Daughters of Eve: The Book That Taught Me to Hate Men

The calendar placed the first day of fall on the 23rd of September, and on the afternoon of Friday, the 22nd, Ruth Grange walked slowly down Locust Street, her schoolbooks gripped by one hand, a brown paper sack by the other.

As I hit the mid-point of my third decade, I'm finally willing to admit that no small portion of my righteous indignation at the crimes of malekind stems not from things I've actually experienced, but from repeated, late-night readings of Daughters of Eve [2]. Certainly the novel itself engenders enough rage at the patriarchy to fuel nationwide bra-burnings. In a rare supernatural-free narrative (OK, there's one psychic character), Daughters of Eve, on the surface, is the story of Irene Stark, dark-browed, dark-hearted feminist faculty advisor, who leads her 10 unenlightened, high-school-aged charges into a twisted version of women's liberation. But despite Duncan's admirable efforts at parity, what emerges is only an unforgettable portrait of rank injustice.

We find the pre-lib girls ensconced in Modesta, Calif.—a town whose name itself denotes placid submission—at the beginning of the school year, in the act of inducting three new sisters into the Daughters of Eve sorority. There are, as I've said, 10 of them, but let's keep our eyes on the big hitters: Bambi Ellis, an icy (is there any other kind?) Homecoming Queen; Ann Whitten, a dreamy artiste; Tammy Carncross, resident Cassandra; Fran Schneider, budding scientist; and the three novitiates: Ruth Grange, household drudge; Laura Snow, a sweet, chubby outcast; and Jane Rheardon, holder of a terrible secret.

Yes, that's seven. Stick with me here! As the book commences, Duncan takes care to establish in excruciating detail the various levels of oppression under which the girls operate. And, although her problems are the most banal, I have always sympathized profoundly with Ruthie Grange, who is forced to babysit and pick up after her three cocky, filth-producing brothers in order that her mother may work a job to feed their college funds:

The boys' cereal bowls from the morning sat out on the table with milk soured in their bottoms, and the egg plates were thick with yellow yolk dried onto them like cement. There was a pool of some identifiable liquid on the linoleum at the base of the refrigerator ...

The sticky intractability also stands as a symbol for Ruthie's own position, where she is trapped like a fly in amber, not even allowed to attend the weekly meetings of Daughters of Eve—that is, until another member pipes up and reminds her that she might as well go on strike and enrage her parents, since she's already effectively grounded.

The other new girls, in ways large and small, are also locked in their positions. Laura Snow, both "cringing" and overweight, is an easy target for a boy who lies to her to use her for sex, while Jane Rheardon is the daughter of a brute who beats his wife for anything—as in, in one of the most terrifying, memorable scenes of wife-beating I've ever read, refusing to sing the secret song all Daughters of Eve are taught:

"That sounds like a winner," Mr. Rheardon said. "Let's hear it."

"Oh, I can't," Ellen Rheardon said ..."It's just that we took an oath. We wouldn't sing the song anywhere except within the sisterhood. It was—sort of—sacred." Ellen gave a short, nervous laugh ...

"But this is almost twenty years later! You're a grown woman, for God's sake, or at least you're supposed to be. You're a married woman whose husband is making a simple request of you, and you sit there and tell him—"

No, Jane cried silently, no, no, no! ...

Jane pressed her hands against the sides of her face to control the twitching. From the room below there came a thud and a high-pitched cry.

A moment later a thin, wavering voice began to sing.

That's a far cry from the sexism of the Grange household, which, besides enslaving Ruthie to devote all her labor, gratis, to her spoiled, obnoxious, messy, ungrateful brothers, is subtle, if no less dictatorial:

"What Ruthie said was true, George; Peter and Niles don't lift a hand to help out. She was right when she said that it isn't fair. It's not fair."

"What's unfair about it?" Mr. Grange asked impatiently. "Pete and Niles are boys. You can expect them to put on aprons and flit around polishing the furniture. I didn't do that when I was a boy, and God help anyone who suggested it."

... "How about some coffee?" her husband said now. His eyes were back upon the newspaper.

"It's on the back of the burner, and the cups are on the drying rack."

"I didn't ask you where it was. I said, how about some?"

KEEP CALM LADIES. But it's the girls growing up in households like these that, in effect, lays the groundwork for Irene Stark—who, as we learn, has arrived in Modesta after being passed over for promotion in favor of a man who assures her it's better in the end, since she's going to need to devote her time to their babies any day now. (Also key to the physically plain Stark's twisted psyche: overhearing her father say, "We'd better get her all the education we can, because God knows, she's never going to find a husband to support her.") While Irene is fond of reciting appalling statistics on female hires, rapes, and domestic exploitation (facts I remember to this day!), her real arsenal is the built-in injustice the girls already experienced, if they'd only open their eyes to it: "You are not like your mothers! ... You don't have to let yourselves be ground under foot as your mothers have been. You can rise--fight back—show the world that you know your own worth!"

When standing up involves refusing to hand over the money they've raised to get the boys' basketball team new warm-up suits when the girls don't even have a soccer team, this is terrific. (By the way, young ladies—have you thanked an older athlete for Title IX today?) Unfortunately, Irene is also fond of such methods as shaving the head of a male malefactor, trashing the science lab, and chopping up the wood-based objects in the principal's office. There is also the matter of Jane eventually bringing down a cast-iron skillet on her father's skull and killing him dead. (Oh, THAT'S why psychic Tammy, at the initiation, saw a candle dripping, as Duncan puts it, "BLOOD!")

But, however you shake it, Irene Stark is, like her name, a character far less scary than the world around her. (OK, I admit the part where she threatens to bean poor old Tammy Carncross's dad with a glass bottle in the face for keeping Fran—justifiably, as it happens—out of the state science competition is a little rattling.) But with her bombastic pronouncements and gloomy indictments, she's almost a parody of a revolutionary—and of a monster.

What Duncan has to say about the ways in which the Daughters of Eve are oppressed is far more interesting. Mr. Rheardon beating his wife is (one would hope) clear-cut abuse. Also easy to object to is the sly way Peter deflects Laura's attempts to make their relationship public. ("Don't push me, Laura. I don't like being nagged at, OK ... there are better ways to get a guy to do things than by nagging at him. A sweet, a loving girl can get just about anything she wants as long as she doesn't keep pushing and getting a guy irritated." Uh huh.) But what about paternalism dressed up as love? Arguing with her husband again about letting Ruth join the group, Mrs. Grange thinks:

Her husband's voice had settled into that solid, reasonable tone that she knew so well and liked so little. It made her feel diminished somehow, childish, as though nothing she said was of any real value, yet at the same time it contained affection. There had never been a moment in the duration of their marriage that she had doubted George's love for her, and that, in a way, made everything harder.

Being held down is hard—but being held down in the name of love is harder. In the case of Ann Whitten, the budding artist whose scholarship to art school, arranged by Irene, gets thrown off track by a (surprise!) pregnancy, Duncan takes the gray area even further. Her fiancé is disappointed by the idea of putting off the marriage, but he makes a solid effort at being happy about it. ("I'm trying. That's the best I can do. I'm trying.") Her father, noticing she's throwing up every morning, takes things a step further:

"There's a friend who thinks I ought to have an abortion."

She had expected a violent reaction, but she did not receive one.

"That's one answer, I suppose," her father said. "I hear they do them real easy and safe nowadays right in the hospital."

"Do you think it would be wrong?"

"What I think doesn't matter," Mr. Whitten said. "It doesn't matter what your mother thinks either, or what this friend of yours thinks. I don't know about Dave. I guess what he thinks ought to matter some, but then again, maybe it shouldn't. It all comes down to you. You've got to make a decision you can live with and once you've done this, you've got to accept it and go on from there."

"It's not fair," Ann said miserably ...

"Of course, it's not fair," her father said. "Why should it be? Whoever said life is fair was a moron."

As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Whitten is the true feminist in the novel. And he's made a good point. As Duncan finally boils down the problem, it's not an issue of whether things are fair—it's whether they are just. Wife-beating, sport-fucking, attempted-raping, labor-stealing: unjust. Getting pregnant by accident: them's just the breaks. It's not that men need to be punished. (I mean, they do, but whatever.) It's that no one should have to subsume one's life for another—unpaid, unthanked, and abused—merely because a set of cocky, entitled people (men! men! men!) prefer it that way.

Daughters of Eve may indict extreme feminism—but it's also as grim a tally as I've ever seen of a world without it. So what if Irene isn't actually a scary warning to would-be revolutionaries, but simply an avatar for the rage engendered when half the people get to leave cereal bowls on the table and the other half have to clean them up? "How could anyone know for sure what went on in all the neat white houses that lined the streets of a pleasant little town like Modesta?" Jane asks, hearing her mother being beaten downstairs. Quite a range of things, as it happens. But Irene has a point. If anyone's leaving half-filled bowls of cereal on the breakfast table for someone else to clean up, they better watch out.

This is an excerpt from Lizzie Skurnick [3]'s book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading [4], out today.