Slaying the Mermaid
Praise for this book:
“This one really is good—can’t put it down, call your friends good.” —Booklist
“An active, thinking women’s guide to mental health and right living.” —Women’s Review of Books
“It will grab you by the short collar and pull you into its pages, which are overflowing with stories guaranteed to promote a transformation in any woman who feels remotely as if she has sacrificed too much of herself for other people.” —Common Boundary
Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice
Stephanie Golden
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 1998 Stephanie Golden
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Contents
1: Sacrifice and the Feminine Ideal
2: Queen for a Day: The Rewards of Virtue
4: A Good Woman Is a Sacrificing One
10: The Lost Side of Sacrifice: Connection
Chapter 1: Sacrifice and the Feminine Ideal
I first confronted the question of self-sacrifice years ago, when I began volunteering at a shelter for homeless women, run by nuns. The atmosphere there of intense Catholic spirituality, which amplified ordinary altruism to extreme levels, precipitated a crisis so disturbing that it sent me on a quest to understand the complex implications of sacrifice in our culture: how it bears upon our individual lives and on our social acts.
The affair began innocuously, soon after the arrival of a new volunteer named John. One day, as Sister Elizabeth stood in the living-room doorway, eating a piece of dried fruit and watching several residents sitting together, John came up behind her. “I believe so much in self-discipline and fasting,” he remarked. “Look at these broken women, look at their faces. Couldn’t you give up eating sweets out of love for them?”
“Of course I could” was Elizabeth’s immediate response. “I love sweets,” she explained later, and the idea of giving them up for the sake of the homeless women “was part of my whole spirituality—denying myself so others might benefit.” Besides, she said, John’s challenge played into deep-seated, pervasive feelings of guilt, of never measuring up to her own expectations, never believing she had done enough.
Talking among themselves shortly after this incident, the five sisters who ran the shelter discovered that John had been speaking in the same way to each of them separately. To Sister Catherine he suggested that everyone stop eating meat and fish, because killing animals was an act of violence; the shelter, he said, should be totally nonviolent, dedicated to creating peace in lives that were victimized by violence. He asked Sister Monica if she couldn’t finally quit smoking. Each day he would take one of them aside and harass her about some issue that pressed on her own weak point.
Thus began an insidious campaign to gain control over the nuns, a relentless siege of psychological manipulation and coercion. John was forever preaching at them, two sisters complained to me at the time; he always had the last word and had to be right. His “first victory,” as Elizabeth viewed it, was prevailing on them to make the house vegetarian. On the surface this change seemed benign, for the food served to the homeless women suddenly improved drastically. But the underlying issue was “who was going to have power,” and in pursuit of this end John eventually pushed the nuns themselves to the point where—in the middle of a very cold winter—they were subsisting on nothing but fresh fruit and water. (“I was ravenous all the time. I could never eat enough, I was so empty,” Elizabeth recalled.) This diet—touted by John as both healing and more spiritual, and accepted by the nuns as a form of fasting—weakened them mentally as well as physically, diminishing their resistance to his continued assaults.
Once, after they had made a painful decision to force a violent, uncontrollable woman to leave the shelter, John painted her as Jesus Christ and Sister Monica as Pontius Pilate. “Don’t you realize it’s bitter cold out there?” he repeated over and over, wearing them down until they questioned a decision they had originally felt quite clear about. In the same way he criticized every other decision they made that signaled an unwillingness to give without limits. He also castigated them for their reluctance to let go of relationships and achievements that were personally dear to them. He told Catherine, for example, that she wasn’t really living in poverty and never could, especially because she wouldn’t give up social work school and her goal of becoming a professional. Heaping psychological abuse on them when they questioned him, sowing doubt in their minds about one another, he broke down their faith in their own perception of reality, and within a few months had created a virtual mini-cult within the shelter—which yet remained invisible to most everyone else, including me.
I had no inkling that something strange was going on until the day things actually came to a head. Late on that typically chaotic Monday, when the constantly ringing phone and doorbell vied with the endless demands of the shelter residents, I was waiting impatiently for the nuns to emerge from a meeting upstairs. They were still the fountain of strength I depended on for practical advice and also for the moral energy it took to respond to the desperately needy homeless women. But the sisters had been mysteriously absent all afternoon.
When they finally appeared, each vanished into the swirling needs of the residents and other volunteers wanting help. Seizing my chance, I cornered Sister Sara at the foot of the stairs. But for once she didn’t give me all her attention; her eyes had a faraway look.
In their meeting, she confided, the nuns had reached a momentous decision. They had founded the shelter out of a mission to aid the most outcast members of society, whom they saw as the shopping bag ladies camped out on the sidewalks in their neighborhood. In accordance with their vows, the nuns lived in the shelter with the homeless women, ate (until John changed their diet) the same food, and wore mostly the same donated clothing.
But now, Sara informed me, they had decided to go still further in order to truly “become one with the homeless.” They would renounce absolutely everything that differentiated them from the homeless, or that prevented their being able to give themselves totally to the homeless. This meant vacations, except the kind that, as she put it, “fill us up again for more giving”; it meant friends; and it meant families.
“I’ve been loved, and I’m not poor,” declared twenty-eight-year-old Sara fervently, explaining her decision to say good-bye to her family and separate from them forever. “Instead of writing to me,” she would tell her mother, “write to someone who is poor and love them.”
For a moment I was speechless. “That’s a lot to ask of someone,” I said finally.
“Yes,” she responded, “but how else are people going to really help the poor? There are so many poor.” Sara seemed to feel that by removing herself from her mother in this way, she was leaving a space that some homeless person could fill—and that by this act she was leading others toward similar acts. “Instead of standing on the sidelines and talking about it,” she added, “why not do it?”
Why, indeed? Sara had touched a sensitive spot in me. Was I doing all that I could do for the poor? I came to the shelter once a week, but the rest of the time I led my regular life; I hadn’t taken a vow of poverty. Yet every Monday I saw women in desperate straits that tore my heart out. How much should I be giving? More time? More money? Part of my apartment? I had been struggling to find a line beyond which I didn’t have to give more; and now Sara had wiped all the lines away.
Yet I found myself resisting her logic. “What you’re doing is really kind of inhuman,” I told her, “though I can see how you feel it’s necessary. But do you realize what an extreme act it is?”
She shook her head.
“When I leave here in the evening,” I went on, “I always ask myself how it is that I’m going to a home and these women have none. I’ve always felt that conflict, but I can’t do what you’re doing.”
“Until you do you’ll always feel that conflict,” Sara answered.
I hesitated. For a split second I felt a vacuum in the air, like an indrawn breath. “Then I might just have to feel it the rest of my life,” I heard myself saying. My vocation, I added, was being a writer, for which I needed solitude; and there were other things I wanted and couldn’t give up. It was as though another part of me, with a knowledge the first part didn’t have, had decided to speak up.
I have never forgotten the disturbing, even horrifying experience of looking into Sara’s eyes as she told me how she planned to cut herself off from her mother. They were impersonal, as though she had passed beyond the everyday human realm of family feeling. For Sara, however, this renunciation was simply the next step in the spiritual path the nuns were following.
By definition, nuns embrace sacrifice: they take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And for this group, creating the shelter was not just a form of social service but part of their spiritual vocation. Since their goal was to “be with” the homeless women, inviting them into the shelter also meant inviting them into a spiritual community in which the nuns and the homeless were one. To Sara it made sense to renounce everything that stood in the way of this oneness.
But I went home that night and cried. In part, I think, my tears were a compensation for Sara’s own failure to feel the pain of what she was doing (I kept thinking of how her mother would react when presented with the instruction to love some poor person in Sara’s place). But they also represented relief—at having found out that for me, at least, there was some sort of line.
I didn’t know yet that the drastic decision to renounce everything in order to “become one with the homeless” had originated with John. It was, in fact, the prerequisite to the grand finale of his whole scheme. For John believed that he could read the signs of the times, and that the Second Coming was at hand. His plan was that he and the nuns would walk out onto the streets, with the poor leading them, and proclaim this to the world, with the help of TV coverage.
At the last moment, the nuns awoke from their brainwashed state and told him to leave the shelter, but the experience was shattering. It left them empty inside, literally self-less, and left the rest of the shelter community (including me) profoundly shaken. Several sisters were so devastated that they couldn’t remain at the shelter. Although other nuns arrived to keep it going, the heady and potent “community of spirit” that the five original sisters had created was eventually replaced by a more conventional social service operation.
Even though I wasn’t directly involved, John’s takeover reverberated in me for years, as though it had activated a harmonic chord in my psyche that wouldn’t stop vibrating. Having become connected to the nuns’ intense community of spirit despite not sharing their religion, I felt implicated in its loss. Having also believed in their strength, I felt undermined by their vulnerability to John’s assault. And having subscribed to their nonprofessional approach to the homeless women, I was left struggling to validate it.
As I rethought the whole experience, what emerged as key was the nuns’ propensity for self-sacrifice. This was the vulnerable point at which John had first applied pressure; and the self-doubt engendered by his condemnations of them for initially resisting his demand that they give themselves totally to the poor was what enabled him to consolidate his power.
Still, religious indoctrination in the virtue of self-sacrifice couldn’t be the whole story, for I had had no religious training at all, yet I too tortured myself over the question of how much to give. And despite being a thoroughly secular, nonobservant Jew, I had certainly bought into the nuns’ vision of their mission in an uncritical way that meant I must have shared with them some blind spot that had nothing to do with Christian ideology. It seemed to me that comprehending John’s ability to destroy the initial vision of the shelter, with its unique success in reaching out to frightened, wary homeless women, would require an inquiry into the fundamental meaning of sacrifice.
My ensuing research revealed that the nuns’ ideal of renunciation was only a magnified version of a mandate that is widespread in our culture, exerting particular pressure on women; the enlargement simply enables us to see the details more clearly. In urging more and more sacrifice on Elizabeth and the others, John took advantage of an imperative that stretches back centuries to the central image of Western culture: the suffering Christ on the cross. As nuns they were particularly attuned to this image, but few of us are unaffected by its legacy, for it permeates our culture.
Christian Virtue and Women’s Role
It was Christianity that made self-sacrifice the “first principle of the moral world”: “The crucified Christ put on Christians’ conscience an unlimited obligation to sacrifice self in all things,” while by extension self-deprivation, pain, and suffering became associated with virtue, nobility of character, and spiritual edification.1 Whereas other traditions, such as Buddhism or Jewish mysticism, found God in “joy and tranquillity,” prominent traditions within Christianity—especially the Protestantism that shaped American culture—emphasized pain and suffering. Martin Luther, for example, asserted that “God can be found only in suffering and the Cross.”2
Some scholars have suggested that Christianity’s emphasis on self-sacrifice grew out of the need to counteract Western men’s tendency toward overweening pride and self-assertion, which separated them from God or the larger, cosmic whole. But self-sacrifice has never been an appropriate ideal for women, whose fault is, rather, excessive self-denial and an inability to assert themselves except on behalf of someone else.3
Certainly the valuation of suffering affected men and women differently. Originally, the sexes were equally prone to seek out suffering to achieve spiritual goals. The Christian saints of the fourteenth century, for example, are famous for their extreme acts of piety. While men were more likely to relinquish wealth and possessions, and women more likely to mortify their bodies—fasting, refusing to sleep, flagellating themselves—both sexes engaged in all these practices.4
This equivalence reflected the equal economic importance of women’s and men’s work in maintaining the family and society. But beginning in the eighteenth century, industrial development increasingly moved production of household items, which for centuries women had manufactured, out of the home. Economic growth led to an increase in wealth among middle-class families that freed more and more women from working in a family business, working for wages outside the home, and even from performing heavy household labor within it.5
As a result, women’s and men’s roles increasingly diverged, until by the nineteenth century they were totally distinct. Women and men came to be defined in terms of the separate “spheres” they occupied: the home for women, everywhere else for men.6 No longer required to work, middle-class women acquired symbolic functions: as elegantly dressed evidence of their husbands’ financial success and as guardians of morality. While men engaged in the aggressive, brutish behavior of the business world, women were entrusted with preserving the spiritual virtues that their men had to ignore to function effectively in the marketplace.7 Since Western Christian culture identified virtue and morality with self-sacrifice and renunciation, sacrifice became women’s responsibility.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, as Chapter 4 will show, self-sacrifice had come virtually to define the feminine character. Woman, wrote the French historian Jules Michelet, whose 1859 book Woman was enormously popular in the United States, was “the altar.” Her ability to sacrifice herself for a man “places her higher than man, and makes her a religion.”8 A perfect woman was “always ready to concede her own pain lest others should suffer,” wrote the American moralist T. S. Arthur in 1845. And an essayist in the periodical Christian Wreath affirmed that while “man lives for himself... woman lives... for all.... She cannot be said to live—even for herself. She is forgotten in the unfoldings of her duty.”9 We still embrace this notion of woman as self-sacrificer, which coexists uneasily and unstably with the more recent concept that women should live for themselves.
The epitome of this ideal was the “Angel in the House,” the pure, devotedly self-renouncing middle-class wife and mother, subject of a long poem published between 1854 and 1862 by the English writer Coventry Patmore. “A rapture of submission lifts / Her life into celestial rest,” he exulted.10 Notice how his language, like Michelet’s, paints domestic self-sacrifice as a form of ecstatic spirituality: this merging of the mundane and the celestial is central to women’s relation to the practice of sacrifice.
“In those days,” recalled Virginia Woolf acidly seventy years later, “every house had its Angel.”
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.
Woolf goes on to recount how, in order to become a writer, she herself had to slay the Angel, who hovered over her as she sat at her desk, cautioning her not to say what she truly thought.11
Woolf presented this description of the Angel in a speech to an audience of pioneering young women who were entering professions previously closed to them, such as law and medicine. She ended by exhorting them to persevere in battling the hindrances remaining from the nineteenth century. Another seventy years have passed since she spoke, but we still battle the Angel.
Certainly we did at the shelter, where, I concluded, our critical failure was an inability to come to terms with the limits of self-sacrifice. For me as for these Catholic religious women, and for other women in our culture, the virtue of self-sacrifice—of selflessness—was a lesson that we absorbed imperceptibly as we grew up. It functions like a tinted filter coloring our judgment when we confront experiences that in Western culture are intimately associated with sacrifice: guilt, suffering, and pain.
The takeover of the nuns happened nearly twenty years before this writing. At the time I thought they were caught in a kind of vestigial prefeminist mentality that would wither away as the women’s movement widened its influence. Yet as the century ended, all sorts of women were still being seduced by the siren song of the call to sacrifice.
A Contemporary Sacrifice
“Let me tell you what I did to myself to make Bobby happy,” said Marilyn, shaking her head ruefully. “For ten years, I put my life on hold so he could play hockey.” Founder of a nonprofit arts organization that used theater to build community in New York City neighborhoods, Marilyn helped generate understanding and affection among different age, ethnic, and racial groups that feared and distrusted one another. But while she was developing this work that empowered other people, Marilyn sacrificed her personal life to a sport—and a lifestyle—she hated.
It started when her son Bobby, at five, turned out to be a talented ice-skater. Starting at a local rink in Brooklyn, then progressing to lessons in Manhattan, Bobby soon joined a New Jersey farm team, which toured every weekend and practiced three days a week. Marilyn and Bobby’s father Jack were divorced and had joint custody. Under the schedule they had set up, being with Bobby in any meaningful way meant taking him at six A.M. on Sunday to New Jersey, and again on Tuesday after school. He was then in the second grade.
Bobby played hockey through his junior year in high school, and every weekend he toured. “Every other weekend I was on the road,” Marilyn said. “If I hadn’t done that, I would not have seen him. But it was an unbelievable ordeal. I was always tired; my life was discombobulated. I spent years of time in stinky run-down motels.” She had nothing in common with the other parents at the games. “I was the only one without a killer mentality. I saw kids get badly hurt, and I couldn’t stand it.” She was the only single parent, and the odd woman out; she always felt alone.
Because her work was so demanding, she gave up every other activity. “I had no personal life. All I did was work and take care of my son. It cut me off from the neighborhood community of other parents because Bobby was never here. I never went to his high-school graduation, because he was away. I devoted the best years of my life to doing this ridiculous thing.” Nevertheless she was unwilling to give up any of her designated time with Bobby, fearing that if she did so, she would lose him completely, since Jack loved his son’s prowess and relished his own weekends on the road with his new girlfriend and the other hockey-obsessed parents.
Marilyn was dynamic and financially independent, and she and her ex-husband prided themselves on their egalitarian beliefs. Yet they wound up playing out a nineteenth-century scenario. “I was noble and self-sacrificing about joint custody,” she remembered. “Even in working out our schedule, I was accommodating.” She was sure that if instead they had had a little girl who wanted to be a figure skater, her ex-husband would have never given her the support he gave Bobby; figure skating would not have appealed to him as ice hockey did, and he lacked that self-sacrificing impulse. “Jack would have said it wasn’t worth it; he wouldn’t have paid fifty percent of the costs as I did. I went along with it and tried to encourage Bobby to do what he wanted to, though it meant sacrifice to me and my life. Jack would never have done that.”
Recounting this experience still brought Marilyn to the verge of tears, even though Bobby was now in college and her days of touring were well past. If giving up her life so that her son could play hockey was noble and right, why did she feel so wounded? And if she found it so painful, why during those ten years couldn’t she obtain some relief? Why did she continue to pay half the costs, when Bobby’s father made much more money than she did? Beneath these questions lies a more basic one: why, for women, does self-sacrifice often equal self-betrayal?
“Burnt Toast Syndrome”
Women’s propensity for excessive self-sacrifice is so well known it’s a cliché, a staple of magazine articles and self-help books. We’re so used to it that we take for granted much behavior which, viewed from a normal perspective (that is, try to imagine a man doing it), appears morbid. “Think of all the women who wear clothes they don’t like because their husbands like them,” my friend Bonnie suggested. “I myself used to buy—and eat—calf’s liver, which I loathed, because my husband liked it.” That hit close to home: I used to never wear pants because my husband hated them.
Bonnie and I are hardly unique. Magazines are full of advice for women like Karen, who “changed her whole style of dressing in the name of love,” getting “gussied up” in “makeup and jewelry and high-heeled shoes” to please “the new man in her life,” even though her own taste ran to “neutral tones, low-heeled shoes; jeans and sweatshirts at home.” Or Rhoda, who after her marriage broke up found herself “crying in the supermarket because I didn’t know what I wanted to eat. We always ate what he wanted.”12
The harmful effects of self-sacrifice are so widespread among women that Christiane Northrup, M.D., an expert on women’s health, has given them a diagnosis: “burnt toast syndrome.” This is “not a disease itself,” she writes. “But it can cause many serious female health problems. It occurs in women who always put others first—and settle for what’s left. Like the burnt piece of toast. Or a husband always working late. Or a life spent in service to others.”13 Dr. Northrup links many common physical symptoms such as lumps in the breast, uterine fibroids, and even cancer and heart disease to years of self-deprivation, of sacrificing one’s own aspirations and putting the needs of others first.
In the same way, women also jeopardize their financial well-being. Too many women “sacrifice their careers for their husbands” and therefore don’t develop pensions or savings plans that can assure their future in case of death or divorce, explains Phyllis Wordhouse, a certified financial planner and financial educator. “Because women are the nurturing sex, they want to make sure everyone else in their family is secure before they think about themselves.”14 Even financially comfortable women may lead lives of constant self-denial, refusing to spend money on themselves not only for simple inexpensive pleasures, but for things they really need. These “self-depriving women” are “momentarily soothed by feelings of being ennobled through self-sacrifice....The fantasy of virtue through martyrdom is a powerful motivator for repeated self-depriving behavior.”15
Women also often sabotage themselves professionally, undermining their careers to protect the feelings of a lover, husband, parent, or sibling who reacts to the prospect of their success with humiliation or resentment.16 More subtly—yet more tellingly—they may do this even when there is nobody to protect. Carmen, who had a doctorate in education from a prestigious institution, was selected for a national fellowship that would bring her to Washington, D.C., to study federal education policy. But the very day she was supposed to move to the capital, she decided not to go—for it meant leaving behind the bilingual education program she had created at her school, which, as she put it, “was my baby.” She called Washington and spoke to the national director of the fellowship program, a woman who told her, “You’re doing something that only women do.” Women, the director explained—she had never known a man to do this—become attached to projects or jobs as if these were their babies, and can’t let go. Consequently they block the personal growth they could achieve if they were willing to move on. “The minute I heard that,” Carmen said, “I realized I was sacrificing my own development for an institution that had no commitment to me.” She changed her plans again and rushed to Washington.
Self abnegation may go still deeper. Many women consciously and deliberately sacrifice their own feelings—as when they fake orgasms because they’re more concerned with their lovers’ pleasure than with making sure they experience pleasure themselves. “Many women still have no concept that their bodies and their sexuality exist for themselves—no concept that their lives can be lived for themselves,” remarks therapist Harriet Goldhor Lerner. They think of this “pretending” as something “done in the service of enhancing another person at the expense of the self.” “To be worthy of being called ‘a good Black woman,’ sisters must be self-sacrificing and long-suffering,” writes Susan Taylor, the editor of Essence. “These are the messages our culture continues to send us.”17
Women absorb these messages early. Journalist Peggy Orenstein, who spent a year talking to eighth-grade girls, found that they were already completely indoctrinated by “the lessons of the hidden curriculum,” which emphasize niceness, teaching girls “to value silence and compliance, to view those qualities as a virtue.” The girls responded by developing an ideal of a relentlessly selfless “perfect girl” who is both “perfectly nice” and “perfectly smart.” But to become this girl they had to squelch all their negative feelings. The result: anorexia, panic attacks, thoughts of suicide—at the age of thirteen!18
Books and articles offer psychological and social explanations for why such girls turn into women who are, as one book’s title puts it, “too good for their own good.”19 Experts point to dysfunctional family dynamics and “toxic parents”—mothers who give mixed messages, perfectionist fathers. They invoke social messages instructing women that their nature is to be nurturing: “cultural teachings...that women should strengthen men, and our bond with them, by relinquishing our own strength.” Some writers point to the greater social power of men, which compels women to hide their true feelings “as a matter of self-preservation.”20 Academic researchers have further documented how women’s willingness to sacrifice their careers—taking jobs that are less remunerative and less fulfilling than they might otherwise be able to get—for the sake of their family responsibilities arises from an early socialization that emphasizes connectedness and the value of caring for the needs of others.21
Yet none of these explanations has successfully disposed of the Angel in the House. Adults like Marilyn continue to sacrifice themselves in contradiction of their own principles, while young girls turn into new Angels. The truth is that women won’t be able to stop sacrificing in these self-defeating ways until they learn what appropriate sacrifice really is. To date, however, they have no models to work with, for while the experts reject the inappropriate types of sacrifice described above, no one has identified a more developed or evolved form that can benefit other people without betraying the self.22
Constructive sacrifice is harder to recognize in our individualistic, rationalist culture, because it occurs at what might be called a collective, or transpersonal, or even spiritual level of experience. Because Western culture defines humans as rational, autonomous beings, set apart from the rest of the cosmos and set against one another, our perceptions are shaped by a mental splitting-off process that separates mind from body, man (associated with mind or spirit) from woman (associated with matter or flesh), and self from other. Despite paying lip service to the value of community, we don’t profoundly acknowledge the validity and virtue of interconnectedness.
One casualty of this splitting-off process is constructive sacrifice. As Chapter 4 will explain, sacrifice was originally a method for achieving a sense of expansiveness through creation of a larger unity. But that aspect of it was lost, and we were left with the familiar Christian ideal of self-sacrifice, with its valuation of pain and suffering for their own sake. It was this truncated version that came to define women’s nature.
This book pulls together a range of approaches—historical, sociological, psychological, anthropological—to construct a comprehensive, integrated concept of sacrifice that points beyond simple analysis of a problematic female behavior to our culture’s fundamental modes of thinking and perceiving. For it is not some essence of female nature that causes women to be overly self-sacrificing, but rather a basic component of psyche and society.
Slaying the Mermaid
So far, in laying out the destructive aspects of sacrifice, I have deployed psychology, sociology, and history. Now, to uncover its lost constructive aspect, we move into the realm of myth, for myth extends our individual experience out into that of the collective. We have seen that women today are still haunted by a phantom that torments them, as the Angel in the House did Virginia Woolf, and ought to be laid to rest. Slaying her requires seeing her clearly and understanding her thoroughly, so I am going to raise this specter here, although in an incarnation more suited to our time.
To those who know only the Disney movie version, Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid may not initially seem the most logical embodiment of the sacrificial spirit. But the film leaves out some gruesome elements of Andersen’s original tale. In order to acquire human legs so she can go on land and make the prince fall in love with her, the mermaid obtains from a sea witch a magic potion. Drinking it, the witch warns her, will make her feel “as if a sword were going through your body.” And once she does have legs, “every time your foot touches the ground it will feel as though you were walking on knives so sharp that your blood must flow.” Andersen dwells on the pain and bleeding of the mermaid’s feet as she dances for the prince and climbs mountains with him: “But she suffered it gladly,” he assures us.23
The mermaid’s sacrifice, however, is more than an expression of her devotion to the prince; it is also a quest for transcendence. When she learns from her grandmother that, unlike humans, mer-people do not have immortal souls, she is possessed by a longing for one. “I would give all my three hundred years of life tor only one day as a human being if, afterward, I should be allowed to live in the heavenly world,” she sighs. As it happens, this is possible, but “only if a man should fall so much in love with you that you were dearer to him than his mother and father.” If he married her, “then his soul would flow into your body and you would be able to partake of human happiness,” the grandmother explains.24
Despite the mermaid’s devotion, the prince marries someone else, which dooms her to death according to the terms of her bargain with the witch. Rejecting the opportunity to save herself by stabbing him with a knife her sisters have obtained for her, she throws the knife away, sacrificing her own life instead. But because she has “suffered and borne [her] suffering bravely,” instead of dying she is transformed into a “daughter of the air,” a spirit with a transparent, ethereal body. She now has the chance to obtain an immortal soul by doing good deeds.25
Transcending the preoccupations of the flesh to connect to a realm of ultimate truth is, of course, the purpose of penitential practices like those of the Christian saints. This vision of salvation, in fact, is what makes the idea of sacrifice so potently seductive. It is not to a transcendent reality that the mermaid tries to connect, however, but to a mortal man; her salvation will come by means of his soul flowing into her body. Human women, too, have been said to need an intermediary in this matter; as Milton put it in Paradise Lost, “He for God only, she for God in him.” The reason the prince’s soul can flow into the mermaid is that she is empty. Her own self was emptied out when she sacrificed her true nature as a sea creature to live on land in pursuit of a fantasy.
In religious terms, “salvation” means deliverance from sin and other evils of life into knowledge of ultimate truth, or God. But people also seek a secular version of it: we all want to be released from feeling bad or unhappy into a sense of being virtuous and justified in the world, or of achieving a satisfying fullness of being. Whether religious or secular, the goal is to feel connected with the source of goodness. The danger, for most women today, lies in seeing that source as another person.
Sacrifice, of course, is a time-honored way to achieve salvation. In true spiritual sacrifice, the individual self merges directly into an authentic, impersonal source of goodness; the secular version may involve dedication to some work or service perceived as greater than the self. But if, like the mermaid, one simply hands the self over to another limited human being, one sacrifices it without transcending or achieving anything. One does achieve a delusion of transcendence—a voluptuous feeling of noble martyrdom. But this type of martyrdom does not have noble consequences.
Like many women, the mermaid confuses spiritual transcendence with the exalted devotion that is idealized as a pattern for human love (recall the spiritualized language of Patmore and Michelet). She embodies women’s tendency to seek salvation through sacrificing the self for another person instead of through self-transformation. Nor does this confusion necessarily involve romantic love: the nuns accepted John as an intermediary in their mission to “the poor.” In either case, women tend to identify so closely with the virtue of being self-less that we literally lose ourselves in giving, as though having and being make us uncomfortable. And as we start to disappear, Western culture cheers us on.
Sacrifice Versus Power
The image of the Little Mermaid joins the glorification of suffering and self-sacrifice to the loss of the self and a corresponding relinquishment of personal power. For beyond individual questions of guilt, the desire for transcendence, and indoctrination in an ideal, the fundamental issue underlying sacrifice is power. In the following chapters we will see how the valuation of sacrifice spirals through different levels of our lives, intertwined with the issue of power.
Most often, self-sacrifice is a practice of the powerless. “Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves...slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others,” wrote the twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil, whom we will meet later, for she provides another spectacular example of highly dubious self-sacrifice.26 Weil too elevated suffering to a transcendent value; but this was because she believed that in a society like ours, built on great inequalities of power, for the powerless suffering is the only path to transcendence.
Chapter 9 will explore the implications of this social imbalance. Here I want to emphasize how destructive self-sacrifice destroys what power people do have. After her sacrifice, the mermaid becomes a cripple, unable to walk without pain, literally lacking a secure footing. In the same way, once the nuns acceded to the sacrifices John demanded, they lost their own firm standpoint and became pushovers for his absurd dictates. And it was Marilyn’s initial sacrifice of her needs that left her in a powerless position, so that her subsequent actions were dominated by her fear of losing Bobby.
Indeed, inappropriate sacrifice winds up subverting all sorts of personal and social ventures, from intimate relationships to social service missions to political movements. “I got to see Bobby,” Marilyn recalled of her excruciating weekends on the road, “but he told me later how much he resented it because I was such a drag.” One observer at the shelter noticed that as the nuns became more involved in John’s scheme, they spent less and less time actually ministering to the homeless women they had dedicated themselves to serving. And I have known advocates for the homeless so possessed by the spirit of sacrifice that they practically became homeless themselves. Naturally this severely limited their resources, making their advocacy less effective. Their major achievements were a monumental self-righteousness and the ability to induce guilt in other people—hardly a socially beneficial motivator.
Because our culture places so much value on sacrifice and suffering, people who feel aggrieved, like those advocates, are likely to cling to their victimhood as a badge of merit and become enraptured with their own suffering. Anger and resentment do generate a surge of energy that provides an illusion of power and strength, but ultimately these emotions are counterproductive.
Amy, a community activist, habitually did much of the “grunt work” that nobody else in her community group would take on. Sitting before her computer one day, putting together a summary of the group’s bylaws, she grew resentful, even though she had volunteered for the task. With the resentment came a surge of adrenaline, and it occurred to Amy that what looked like sacrifice or selfless service on her part might actually be a form of addiction to that adrenaline rush. To experience the rush, she needed something to provoke her resentment, which was why she took on these tedious tasks. As a consequence, her activism was tainted and her energy wasted.
Amy conjectured further that her “addiction” to the adrenaline rush was somehow tied to chronic pain she suffered from a whiplash injury. She had, in fact, discovered the connection between sacrifice, physical pain, negative emotion, and the ability to act effectively, which Chapter 9 will explore further. Here I simply note that pain—as philosophers and scientists both have remarked—is an isolating experience that cuts us off from human community and the empathy engendered by connection.27 Yet originally, sacrifice was not about suffering.
Sacrificial rites are among the earliest forms of worship known. They were intended to create communion between the human and the divine, a connection whose beneficial power strengthened not only individuals but the whole community. Over time, this expansive, empowering, collective meaning of sacrifice—in which whatever is forfeited is not lost, because as part of a cyclic movement it returns in the form of other benefits—has largely been forgotten. My project here is to reclaim it, translate it into modern, secular terms, and build a new interpretation upon its ancient meaning.
The process begins with a shift in consciousness that alters our perception of previously unquestioned behavior. This happened to Amy when she realized that her own self-sacrifice was rooted in physical pain and the energy rush of resentment, not in the inherent necessity of the tedious jobs she took on. All at once the rationale she had constructed for performing them fell away, leaving her free to evaluate the importance of each task and make a choice about it. Once her inner feeling of compulsion was gone, so was Amy’s resentment, and the energy bound up in resentment was released for more productive, satisfying work.
Various stimuli can trigger this kind of perceptual shift. It may occur spontaneously, like Amy’s, or through imaginative identification with a mythic figure like the Little Mermaid, as it did for me. And it can also happen when new knowledge strips away the accumulation of centuries of cultural imprinting. The following chapters offer historical information, analysis of contemporary examples from popular culture and everyday life, and powerful mythic images, all as tools readers can use to reconceptualize their own experience.
There can hardly be a single woman in our culture who hasn’t struggled with the conditioning that tells her she’s no good unless she consistently disregards herself to put other people first. “It’s so ingrained,” one friend remarked, “you do it with your dogs.” Sacrifice should be a choice, not an obligation; it should enlarge the self, instead of diminishing it. Accordingly the following pages develop a model of sacrifice that balances autonomous individuality with the awareness that our own welfare can flow from the well-being of others.
Chapter 2: Queen for a Day: The Rewards of Virtue
“I want a house and some food,” the young woman is saying, barely above a whisper. Young, pretty, blond, she wears a styleless straight skirt and dark shirt with a pale cardigan—you can’t see the colors, for this is a grainy black-and-white TV image. What’s clear is that she’s gripped by an affliction so enormous she barely knows where she is.
It’s March 1956, and Mrs. Ellen Brewer is contestant number three on today’s episode of Queen for a Day—the “Cinderella show” that grants the dearest wish of the most pathetic among five hard-luck women who each weekday afternoon provide nonfiction soap opera to a nationwide audience. Number one has asked for power tools for her laid-up father-in-law. Number two wants a washer-dryer so she won’t have to keep doing the laundry for her five children by hand. Fairly humdrum requests—in fact, number one tried to spice hers up a bit by claiming that the tools would give her father-in-law “saw-curity.”
But Mrs. Brewer is of another order. A mother of four, whose truck driver husband is in the hospital (he had an accident and then pneumonia twice), she gazes at Jack Bailey, the show’s avuncular host, with the teary helplessness of a little girl waiting for Daddy to make it better. He has to prompt her for each desperate detail of her tale of woe.
“We live in a trailer camp and we haven’t paid our rent, and the man come over last night and said we have to be out by tomorrow. We don’t have any money,” she adds, in a rising wail. “My mother and father live with us, and they’re not able to work.” The camera repeatedly cuts to her hands, ceaselessly wringing a handkerchief.
“If you’re elected our queen, we’ll get you the food, and we will get you the house, and you had a smile a minute ago, well, you put that back on,” admonishes Bailey jocularly. She smiles reflexively but her mouth can’t stretch the whole way; it trembles and, as she returns to her seat, her expression relapses into wistful misery.
Number four, up next, asks for a secret meeting with her real mother, who gave her up for adoption—to be arranged without the knowledge of the mother’s husband, who doesn’t know she ever had this baby. As number five approaches Bailey, Mrs. Brewer can be seen behind her, sniffling into a handkerchief. Number five would like a new bicycle for her boy. Since his old one broke, she’s been getting up at four in the morning to take him on his paper route. He gave her the money to come here today—which is his birthday, she adds gratuitously, trying to extract maximum pathos from a not very pathetic situation.
So it’s not surprising that when the moment of judgment arrives, Mrs. Brewer wins hands down—or, more precisely, hands up, since the contest is decided by the volume of audience applause registered on an “applause meter” superimposed over the contestants’ faces. Still apparently overwhelmed by her inner vision of imminent disaster, Mrs. Brewer barely reacts as the female attendants drape a fur-trimmed cloak around her shoulders, set a tiara on her head, and hand her a bunch of roses. But when Bailey announces that she’ll be taken to a supermarket to “shop to your heart’s content” and that the show will find her a house and pay the rent for six months, her mouth opens and she gasps, then smiles, shaking her head in disbelief.
As Bailey begins to recite all the prizes she’ll receive in addition to the granting of her wish, the camera, which has been glued to her face, tears itself away to display these items, as much a part of the show as the contestants. Among much else, there’s a vacuum cleaner, a sixty-seven-piece set of china, a dinette set (the audience oohs), a sewing machine (“Ooh! Ahh!”), and a refrigerator (Mrs. Brewer herself gasps over this one). With all the gifts announced, the attendants seat her on a throne, and the camera resumes its tight close-up of her face, which now wears the dazed yet hopeful expression of a dog unused to not being kicked. The audience applauds wildly.
Queen for a Day started out on radio in 1945, became a local TV show in Los Angeles in 1950, and went national in 1955, airing at four-thirty in the afternoon. Its formula, allowing viewers to identify with the contestants’ real-life sob stories and then wallow vicariously in the flood of consumer items that compensated the winners for their pain, was irresistible. Within a few months, Queen was the number one daytime show, watched by 13 million. It lasted until October 1964.28 For many women of that time—and their daughters who watched it after school—it remains an icon.
“That was one of my favorite shows,” recalled Diane, a forty-two-year-old theater director and performer. “I loved its high emotional intent—the women suffering, trying to outdo one another in who suffered more. I liked to cry—I think it was an identification with my own suffering from having lost my mother.”
Diagnosed with breast cancer when she was four months pregnant with Diane’s youngest sister, her mother, a devout Catholic, chose to delay treatment, which would have meant an abortion. But in her seventh month, her doctor decided the baby must be born by cesarean so she could have surgery. The cancer went into remission but returned a year or two later, and she died at thirty-five, when Diane was five.
“To me that’s the ultimate sacrifice: my mother sacrificed her life for the life of my sister,” Diane said. Her mother had a choice, for the Church permits abortion to save the mother’s life. However, Diane pointed out, “the social pressures put on a woman at that time, the onus of abortion, and the notion of what a good woman does—the priority of the life of the child—were all very important.” Her mother’s death left her with a “terrible legacy that I have to consciously fight against,” of “putting other people’s needs in front of my own.” Coupled with a Catholic education which taught her that “the world is a bad place, and somebody’s got to be like Christ and make it a better place,” this legacy left Diane believing that, even though all her own needs would never be met, she should be taking care of other people’s.
Diane’s painful legacy and the vulgar, blatantly exploitative Queen are linked by that central fifties image: woman, the devoted mother-martyr. The crowning of Mrs. Brewer, whose suffering on behalf of her family the TV camera conveyed so voluptuously, was a response not just to her obvious need but to her equally evident virtue—for, as we’ll see, her suffering was a badge of her goodness. As Diane recognized, the show’s equation of suffering with virtue carried a kind of emotional exaltation that is a modern version of Michelet’s and Patmore’s spiritualized language of female self-sacrifice, quoted in Chapter 1. In our secular time, however, the queen receives an earthly rather than a heavenly crown. So Mrs. Brewer got not only what she really needed—the house and food—but a shower of consumer goods to reward her virtue.
The women who appeared on Queen for a Day were the mothers of the baby boomers—of Diane, and myself as well, who were in our forties and fifties as the nineties drew to a close. Unlike daughters in most historical periods, a lot of us looked at our mothers and said, “Not me!” But like Diane, most baby boomers did not completely escape their legacy. And their own daughters, while in many respects freer yet, still, when they came face-to-face with the blinding light of the sacrificial ideal, were also often transfixed before it, like a rabbit on the road at night.
Asking women about sacrifice presses a button that makes their eyes light up: “Women are the agents of sacrifice!” exclaimed one, when told what my subject was. Another insisted that this was the “central characteristic” of women in our culture. Asked to elaborate, however, everyone had a different notion of what “sacrifice” is really about.
The Vital Substance
Most definitions of sacrifice for women cluster around the idea of motherhood. The essence of this notion was best expressed by Bernice, whose story typifies the trajectory of middle-class women who came of age in the fifties and early sixties.
Bernice described herself as “a displaced homemaker in an Armani suit.” Married for twenty-nine years to a top movie executive, she lived “a grand hello-from-Hollywood life” before her divorce. She had a second home on the ocean; traveled around the world several times; ate expensive meals at three-star restaurants; entertained celebrities, domestic and international. But Bernice is not a member of the Hollywood First Wives Club, for she was the one who walked out of her marriage.
“I was my husband’s partner,” she recalled, “fused at the hip. We were Mr. and Mrs. America and their three children. I thought that was oneness. I was an extraordinarily good caretaker, and he let me.” When people asked what she did, Bernice told them she was a juggler: “I juggled my life and everybody else’s, juggled my day so that when my husband and the kids came home, I was there. But I didn’t know that what I was sacrificing was myself.”
Her husband was “particularly needy of me: I’d take an art class, he’d call me there three times. He performed in the world very well, but when he came home he literally sucked at the breast.” Bernice went to the Cannes industry festivals twenty-three times. After the fifteenth time she told her husband, “I can’t do this anymore.” But he said, “I can’t go without you. Please.” So she went, because she was “still holding his hand.” Yet more and more she felt that she “needed to breathe my own air.”
Once her children were grown and gone, she felt she had to stop being “mother” and “tap into ‘woman’”—get a job, start a business. “Why didn’t I? I think it was that mother role, that self-sacrificing, of my generation. At one point—the kids were already in college—I was invited to join a group of women who were meeting from five o’clock to seven to learn to meditate. My husband didn’t even get home until seven, seven-thirty, but it was still a major breakthrough to do this thing for me.”
Bernice’s husband, unable to comprehend why she was leaving him, fought her in court for four and a half exhausting, demoralizing years. One day, soon after their settlement was finally signed, she “looked down at my rather pendulous breasts. I called a friend and said, ‘Give me the name of your plastic surgeon.’ Ten days later I had a breast reduction. I was ending that period of mothering, nurturing everybody else.”
This is the essence of the mother: pouring out her vital substance to nurture others. But such nurturing is not restricted to literal mothers. Wendy, an artist and performer, was single and young enough to be Bernice’s daughter. Whereas Bernice’s family was essentially normal, Wendy’s was floridly dysfunctional, centering around her older sister’s mental illness. In this family’s belief system, Wendy’s caretaking was considered essential to her sister’s happiness and well-being. “The burden of being her friend, let alone her only friend, was almost unbearable,” Wendy said. “I became transfixed by the idea that I was being asked to lie down and give my sister a transfusion of all my blood in order to help her be healthy and well. It would have been fine with everyone even if I had died. And it became clear, too, that nobody really expected her to get well from that transfusion, that in some complicated way this involved sacrificing both of us.” To survive, Wendy wound up estranging herself from her family.
More often, women let themselves be drained in commonplace ways. Marsha, a fifty-year-old technical writer, happily married, passionately recounted her acute resentment at pouring her energy into taking care of friends who didn’t reciprocate. “Taking care” might mean months of helping a friend with cancer—running errands, visiting her at home and in the hospital—or simply going out of her way to keep a date with her cousin’s son in order not to hurt his feelings. The sick friend recovered but no longer took any interest in Marsha’s own needs or problems; the cousin repaid her consideration by canceling a later plan on a whim, blithely assuming that “Marsha won’t mind.” She did, but she couldn’t say so. “When I get depressed,” she explained, “I feel I only exist to help other people, and that all my friendships have to be based on my taking care of them.”
When I broke a dinner date with her because of a bad headache, “I couldn’t even let you know how I felt,” she confessed later. “That’s what I think of as sacrificing my needs for someone else. Though my need was so strong for you to understand how I felt and to apologize, I still felt you were in pain and I had no right to impose my needs on you. I wasn’t worthy.”
Marsha thought she might be modeling herself on her Jewish mother. “When I was growing up, I don’t remember my mother ever, ever being sick. I remember her crying when my grandparents died. But she was just always there and always able to take care of everyone. She never had a cold, she never had temperature. As an adult, when I found out that some of my friends’ parents had headaches or colds, it shocked me. Mothers don’t get headaches, mothers don’t get colds.”
Women’s thinking about sacrifice almost always wends its way back to this source. The most frequent single reaction among the thirty or so women I talked to was epitomized by Anne, who said, “When you asked about sacrifice, I thought about my mother.” For some the reaction was, “She sacrificed so much for me and I’m so grateful”; for others, “I looked at what she did and swore my life would be different.” A few said their fathers had sacrificed, too (though never quite in the same way). But nobody said, “When I think about sacrifice, I think about my father.”
The Mothers’ Legacy
Whether a mother’s sacrifice was a support or a burden, the awareness of it bit deep into her daughter. “My mother’s generation were caregivers and nurturers,” Anne explained. “This was the woman’s role: she takes the broken chair”—like the Angel in the House, who took the leg of the chicken. Anne’s father had food allergies, and at restaurants her mother would order for herself not dishes she liked but food that Anne’s father could eat, to provide extra for him, since he would be unable to eat part of his own serving.
“My mother lived through her children. She had nothing else,” Anne continued. “This was her decision—it wasn’t out of necessity. I and my siblings resented her because our friends’ mothers did needlepoint, or painting by numbers, or they golfed—they had something that was their own. Our mother had nothing; it was all her children.” The children, in turn, were supposed “to make her happy by fitting the mold.” Anne found this “a heavy burden to carry. When I was a teenager, I thought I’d never get married or have children, partly because I didn’t want to be like my mother.” When Anne did marry and have a son, she thought through the issues carefully, and as we will see, she did it differently.