Read Online Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong - Free Book Online

go back, back, back in time. I try to transcend the family myths and the communal screen memories and transport myself to a time I know chiefly through Henry Miller’s life—not my parents’ life—the Jazz Age, the Crash, the speakeasies, rolled stockings, and bootleg gin: 1929.
    My mother was in art school at the National Academy of Design. A brunette with bobbed hair and big brown eyes and a fast mouth, she was the best draftswoman and painter in her class and she had every reason to win the top prizes—including the big traveling fellowship—the Prix de Rome. “Watch out for that Mirsky girl,” her art teacher used to say to the guys: “She’ll beat you all.”
    And my mother felt teased and tantalized by this because she knew (yet did not know) that her sex precluded her from ever being sent to Rome. When she won the bronze medal and was told—quite frankly (no one was ashamed to be sexist then)—that she hadn’t won the Prix de Rome because, as a woman, she was expected to marry, bear children, and waste her gifts, she was enraged. That rage has powered my life—and also, in many ways, impeded it.
    â€œI expected the world to beat a path to my door,” she always says. “But the world never does that. You have to make them come.”
    Feminism was hot in my mother’s time too. The twenties were a time of hope for women’s rights. But those rights were never codified into law. And without law, feminism never sticks. My mother blamed herself for “her failures.” She never thought to blame history. And I never wanted to be as consumed with anger as she was. I wanted the power of sunlight, not the power of night. I wanted abundance, not scarcity; love, not fear. Sometimes I think my mother made my father quit show business so he would have to make the same renunciation she had made. If children were to hobble her, they should also hobble him. She would not accept the “womanly” role of enabler. She would not let him be an artist if she could not let herself be one. So the mother-daughter dynamic is a subject I can’t avoid if I am to tell “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” My mother’s frustrations powered both my feminism and my writing. But much of the power came out of my anger and my competition: my desire to outdo her, my hatred of her capitulation to her femaleness, my desire to be different because I feared I was much too much like her.
    Womanhood was a trap. If I was too much like her, I’d be trapped as she was. But if I rejected her example, I’d be a traitor to her love. I felt a fraud no matter which way I turned. I had to find a way to be like her and unlike her at the same time. 1 had to find a way to be both a girl and a boy.
    In this I may be most typical of my whiplash generation. The models of motherhood we had did not serve us in the lives we led. Our mothers stayed home, but we hit the road. We were often the first female members of our families to stay in hotel rooms alone, to raise children alone, to face tax problems alone, to stare at the glass ceiling alone and wonder how to crash through. And we were guilty, and therefore ambivalent about our lives, because many of our mothers never got even that far.
    When I talk to the members of my college class, the theme that comes up again and again is guilt toward our mothers.
    â€œWe are the sandwich generation,” one member of my Barnard class said at a little pre-reunion dinner we had to celebrate our fiftieth birthdays. “Our generation suffered because our mothers had nothing to look forward to at fifty,” said another. “We held ourselves back so as not to lose our mothers’ love,” said another. “Mixed messages,” we all agreed. Mixed messages about competing and not competing, about making money and not making money, about assertiveness and subordination. These are the earmarks of the