LITERARY WORLD · ESSAY
The Impertinence of a Woman’s Desire
Nancy Friday asked women what they imagined when nobody was listening. Their answers made a bestseller, offended censors and divided feminists. The most enduring scandal was that women had been considered such unreliable witnesses to their own pleasure.
In June 1973, a woman might have opened Cosmopolitan and learnt from a psychologist that women scarcely had sexual fantasies. She might then have gone to a bookshop and found Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, published that same month, and discovered that other women had been having the very thoughts she had just been assured were beyond their capacity. Friday later recalled the coincidence with evident relish. It had taken her years of advertisements, interviews and correspondence to collect what a man with the proper credentials could dismiss in a few paragraphs. The disparity was worth a book in itself.
The sexual revolution liked to think of itself as a revolt against hypocrisy. Yet many of its emancipated men had definite ideas about how a free woman ought to desire. They could welcome a mistress more readily than a wife with a private imagination. Some editors, Friday recalled, were delighted by the prospect of publishing women’s fantasies and appalled when they read the material she sent. What had they expected? Perhaps agreeable obscenities, with men at the centre of them and a flattering conclusion about masculine prowess. They had asked to see what women imagined and found, among other things, how little they could govern it.
A woman who knew the price of being looked at
Nancy Colbert Friday was born in Pittsburgh in 1933 and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. Her parents divorced when she was young. She would later connect the absence of her father to her appetite for the loving attention of men. It was an interpretation of her own life, offered with a frankness that might embarrass a biographer more than it embarrassed her. There was vanity in the admission, and also good sense. A woman can make a career of challenging male authority and still feel the pleasure of being admired by a man. Friday knew how much trouble could come from asking either of those truths to excuse the other.
She graduated from Wellesley in 1955 and worked as a reporter in Puerto Rico, where the publisher Michael Butler took notice of her work and hired her to edit a travel magazine. She went on to magazine journalism and public relations, working in New York and Europe. In 1967 she married Bill Manville, a novelist and Village Voice columnist. She began work on My Secret Garden while they were living in Europe. The marriage ended in divorce, as did her later marriage to Norman Pearlstine, whom she married in 1988 while he was managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. She had no children. In one interview she speculated that, had she become a mother, a more circumspect version of herself might have governed what she could bring herself to write.
That last admission deserves a pause. Friday understood that a woman might govern her speech according to who would have to hear it. A daughter has parents who can be wounded, a mother has children who can be embarrassed, a wife has a husband who may interpret an idea as an accusation. The restraint involved can be affectionate and sensible. It can also become so habitual that a woman scarcely knows what she would say in the absence of an audience. Friday’s books begin where that uncertainty becomes interesting. She was prepared to ask what a woman had thought before she had tidied the thought for company.
What was so damnable about the garden?
The women who answered Friday’s appeals were able to set down thoughts they might have found impossible to utter across a dinner table. Some wrote about fantasies that gave them initiative. Others imagined giving it up. Some ventured into scenarios involving coercion, among the most disturbing material in the collection. Here precision matters. A person may privately imagine a scene she would fear and reject in life. A fantasy gives no one permission to enact it. Even telling a lover about it confers no such permission. Consent belongs to the people present and to what they freely agree to do.
The scandal lay partly in the kind of witness Friday had invited. Women had supplied ample material for literature as beloveds, adulteresses, temptresses and fallen creatures. They had written frankly about desire before Friday. Her particular offence was to gather the words of ordinary women in sufficient number that a reader could hear them disagree. There was no single feminine disposition to praise, deplore or diagnose. One woman’s delicious reverie could be another woman’s absurdity. There was something democratically indecent in that arrangement. Nobody had been given the authority to declare which contributor was the authentic woman.
The book was historically banned in Ireland for its sexual content. In October 2004, Malaysia gazetted a prohibition on a Pocket Books edition under its publications law. The record concerns specific acts of censorship, and they deserve to be named as such. A bookseller can decline to stock a book, a critic can call it trash and a reader can fling it into the grate. The state, when it prohibits a book, presumes to make that choice for the reader. In Friday’s case the object of the prohibition was a volume whose offending material had arrived, in considerable part, through the post.
The argument with feminists
Friday had formidable critics among women. Ms. magazine challenged her feminist credentials. There was a real question underneath the acrimony. A woman might gain the language to describe her pleasures and still lack the money to leave a marriage, the standing to be believed when she reported violence, or the freedom to shut a door and be left in peace. There was also a question about publishing itself. Who benefited when a commercial house put women’s intimate confessions on sale? The contributors had furnished the material. The editor arranged it. The publisher could put the most provocative promise on the cover. Those interests could coincide, and they could diverge sharply.
Friday could be too quick to hear prudery in criticism. A woman might object to the way a fantasy is presented while defending the freedom to have it. She might dislike the book’s appetite for sensational material without wishing to put a constable in the bookshop. The stronger defence of Friday allows those objections their full weight. The political value of the book lies partly in the arguments women could have over it, with as much right to dislike it as to find themselves in its pages.
Friday’s evidence, too, had limits. An advertisement seeking intimate disclosures reaches people willing to answer that advertisement. It will tell us little about the woman who never saw it, the woman who laughed and passed on, or the woman who composed a letter and burnt it. Friday selected and organised the material. She was an editor with a point of view, and at times a reader may wish she had intervened less. The collection established something important without establishing a general rule. The voices existed. They contradicted an authoritative fiction. What proportion of women thought or felt in any particular way was a different question.
From the bedroom to the family parlour
In Forbidden Flowers in 1975, Friday gave a second gathering of contributors room to speak. Two years later, in My Mother/My Self, she pursued an earlier and often more delicate intimacy. A daughter first encounters many of the rules of womanhood in the person of a woman she loves. She learns what merits praise, what provokes embarrassment and what must be concealed if the household is to remain comfortable. Her mother may have inherited those rules at great cost. She may pass them on believing that she is teaching her daughter how to get through the world unharmed. Friday understood that a rule can be enforced by affection and lose none of its force.
Men in Love took up men’s sexual fantasies. Jealousy pursued the distress of wanting another person’s love and discovering how little one can guarantee it. In Women on Top, published in 1991, Friday returned to women’s fantasies with a generational question. What might change in the imagination when women’s ordinary lives began to change? Later came The Power of Beauty, subsequently issued as Our Looks, Our Lives, and Beyond My Control. The books vary in persuasiveness. What holds them together is her interest in what happens when people need something from one another and are ashamed of the extent of the need.
“We women fantasize just like men, and the images are not always pretty,” Friday wrote in Women on Top. There is much to like in that last word. The trade in prettiness had kept an extraordinary number of people employed, from the editors of women’s magazines to the men who advised their wives how to behave. A pretty woman might be thought entitled to a pretty interior life, full of tender feelings and creditable intentions. Friday allowed her contributors the less presentable inventory. A woman could be funny, selfish, frightened, impatient, sentimental and ravenous in the course of an afternoon. There was no obligation to submit a harmonious account by evening.
The right to close the door
The word secret can suggest a thing concealed through shame. It may also describe a thing kept because it belongs to somebody. A woman can discover the difference when a man asks her to confess what she has never promised to tell him. He may be a good man and she may love him. His curiosity may even flatter her. She is still at liberty to judge what the telling would give them and what it might take from her. A confidence freely offered can make two people closer. Demand it as proof of love and the same words, however intimate, will tell you more about the terms of the demand than about the woman who answers.
Friday died at her Manhattan home on 5 November 2017, aged eighty-four, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Barnard College holds her papers, including hundreds of letters sent by readers and contributors. The archive protects identifying information about the people who wrote to her. There is a sound principle in that practice. A woman may wish her words to survive and still reserve the right to decide who knows that they are hers. The letters have historical value precisely because their writers were people with jobs, relations and private lives, rather than anonymous specimens put on earth for the education of a future reader.
A woman today may encounter a curious reversal of the old prescription. She is encouraged to be adventurous, to have a repertoire of desires, to announce her preferences with confidence and to regard any hesitation as a defect she ought to correct. The old examiner has learnt a few new words. He still expects to mark the paper. Friday’s work can be read against that demand as readily as against the old demand for innocence. Freedom includes the right to want a great deal, to want very little, to change one’s mind, to disappoint a lover and to keep an excellent secret.
There are women who have taken years to say, in an ordinary voice, what gives them pleasure. Others have taken just as long to say they would prefer to stop. Either sentence may alter the terms of a marriage. Either may be met with an injured expression by someone who had grown comfortable with the previous arrangement. Friday’s best readers will recognise the importance of allowing both sentences to be finished. The woman speaking is neither a theory nor a specimen. She has a life to get on with. A lover can ask to share it. He can bear to be told where his share ends.
LITERARY WORLD · BOOK REVIEW
My Secret Garden and the Trouble with Believing Women
The most unnerving thing about My Secret Garden is its ordinary means of production. Nancy Friday placed advertisements, asked questions and waited for the post. The replies supplied a book that many people would have preferred to believe she had invented. In her later account of the reception, Friday recalled being accused of making up the fantasies. The accusation is worth considering. An invented chorus of women would have been an impertinence on the part of one writer. Real women saying these things presented a difficulty of another order. A reader might have to believe them.
As a work of literature, the book depends on the unevenness of its voices. Friday can be brisk, interpretive and eager to explain. The contributors are under fewer obligations. They can tell a story whose details strike them as perfectly reasonable and which another reader finds astonishing. Their accounts vary in tone as much as in subject. The shifts give the collection its energy. In a novel, one might admire the author’s range. Here the range belongs to people who supplied the raw material, and some of the pleasure of reading consists in feeling them slip the editor’s grasp.
The title is more artful than it first appears. A secret garden promises a pretty enclosure. The phrase can conjure a respectable sort of feminine privacy, furnished with the appropriate flowers. Friday’s material keeps spoiling the picture. Desire may be tender and it may be ridiculous. It may make much of a stranger and very little of the person whose opinion usually matters. In imagination, the timid can be imperious and the habitually competent can set down their burdens. The title retains a certain daintiness while the contents steadily deprive it of any power to reassure.
There are places where the reader may wish Friday had trusted the material more. Her effort to identify motives can leave a contributor sounding tidier than she did in her own telling. An editor can make an account legible and, in the process, make it too legible. And the book’s publicity can encourage a reader to look chiefly for the most sensational passages, skipping the more delicate business of how shame enters the story a woman tells about herself. A hurried reader will find plenty to point at. A patient reader will have the better book.
The fantasies involving coercion demand particular care. Their presence in the collection has furnished an opportunity for a familiar piece of male vanity, the claim that a woman’s actual refusal conceals a wish to be overruled. That conclusion requires ignoring the circumstances that make a fantasy possible in the first place. In private imagination, a person can stop, alter the scene or abandon it without another person’s permission. In life, the difference between willing participation and harm depends on what people actually agree to. A reader who comes away with a licence to disregard someone’s refusal has learnt a great deal about his own wishes and remarkably little about hers.
Friday’s collection also bears the marks of its method. It cannot say how common a fantasy is, or how the accounts would have differed among women with no inclination to answer an advertisement. That weakness is decisive if the book is read as a representative survey. As a collection of intimate testimony it has a different power. One letter may be enough to change what a reader believes possible. A second can contradict it. The distinction makes the book more interesting to read, since it leaves the reader free to be startled by one woman without turning her into an explanation of half the species.
What lasts is the act of attention. Friday could be overbearing about what she had heard, but she went to the trouble of hearing it. A woman who had never dared describe a fantasy might read the book and decide she had no wish to describe one now. She could still find herself altered by the encounter. She had seen what happened when other women put the words down and the world, after a considerable show of indignation, went on. There are worse services a book can render than to let a reader return to her private life with a little less fear of what she will find there.