Flying from Work

Work, and all that it implies--responsibility beyond the private life, independence, power, ambition--is still unexplored as a genuine and serious subject in most women's literature. Those best sellers which claim to be daringly, even brutally, honest about contemporary women's lives are never honest about work. Instead, they use erotic fantasies as a way of escaping the problem of work, of rewarding their heroines for their inability to exist on their own outside the roles of wife and mother. When their heroines are shown imagining a larger life for themselves, they are punished or distracted, even in their own fantasies. The popularity of these books is, I suspect, inevitably linked to how firmly (if covertly) they suggest the limits of liberation. If what women really want is not the love and work which Freud said humans--that is, men--crave, but only the freedom to dream about sex and complain about the husbands who support them, then their energies are no threat to the world as it now stands

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