The Mother of All Questions Read online

  The

  Mother

  of All

  Questions

  Rebecca Solnit

  Images by Paz de la Calzada

  Haymarket Books

  Chicago, Illinois

  © 2017 Rebecca Solnit

  Interior images © Paz de la Calzada

  Haymarket Books

  PO Box 180165

  Chicago, IL 60618

  773-583-7884

  [email protected]

  www.haymarketbooks.org

  ISBN: 978-1-60846-720-4

  Trade distribution:

  In the US, through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

  In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

  Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions.

  Please contact Haymarket Books for more information at 773-583-7884 or [email protected].

  This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Wallace Action Fund.

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Mother of All Questions

  1. Silence is broken

  A Short History of Silence

  An Insurrectionary Year

  Feminism: The Men Arrive

  One Year after Seven Deaths

  The Short Happy Recent History of the Rape Joke

  2. Breaking the Story

  Escape from the Five-Million-Year-Old Suburb

  The Pigeonholes When the Doves Have Flown

  80 Books No Woman Should Read

  Men Explain Lolita to Me

  The Case of the Missing Perpetrator

  Giantess

  Acknowledgments and Text Credits

  Artwork Credits

  About the Author

  In hope we keep going

  with love for the newcomers

  and their beautiful noise:

  Atlas

  Ella and Maya

  Isaac and Martin

  Berkeley

  Brooke, Dylan, and Solomon,

  Daisy and Jake;

  and thanks to the readers

  and to the hellraisers

  Introduction

  The longest and newest essay in this book is about silence, and I began it thinking I was writing about the many ways women are silenced. I soon realized that the ways men are silenced were an inseparable part of my subject, and that each of us exists in a complex of many kinds of silence, including the reciprocal silences we call gender roles. This is a feminist book, yet it is not a book about women’s experience alone but about all of ours—men, women, children, and people who are challenging the binaries and boundaries of gender.

  This book deals with men who are ardent feminists as well as men who are serial rapists, and it is written in the recognition that all categories are leaky and we must use them provisionally. It addresses the rapid social changes of a revitalized feminist movement in North America and around the world that is not merely altering the laws. It’s changing our understanding of consent, power, rights, gender, voice, and representation. It is a gorgeously transformative movement led in particular by the young, on campuses, on social media, in the streets, and my admiration for this fearlessly unapologetic new generation of feminists and human rights activists is vast. As is my fear of the backlash against it, a backlash that is itself evidence of the threat feminism, as part of the broader project of liberation, poses to patriarchy and the status quo.

  This book is a tour through carnage, a celebration of liberation and solidarity, insight and empathy, and an investigation of the terms and tools with which we might explore all these things.

  The Mother of All Questions

  (2015)

  I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question period that followed, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was whether Woolf should have had children. I answered the question dutifully, noting that Woolf apparently considered having children early in her marriage, after seeing the delight that her sister, Vanessa Bell, took in her own. But over time Woolf came to see reproduction as unwise, perhaps because of her own psychological instability. Or maybe, I suggested, she wanted to be a writer and to give her life over to her art, which she did with extraordinary success. In the talk I had quoted with approval her description of murdering “the Angel in the House,” the inner voice that tells many women to be self-sacrificing handmaidens to domesticity and the male ego. I was surprised that advocating for throttling the spirit of conventional femininity should lead to this conversation.

  What I should have said to that crowd was that our interrogation of Woolf’s reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, “Fuck this shit,” which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter.

  The line of questioning was familiar enough to me. A decade ago, during a conversation that was supposed to be about a book I had written on politics, the British man interviewing me insisted that instead of talking about the products of my mind, we should talk about the fruit of my loins, or the lack thereof. Onstage, he hounded me about why I didn’t have children. No answer I gave could satisfy him. His position seemed to be that I must have children, that it was incomprehensible that I did not, and so we had to talk about why I didn’t, rather than about the books I did have.

  When I got off stage, my Scottish publisher’s publicist—slight, twenty-something, wearing pink ballet slippers and a pretty engagement ring, was scowling in fury. “He would never ask a man that,” she spat. She was right. (I use that now, framed as a question, to stymie some of the questioners: “Would you ask a man that?”) Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women, the 51 percent of the human species who are as diverse in their wants and as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 percent, only Woman, who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species. At their heart these questions are not questions but assertions that we who fancy ourselves individuals, charting our own courses, are wrong. Brains are individual phenomena producing wildly varying products; uteruses bring forth one kind of creation.

  As it happens, there are many reasons why I don’t have children: I am very good at birth control; though I love children and adore aunthood, I also love solitude; I was raised by unhappy, unkind people, and I wanted neither to replicate their form of parenting nor to create human beings who might feel about me the way that I sometimes felt about my begetters; the planet is unable to sustain more first-world people, and the future is very uncertain; and I really wanted to write books, which as I’ve done it is a fairly consuming vocation. I’m not dogmatic about not having kids. I might have had them under other circumstances and been fine—as I am now.

  Some people want kids but don’t have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don’t want kids, and that’s not anyone’s business either. Just because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it ought to be asked. The interviewer’s question to me was indecent, because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.

  But even to say that there’s one proper way may be putting the case too
optimistically, given that mothers are consistently found wanting, too. A mother may be treated like a criminal for leaving her child alone for five minutes, even if that child’s father has left it alone for several years. Some mothers have told me that having children caused them to be treated as bovine nonintellects who should be disregarded. A lot of women I know have been told that they cannot be taken seriously professionally because they will go off and reproduce at some point. And many mothers who do succeed professionally are presumed to be neglecting someone. There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.

  We talk about open questions, but there are closed questions, too, questions to which there is only one right answer, at least as far as the interrogator is concerned. These are questions that push you into the herd or nip at you for diverging from it, questions that contain their own answers and whose aim is enforcement and punishment. One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, “Why are you asking that?” This, I’ve found, is always a good answer to an unfriendly question, and closed questions tend to be unfriendly. But on the day of my interrogation about having babies, I was taken by surprise (and severely jet-lagged), and so I was left to wonder: Why do such bad questions so predictably get asked?

  Maybe part of the problem is that we have learned to ask the wrong things of ourselves. Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obsessive question is: Are you happy? We ask it so reflexively that it seems natural to wish that a pharmacist with a time machine could deliver a lifetime supply of antidepressants to Bloomsbury, so that an incomparable feminist prose stylist could be reoriented to produce litters of Woolf babies.

  Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row—spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences—even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.

  We are constantly given one-size-fits-all formulas, but those formulas fail, often and hard. Nevertheless, we are given them again. And again and again. They become prisons and punishments; the prison of the imagination traps many in the prison of a life that is correctly aligned with the recipes and yet is entirely miserable.

  The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower—and wither—all around us.

  Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles, and she is loved and respected by her descendants. But I wouldn’t call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person—loving and being loved or having satisfaction, honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope.

  Part of my own endeavor as a writer has been to find ways to value what is elusive and overlooked, to describe nuances and shades of meaning, to celebrate public life and solitary life, and—in John Berger’s phrase—to find “another way of telling,” which is part of why getting clobbered by the same old ways of telling is disheartening.

  The conservative “defense of marriage,” which is really nothing more than a defense of the old hierarchical arrangement that straight marriage was before feminists began to reform it, is sadly not just the property of conservatives. Too many in this society are entrenched in the devout belief that there is something magically awesome for children about the heterosexual two-parent household, which leads many people to stay in miserable marriages that are destructive for everyone within range. I know people who long hesitated to leave horrible marriages because the old recipe insists that somehow a situation that is terrible for one or both parents will be beneficent for the children. Even women with violently abusive spouses are often urged to stay in situations that are supposed to be so categorically wonderful that the details don’t matter. Form wins out over content. And yet I’ve seen the joy of divorce and the myriad forms happy families can take, over and over and over, from one parent and one child to innumerable forms of multiple households and extended families.

  After I wrote a book about myself and my mother, who married a brutal professional man and had four children and often seethed with rage and misery, I was ambushed by an interviewer who asked whether my abusive father was the reason I had failed to find a life partner. Her question was freighted with astonishing assumptions about what I had intended to do with my life and her right to intrude upon that life. The book, The Faraway Nearby, was, I thought, in a quiet, roundabout way about my long journey toward a really nice life, and an attempt to reckon with my mother’s fury, including the origin of that fury in her entrapment in conventional feminine roles and expectations.

  I have done what I set out to do in my life, and what I set out to do was not what my mother or the interviewer presumed. I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures. Men—romances, flings, and long-term relationships—have been some of those adventures, and so have remote deserts, arctic seas, mountaintops, uprisings and disasters, and the exploration of ideas, archives, records, and lives.

  Society’s recipes for fulfillment seem to cause a great deal of unhappiness, both in those who are stigmatized for being unable or unwilling to carry them out and in those who obey but don’t find happiness. Of course there are people with very standard-issue lives who are very happy. I know some of them, just as I know very happy childless and celibate monks, priests, and abbesses, gay divorcees, and everything in between. Last summer my friend Emma was walked down the aisle by her father, with his husband following right behind on Emma’s mother’s arm; the four of them, plus Emma’s new husband, are an exceptionally loving and close-knit family engaged in the pursuit of justice through politics. This summer, both of the weddings I went to had two grooms and no brides; at the first, one of the grooms wept because he had been excluded from the right to marry for most of his life, and he had never thought he would see his own wedding.

  Still, the same old questions come buzzing around—though they often seem less like questions than a sort of enforcement system. In the traditional worldview happiness is essentially private and selfish. Reasonable people pursue their self-interest, and when they do so successfully they are supposed to be happy. The very definition of what it means to be human is narrow, and altruism, idealism, and public life (except in the forms of fame, status, or material success) have little place on the shopping list. The idea that a life should seek meaning seldom emerges; not only are the standard activities assumed to be inherently meaningful, they are treated as the only meaningful options.

  One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.

  While many people question the motives of the childless, who are taken to be selfish for refusing the sacrifices that come with parenthood, they often neglect to note that those who love their children intensely may have less love left for the rest of the world. Christina Lupton, a writer who is also a mother, recently described some of the things she relinquished when motherhood’s consuming tasks had her in their grasp, including

 
all the ways of tending to the world that are less easily validated than parenting, but which are just as fundamentally necessary for children to flourish. I mean here the writing and inventing and the politics and the activism; the reading and the public speaking and the protesting and the teaching and the filmmaking. . . . Most of the things I value most, and from which I trust any improvements in the human condition will come, are violently incompatible with the actual and imaginative work of childcare.

  One of the fascinating things about Edward Snowden’s sudden appearance a few years ago was the inability of many people to comprehend why a young man might give up on the recipe for happiness—high wages, secure job, Hawaiian home—to become the world’s most sought-after fugitive. Their premise seemed to be that since all people are selfish, Snowden’s motive must be a self-serving pursuit of attention or money.

  During the first rush of commentary, Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker’s legal expert, wrote that Snowden was “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” Another pundit announced, “I think what we have in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us.” Others assumed that he was revealing US government secrets because he had been paid by an enemy country.

  Snowden seemed like a man from another century. In his initial communications with journalist Glenn Greenwald he called himself Cincinnatus—after the Roman statesman who acted for the good of his society without seeking self-advancement. This was a clue that Snowden formed his ideals and models far from the standard-issue formulas for happiness. Other eras and cultures often asked different questions from the ones we ask now: What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life? What’s your contribution to the world or your community? Do you live according to your principles? What will your legacy be? What does your life mean? Maybe our obsession with happiness is a way not to ask those other questions, a way to ignore how spacious our lives can be, how effective our work can be, and how far-reaching our love can be.