Novels do more than tell stories. Among other things, I wanted Late Flight to Lisbon (LFL) to shine a light on how difficult it is for women living under patriarchy, regardless of social class or education, to be understood, seen, and free. I wanted to portray women as we truly are, not as the caricatures patriarchy makes us out to be. I also wanted to show how patriarchal prejudice is so embedded in our culture that its insults and contempt are treated as deserved truths, and how women have to battle against these beliefs every day.
To avoid writing “generally speaking” repeatedly as I continue these thoughts, please know that what follows is in that vein.
Through all the decades since the 60s and 70s when we wriggled our bras out our sleeves and tossed them in campus trashcan fires, grew our hair, sang You Don’t Own Me, Respect, I Am Woman, and danced and sang to my favorite female anthem, I Will Survive (a pause to thank Lesley Gore, Aretha Franklin, Helen Reddy, and Gloria Gaynor), until feminism’s fourth wave today, we still have not wiped out misogynistic culture. In fact, it is having a resurgence.
Women are still dismissed and vilified for not seeing the world as men see it and not making decisions the way men make them. We see a bigger picture: where men see a portrait, we see a landscape, where men recognize only an immediate outcome, we see how a decision will play out in the future. If we try to convince men to make decisions that will prevent future problems, they accuse us of missing the point, being all over the place, and talking too much. But we don’t talk enough where it matters and seeing the big picture does not translate to being all over the place. I’m convinced that the planet would not be in the mess it’s in today if women had been included in all important and far-reaching decisions.
A favorite quote that illustrates how I see men making decisions is from Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize winning Danish physicist. During a 1927 conference, he said to Einstein, “No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.” Just because we can make sense of something doesn’t mean it makes sense.
How did we get here? Women are almost entirely omitted from history, which most of us were taught as great men narratives. For the longest time, we were not allowed to vote, denied entry to the best schools, taught needle and kitchen arts instead of math and science, and had no say in decisions that affected us. We couldn’t publish our books, own property, open a bank account, or have a credit card. We were told options were matrimony, a convent, or the street; later that evolved to wife, mother, schoolteacher, nurse, and secretary. If we outlived our husbands, we could be burned on his funeral pyre or die in a hail of stones. If we talked to our cat or made a pot of herbal tea, we could be murdered for witchcraft.
We were silenced, and when we were allowed to speak, we were not given enough time to explain ourselves and we were ridiculed when the men listening to us could not follow our insightful, inclusive, and sensible reasoning.
Men were presidents, popes, priests, professors, principals, pilots, coaches, government officials, and sea captains. We were in the nursery, kitchen, or tucked in a corner.
For more than a hundred years, nearly all published books were written by men. The few women who were published had passed themselves off as men. Authors Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell were Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte. In recent times, J.K. Rowling said her publisher “unisexed” her to drive sales. Female characters created by men were not fully drawn, but caricatures. Appallingly, two of the most famous female characters created by giants of classic literature, Gustave Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy, committed suicide over romantic unhappiness – Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. These realities and much more have shown women who men are and have kept men from knowing women.
Although most of what I’ve written here has gratefully changed and continues to change, women are still not known the way men are. That insulting question – what do women want – is still asked, and, absurdly, women can still be regarded as mysterious. Women are burdened with letting the world know who we are, how we think, what we stand for – and with undoing thousands of years of disinformation, indoctrination, and myths.
I wanted LFL to have women talking naturally; I wanted to show our inclusive way of thinking, and how we make decisions. Many novels, especially those written by men, show female characters having only transactional exchanges and talking in the terse, linear way we associate with male speech. The pressure to write that way is demanding and belligerent. I took heart from French writer Annie Ernaux’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. She said that “writing through the eyes and voice of a woman feels important, needed, and rich,” and that doing so can help balance our male-dominated society. She observed that literature is trending from Romanesque writing toward writing about everyday life – a trend she thinks will include more writing by and about women. Late Flight to Lisbon might be part of that movement. I hope so. -MAT