The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City PDF
Preview The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City
THE FEMINIST BESTSELLER Related titles from Palgrave Macmillan Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970 Merja Makinen, Feminist Popular Fiction The Feminist Bestseller From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City Imelda Whelehan © Imelda Whelehan 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillanis a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-1121-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-4039-1122-3 ISBN 978-0-230-21182-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-21182-7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Dedicated with love to the memory of Thomas Joseph Whelehan (1921(cid:150)2000) Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Part 1 The Second Wave 1 Sex and the Single Girl 21 2 Burnt Offerings: The Emergence of Radical Feminism 42 3 Mad Housewives 63 4 Women(cid:146)s Spaces: Marilyn French, Erica Jong and Marge Piercy 93 5 Forbidden Fruit: Sexuality 119 Part 2 (cid:145)Post-feminism(cid:146)and Third Wave Feminism 6 Crashing of the Superwoman: The 1980s 141 7 Where Have All the Feminists Gone? The Anxiety of Affluence 156 8 Hooray for the Singletons! 173 9 Urban Sex 191 Conclusion 213 Notes 220 Bibliography 222 Index 232 vii Acknowledgements My greatest debt of thanks is to the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a Research Fellowship during 2001(cid:150)2002. This period of leave allowed me to do the remainder of the research for this project and gave me space to think it through for the first time in nearly a decade. I thank you not only for allowing me to complete this project, but also for significantly enhanc- ing my research life since. Thanks also to Helena Wahlstr(cid:246)m, whom I met at a confer- ence in 2001 and who very kindly sent me her PhD thesis when she learned that we had similar interests. Kathleen Bell is always willing to share her experiences as one who remem- bers reading the feminist bestsellers in the 1970s and I(cid:146)m eter- nally grateful to her for her opinions and observations on these and so many other things. Mary Joannou collaborated with me on a chapter for The Feminist Seventies (2003), which helped focus my mind at an early stage of research for this book. Thanks to Deborah Cartmell for helping me to balance teaching and research and to all colleagues at De Montfort University who have slipped articles into my pigeonhole over the years. Esther Sonnet gave me signed first editions of Kinflicksand Sexual Politics, which I treasure. Carol Edwards is a great friend to have. John and Loreen literally kept things in order and prevented me from becoming a mad housewife. Thank you Palgrave Macmillan (cid:150) especially to Anna Sandeman for taking on the book and latterly to Kate Wallis and Sonya Barker for seeing it through and waiting the extra year. Sorry for being the typical author and holding things up. David Sadler endures the fits and starts, the bad tempers and the reckless enthusiasm, and for that I thank him. Sorry for all the inconvenience (is there ever a good time to write a book?) and for needing to write this on the kitchen table. Did I prove that I am Superwoman? Thanks to all my students, past and present, who always provide the most incisive and provocative criticisms. viii Introduction I have been wanting to write a book about feminist bestsellers for years. In fact, when my PhD was nearing completion and I had my first meeting with an academic publisher, I pitched two proposals (cid:150) one on Second Wave thought and one on the relationship between the Women(cid:146)s Movement and novels such as Erica Jong(cid:146)s Fear of Flying (1973), Lisa Alther(cid:146)s Kinflicks (1976), and Marilyn French(cid:146)s The Women(cid:146)s Room (1977). The publisher plumped for the first proposal,1which was probably very sensible since at the time I had no clear overall plan for the other project; just a sense that these writers were engaging in a dialogue with the Women(cid:146)s Movement without getting much of a response. There was little work on these writers at the time (the early 1990s) and feminist critics were only really beginning to take a broad interest in popular women(cid:146)s fiction at all. By the time I finished my first book, other, more achiev- able, projects came along and the original proposal lay in its buff folder until the turn of the new century. By then other crit- ics had written on this and related topics and in writing this book I am grateful to be able to draw on the assiduous research and insightful thinking of Maria Lauret and Lisa Maria Hogeland, who both produced books covering many of the issues which had sparked my interest in this topic, not to mention other critics, such as Maroula Joannou, Gayle Greene, and Lorna Sage, whose work was also of direct relevance to me. Collectively their work allows me to move the debate forwards in a new direction, since there is certainly no need to write a book which covers much of the same ground. The term (cid:145)feminist bestseller(cid:146) only comfortably covers the novels I write about in chapters 3 to 5 of this book; and not necessarily all of these, if this means that the writer of each book must have seen action in the Women(cid:146)s Movement to be an authentic feminist. All of these books owe their success to their women readers who bought them, discussed them, and 1 2 The Feminist Bestseller passed them on so that some, like Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), became a bestseller by word of mouth. Their content and the issues raised were unmistakably feminist: some seemed a rehearsal of problems foregrounded in other non-fiction texts such as Betty Friedan(cid:146)s The Feminine Mystique (1963) or Kate Millett(cid:146)s Sexual Politics (1970), themselves feminist bestsellers. Sue Kaufman(cid:146)s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967) has remarkable echoes of Friedan(cid:146)s groundbreaking book and Bettina Balser, its central figure, is definitely a victim of the (cid:145)problem that has no name(cid:146) (which I shall briefly explicate in chapter 1). Other epithets could also suit this clutch of writings that do not actu- ally acknowledge each other(cid:146)s existence or seem to draw anything from each other. The earlier novels which closely followed the themes explored by Kaufman might be collec- tively dubbed (cid:145)mad housewife(cid:146) novels (for reasons which will become clear in chapter 3) and those which were published after the mid-1970s and which have remained internationally renowned, such as The Women(cid:146)s Room, have been variously termed consciousness-raising or liberation novels for their much more direct engagement with the discourses of Second Wave feminism. I find the term (cid:145)consciousness-raising novel(cid:146) particularly useful, as will become clear through the course of this book. However, generically (cid:145)feminist bestseller(cid:146) suits my purposes extremely well, not least because it allows me to problematize the linkage of the two terms. The phrase feels awkward, even treacherous, particularly when we apply it to groundbreaking non-fiction texts such as Kate Millett(cid:146)s Sexual Politics or Germaine Greer(cid:146)s The Female Eunuch(1970), because the fact that individual women could make a great deal of money out of their feminist convictions caused controversy within the Women(cid:146)s Movement at the time. Towards those feminist writers not visibly active in women(cid:146)s groups in Britain or the US, such as Greer, there was only suspicion: (cid:145)the whole tone of The Female Eunuch is shal- low, anti-woman, regressive, three steps backward to the world of false sexual liberation from which so many young women have fled(cid:146) (Dreifus 1973: 359). The Women(cid:146)s Liberation Movement (as the radical wing of the Second Wave of feminism came to be known) was a movement based on collectivity. Early activists went out of their way to avoid the media(cid:146)s selecting a (cid:145)star(cid:146) from their midst to act as a
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