Word: kates
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is a book about what Doris Lessing, as always with a straight face, describes as "a pretty, healthy, serviceable woman." Her name is Kate Brown. She is upper-middle-class English. Unlike most Lessing women, who are versions of Lessing herself, she is no intellectual. She is bright, though, and at 45 has long since acquired at some pain those caring virtues necessary to bring up a family: "Patience, self-control, self-abnegation, selfdiscipline, chastity, adaptability to others...
This is also a book about beginning to grow old. As death approaches, so does the need to satisfy a feeling, "perhaps the deepest one we have," Kate reflec'ts, "that what matters most is that we learn through living." None of the received ideas she can reach down off the rack, along with those becoming dresses from a boutique called Jolie Madame, are much consolation: "Marriage is a compromise." "A lot of time, a lot of pain, went into learning very little." The possible reactions to much of what is going on in the world today...
What would normally be in store for Kate? Literarily, she might in this day and age wind up embalmed as the heroine of a Jean Kerr comedy, or a case history for Women's Lib (Anatomy is not Destiny, etc.). In life, Doris Lessing notes, Kate's future would be a slow, desperate struggle against the signs of decay-"tinting her hair, keeping her weight down, following the fashions carefully so that she would be smart but not mutton dressed as lamb...
Cool, cool Byzantia, Mrs. Weldon decides, "is a destroyer" in a generation created to destroy forever a certain sort of female image. A bit melodramatic, even scifi, perhaps. Yet beside Fay Weldon, all the Germaine Greers, all the Kate Milletts, all the non-fictionists of Women's Liberation pale into abstract theory...
...could identify, no matter what their politics. There is a bitter, continuously frustrated campaigner against the war (Kathleen Nolan), a vociferous, tirelessly anti-Communist booster of the military effort (Katherine Justice), and a neutral, who nevertheless gets a little queasy when shown some scenes of maimed North Vietnamese children (Kate Jackson). The movie is painstak∎∎ing in its refusal to take any kind of stand at all, other than a rather strong suggestion that war plays hob with hearth and home...