The Sex War: Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, and The Golden Notebook

Abstract

Despite Lessing’s sometime claim to being one, feminist is not a term that I can easily apply to her. I cannot imagine Lessing endorsing arguments about difference or calls for separatism. The doctrinaire quality of so much contemporary feminism would be unappealing to the Lessing who wrote The Four-Gated City and Canopus in Argos: Archives. That same doctrinaire quality would be equally unappealing to the Lessing who wrote the early volumes of Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook. Still those earlier books present female protagonists living in societies grappling with what the Victorians called ‘the Woman Question’. And like so many of the Victorian reformers before her, Lessing centres her response to ‘the Woman Question’ on a critique of the institution of marriage which she vigorously attacks in Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. In both novels, Lessing presents a critique of marriage and family as the enemy of free women.

The truth is I have sympathy for men. Men ought to be horizon-bashing, challenging and raising hell. A woman would be perfectly happy with that sort of man.

Doris Lessing, 1969¹

I’ve never agreed that the women’s movement should be restricted to women, … I didn’t expect much to arise out of it, and nothing much has.

Doris Lessing, 1984²