Thought for the Week: Joseph Jones on women’s work
‘There is a clear lesson here for those of us who share lives with women.’
We lost too many people in that long first year of pandemic. Among them was the poet Eavan Boland, who had returned to her native Ireland to be close to family during the crisis. She already had some experience of lockdown – artistically, that is, having written ‘Quarantine’ (2008) about a couple leaving a workhouse amid the 1847 typhus epidemic. It was, she says, ‘the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people’. It’s a tragic love poem. Exhausted and ‘sick with famine fever’, the wife is carried by the husband into the cold. They’re found dead the following morning, with her feet against his chest for warmth.
Boland’s sober, intense gaze prevents the story drifting into sentimentality. It is instead a discovery of ‘what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved.’
Irish poetry changed while Boland was writing it. ‘I began to write in an Ireland where the word “woman” and the word “poet” seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other’, she said. By the time she died the Poetry Foundation acknowledged that ‘Modern Irish poetry would be unthinkable without her presence’. She had built a reputation on ‘subverting traditional constructions of womanhood’.
Re-reading ‘Quarantine’ reminded me of the huge number of poems sent to the Friend in those first months of lockdown. Those too were usually written by women, along with more and more prose articles (for which we have much more space). In more usual times, a distinct majority of the unsolicited contributions we receive are from men. I’m grateful for any submission, but I’ve been a little disappointed recently as that imbalance has resumed. Friends may have a clearer idea than me why that might be the case, but I suspect that the difficulties of human connection under lockdown had something to do with it. Also, what feminists like Boland taught unmindful men like me was that the emotional management of the social web of a household – building relationships, maintaining connections, holding calm – is itself a significant labour, and not one to which men have traditionally paid much attention. Perhaps when such work was not there to do, there was more space, energy and desire for other forms of expression.
If this is the case then there is a clear lesson here for those of us who share lives with these women – at least, for those who want to live up to our Testimony to Equality. Almost a century ago Virginia Woolf asserted that ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’. True or not, it seems to me that she needs someone to share the emotional labour too.
Joe is editor of the Friend.
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