Herstory - The Confusion of being a Woman

Dec 12

Dec 12 Herstory - The Confusion of being a Woman

“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths are straight, the trees regular, the sun shaded; escorted by gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergymen, she has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave and no one will touch a hair of her head. But on the other side all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. The paths wind between bogs and precipices; the trees roar and rock and fall in ruin.”

― Virginia Woolf ―

Elizabeth Gilbert with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast:

"MS. GILBERT: Yeah. Well, I spent my 20s writing about men for men. And I wanted to. And it was very much a reflection of where I was in my life at that time. I was really interested in masculinity, and I think the reason that I was is because I wanted to be a guy. And the reason I wanted to be a guy — and I don't mean literally and certainly, that's a very serious situation when somebody's born in a woman's body and wants to be a man. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is I wanted to live the way men live. And the reason for that was because it was better. And I grew up watching what many of us grew up watching, which was men who had a great deal of freedom and women who followed them around and took care of them and took care of their every need. And when I looked at those two models, one of them seemed a lot better than the other one. [laughs] Very clearly. And so I just threw myself into men's worlds. I worked in bars. I worked on a ranch in Wyoming for a long time. I became a writer for GQ, and Esquire, and Spin, very much men's worlds.

MS. TIPPETT: That's right.

MS. GILBERT: I mean, I threw myself, not only into men's worlds but into men's worlds where they were spending their life studying what is masculinity too, right? And examining that question again and again, what it means to be a man. I was just as interested in that as they were. And I felt comfortable in those worlds. And I mean, I even did a story for GQ once where I dressed up as a man for a week, and lived as a man in New York, and felt what that felt like, which interestingly, I didn't enjoy because I felt very constrained in that gender once I was in it. [laughs] I much preferred being a woman among men, then being a sort of fake man among men.

But what happened, I think, with Eat, Pray, Love is that it was a time in my life where I sort of came out of the closet as a woman. And I needed to because the questions that I was grappling with were very much women's questions. And there are certainly universal spiritual questions that I was grappling with, but the main one that I was grappling with and what ended my marriage was the question of whether or not to become a mother. And certainly, that is the sort of ultimate woman's question. What does it mean if I'm a woman who doesn't have children? What does it mean if I take a different path? Am I still a woman? These are all, in a way, gendered questions."