Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975, 1983). 2000 Modern Library Paperback Edition.
To me, Nora Ephron has always been the writer of When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail and involved in writing other similar of my secret pleasures. I’ve seen her on talk shows. I read her book I Feel Bad About My Neck because my mother had it. I am always reading books I would never read because my mother has them lying around when I visit.
This book is a collection of magazine pieces from the 1970s, and it reveals much about Nora Ephron. Despite a privileged Beverly Hills upbringing, amazingly successful Hollywood writer parents, her own successful career endeavors, she always comes across as funny and real. And certainly this collection has some great laughs and is entertaining in itself.
She writes, in the early 1970s, about women’s liberation, feminism, with an immediacy and sense of… sort of manifest destiny, “when we are liberated,” which I admit is somewhat disconcerting for me , born in 1975, to see a writer I am entertained by now, for her jokes about aging and cosmetic procedures. I am entertained by her because she seems to capture the mainstream essence of a kind of cultured, urban, vaguely preppy, liberal life– and with it a kind of smirky, breezy, in-the-thick-of-it laugh at divorce, the upscaling and designing and gourmeting of every aspect of upper-middle class life in the last thirty-odd years.
But I wonder, then, was feminism, this in-your-face feminism, that kind of social norm deconstruction, mainstream in 1973? Apparently, yes. So then I ask, how did those same women become, by the mid to late 1980s, characters in When Harry Met Sally? When I watch that movie I do see the remains of the women described in these early columns, but I don’t understand how the change happened.
I wonder what kind of conclusions people will draw about my generation in thirty years. We were grunge, could-care-less about the world going to hell, Generation X that refused to be identified or pinned down to anything. Have we been? Are we now seen by the younger generation as seriously preppy, conservative, let’s reclaim the heyday of idealized American culture? Do they? Have we?
But back to the point: I do see one thing clearly: feminism now seems to ring a bit hollow. It seems like it has become associated with radical lesbians, bitter aging women on the one hand, and women who spent their youth burning bras and fighting equality only to get married and suddenly seem happier than ever, if for a time. Did these women just finally meet the perfect man (an anti-feminist thought)? Were they lonely? Or did they achieve enough “liberation” in the workforce, through the sexual revolution, and with the new casual society that they became comfortable?
It seems that many women do have choices about their life path today: married or single, mothers or not, and if a mother, stay home or career. And that makes the oddity, the huge amount of anger and resentment women have about and towards other women who’ve made a different choice. Wasn’t that the idea? To make the various choices available? To liberate women from the required drudgeries of housework and birth? Yet still leave the choice of motherhood and domesticity open to women?
Economics does still influence these decisions for many women. Surely it impacts some men as well, though I suppose not as dramatically.
Have we, the mainstream, just continued to marginalize feminism because it upsets conventional ideas that reassure us? Do we then punish these women for making traditional choices some of the time, while still thinking the ones who stay radically feminized as somehow too masculine?
From what I see, and that is of course a warped view (33 year old, gay white male, middle class), straight men have evolved since 1973. They seem to accept that they will be part of, perhaps not equally part of, but part of doing domestic duty. And parental duty. And of course most straight, educated men I know now actually want an educated career woman as a partner. They don’t seem to want a dependent woman, clingy and intellectually undeveloped. But of course they do have to somehow keep the masculine edge. Is that what gyms and sculpted muscles are all about? And the rise of men’s grooming as a bigger industry?
These men seem to feel themselves even more progressive than they are. You can still catch many of them, in telling quick moments, taking emotional dominance over their “equal” partners. They can still get as testy and irritable with women as my father’s generation.
In this election season we are all thinking and talking about things like race, gender and class. I think going back a generation and reading the views that Nora Ephron shares here is healthy for us. Not that it answers questions.
