To mark the sixth anniversary of Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination, we are reproducing some of the articles she wrote for The Sunday Times of Malta.
This article appeared in the May 19, 1991 edition.
Does a woman have the right to life, or is she only here on sufferance?
I left the first session of the Nationalist Party’s policy conference, Il-Mara fis-Socjeta, with much to mull over. Much of this mulling had little to do with theme of the conference, but with the reasons why change is so slow in this country.
People like status quo, reasoning perhaps that the devil you know better than the devil you don’t.
This is why we keep hearing the same things over and over again, using words like a placebo. There is little point in hearing that women should form a larger part of the gainfully employed, that there should be day care centres for children under three, that women have minds and that therefore they should use them.
What is all this rubbish?
We can moan and groan forever about the need for daycare centres, and we may even eventually get them. We have all conveniently overlooked the fact that a five-year-old child must go to school and that school hours do not necessarily coincide with working hours.
This means that the only women who get to work are those with kind and helpful mothers of their own, those with a profession they can exercise at will, and those who work from home or part-time.
The real question is not whether women have a right to work – which to me is like questioning the wrongs of apartheid – but whether women know what they’re doing when they have children.
First they get pregnant, then they think about the problems of juggling work and motherhood, which is rather an irresponsible approach.
Choices, as with everything else in a life that constantly slams doors in our faces while opening others, must be made.
The earth-mother approach (“Let them come, let them come, they are all welcome!”) is very well for women who like pottering around the kitchen making jam and bread and stew, and spending several consecutive years in the same four maternity dresses, tied with a floppy bow under their chins like a fat Eastern gift.
It is all right if they don’t mind varicose veins, a constant smell of sick, and the expenditure of a large percentage of the house-keeping money on disposable nappies.
It is all right, that is, until the day they look into the bathroom mirror and say cruelly to themselves: “You are a moron.” This is where hysteria sets in leading either to change or a nervous breakdown, depending on one’s inclinations.
The earth-mother approach is not at all acceptable for women who are not willing to have boiled egg vomited over them while they are sailing out of the front door, ten minutes late for a work appointment. You cannot produce three or four children, whatever sort of emancipated husband you may have, or however advanced the laws of the country may be, and expect to carry on as normal. Children spell upheaval, quite simply because they cannot be controlled.
It is not unknown for all the children in one family to go down with whooping cough – not simultaneously, but consecutively – thereby reducing their parents to ten minutes’ sleep every night for five months, and impaired mental faculties and severely depleted patience.
It really is not possible to have it all, to be an earth-mother and somebody else’s employee for eight hours a day. All the day care centres in the world will not change that simple fact. Day care centres are for those women with manageable families of one child, or two children with four years between them.
Women who want to do any sort of credible work must plan their families. If they don’t they will wind up enjoying neither job nor motherhood, and doing neither to the best of their ability.
We can say that parental roles are defunct, too. The fact remains that they are not. We talk about women having the right to work, but nobody ever says that men have the right to stay at home, which is what equality comes down to after all. This is because the majority of men are not brimming with eagerness to swap the jobs they complain are so tiring, with the brain erosion of waking up in the morning, going to buy the vegetables, coming home, cleaning and cooking a meal.
Then the men who do decide to stay at home are somehow diminished in the eyes of society, and stoned by the women, who call them shirkers sponging off their poor overworked, varicose-veined wives.
We don’t hear much about this other side of the argument, too, because plenty of women would leap out of their skins if their husbands (the ones who hand over the cash that pays for the cleaning woman, the clothes and the fripperies) came home one night and suddenly declared that they were giving up their jobs because they had every right to stay at home.
What is horribly wrong in these discussions about women, women and women is all this categorizing by sex instead of ability, and all this over-emphasis on what is natural and unnatural. I raise two fingers at natural, except where food is concerned, because it is nature itself that works against women. By giving them both a womb and a mind, and sometimes even a personality, she crippled them for life.
Nature must of necessity be outwitted: if she were not, we would all be copulating in the streets, and producing babies like hamsters and rabbits. Even calling the rhythm and billings methods of birth control “natural” is laughable, because they are methods of tricking nature, and involve enormous self-control where natural sexual impulses are concerned.
All too often, we say “natural” when what we really mean is “moral”, and insist on confusing the two and confusing ourselves in the process. Instinctive human activities are by their very definition natural. Whether they are moral, or even acceptable, is another matter.
Besides, there are many married women who are not mothers of young children, who are young enough to start work and who do not do so. Childcare is only the tip of an enormous problem, a problem which is not seen as such.
The real problem is cultural and educational: the barefoot-and-pregnant syndrome, the vegetable truck mentality, the over-excitement about the stock of new clothes at X, when the new clothes at X should only be at background to one’s life and not the foundation on which it is built.
Then there is the spite, jealousy and fear with which women who have shaken off the shackles are regarded she's more like a man … she may have a fancy job but she’ll never get a husband … she’s just a frustrated spinster … of course she looks good, she hasn’t any children... (if she has children and a husband and a job) poor man, I wonder when he last got a good meal … he must be dying to leave her … he’s probably having an affair with his secretary, and I don't blame him … he must be a real wimp, putting up with that sort of woman … she probably walks all over him … I bet she gets up at 5 a.m. to put on her make-up and get the kids ready for school, what a life … What a bitch, she must be a bitch to get where she has … well, she probably sleeps with her boss.
And so on. There are many women who stay at home because they want to, because they have spent many years raising children and now want a rest. The pity is that they define rest as staying put and going soggy at the mental and physical seams.
There is life in between jobs and deterioration, the sort of life that involves taking an interest in the world (enormous, bounded by four streets) around one. Plodding between butcher and front door with a sallow face and a dirty tracksuit must surely be defined as a sin of waste. Unfortunately, Martha and Mary are two of the Biblical figures we prefer to push to the backs of our minds.
We can churn up hot air about women and society for ever, but one thing will not change for now: there will not change for now: there are many women who would like to work, and for those there are few obstacles unless they have children. There are many more who do not want to work, because they think they are happy as they are, and they are probably right in the sense that animals who are fed and housed are happy.
The only difference is that people are not animals, and they require something more than food and a roof over their heads. They need activity, they need fun and they need to have their spirit fed.
If we segregate the sexes, can we expect otherwise?
There is little point in talking about women in society and women in the workforce. We’re dealing with an attitude problem: women to themselves, and men to women. it is pointless to discuss problems to which there is no solution unless men and women live the same lives from birth. As it is, they are separated. They are given segregated schooling, segregated sports training, segregated this, segregated that. In village churches, and in Gozo, men and women even sit on opposite sides of the aisle.
Separation of the sexes is inherent in our culture to an almost ineradicable extent. We have not had the advantages of other countries, where mixed schooling has been a fact of life for generations in Malta, we perceive change as an advancing army tank, and lie down in protest in its path.
Sex is still very dirty, and mixing children at school might lead to all sorts of unnatural practices (when reality proves the opposite). Why? I consider it less dangerous to mix children from the age of five onwards, than to keep them separate until they are 16 and then to fling them, uninitiated, together at Sixth Form, at what is the most dangerous age from a sexual point of view.
When children grow up in an environment in which boys are separated from girls, they grow up thinking that the other sex is separate and different, obviously.
We then expect them to have a perfectly easy-going attitude to each other; this is pretty difficult because, instead of learning that easy-going attitude from birth, they have to start learning it at 16. At 16 it is such a difficult process that it sometimes never does take place.
When children are schooled together, it is personality not gender that becomes the over-riding factor. Gender differentiation is taught by parents and teachers (Ya, ya, stupid girl! Go away, smelly boy). Girls are not born thinking boys are smelly. Boys are not born thinking girls are inferior and ridiculous.
It has been particularly interesting to notice developments in my children’s behaviour. Because they have no sisters, going to school proved a time of great confusion and new grammar. (“I’m going to give this book to Pia. He likes reading. Rebecca wears a skirt, and when he sits on the floor, he gets cold. Emma didn’t eat his sandwich. He put it in the bin and the teacher was cross with him.”)
The real trouble came when the five-year-old came home to regale me with stories of a boy-in-my-class-called-Melanie. No amount of convincing could get him to think otherwise; as far as he was concerned, Melanie had short hair and a track suit, therefore she was a boy.
The boys and girls who never attend a mixed sixth form or university, and who come from families where the offspring are of a single sex, will regard the opposite sex as an untold mystery for the rest of their lives. How does a sheltered boy deal with a girl if he has never had one as a friend?
How does a sheltered girl deal with a boy if boys are those creatures as high up on their pedestal as Nelson is on his column? She lets him wipe the floor with her, because she has grown up thinking that all men are wonderful, not just some, and that it is only women who pick their noses and are fallible.
Single-sex education is one of the greatest contributing factors towards the sexual antagonism in Malta. Some studies have shown that girls perform better in classes without boys. This may be true of the private girls’ schools, which consistently produce a series of very clever, gifted women. The state schools, however, I continue to churn out sewing machinists, shop assistants, and candidates for the more menial jobs.
Private schools for girls have provided this country with most of the women in the professions and in more prominent positions in the working world. I think, however, that this has not so much to do with the lack of competition from boys within the school, but to the fact that nuns are – in a way – feminists. Their pupils are encouraged to work, to study and to succeed.
For obvious reasons, there is no emphasis on marriage being a woman’s natural state, and for other reasons there is none of the “oh-she-can-always-get-a-job-in-a factory” approach. These nuns guide their pupils upwards, and though there are many differences of opinion along the way, they often have reason to be proud of their creations.
Private schools, and those run by religious orders, are almost always single-sex. But where else in the world, in 1991, are state schools segregated? I can’t think of any reason for this differentiation on grounds of sex, except that integration might be too difficult a task to accomplish with all the other problems the schools are now facing.
There will, too, be all the hysterical resistance from parents who don’t want their daughters mixing with boys at school, as though they may somehow get pregnant by reverse osmosis. Yet, this is the real root of the problem. it is a quiet form of apartheid. For all the lip service we pay to the problem, we don’t really want our children to mix, girls and boys together, so that in future years they may perhaps live in some form of harmony.
I find segregated schooling as fundamentally offensive as having separate schools for coloured people and for white people, then throwing them all together at the end and not expecting racial warfare.
Tell me what I want to hear
The speakers at the policy conference were all good, but only one or two dared to say any thing new, and it was not very well received. Which brings me to ask: why do we bother going to discussions if we only tolerate what we want to hear? Why don’t we just stay at home and play a record?
And everything probably floated through the empty mind of the great unwashed (all men all ghastly) at the back of the room, who seemed more concerned with discussing the sexual and mental attributes of each speaker, and who would certainly have been a lot happier if they had taken to the podium in their bra and pants. People like that have lied on a diet of Colpo Grosso for too long, and should have stayed home that evening to watch a tits-and-bums video.
The policy conference was a good initiative and it was thoroughly depressing to see such a low attendance. It speaks volumes about the crass mental and political apathy in which most people live. looking at my guinea-pigs, I am reminded very much of some people’s lives. They go from A to B to C to D following each other in well worry paths. If you remove B, they are thrown into a panic. If you interest E, they get hysterics for a while then they get used to it, and even include E as a destination point in their scurries around the yard.