Women and Agency

Back in the bad old days of the patriarchy, you may remember, women were notoriously lacking in agency. In the Victorian Era (which seems to have extended mysteriously beyond the boundaries of realm of the Queen and Empress of that name) women were put on pedestals and were worshiped as goddesses. But not allowed to have a bank account. Or something.

Now, of course, with women fully liberated, they are insisting on protection from microaggression and demanding safe spaces from "hate."

The consequence is that little Bari Weiss of Squirrel Hill and The New York Times can tell media sensation Jordan B. Peterson that she just doesn't go along with his Jungian association of women with Chaos. Well, I suppose that if you have been protected in safe spaces all your life, it would be easy to think that.

But Bari Weiss should read The Summer Wives, the latest by my daughter Beatriz Williams. There she will find plenty of female agency and also plenty of women and Chaos. Where you been all this time, Bari? And don't worry. In this tale of sex and class and murder, you get high-class women and Chaos and low-class women and Chaos. And cross-class women and Chaos too, I dare say.

Now, just in case you haven't quite got with the program, the main character in Summer Wives complains at one point about the problem of men writing most of the movie scripts: their women are unconvincing because men just don't get women. That is supposed to be a clue, Bari, that in this book, we are going to run the gamut of womanly behavior from the sweet innocence of virginal youth, to the ruthless use of sex by a woman to take a man away from a step-sister, to the usual thing of women not talking to each other for years at a time.

Did you see that that US Navy destroyer that collided with a container ship featured two women officers on duty that night that were not talking to each other?

I think the point here is that women are different than men. Their agency is a different kind of agency than the typical warrior agency of men, and it is not as visible. And, of course, women's agency is inextricable from that curious aspect of women's lives: the children that they bear and birth and raise.

In our age activist women and their supporters reduce the agency of women down to women and careers. Are enough women represented in certain professions, in corporate hierarchies, and in politics? And are women heroes in movies kicking ass like men heroes?

But this is to miss the point entirely.

The whole  point of  life, the universe, and everything is not who gets to be CEO or President. The whole point is who gets to create posterity. Babies, and stuff.

And that is why it is a monstrous perversion that the be all and end all of educated and evolved womanly politics appears to be abortion, as we see in the current mob politics around the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Put it this way. In the author not on the back flap of The Summer Wives Beatriz Williams notes that

She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

Ah yes. Laundry. A lot of energy, down the ages, has been devoted to off-loading the hum-drum chores of life onto servants, or, in our own time, onto baby sitters and government child-custodial facilities.

But that is odd, for what is more important in life than making the dinner, washing the clothes, and raising the children?

Why do we spend so much of our lives and agency figuring out ways not to do the basics?

And why is it that the philosophers have devoted so little of their incandescent wisdom to this important topic?

That feels like the topic for a novel.