Marilyn French – Thursday 21 November 1929 – Saturday 2 May 2009

Introduction

Marilyn French’s novel was one of the first feminist themed books I read. Sometimes it’s a struggle to remain self-defined and to know exactly who you are and where you should be. Or what you should do. The Women’s Room presents these wonderings in an era of awakening for women.

Dedication in The Women’s Room

“TO ISABEL, TO JANET- SISTERS, FRIENDS”

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Women’s Room

“Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room. She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies’ in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she saw the cross-out on the door, had never thought about it. “Ladies’ room” was a euphemism, she supposed, and she disliked euphemisms on principle. However, she also detested what she called vulgarity, and had never in her life, even when handling it, uttered the word shit. But here she was at the age of thirty-eight huddled for safety in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall, gazing at, no, studying that word and others of the same genre, scrawled on the gray enameled door and walls.

She was perched, fully clothed, on the edge of the open toilet seat, feeling stupid and helpless, and constantly looking at her watch. It would all have been redeemed, even translated into excitement, had there been some grim-faced Walter Matthau in a trench coat, his hand in a gun-swollen pocket, or some wild-eyed Anthony Perkins in a turtleneck, his itching strangler’s hands clenching and unclenching-someone glamorous and terrifying at any rate-waiting for her outside in the hall, if she had been sitting in panic searching for another way out. But of course it that were the case, there would also be a cool and desperate Cary Grant or Burt Lancaster sliding along the walls of another hallway, waiting for Walter to show himself. And that by itself, she thought mournfully, feeling somehow terribly put upon, would have been enough. If she had one of them, anyone at all, waiting for her at home, she would not be hiding in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall. She would have been upstairs in a corridor with the other students, leaning against a wall with her books at her feet, or strolling past the unseeing faces. She could have transcended, knowing she had one of them at home, and could therefore move alone in a crowd. She puzzled over that paradox, but only briefly. The graffiti were too interesting.”


Yesterday’ writer – Fannie Flagg
Tomorrow’s writers – Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubor

Source: French, Marilyn. The Women’s Room. Jove/HBI, October 1978. Dedication: page 4, Excerpt: pages 7-8

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Women’s Room

Center: Marilyn French from the website washingtonpost.com