What About Women Reminds Us About Feminism
A few weeks ago the French artist Françoise Gilot caused a minor ruckus on the Internet when media outlets like The Guardian and Elle picked up on passages from her new book, in which the 93-year-old expressed some very behind-the-times ideas about rape.
Gilot is a well-regarded painter with work in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she is perhaps best known for the decade (1943–53) she spent partnered with Pablo Picasso, father of two of her three children, an experience she chronicled in her best-selling 1964 memoir, Life With Picasso. She cowrote her latest book, About Women: Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter, on sale this week, with her old friend Lisa Alther, author of the ’70s feminist novel Kinflicks. (It’s worth noting that in a not-so-sisterly move, both The Guardian and Elle all but ignored Gilot’s artistic career, referring to her instead as Picasso’s “muse.”)
The new book does exactly what its subtitle suggests: It’s a faithful transcription of Alther and Gilot’s wide-ranging exchanges on the topics of womanhood, motherhood, fashion, and creativity. In less thoughtful hands, this experiment might be boring or feel sanctimonious: After all, 256 pages of uninterrupted sociological discourse is not the easiest sell. But while some sections do lag, the friends of 25 years have a provocative way of digging into whatever they’re discussing that keeps things generally interesting. And because they’ve emerged from such disparate backgrounds—Alther from backwater Tennessee, Gilot from the ranks of the French bourgeoisie—their book offers an intriguing case study into how the events of the 20th century shaped two women from two very different cultures.
Which brings me back to the controversy: The passage that most offended was part of a conversation about how French women and American women feel about being catcalled. “There’s so much violence against women here, and women feel it sets the climate for men’s violating their personal space,” asserted Alther.
“There are probably fewer rapes in France because people are less repressed,” responded Gilot. “If a man whistles at you and you smile, that oils the social wheels and eases the tension between the classes and sexes. It affirms that you both belong to the same culture. It’s a kind of give-and-take that acknowledges that the other person exists, so in that sense it’s not treating another person as an object . . . Each time a man says something to me, if I take it as an insult, then I’ll be insulted several times a day by strangers I’ll never see again. Whereas if I smile vaguely and go my way, it doesn’t cost me very much.”
It’s easy to see why the 21st-century feminist media might object. Gilot’s retro views, expressed elsewhere in the book as well, reek of a certain upper-class, white privilege that’s hard to swallow, and they implicitly suggest that women can antagonize men into sexually assaulting them. Not really the way we think about things these days. It’s also totally valid to point out that Gilot, now in her mid-90s, is probably not the right spokesperson for the thoughts and feelings of all, most, or even many French women.
But that doesn’t mean her perspective isn’t valuable. For me, About Women is most fascinating as a historical document, a real-time look at two women as they wrestle with and negotiate the tenets of modern feminism in their own lives. Gilot was born in 1921 and came of age during World War II, only after which were women in France granted the right to vote; Alther was born in 1944 and came of age in the ’60s, as second-wave feminism was beginning to grip the nation. Their points of view reflect experience of different historical events, different cultural influences, and different moments of consciousness-raising. Alther is generally apt to toe the party line; Gilot is usually quick to complicate modern notions of how to behave. She learned early that it was better to be wily and get what she wanted than to be strident and come out behind. But both are eager to discuss, to try to understand each other’s perspectives, and to try to incorporate new information into their worldviews. That kind of discourse between two women analyzing their own experiences of their own lives feels like precisely what feminists should celebrate.
In some ways we love to glamorize the origins of the women’s movement. Just look at present cultural offerings like the film Suffragette, about the women’s suffrage movement in early-20th-century Britain, or Good Girls Revolt, the new Amazon pilot about female researchers petitioning for the right to write at Newsweek in early 1970s New York. Or read Amanda Fortini’s recent essay, also in Elle, an ode to the unacknowledged feminism of the Hollywood femme fatale, a “crafty, magnetic woman who manages to maneuver around society’s constricting rules and expectations” and who “acknowledge that sexuality, however assured, can sometimes be a performance.” Fortini notes that the archetype may have arose from anxieties about rapidly changing gender roles catalyzed by World War II, the very moment, of course, when Gilot was stepping into adulthood. Can these seductresses who use their ultra-femininity to snare and manipulate men be seen as feminist icons? “The truly feminist notion, I now think,” Fortini concludes, “is to use every advantage you’ve got. A man would.”
The femme fatale makes active what Gilot suggests French women do passively as a matter of course: harness their self-presentation to negotiate the hazardous world of men. That notion that women have to walk a tightrope in order to avoid trouble is the same one invoked by the 87-year-old sex columnist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who created a firestorm back in June when she went on NPR and claimed that a woman who gets naked with a man and gives him an erection doesn’t have the right to change her mind about having sex. She later, on Twitter, clarified that she’s “100% against rape” and compared the scenario with other “risky behavior like crossing [the] street against the light. If a driver hits you, he’s legally in the wrong but you’re in the hospital.” And it’s also essentially the same sentiment that got Chrissie Hynde, 64, into hot water in September, following the publication of her memoir, Reckless, in which the singer recounted a long-ago anecdote when, high as a kite, she went home with a crew of Hells Angels and was beaten and sexually assaulted. Later, Hynde justified her nonchalance about the episode by telling the Sunday Times, “If I’m walking around in my underwear and I’m drunk, who else’s fault can it be? If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault.”
Thank goodness we’re now teaching our daughters that sexual assault is unacceptable no matter what: how you’re dressed, if you’re drunk, how far you let things go in bed, whether you acknowledge the men who harass you in public—none of that should have any bearing on your fundamental right never to get raped.
But feminism did not spring from the womb fully formed. We can’t negate the women who grew up walking that tightrope, who fought feminism’s early battles, and who made the best of things under constraints they didn’t know might soon change. As Alther says in the book, “Every generation stands on the shoulders of the generations that precede it. That’s why I get annoyed when I hear young women repudiating feminism, even as they enjoy the rights we’ve managed to acquire.”
About Women feels progressive because it creates space for two women to question their own cultural biases, and because it acknowledges the fluidity of history. As Gilot says in the book’s last passage: “Whatever the prevalent philosophical attitudes that have come down to us as legacies from all the different cultures of the past, each age needs to reformulate them. The times are always changing, so if we have studied some philosophical systems and gone through spiritual experiences, our duty is to express these things in a way that will be appropriate for people in the present and the future.”
Perhaps Gilot has fallen a touch short of her mark on that last part. But is she a “present-day menace to modern women”? Hardly. She’s 93 years old and she has just published a thought-provoking book with her younger feminist friend about motherhood, love, sex, art, and friendship. Sounds pretty good to me.
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