Emancipation

In Brussels several months ago I read an interview with the Dutch author Hella Hasse in a local newspaper. In it she said that she didn't see how the freedom to sit behind a desk and perform menial office work was emancipation. I couldn't agree more. Of course, working in an office gives you the freedom and power that your own income brings. Being dependent on a man's income isn't an option for most women today, although 62 percent of women in The Netherlands work, most of them part-time, so there must be a lot of dependency going on here.

I read Martha Quest and The Grass is Singing over ten years ago, and I'm not even sure where my copies are anymore. After Martha is married, has a child, and is living miserably as a housewife, Lessing remarks that "she woke up everyday to endless deserts of time," waiting as she did everyday for her husband to return.

In in The Golden Notebook Lessing remarks that each housewife was locked up at home alone and isolated in her own personal hell.

Of course Doris Lessing worked hard, and wasn't afraid to think, or to draw from her own experience.

She said that she wouldn't recommend raising a child without a father, especially a boy. She and her son Peter are still living together today.

Writing a good novel is just as all-engrossing as raising a child well. I doubt very much if the two can go together. Either you neglect the child, or you neglect your work. If you have the money, or you have to work, you can pay someone to raise the children for you. There's always a sacrifice. Of course if you raise your children, and you'd really rather be a novelist the entire time, the children are probably going to grow up being made aware of it somehow. Few people have the true measure of freedom creativity requires to thrive. Perhaps you just have to be bold enough to take freedoms. Someone, or something, eventually has to give. Either that or you wind up on the boulevard of thwarted dreams. Or are they illusions....