On Women’s Autobiography

The following selection is excerpted from a speech made by Lillian Smith at the University of Florida in 1962. 

We have no record that Adam was aware of himself before Eve gave him that first long look. She was his primal mirror, it must have been quite a shock to discover himself in a female’s eyes. Yet this profoundly traumatic experience has not been dealt with adequately either in poetry or psychology. Freud missed it entirely — as he missed so much that is important about women and men and their relationship with each other. 

The women, themselves, have never written much about what Eve saw when she looked at Adam, although what she saw may have had a great deal to do with her learning to talk first. She has whispered about it to other women for a million years, and some of what she whispered has leaked out, of course. 

What is more important — at least, to our topic of autobiography — is the fact that women have not broken the million-year silence about themselves. Or, they are only beginning to. They know how they look in men’s eyes. At least, they should. For poetry and art and myth and fiction and religion are filled with icons and images and dreams and nightmares about the female; and there are the Greek furies and maenads and the Protestant witches and the Catholic Madonna.... 

But they dare not record how they look to themselves. Why? 

There are reasons. One is there are many women who have no awareness of themselves. They have never asked who they are and they don’t care. And there are the appeasers, who may have their own ideas, but have settled, publicly, for the men’s view. It seems the simplest way to live and often the only way to keep the bread buttered. There are others, confused by what they have been told which is not in the least what they know about themselves, who have settled things by turning off the light in their interiors; they are different and they know it but these differences are easier to accept if unnamed. 

But there is a more cogent reason why women have kept their silence. They dared not tell the truth about themselves for it might radically change male psychology.... 

So — playing it safe — women have conspired to keep their secrets.... But great autobiographies are not written by people who have conspired to keep silent, and we must face the fact that no woman has, as yet, written a great autobiography. 

However, women are exceptionally good at memoirs and diaries and journals. They rarely tell the truth, even in their diaries, about their sex experiences or their most intimate relationships; nor do they spend much time asking the unanswerable questions about the meaning of human life since they have never been too sure they were human. But they have a blunt, and highly entertaining way of cutting the homefolks down to size; they see the specific things, the small events that are so often full of heart-stopping implications; and they can get it on paper. As you know, the best women writers do not use a self-conscious literary style but write the spoken language with beautiful precision, and sometimes with poetic lyricism. 

This down-to-earth, vivid and sometimes poetic quality in their writing has a certain enchantment. We all know women are less given to abstractions and generalities than are men — not because they are not capable of abstract and categorical thinking but because they are, like artists, closer to things, to the human flesh, and human feelings; and they tend to remember that the concrete is always different while the abstract has a deadly sameness. And because they avoid abstractions, it follows that they tend to be less romantic than men. Maybe much of it comes from their age-old task of changing diapers and washing them, laying out the dead (in the old days), giving medicine and enemas, doing the homey, dirty, naked sort of things that only women and doctors and today’s undertakers are familiar with.... 

Women, including women writers, have a tendency to deflate the hero’s ego. But, even though it is hard to forgive them this sin, we must admit that in their diaries and journals they have left us some unforgettable pages. What women are more different from each other than Harriet Martineau, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth — yet they all have given us in letters or diaries a superb, unforgettable awareness of fragments of the human experience. Even their rebellion has for me a special poignancy. I find myself thinking of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It was an outburst — and her men friends were cool to her, afterward, for weeks — it was an impassioned protest of women’s position in the world, of the woman writer’s almost insuperable difficulties. It is certainly not her best writing. Nor does it reveal her most interesting and subtle qualities as a woman. Yet it sticks with you. Such plain, raw facts, so deeply felt by one woman and so meaningful to millions of others.... 

Freud said once that woman is not well acculturated; she is, he stressed, retarded as a civilized person. I think what he mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization. Southern women have never been as loyal to the ideology of race and segregation as have Southern men. The Southern woman has always put the welfare of one individual above the collective welfare or collective values. Many of them have been betraying White Supremacy for 200 years, but most who have done so could not reason with you as to why. Instinctively woman chooses life, wherever life is, and avoids death, and she has smelled the death in the word segregation.... 

Women have been particularly good with the bitter times of war.... They recorded our individual differences while the newspapers recorded our group samenesses. But, though we were given many letters and diaries that tell us how unsolid the South was even the year before the [Civil War] began, how torn were the hearts and minds and souls of men and women, there did not come out of this traumatic ordeal one good autobiography. The Southern women played it by ear, day by day — and never, afterward, turned back to see what significance, what meaning, lay in what she had actually done and said and thought and recorded. She could not form a gestalt and say: This has been my life and my people’s life. 

With all their talent for the specific and the concrete, with their capacity for passion and for disloyalty to conformity, women have not, as yet, written autobiographies that deserve the word “great. ’’ 

Have men? Yes. Yes — and no. To write the perfect autobiography would of course require a man able to accept and bring all his selves together...he would need to know the archaic depths of the unconscious and at the same time criticize these depths with a rational, logical mind; he would need to accept and understand his childhood as well as his present; and he would, finally, need to be a man who knows a great story never gives an answer to its listeners but instead asks a great question. I have for years been asking myself, ‘when is a story a real story?’ The only satisfying answer I have found is this: When a story begins with one specific question about life, or a handful of questions, and ends with a bigger question, one that human beings must keep asking, knowing as they ask that it cannot be answered, then a story is a real story — and maybe an immortal one. 

So, when a story teller — and every autobiographer is a story teller -- starts out to tell his own story, he has to search deep and wide to know what that story really is. This is a spiritual and intellectual ordeal. It is more: it is a creative ordeal for he is actually creating his own Self and his own life as he writes, because he is giving it its meaning... What a courageous, and almost demiurgic task to set out on the quest for the meaning of one’s life, what stoical honesty is required in order to write it down! No wonder most of us settle for smaller matters. No wonder women for the most part have settled for notebooks and diaries and journals. 

I hope, some day, to write my autobiography. I have not yet done so — although most of my writing is autobiographical. In one book, Killers of the Dream, I have chosen to take one fragment of my life, my experiences as a white person in a strictly patterned, highly conformed culture, and write as fully as I could of that. I have told in that book many true things about my childhood as I lived it... Only in a tight, dosed culture could such a book be written. A German, reared as a child in the Nazi days could give us a book of similar worth. Why did I do this — instead of writing about myself as an individual? Because I was not a free individual during some of those years, I was a white conformist. I told, both as documentary and as confession, my story as one human being caught in the white-black strands of a web that seemed to be soft and pliable but was made of thin steel wires which caught and held and wounded the human spirit. 

Someone asked me, ‘Did you write this book as an act of penance?’’ I think perhaps I did in a way — as every autobiography is an act of penance — but it was also for me, if I may say, a very serious thing, a step toward redemption. As was St. Augustine’s Confessions. I began the book not to give answers but to find the big questions that I could and must live with in freedom. And because the situation I lived in, and still live in, is one of great importance to the earth’s future, because segregation as I knew it and others in the South knew it is both symbol and symptom of the deep malaise which the human race is suffering from, I also appealed in this book to the reader to help us change ourselves. For I felt, and I still do, that insight and understanding can help us bring our split selves into some kind of unity — and this seems to me important for every individual in our times.