A Difficult Woman Read Online Free

quickly earned an unenviable reputation for being demanding, greedy, ambitious, loud, and bad-tempered. The evidence suggests that she was, at times, all of these things. Yet her quick and angry style, her sexual energy, might have drawn less critical attention in a similarly situated male.
    Hellman positioned herself as a southerner, a Jew, and a playwright before she ever identified herself as a woman. Yet she could not escape the pigeonhole of what a woman was supposed to be. In the eyes of many, she remained a woman first, forever assessed as a woman playwright, a daughter of the South, a renegade Jewish woman. So it was with her sexuality. Hellman’s autonomous and vigorous pursuit of sexual satisfaction reflected the risky goals of young women of her class in the 1920s. Nor did Hellman change these behaviors as she matured. Unlike other women of her generation (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Mary McCarthy come to mind), she did not atone for her past promiscuity by settling down with a partner. On the contrary, she walked away from an early marriage with no hard feelings and the recognition that marriage was not for her. Critics in the 1930s sometimes described Hellman as a “she Hammett.”
    One suspects that her lack of conventional beauty multiplied the offense given by Hellman’s want of decorous behavior. Still, she continued to be sexually active throughout her life and sexually attractive into her old age, when her magnetism drew comment. Look at her in that mink coat, sexy, knowing, ironic, plainly the picture of a woman thoroughly enjoying herself into her seventy-second year. Late in life, her sometimes salacious pursuit of young men attracted sneers and jokes that increased as she became sick and feeble. It was then that she became known to her enemies as a “sexual predator.” The combination of wrinkled and leathery skin and sexual aggressiveness drew bitter comments like “she had a face that looked as if a mouse died on it.”
    Once again Hellman illuminates the historical moment. The twentieth century was, after all, a time of volatile gender relationships. Modernity, Depression, war, and suburbanization all challenged traditional gender norms; new habits of consumption and political protest led women in particular to seek new paths. The young Lillian who in the twenties enjoyed the sexual and lifestyle freedom of the flapper generation lived through themore traditional, family-oriented fifties, insistently committed to her own brand of independent womanliness. When the second wave of feminism came along, she dismissed the young women who participated in the new movement as lacking in seriousness. She refused to call herself a feminist, denied that she experienced obstacles to success as a woman, was reportedly fiercely combative with female subordinates. Small wonder, then, that a new generation of young women who adored her also felt a touch of ambivalence. They admired her explicit acknowledgment of sexual desire and appreciated her iteration of a free and self-made life. But they were disappointed at the lack of emotional autonomy it demonstrated—at the failure of women like Hellman to refuse dependence on men, or to identify with women.
    In her search for economic independence, too, Hellman transgressed the idea of a woman’s place. Unlike the lives of many early-twentieth-century women, whose stories rotate around courtship, marriage, and family even when their achievements are substantial, Hellman’s tale is better captured by following a typically male trajectory. Her life tells a story of mounting attainment. At one level, she exemplifies the Horatio Alger myth that promises success to those who (with the aid of luck and pluck) pull themselves up by their bootstraps. At another, it manifests the courage and assertion it took for a woman to pursue a course generally closed to her sex. For a woman to achieve the economic resources that