Took a small break from the Christmas business a few nights ago to watch the film adapation of Jill Ker Conway’s memoir The Road from Coorain. The film, a coming of age memoir set in the Australian outback, didn’t especially move me; maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas cookies or maybe I was just sleepy. But I did perk up during (of all things) Russell Baker’s concluding statements that the book was a best-seller, in part, due to “its powerful evocation of the soul-crushing tedium that defined women’s lives in places like Coorain. Jill’s mother becomes heroic simply by enduring it.”
What? (I sat up.) Did I miss something? Had Russell Baker and I watched the same movie? Jill’s mother wound up a miserable, envious, emotionally blackmailing bitch of a woman. What Baker should have said was that Jill’s mother started out heroic, but ended up pathetic. And the reasons why are a very, very telling.
Jill Ker Conway, a successful academic who went on to become Smith College's first woman president, never had children. I'm not sure if that was by choice or not, but having had a successful career, and perhaps trying to explain it, she said that she wrote the memoir “to communicate very directly about the authenticity of women’s motivation for work, about how a person strives to find some creative expression."
“The moral of my mother’s life was that while she had challenging work, she was indomitable and when she didn’t, she fell apart.”
During the first half of the film, set on a sheep farm in the Australian Outback, the challenges of survival--of feeding, clothing and raising her three children during the lean years of drought, and of shouldering all the burdens once her husband died--might have involved great amounts of tedium, but Ker Conway’s mother did not complain and carried on with good-natured soul intact. While she had challenging work, she was indomitable. There was nowhere else she had to be; there were no other people she had to impress. There was great isolation, which was hard to bear, but from what I could tell she seemed to handle it with a pioneer spirit. She would not let her family sink; that is to say, her pride would not let her family sink. (Pride, eventually, turned out to be much of her problem.)
Her husband died young, but still she rallied, worked hard, and took risks. As can happen in this world, her work and risks paid off. She became materially successful; (the film glosses over just how this happened, something about a bumper crop of wool).
Anyway, my point is, Mr. Baker, that it was not the tedium of hard work that crushed her soul, but rather the subsequent ease and preoccupations of privilege. She busied herself with acquring fine things, with grooming herself impeccably, and with expecting too much from and trying to control her children. She did not busy her mind with any plans to challenge herself in the future, once her children were grown; that was her downfall.
A typical second-wave feminist take on the situation might be that because the mother had given up her career as a nurse, in order to dedicate herself to marriage and family, she found herself aimless later in life. I think the plain truth is that she let herself rot. There was no one else to blame.
11:52:26 PM 
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