Joy Davidman

She came at one of the worst possible times. Joy and her husband were almost at the end of a downward spiral. In an attempt to fix their problems, they were trying a new therapy that only aggravated matters. Joy was battling physical illness as well. Phyl confided in the Greshams about her sexual struggles and suicidal thoughts. Years later she would call them a "neurotic threesome."

As someone who had had mental breakdowns and attempted suicide at least twice, Bill sympathized. Emotional entanglements had historically led to other things, especially for a man already prone to having affairs. Nor were alternative lifestyles a foreign concept. Bill had had a significant affair with a bisexual woman.

When Phyl left for England in January of 1951, Joy was too ill to accompany them to the pier. When Bill called to tell her that it was snowing too hard for him to get home right away, Joy assumed the worst. For her, it was the last straw. Both marked the ensuing fight as the end of their relationship. When Joy's cousin visited months later, she found them occupying separate bedrooms.

Upon returning to England, Phyl was living with a woman named 'Sel'. Joy does not seem to have held a potential affair with her husband against her, given the fact that Phyl was unaware of them fighting over her until Bill told her years later. (Joy did not hold a grudge against her cousin for her affair with her husband either. She blamed Bill.)

When Joy visited England in 1952, she sometimes stayed with Phyl and Sel. When Joy returned to England a year later, now in the midst of a divorce, Phyl was still a friend. On at least one occasion, they had lunch with C.S. Lewis. (Lewis' best friend from childhood also had some "unconventional" leanings.)

In one letter, Joy wrote:

Jack had to come to London the 27th to take part in a debate; and we took him to tea at the Piccadilly Hotel beforehand. (His suggestion; my organizing work; my parents' dough.) We had [Phyl and Sel] too; they are having a hard time, but had had us to tea and been very nice...

When she was living in London, Joy often visited the couple and watched their tv. Phyl's son played with her sons.

Phyl continued to struggle with suicidal tendencies. After a short stay in a mental institution she found a therapist who helped. Joy expressed doubts about the Freudian approach, but was encouraged that Phyl was doing better.

Phyl described her relationship with Joy as a dramatic one. She said they disagreed on almost everything and argued constantly, but they remained friends. Indeed, by 1956, Joy was pretty much the only friend she had left. Joy's cancer diagnosis caused an argument ceasefire (in letters, as Phyl had returned to Africa a few months before). Phyl admired Joy's courage in the face of her impending doom. She said it was an honor to have known her.

After Phyl moved back to South Africa she opened a swimming school. Sel moved with her. It's unknown what happened between them beyond that. Her son Robin died prematurely in 1963. This, understandably, caused a relapse. She again struggled with depression.

A book of her poems called A Taste of Salt was eventually published as part of a South African poets collection. Phyl said she liked to let things almost 'bubble up' inside of their own accord, and her poetry does give off an almost "passive author" vibe. At least some of her clashes with Joy were undoubtedly over poetic theory.

At least one academic has tackled the topic of Phyl's work. Much information here comes from that article. In one letter she wrote:

For me the natural world is far more important than the political or religious, or anything, since it encloses us all. If I have a faith at all, it must be more or less the same faith a tree has, & wish I had the same acceptance of the ills of the world. When it is time to die, I will console myself with the thought that in any case in my life time there is no understanding, pity or love between people and things. So, call me a crank!

In an earlier letter to Bill, Joy wrote:

Phyl often asks about you. She's in South Africa now, working hard and sending Robin to college - has got over her worst troubles and is trying to write children's stories... She is also flirting with Buddhism and seems to have the impression that Christianity rejects the world while Buddhism affirms it, but she's a nice girl all the same.

Nor does the market end with marriage. Once caught, the husband must be held; and woman's life work, hundreds of films imply, is holding her man with the aid of the beauty parlor and judicious fits of the sulks...

Increasingly, women succeed along lines once reserved for men; as in the Soviet Union and Britain, women replace men wherever possible in the war effort... women who have realized their potentialities as creative human beings make better mothers than frustrated women who must take all their ambitions out on their children...

Male chauvinism is a subtler, milder, more easy-going thing than, for instance, race chauvinism. Perhaps for that reason it is singularly persistent. Many a man who judges his own conduct by the most enlightened standards will apply far more primitive ideas to his wife's behavior...

Dominating commercial entertainment as it does, male chauvinism has the power of perpetuating itself. It is able to imply a dozen times a day that the measure of a girl's value to society is her erotic attractiveness.

The radio serials and the popular magazines preach something called Love (= sex plus financial dependence) as the only real fruition of a woman's life. And a girl's "personality" itself, according to the films and the ads, is composed of cosmetics, charm, and that Ohrbach dress...

Tom, Dick, and Harry... presented this "woman question" in terms of three alternative husbands-a millionaire, a go-getter, and a shiftless screwball. Although the heroine was a working girl, she regarded her work as nothing better than a stop-gap while she prepared for the "real business" of life.

At first she chose the millionaire as the man who could most completely relieve her of all responsibility for her own existence; this was offered as the "practical" solution.

Eventually, however, she eloped with the screwball, because her physical response when he kissed her was uncontrollable. This was the "romantic" and hence the "correct" solution. For "romance" is an indispensable adjunct of male chauvinism; it is obviously impossible for the films to advocate openly that women marry entirely for cash. The poor men would never stand for it.

But Tom, Dick, and Harry never made any suggestion that the heroine might have something to offer the world as an individual; she was merely, to put it nakedly, something to be marketed...

A logical development of this thesis is found in the group of films dealing with the misunderstood wife. She is, inevitably, a woman of the idle rich or a prosperous suburbanite; usually with no children, always with no work.

She has a genuine grievance, the complete thwarting of all her impulses to be a useful member of society.

The wistful reactionaries who exalt the home-keeping woman of more primitive cultures overlook the fact that the home used to be the factory,  and the home-keeping woman the most productive worker in existence.

She made her bread, she made clothes, she turned out innumerable essential articles; further back she ground the raw grain and carded the raw wool, accomplishing not one but a dozen different productive processes on each article of consumption. The more primitive the culture, the more completely all productive operations were carried on by women, while man went out and shot the raw material with his bow and arrow.

Now the work has moved out of the home; but the woman remains. She sits with folded hands, which is good neither for her nor for her family, as anyone can testify who has watched the idle mothers in our parks tormenting their children.

And her grievance takes itself out in Mah Jongg, ice-cream sodas, or, in the film, simple dissatisfaction with her husband. He doesn't love her enough, he loves his business more, he actually forgets their wedding anniversary or expects her to be polite to his nasty old boss. Ibsen's Nora, many years ago, simply walked out of her doll's house to get a job. But the films have not caught up to Ibsen yet. Their heroines can think of only one escape - a new man.

In Skylark, even in the progressive Male Animal, in a hundred other movies the heroine tries "romance" briefly, ends by realizing that she loves her husband best, and crawls back chastened among the dolls. Husband, for his part, promises to pet the cute little thing more often. Thus the thesis of these films is teaching woman to "know her place."

When the movies do present a woman with a career, they usually take care to make her suffer for it. Sometimes she has dependents and is consequently "forced to sacrifice herself" by actually doing something useful and interesting with her life.

Sometimes an exception is made; she is a member of a "womanly" profession such as acting, singing, nursing, and recently even medicine. Such trades make her glamorous, and, as glamour is the standard by which woman is judged, such trades are excusable.

Nevertheless her career always separates her from her man or her child, and after spectacular suffering she comes to realize that she must abandon art for the home.

The cardinal point of woman's emancipation - the admission that she can have a successful career and a successful marriage too - is almost never made. The Men In Her Life is the latest of this vintage; there have been countless others.

Then sometimes we have such movies as Woman of the Year... in defense of this film it has been alleged that the heroine was not meant to retreat into the kitchen, being portrayed as capable of speaking twenty-seven languages simultaneously but as miserably incapable of making waffles. But this is just as male-chauvinist as the assumption that she belonged in the kitchen in the first place. Career women make very good waffles. So do career men.

To the anti-career list I need only add the endless films caricaturing the schoolteacher – noble but crotchety; caricaturing, as in Design for Scandal, the professional woman - thwarted and “unglamorous"; and, above all, caricaturing the unmarried business woman, who appears again and again as that minor comedy character, the office sourpuss. (A mother,  presented as such, is on the other hand never caricatured-she is always all-wise and all-sweet, except when she is a mother-in-law.)...

The deliberate attack on careers for women is only the male chauvinist's second front. It is doubtful whether all the film attacks ever influenced one girl to give up her job. Emotional attitudes, however, are more easily affected by films than are rational decisions; in other words, thousands of adolescent girls have been influenced subtly and perniciously in their expectations of life and their social relations by the antics of their favorite glamour girl.

In forcing women into the harem, the important thing is to make the women like it; they must be induced to accept their unhealthy fate as highly moral and emotionally desirable....

The routine film heroine has no integrity, no sense, no reliability. She is always breaking off her engagement when a more enticing prospect comes along; yielding spinelessly to the blandishment of the brash youth whom she began by resenting; falling among thieves and Nazi spies; dancing helplessly in the background while the villain conks the hero; slapping faces at insults to her imbecile "dignity"; making an idiot of herself at baseball games.

But ah, she has beauty! She has SA, she has It, she has Oomph; she has a wonderful apparatus for getting men excited. College students cry for her - according to the studio publicity department. That is all she knows on earth, and all she needs to know.

This phase of the attack on women is not clearly understood even by those who wage it. Producers select film actresses for their physical conformation; decorate them to enhance it; make it the whole point of a film; follow it around with the camera.

They publicize a Veronica Lake or a Gene Tierney, whom nobody even pretends to consider actresses. They build movie after movie on the theme that Love is the Ultimate Reward of Life, especially when enhanced by furs and diamonds.

In short, they attempt to educate girls for the happy life of the harem. But they do it quite without malice.

There are many reasons for the movie exploitation of sex. The most obvious is, of course, the box office; when you want to please an audience of 60,000,000 or so, it is not easy to find themes which will interest all of them. The most interesting theme of all - the real-life problems of the audience - is taboo in the films except to a group of progressives with the courage and the imagination to tackle such problems.

The Frank Capras and the John Fords, the John Howard Lawsons and the Dalton Trumbos, may come to grips with reality. But, to most filmmakers, the only subject on which they are sure of interesting a vast audience is sex. It is the one thing that almost everybody has.

More significant than this nakedly financial motive, however, is the plain fact that film-makers write as they think. If they regard woman as a commercial article, that is because pretty girls come to Hollywood from all over the country to trade in their beauty. Beauty is a drug on the market in southern California, with the natural result - the price goes down.

This is still not the whole story, however. After all, film-makers were not born to the celluloid;  they have known women in more normal settings, and there are plenty of independent and intelligent women in Hollywood too, to enlighten them. If film society really were a grotesque contrast to the rest of our society, as scandalmongers imply, the harem ideal would not be presented in many movies as a matter of course.

But film society is not a contrast; it is an intensification. It concentrates in articulate people most of the prevailing attitudes of our civilization, good and bad...

It is not by accident that southern California has become a Mecca for fighting intellectual anti-fascist refugees from all over Europe. But in Hollywood may also be found some of the most degenerate and parasitic elements of our society - the swamis, the astrologers, the debutantes, the fifth columnists, the reactionaries of every size and shape.

Thus, in presenting woman as they do, the films present in intensified form an attitude that exists wherever reaction may be found; an attitude based at least in part on the facts. For there is no denying that thousands of young girls do think of themselves as articles for the marriage market; do track down a husband as the sole end of existence; and do feel cheated when they discover that glamourized Love is not a sufficient full-time occupation...

Perhaps the greatest single cause of harm is in the compensatory mechanism which women develop, and which the movies encourage, to overcome the unhappiness of their frustration and disappointment - a mechanism which has made the neurotic, attention-getting woman so frighteningly familiar in our society.

Taught to value herself only by her reflection in a man's admiring eyes, many a woman spends her whole time in desperate scheming for attention, in frenzied resentment of people or ideas that "come between her and her family"; many a woman clings pathetically to girlishness well into her fifties.

These cases are not intrinsically inferior people but poisoned people; the film is not the major source of poison, but an important contributory cause of what amounts to an undermining of the family.

...The movies, out of carelessness or miseducation or corruption, imitate and prettify some of the worst features of daily life; and life promptly imitates the movies. As real life has less money to spend than the movies, however, life imitates without prettifying, and the results of such imitation are hardly satisfactory.