adore