Consider Her Ways

"Even though Wyndham wrote several novels which were very successful, he carried on enjoying writing short stories. He wrote them to entertain himself, and lots of them could be entire novels. Some of them are funny; some of them are horrifying; some of them explore ideas that are really very complicated or unusual. Consider Her Ways is one of the most interesting of his short story collections because of that story at the start of it, Consider Her Ways . Although also, looking through it, Stitch in Time , Random Quest … a lot of them are about women. Consider Her Ways is, as far as I know, the first exploration of what a world would look like if there were only women in it. In some ways, it feels a bit dated. For instance, he says that there’s less technological innovation – some, but less. The name, ‘consider her ways’, comes from the Bible: ‘go to the ant thou sluggard, and consider her ways’. The idea is that women set up a world that’s modelled on an ant’s nest: there are people who are mothers, and that is their only function; there are people who are workers; there are the intelligentsia, the doctors; and there are the people who care for the mothers, the carers. Everybody knows their place. Everybody has a function. It’s very conflicted, as a story; he’s not sure if this is a good world or not. His narrator – it’s written from the first-person viewpoint of a woman who visits this world – she’s not sure if she likes it or not. She can see the pros, she can see the cons. The women she talks to think that it’s an improvement, but on the other hand, they’ve never known a world with men in it. It’s a really interesting exploration of an idea that I think would have occurred to very, very few men to write. It was first published in 1961, so he was probably writing it in the late ’50s. Then the other stories in it… There’s one called Stitch in Time , which is playing with time travel, and Random Quest , which is playing with the idea of alternative universes, which might be a bit like ours, but different. Of course, that’s something authors have been playing with now for a very long time. It’s a nice collection of stories, but I think Consider Her Ways is clearly the standout one in there. Yes, very ambivalent about motherhood. He took the view that marriage was slavery for women – not just in the sense that they couldn’t escape it, but also in the sense that it turned them into slaves, and there was an inevitable mental subjugation that came with chaining yourself to a man. He didn’t really seem to believe that it could ever be a partnership of equals. He thought that inevitably, the slave would start acting like a slave. And the motherhood issue was part of that. He himself had a disastrous childhood. He lived in a very wealthy family, quite religious in some ways – his grandparents and wider family certainly were, which comes out in the Chrysalids , which we’ll discuss later. His mother just had no idea what to do with herself. The children were sent off to a whole variety of schools, and she went to live in hotels where she drank whiskey and played bridge for her entire life. She didn’t actually raise the boys very much. Whenever she got bored of one place and decided to go and try some spa in another, she would move the boys – Wyndham had a younger brother – to another boarding school, closer to where her new hotel was going to be. So they had this disrupted childhood governed by quite a selfish woman, who doubtless loved them, but really was not engaging with the whole project – and who had moved straight from daughterhood to wifehood, and then when her marriage failed, back to daughterhood again, without ever really being independent in any way. He was very ambivalent about mothers and motherhood, but he could see that it was something incredibly powerful. There’s another short story in the other collection we’ll discuss, called Survival , where a woman does everything she can to protect her baby, ruthlessly – so he could see that it was this massive driving force behind the universe, and that actually nothing mattered apart from that. Everything else was just playing around with boys’ toys. But he seemed to think it was mentally narrowing and damaging to women, that laser focus, that inevitably meant they lost a broader vision. Quite a strange attitude, really. He himself never had any children – as far as we can tell, by choice – and neither did his brother; both were in long term, very happy relationships, but neither had any children."