Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women - Couverture souple

PROLOGUE
 
Statistics, and a Game of Tennis
 
WHEN I began to gather material for this book, it was to be about the problem of women and depression. The book that I have written is, however, simply a book about women.
 
This happened, I suppose, because the sorts of issues and concerns that kept cropping up in the intensive interviewing that I was doing—with women of differing ages, who were anywhere from mildly to very seriously depressed—were not discernibly different from the sorts of issues, concerns, and difficulties that preoccupy women in general.
 
The problems, as they were articulated time after time, had to do with power and dependency, love and hate; with the need to be cared for and the need to care for and to nurture others. They had to do with marriage and disappointment in marriage; with childbirth and menopause; with trust and betrayal; with moods, the menstrual cycle, widowhood, and loneliness; and with the difficulties associated with the handling of angry and aggressive feelings. They had to do, most crucially, with the search for security within the context of a set of vitally significant relationships.
 
Again and again, in the course of these interviews, the conversations seemed to return to a couple of underlying, interrelated leitmotifs, or life themes. One concerned the woman’s struggle to liberate her self (or certain aspects of her self) from its thralldom to magical figures from the past—to liberate the adult person from the shackles of her childhood. The other recurring theme involved the demanding and sometimes daunting effort to develop an independent and autonomous sense of self: by which I mean, speaking broadly, that inner confidence that one will be able to survive on one’s own emotional resources, should it become necessary to do so. (It will be seen in the pages that follow how agonizingly critical an issue this can be.)
 
These matters are not, obviously, the concerns and preoccupations of depressed women only. They are the issues, considerations and concerns of most women—and the powerful discussions that I was engaged in, throughout this time, were certainly evoking resonances and recognitions in me. During the same period, which stretched out to become several years, I was also consulting with biologists and psychologists, psychiatrists and psychiatric researchers, anthropologists, gynecologists, and others. I was reading in the rich psychiatric literature on the subject of depression; and reading about female psychological and biological development as well.
 
Eventually I could really see—comprehend—what I was seeing, hearing, reading. I began to recognize that there are certain psychological tasks to be negotiated, throughout the course of female adulthood; and that a woman’s failure to deal with one of these periodic challenges, when it arises, can impede her seriously when it comes to meeting the subsequent set of life demands. I began to discern the kinds of problematic businesses that must be transacted and transcended, during the course of a woman’s lifetime—and what it was that brought satisfaction, and what sorts of things could bring about a sense of meaninglessness, of self-disgust and despair. These matters became the subject of my book.
 
Concerning Loss
 
My research on this manuscript was begun, undoubtedly, at the moment when I first encountered those bizarre statistics on women and depression. I came across them by chance—I was actually doing some background work for an article on manic-depressive disturbance—and my initial reaction was one of wry disbelief. The figures seemed strange—strange almost to the point of absurdity. If they were accurate, though, the evidence was clear and overwhelming: women, from adolescence onward—and throughout every subsequent phase of the life cycle—are far more vulnerable to depression than are men.
 
Was it true? Or was there some hidden kink or bias in these peculiar statistics?
 
The same results or findings—more depressed females than males—turned up, I then found, in every study, carried out anywhere and everywhere. More women were in treatment for depression. It was so, in every institution—inpatient and outpatient—across the country. It was true in state and county facilities. It was the case in community mental health centers. It was simply true, across the board. And, when the figures were adjusted for age, or phase of life, or social class and economic circumstances (in other words, any which way) the outcome was still the same.
 
It cut across all other variables and was a constant factor. For every male diagnosed as suffering from depression, the head count was anywhere from two to six times as many females. The figures did show variation, depending on who had run the study, and in which particular geographical location, and what the criteria for “being depressed” actually had been. But the numbers of men who were depressed, and the numbers of women who were depressed, were simply never equal.
 
What did this consistent disparity—these sexually lopsided statistics—say, or mean? Were they considered true findings?
 
I called the late Professor Marcia Guttentag, who was then (in the spring of 1974) directing the Harvard Project on Women and Mental Health. She said that the figures represented the reality, and that depression was not only widespread among the American female population; it was present to a degree that she would call “epidemic.”
 
The figures that she and her colleagues were analyzing, moreover, indicated that the rates of depression among women hadn’t peaked or stabilized; they were rising. “Not only is there that excess of treated depressions,” she observed, “but there are also vast numbers of women who are depressed for various reasons—and who have many of the clear-cut symptoms of depression—but who are walking around, not realizing they ‘have’ anything, and therefore not seeking, or getting, any treatment.”
 
I hung up the telephone feeling dissatisfied, for she’d had no ready explanations to offer, nothing to say in answer to the question of “Why?” Why, after all, should one sex, the female one, be more prone to develop a depressive disorder than was the male? It really made no sense. It seemed, in a way, as odd as the idea of one sex getting flu, or measles, or appendicitis—or some other illness—far more frequently than the other. The only thing by way of a clue that Marcia Guttentag had had to offer (and it was mentioned almost as an aside toward the close of our conversation) came from an intriguing content-analysis that she and her co-workers were then carrying out.
 
They were sifting through materials in popular magazines being published for primarily male and primarily female markets, and looking for underlying themes. The idea was to search out—and to spell out—consistent differences in stories and articles directed toward men and toward women. And the differences they’d found, said Professor Guttentag, had been absolutely striking.
 
In the fiction and essays directed toward the male market, the material tended to concern adventure, the overcoming of obstacles; the preoccupations were with mastery and with triumph. While women characters did appear in much of what was being written for men, women were there as objects of fantasy.
 
The magazines being written for women had a very different orientation. The clear preoccupation, in these materials, was with the problem of Loss. While many women’s articles and women’s stories did have to do with relating to others emotionally and with pleasing others—“especially,” said Guttentag ironically, “with pleasing men”—the theme of Losses, and how to handle losses, was omnipresent. It was simply everywhere, running through most of the fiction and the non-fiction being published for the women’s market. Her analysis of these female-oriented materials revealed what Marcia Guttentag described as “huge concern” about disruption, or the threat of disruption of crucial emotional bonds.
 
The stories and articles mirrored concerns about other kinds of losses as well—loss of attractiveness, loss of effectiveness. But the melody running through all of the very disparate sorts of writing for women, and played upon in seemingly endless variation, was the deadly seriousness of such losses, the difficulties encountered in trying to overcome them....
 
Similar themes were found nowhere in the material being written for men.
 
Did she, I asked, link that worry or sensitivity about losses to the enhanced vulnerability to depression among women? Guttentag acknowledged that she herself didn’t know what to think. She was put off and perplexed by those statistics on women and depression; but she was convinced that the findings were accurate (see Appendix II: “Do Numbers Lie?” for a run-down of the many efforts to explain away those problematic figures). She was, she added, still in the middle of that magazine-content-analysis.
 
I was invited to come and talk with her in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to meet with some of the other mental-health statisticians working on her project. She sounded uncertain. I myself might have let the whole matter drop there—as an unexplainable curiosity—if my friend Barbara hadn’t stood me up, several days later, for a game of tennis.
 
Barbara and I are, among other things, both Yale faculty wives. We’re both also tennis duffers, in the most extreme sense of that word. We used to play a weekly game that was punctuated with elaborate apologies; it was the funniest, most terrible game imaginable. We were so bad, in fact, that we’d had to find a tennis court (it was close by a newly-built housing project) that no one ever went to and which was, perhaps because it was still undiscovered, very rarely used. There we used to play out our preposterous and yet infinitely satisfying tennis game unseen.
 
The ball went everywhere. We ran all over our court, and the next court—and we claimed that our game was actually deteriorating as a result of the acquisition of so many newly acquired bad habits!
 
We were ridiculous, but we laughed a lot, and indisputably got a good deal of exercise. Thus, I wasn’t prepared for it, and was hurt, when Barbara started arriving late, and with the flimsiest of excuses. One week she said she’d almost forgotten entirely—an apology that I found annihilating. I was angry even before arriving for our next week’s appointment—and that time she didn’t show up at all. I sat there fuming on that empty court for almost an hour.
 

“An extraordinary panorama of women’s lives today.”—The New York Times Book Review

In detailed, revealing portraits of women from their teens through their sixties, Maggie Scarf explores the core experiences of women’s lives and discovers what can happen when the days and years scurry by, leaving unfinished the tasks that transform us from child to girl to woman.

Praise for Unfinished Business

“Real-life problems are thoughtfully and sympathetically analyzed in Unfinished Business. . . . Love and loss, deprivation and fulfillment, the pangs of growing up and, worse, the plight of those who never do—these are Scarf’s subjects, and she gives them the attention and respect rightly due such integral threads in the fabric of our lives.”—Cosmopolitan

“No woman or man will be untouhed by Maggie Scarf’s brilliant research. There is a gift for all of us in these pages—that freeing, exhilarating emotion: thank God I read this book—I thought I was the only one.”—Nancy Friday