Silence of a Woman’s Home


It is man’s right to roll over and give up if he so chooses. I invoke that right, but I am a woman, and not allowed. I was rejected to-day. I know why. I agree. I did a very risky thing a few months ago. I cannot say I regret subjecting myself to vulnerability, but I would be very happy to forget everything and die dreamless. So many men die at home, and I am more than certain that more than half of the men who did not, wish (like a boy with a birthday cake) that they had. Why should I be any different? Because a woman has no home. Her home is her family, and her family changes; a woman, must go inside herself to die. The bed she makes, for her husband. The bed she once made, sold to the devil upon age. The bed she will make, abstract and as decayed as she.
Robert Frost wrote “Death of a Hired Man” about a man who had left the little he had to menace, and potentially make something greater of himself. He failed. Upon failure, he came back, waited for death, and died. It was not the traditional home, however, he came home to. His mother was not waiting in the doorframe with a pie, his father not in an easy chair with a televised baseball game. He arrived to the definitive modern home: the one place he, in his fruitless life, had stayed longest. Having been the unfortunate man who, on his quest for money—perhaps dignity even—failed, he has no place to go but where he last was. But this is a place that no longer wants him, so says the man of the house. It quickly becomes clear that, though Warren (the head of the estate) proclaimed that Silas (our man of desperation) should no longer be allowed refuge, he does not mean it. It is the duty of Mary, his wife, to contort herself into an excuse that falls easily off the tongue. For a woman, beyond its simple definitions, is in fact a homemaker.
It is impossible to claim that every woman is subject to slavery by ways of mortgage, heat, and dinner; but it can be asserted that her responsibilities lie larger than credit. She is a shadow. Waiting to make a world that never before existed, one that never again will. There is rare a woman who has died inside her home. To claim her empty, however, is a mistake. For as women we find little room for ourselves in a world that is clearly so big. She does as the male does as well as what she was taught: stillness. No matter the woman, there is somewhere she is silent. She is silent because there is a desire she will not allow herself. It is in this silence that is her home. It is hardly known, but the quiet woman is always crying.