On Women

Susan Sontag

Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

 

Review by Rosemary Goring

 

American intellectual Susan Sontag was part of a band of second-wave feminists who delineated the cause with uncompromising swagger. With notable exceptions - Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan - few of her generation were as clear in their views or as trenchant. Not that Sontag viewed herself as one of a team; none of these pioneering polemicists worked liked that. At times, the fissures that erupted between feminists who were, to the onlooker, on the same political wavelength make the infighting of today’s Conservative party look half-hearted. Thus, nearly 20 years after her death, Sontag remains sui generis.

Reading the seven essays and interview that comprise On Women is like turning back the clock to the days of Sontag’s prime. As critic Merve Emre writes in the introduction, all the pieces it contains were written in the early to mid 1970s, between Sontag’s tour of Vietnam and before her first cancer diagnosis, a period described by Emre as “bracketed by death”.

A philosopher and an academic, a novelist but above all an essayist, on her death in 2004 Sontag left a legacy of heavy-hitting works. They addressed  modern culture from myriad angles, from fashion, disease and war to literature and the arts in such titles as Illness as Metaphor, On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others. When I heard her speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, she held the stage as one born to the podium. Had she lived in the age of social media, her fans would have been legion, but so also her denouncers.

If anybody could cope with hostility, it was Sontag. On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality. One of the pieces is an exchange between Sontag and leading feminist Adrienne Rich, who had found her essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’, about Leni Riefenstahl, inadequate and contradictory. One of the most intriguing pieces in the collection, this essay taps into Sontag’s own work as a screenwriter. She offers a cold-eyed appraisal of the work of the controversial Nazi propagandist film-maker who, in the 1970s, was enjoying a reputational come-back. Rich was unconvinced by Sontag’s analysis, but if she was not smarting after Sontag’s (long) retort, she must have been encased in armour.

Edited by Sontag’s son David Rieff, these essays range from the substantial to the  - by his  mother’s standards –throwaway. ‘The Third World of Women’ is her response to a questionnaire from Libre magazine. Questions are on the lines of: “It is often said that most salaried work in present-day society is alienating. In spite of this, do you advise women to seek salaried employment as a means of liberation?”

Sontag’s replies are considered and extensive; in this case, she begins: “However alienating most salaried work may be, for women it is still liberating to have a job, if only because it frees them from the confinement of domesticity and parasitism.” In fact, Sontag later argues that “Until they become important to the economy… women have no means of exercising political power”. By this she does not mean low-grade work, but women in positions of authority across the career spectrum.

There is much in these essays that still holds true. Elsewhere, however, there is the creakiness of ideas that have been refined, or simply dropped. For example, when discussing how women can achieve equality, Sontag writes, in a throwaway line: “I do not exclude the utility of real guerrilla violence as well.”

Nor have certain sweeping generalisations, true as they probably were in the 1970s, weathered well: “Women rarely feel anxious about their age because they haven’t succeeded at something.” There are instances also of Sontag anticipating swifter progress than happened, or not foreseeing regression on ground once thought won. “Within the next twenty years, they will get equal pay for equal work and be granted effective ownership of their own bodies”, she writes with misplaced confidence. Tell that to the British graduates today, who start their careers on a pay scale on average £2000 below their male counterparts; or to those in religiously conservative US states, whose right to abortion has recently been lost.

The opening piece, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, initially feels sepia-tinted: women take out their compacts and touch up their lipstick while at the restaurant table. They see middle-age as the end of their romantic hopes, and have no expectation of what today we’d call a career. Very quickly, however, it becomes apparent that the subject of women’s looks, and the importance placed on them, has changed only superficially in the past 50 years.

Written when Sontag was nearly 40 and recognised as not just clever but strikingly beautiful, ‘The Double Standard of Ageing’ is a devastating and dispiritingly relevant denunciation of what growing old does to women’s status compared to men’s: “One of the greatest tragedies of each woman’s life is simply getting older; it is certainly the longest tragedy…. After late adolescence women become caretakers of their bodies and faces, pursuing an essentially defensive strategy, a holding operation.”

In her telling, women are raised as second-class adults, whose value lies in staying as youthful as long as possible, thereby forestalling the day when their faded allure spells sexual redundancy. The correlation between the vulnerability of an older woman and the inferior status of womankind is easy to make:  “Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” With undisguised contempt, she writes: “Most of what is cherished as typically ‘feminine’ is simply behaviour that is childish, immature, weak… So far as women heed the stereotypes of ‘feminine’ behaviour, they cannot behave as fully responsible, independent adults.”

Sontag’s certainties, her table-thumping passion, are conveyed with a paradoxically patrician tone. While there is much that has dated in this collection, and much that many of today’s feminists or post-feminists would argue with, it nevertheless stands as a useful measure to gauge how far we have come in half a century. Or, to put it another way, how far there is yet to go.