Anais Nin on Creative Contracts
From the Anais Nin oral history interview, 1972. Found at a great mother lode of such interviews, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
DOLORIS HOLMES: I asked you to read that because it seems to me as if one of the reasons for the antagonism between men and women is this real over-dependence, and that a good result from the Women’s Liberation Movement will be that men will be more separate from women, each will have more of a chance to define themselves as separate beings and then when they come back together there will be more chance for real love. Sylvia, does this get into anything that you have been thinking about?
SYLVIA GOLDSMITH: Well, it’s like Miss Nin said. I think what happens is that we’re so inter-role playing, we’re so conditioned very early to think of ourselves as helpless, as not wanting to compete with men in order to gain their love and feel that if we achieve something of our own very often we lost their love. So I think we’re psychologically conditioned to always accept and think of ourselves in a secondary way. We fear very much our freedom at the same time that we want it.
ANAIS NIN: I feel the solution to that is a real, very complex, creative labor with man about relationship, and when we can convince him that whatever we achieve is an enrichment of his life, that it doesn’t take anything away from him, that actually dependency is quite clear, that it is just as bad for him as it is for the woman: it puts a great burden on him and doesn’t free him. And I think the young men are beginning to realize that this is freeing them.
SYLVIA GOLDSMITH: I mean they say now too that Women’s Liberation is Men’s Liberation.
ANAIS NIN: So that when they don’t have this helpless woman, but somebody who is bringing enrichment and stimulation into their life �- I think that many men have seen that this is really an enrichment; it’s not taking something away. We still have the problem of when one artist is more successful than another, but this has always been true. I was reading about a very old woman photographer. She and her husband were photographers, she became famous and he divorced her.
The photographer in question might have been Doris Ulmann, I’m not sure.
