why aren't there more creative women?

by lois phillips hudson

despite all the disagreements among various schools of psychology, there are points on which almost everyone agrees. one is that we don't know very much about what we call "the creative process," but we do know that creative insights, whether they be insights that flash a marvelous metaphor into our heads, insights that enable us to put together a story or a novel, or insights that produce scientific discoveries--all these insights arise, somehow, from our subconscious.

now let us look at what happens to the subconscious of just about every single human female in any time, any culture. every one of us knows that we are at the mercy of just about every physically normal male between the ages of thirteen and seventy-five. we many not let ourselves think about it, as numbers of young women who hitchhike have said to me. but it is always there--that knowledge we have had since we were very young.

and many of us have had terrible experiences by the time we are ten years old. my first was at nine. a seventy-year-old man who was the father of my mother's best friend. he was also a preacher. i had been taught to revere him. mr. betts did not rape me. he followed me into the woods when i thought i was alone, and he fondled me. i cannot describe my terror--not even today. nor can i describe my feelings of guilt. i must have somehow done something hideously wrong, out exploring alone in the woods when he came upon me. otherwise, how could a preacher, the father of my mother's beloved friend, how could he have done that?

and what was it that was wrong with me?

when i was thirteen, my mother arranged for me to catch a ride, with our neighbor, to town six miles away. it was during the war, and we had gas rationing. i was to ride to kirkland with mr. ahmann, go to the dentist, and wait for my father to pick me up there on his way home from work at boeing. mr ahmann, the father of thirteen children, including three girls who were my best friends, took a back route through what was at that time a forest. he stopped the car and turned to me with a look in his eyes that, again, i cannot describe. he pulled me to him, his hand over my new breasts, kissed me with his tongue in my mouth. i had never been kissed in my life by anybody except my mother. (mr. ahmann, incidentally, is one of the reasons why, three years later, i didn't date boys, to the consternation of my concerned guidance counselor.) he was trembling, but for the firs time in my life, i really understood all the implications of male strength. i was an unusually strong, athletic girl, and i had my full growth, but i knew i was helpless. even so, i thought of how i could manage to break away and run into the forest. no, i thought, he can catch you. it's better to beg.

so i begged. what does it do to a human female to have to beg for her survival--her plain, simple physical survival--from the time she is ten years old? or even younger. what does it do to us to be taught to beg, to flatter, to cajole, taught by both men and women, from the time we are tiny? i'm not talking about optimum conditions for creativity here. i'm talking about survival--physical survival. what does this do to our sense ourselves as creative human beings? i submit that the creative woman has surmounted obstacles that most men have never imagined. i begged him. i made myself into nothing, and begged.

and after a few more agonizing squeezings of new tender breasts, and a few more kisses with his disgusting saliva all over my face, he stopped trembling and let me go. in a shaky voice, he told me he would let me go if i promised never to tell anybody. of course i promised. so far as i can remember, that was the first time i made a promise i knew i didn't intend to keep. (oh yes, we women are so sly and cunning.) that was the first time my adult integrity was raped.

i did, finally, after i recovered from the worst of my own self-loathing, after i had scrubbed my mouth so many times that i not longer felt so filthy that i couldn't speak of it--i did finally tell my mother. i knew it would hurt her, but i had to. and i must insert here, how many girls can't tell their mothers? how many girls have mothers who have been so frightened by men that they have, in subtle ways, made it clear that they do not want to hear any such stories from their daughters?

and when i think of my father at that time, i am nauseated. every time the ahmann girls came over to our house, he had to get his hands on them. there was always a funny, laughing reason to give them a hug. (he never, of course, hugged me!) always a reason to whistle at them, pinch them, slap their fannies, as the male saying goes. i know that my father would never have done more than that, but i could tell they hated it. and i knew how they would feel if they ever knew what their father had done to me!

so--we never tell, do we?

but we need our egos. at a cocktail party for me as an author, a man i knew fairly well, a colleague of my husband's, said to me, with the greatest of admiration, "lois, i can't imagine how much guts it takes to be a writer. you must have to have the ego of a prizefighter." i agreed. you have to have an ego that will make you get up again, no matter how many times you've been knocked down. to do anything creative--in science, business, anything--you have to get up again and try again. so who are we? if we have no right to our own bodies, how can we have the right to our own wills? (it's hard to have the ego of a prizefighter when you know that any punk kid may take a notion to rape and perhaps kill you.) and, most of all, there is our feeling that we don't have the right to our own feelings.

i think the belief that one has the right to her own feelings has got to be the basis of any creativity. you have to feel that what you see, what you hear, what you think--that these things are totally valid.

but what if you are told, in a thousand ways, from the time that you are born, that you can and will be raped? what if you are told that whether you want sex or not, whether you want to cater to another person's ego or not, this is what you were put on earth to do? what rights do you have then? how do you dare to have your own feelings? what great artist does not express his or her own feelings?

what, besides the right to her own feelings, does any creative person have to feel? you have to feel that you are in control. this is a story, this is an essay, this is a novel, this is a painting, this is a musical composition that i will control! this is what i want to say, and i will say it!

if you are a human female, somehow you have to decide that you do have a right to your own feelings, a right to control what you are doing, and that despite everything that everybody has taught you, you will assert that right.