Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

bargain with her reader. Come with me, she says, to a place where distinctions slip away; where there is no time, no culture, and no preconceived notion of sexual identity. Only then can we see who we are. The beach and its primeval rhythms will strip us of pretense, and the “twisted strands” of our lives will gain clarity, meaning, and perspective. But for all its literary and philosophic glaze,
Gift from the Sea
is a personal statement of “hunger and thirst,” tempered by an implicit faith in Nature.
    Faith was new to the feminist scene. The redefinition of American female roles had its roots in defiance. Anne’s mother and other turn-of-the-century middle-class, urban, educated women had fought for suffrage. Women of the twenties and thirties had thrust open the doors of educational institutions, making their way into professions once bastions of male dominance. Law, medicine, even governmental service, became accessible to those willing to pay the price of loneliness, frustration, and prejudice. But in 1955 women had traded college for marriage. The average age of a woman at the time she married was twenty, and it was quickly dipping into the teens. The proportion of women attending college in comparison to men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958, and 60 percent dropped out of college to marry. By the end of the 1950s the birth rate in the United States was overtaking that of India. 12
    “Home” had become the focal point of the postwar social order. It symbolized a sinecure amidst the uncertainty of a cold war. It was a microcosm of an ideal world—peaceful, safe, and technologically advanced—in a sea of potential nuclear devastation. Later, Betty Friedan wrote,
    The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American women, and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world … She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment … She had everything that women ever dreamed of … but she wanted more. 13
     
    By 1955, nearly six million women had entered the marketplace. Unlike twenty years earlier, 30 percent were married, and 40 percentcame from the middle class. Furthermore, and perhaps most significant, 39 percent of women with school age children were employed. As a result of these changing patterns, a great debate broke out in American media: Could a woman be a wife and mother and still pursue a professional career? It was called “the woman problem,” and scores of social theorists rose to explain it. Feminists believed women were unhappy because they were compelled to stay at home. Antifeminists blamed the discontent of housewives on their violation of tradition, dogma, and social role. 14 Amidst this conflagration of ideas, Anne retreated to Captiva to find her own solutions.
    The universe Anne enters is Darwinian and amoral, governed by laws beyond human control. But for all its bare-boned obsession with death—the skeletal shells of wandering homeless creatures—she finds an affirming, life-sustaining force in the rhythmical turnings of nature and the sea.
    It is a journey infused with classical literature and Christian doctrine, yet rooted in the teachings of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. A circular metaphor, womblike and nourishing, is the unifying principle
of Gift from the Sea
. At its center is a maternal force, nameless and sacred, that enlightens and transforms all who enter. It is an oasis—both full and void—that connects the individual to her unconscious, and the unconscious to the collective whole. Camouflaging her Hindu and Buddhist sources beneath the words of Christian saints and modern poets and writers, Anne chooses to articulate only those concepts which mesh with the writings of Saint Augustine, Saint Catherine of Siena, and the works of William James, Charles Morgan, Rilke, John Donne, and Saint-Exupéry.
    The book comprises eight essays, six of them