Room For The Life

[Lori]

Hey there, you lady in tears
Do you think that they care if they're real, woman?
They just take it as part of the deal
Lost in your men and the games you play
Trying to prove that you're better, woman
But you needn't get heavy with them
Like it or not, we were built tough
Because we're woman

No, we never die for long
While we've got that little life
To live for, where it's hid inside
No, we never die for long
Oh! Woman, two in one

There's room for a life in your womb, woman
Inside of you can be two, woman
There's room for a life in your womb, woman
Mama woman, aha

Night after night in the quiet house
Plaiting her hair by the fire, woman
With no lover to free her desire
How long do you think she can stick it out?
How long do you think before she'll go out, woman?
Hey! Get up on your feet and go get it, now
Like it or not, we keep bouncing back
Because we're woman

No, we never die for long
While we've got that little life
To live for, where it's hid inside
No, we never die for long
Oh! Woman, two in one

There's room for a life in your womb, woman
Inside of you can be two, woman
There's room for a life in your womb, woman
Mama woman, aha

A-mama-woma-mama-woman-aha
A-mama-woma-mama-woman-aha
Oh, mama-woman, two-in-a-one, aha
Oh, two in one, aha
Oh, woman! Woman! Woman! Woman!
There's room for a life in your womb
There's room for a life in your womb
Two in one, aha
Two in one! Two in one! Two in one!
Room for a life in your womb

[stev0]

I wonder if Kate is going to re-do this one (ala the new version of Wuthering Heights or even the French version of Infant Kiss) now that Bertie is in the picture.

[Al Truest]

Good question - maybe a thematic redux if not a new version.

[mizzshy]

That would be interesting...

[tannis]

Kate's Bush: For or Against Woman's Lib?

Night after night in the quiet house,
Plaiting her hair by the fire, woman,
With no lover to free her desire,
How long do you think she can stick it out?
How long do you think before she'll go out, woman?
Hey! Get up on your feet and go get it, now.

Wendy: Hello, Kate. Both your albums seem to me to be very woman orientated like Room For The Life and In The Warm Room. Would you say that you are for or against woman's lib?
KB: I'm always getting accused of being a feminist. Really I do write a lot of my songs for men, actually. In fact, "In The Warm Room" is written for men because there are so many songs for women about wonderful men that come up and chat you up when you're in the disco and I thought it would be nice to write a song for men about this amazing female. And I think that I am probably female-oriented with my songs because I'm a female and have very female emotions but I do try to aim a lot of the psychology, if you like, at men.
Wendy: That's very good. [Kate laughs] Thank you.
KB: Thank you.
Wendy: Kate, where do you get your hair done?
KB: My hair? I don't get it done anywhere, it does itself I'm afraid.
Wendy: Oh, lovely. I think it's terrific.
KB: Oh, thanks.
"Personal Call", BBC Radio 1, 1979
gaffa.org/reaching/ir79_pc.html

When I am a man
I will be an astronaut,
And find Peter Pan...

KB: "When I'm at the piano writing a song, I like to think I'm a man, not physically but in the areas that they explore... When I'm at the piano I hate to think that I'm a female because I automatically get a preconception. Every female you see at the piano is either Lynsey De Paul, Carole King...that lot. And it's a very female style. That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical, but it doesn't push it on you, and most male music -- not all of it, but the good stuff --really lays it on you. It's like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall, and that's what I'd like to do. I'd like my music to intrude. It's got to. I think that anything you do that you believe in, you should club people over the head with it!
"Not many females succeed with that. Patti Smith does, but that's because she takes a male attitude. I'm not really aware of it as a male attitude. I just think I identify more with male musicians than female musicians, because I tend to think of female musicians as...ah... females. It's hard to explain. I'd just rather be a male songwriter than a female. What it is, basically, is that all the songwriters I admire and listen to are male... I really enjoy some female writers, like Joni Mitchell, but it's just that I feel closer to male writers. Maybe I want to be a man," she laughs. "I like the guts than men have in performing and singing --like the punks. Like the way Johnny Rotten would use his voice was so original, and you get very few females even having the guts to do that, because they unfortunately tend to get stereotyped if they make it. I really enjoy seeing people doing something that isn't normal, you know. It's so refreshing. It's like that guy, you know, 'Cor baby, that's really free.' John Otway. It was amazing watching him perform and you just don't get females like that."
Melody Maker, "The Kick Outside", June 3, 1978
gaffa.org/reaching/i78_mm2.html

Do you consider yourself a feminist?
KB: "I really react to that word, and I think probably the majority of women--but I don't know--would feel the same. Feminist is one of those words. When you hear 'feminist' you go 'ummgh!' It's a 'concept'. You get all these terrible images--like women with hairy legs and big muscles. And I mean you just think of butch lesbians [the "Lavender Menace"]. I think the media's been playing around with it, but I also think there are an awful lot of groups that basically don't like men, and they tend to get quite a lot of publicity. And they are terribly aggressive and quite illogical: 'What have we got men for!' I think a lot of women feel very confused by the whole thing--I know I do--where you've just got to get in there--that's the thing--and work!"
Hot Press, "The Private Kate Bush", November 1985
gaffa.org/reaching/i85_hp.html

The phrase "Lavender Menace" was first used in 1969 by Betty Friedan, president of National Organization for Women (NOW), to describe the threat that she believed associations with lesbianism posed to NOW and the emerging women's movement. Friedan, and some other straight feminists as well, worried that the association would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement. Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes. On March 15, 1970, straight radical feminist Susan Brownmiller quoted Friedan's remarks about the "lavender menace" and dismissed her worries as "A lavender herring, perhaps, but no clear and present danger" in a New York Times Magazine article. Some lesbian feminists took her remarks as "a scathing put-down" and "evidence of Susan's homophobia or closet homosexuality--that is, that she was trying to distance herself from lesbians by insulting us" — because they felt that the quip dismissed lesbians as an insignificant part of the movement, or lesbian issues as unnecessary distractions from the important issues.

"There are a lot of women who --obviously--want the same opportunities, who don't want doors shut in their faces. But you know we should help each other, for God's sake, we shouldn't be fighting against each other. We should be working to help each other. And men have to be educated as much as women do. We have both been really conditioned. Okay, we are different, we have to recognise that, but we should be able to work together and help each other, and I think we can. We are all sort of sitting here feeling confused, both the women and the men! Or alternatively, the men are out there being chauvinist pigs and the women are out there being feminists. But there's a lot in the middle, a hodge-podge of people, just trying to adjust."
Hot Press, "The Private Kate Bush", November 1985
gaffa.org/reaching/i85_hp.html

Germaine Greer: "The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity. And I think it's women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation."

You have actually charted a very independent course yourself, and in some ways you'd offer a definition of what feminists would want women to be able to do.
KB: "I would like to think that there is actually a very strong force of women who believe we should have equal opportunities, be able to work, be treated nicely without any threat, all of that. And not necessarily come on with 'We hate men--Off with your balls!' Do you know what I mean? And I think there are lots of women who are starting to really do it properly. Look at comedy. I think comedy in this country is incredible. The best. It really is, it's superb. I suppose a lot of it is negatively based, but it still is superb, and just streets ahead of anyone else in the world. But, I think women have been used so much in comedy. Either there's something really hideous and ugly that's meant to be attractive, and then when it's hideous and ugly everyone goes 'aah!", or there's Benny Hill's cutie-pies that don't speak. But now there's a revolution in comedy which involves women in a much more interesting way. They're not being used as women, they're not really pretty or really ugly, they're just people. I think that really says a lot. And it's nice to see that, because so often I think women are pandered to. Like: a couple of years ago there was a trend of these feminist programmes that were meant to be for women, and they were all basically anti-men jokes. And all the women I knew thought they were horrific. It was totally insulting and unfunny. Yet women were presumed to laugh at this. Women came on and told jokes just as sexist as the men's. But it seems to have changed. It's women--Victoria Wood, Jennifer Saunders, Tracey Ullman--it's women, real women."
Hot Press, "The Private Kate Bush", November 1985
gaffa.org/reaching/i85_hp.html

From debut single onwards, Kate Bush has got up on her feet and gone got it, wanting control over almost all aspects of the composing and recording process. Her mastery of the Fairlight furthered her control to achieve her vision. Yet, in investigating the path of Kate Bush from ingénue to auteur, what is immediately striking is her lack of referenced recourse to explicitly ideological feminism (Moy, 2007). At points she has gone as far as to be downright derogatory to the ideology (all hairy legs, big muscles, and butch lesbians). Whenever the subject of gender in relation to creativity or musical 'politics' is raised in interviews, KaTe praises 'masculine values', eulogises on the beauty of the male form, or identifies with masculinity: "When I'm at the piano I hate to think that I'm a female..." The fact that she uses the phase "accused of being a feminist" strongly intimates an antipathy to feminism, with the less ideological term 'female' being preferred. In addition, one can only guess at the feminist connotation placed upon "interrogation", "puts you against the wall", and "club people over the head with it".

ANNIE: I'm home!
ALVY: Oh, yeah? How'd it go?
ANNIE: Oh, it was ... (Laughing) really weird. But she's a very nice woman.
ALVY: Yeah?
ANNIE: And I didn't have to lie down on the couch, Alvy, she had me sitting up. So I told her about-about the-the family and about my feelings toward men and about my relationship with my brother.
ALVY: M'm.
ANNIE: And then she mentioned penis envy ... Did you know about that?
ALVY: Me? I'm-I'm one of the few males who suffers from that, so, so ...
~ Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qH93lydpRg&feature=related
1:44...

'Penis envy' in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the theorized reaction of a girl during her psychosexual development to the realization that she does not have a penis. Freud considered this realization a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women. The girl child desires a penis, and the power that it represents (this is described as penis envy). She sees the solution as obtaining her father’s penis. She develops a sexual desire for her father (The Kick Inside).

A significant number of feminist critics and activists have been highly critical of penis envy as a concept and psychoanalysis as a discipline, arguing that the assumptions and approaches of the psychoanalytic project are profoundly patriarchal, anti-feminist, and misogynistic and represent women as broken or deficient men. Karen Horney—-a German psychoanalyst who also placed great emphasis on childhood experiences in psychological development-—was a particular advocate of this view. She asserted the concept of "womb envy" to challenge the idea of penis envy.

'Womb envy' is the unexpressed anxiety felt by some men over women's ability to give birth, leading them to dominate women or driving them to succeed in order for their names to live on. Horney claims that men experience womb envy more powerfully than women experience penis envy because 'men need to disparage women more than women need to disparage men'. Horney considers it likely that womb envy is a psychosocial tendency, just as penis envy is, rather than a quality inherent in men. Other feminists have initiated "vagina pride", or "pussy pride", partly popularized by The Vagina Monologues as a response to penis envy. Or Room For the Life...

There's room for a life in your womb, woman,
Inside of you can be two, woman,
There's room for a life in your womb, woman,
Mama woman, aha!

Room For the Life offers a feminist take on the womb as power, a womb of her own... French feminist Simone De Beauvoir observed in her landmark 1950s book, The Second Sex, "Women who are primarily interested in pleasing men . . . are distressed to see themselves deformed, disfigured. . . Pregnancy seems to them no enrichment, but a diminution of the ego." The early twentieth-century dancer Isadora Duncan's account of her pregnancy exemplified de Beauvoir's claim: "The child asserted itself more and more. It was strange to see my beautiful marble body softened and stretched and deformed. . . . More and more my lovely body bulged under my astonished gaze . . . Where was my lovely, youthful Naiad form? Where my ambition? My fame? I felt miserable and defeated."

But KaTe's Womb For the Life celebrates the Girl Power to be mined from the indisputable life-producing difference between male and female. The chorus resists identifying with either the male norm or the hard-lined second wave feminist norm. As Daphne de Jong stated in 'Legal Abortion Exploits Women': "The womb is not the be-all and end-all of women's existence. But it is the physical center of her sexual identity, which is an important aspect of her self-image and personality. To reject its function, or to regard it as a handicap, a danger or a nuisance, is to reject a vital part of her own personhood. Every woman need not be a mother, but unless every woman can identify with the potential motherhood of all women, no equality is possible. American Negroes gained nothing by straightening their kinky hair and aping the white middle class. Equality began to become a reality only when they insisted on acceptance of their different qualities - 'Black is Beautiful.'"

I ASKED her whether she thought of her music as being distinctively female -- taking 'Room For The Life' from 'The Kick Inside' an example.
KB: "People thought that song was feminist which disappointed me. It was actually saying we should go a bit easier on men because we are the ones with survival inside us, we carry the next generation, we have the will to keep going, we keep bouncing back. I don't know it that's anti-liberationist but I wouldn't say femininity was very strong in my songs. I've always felt there was something lacking in my feminine ... role, do I mean? Being brought up with two brothers I'd sit philosophising with them while my girlfriends wanted to talk about clothes and food. Maybe it's the male energy to be the hunter and I feel I have that in me".
Sounds, "Labushka", August 30, 1980
gaffa.org/reaching/i80_so.html

KaTe's early years sound like the Marxist utopia, where the individual would at last be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic [philosopher]" (German Ideology, 1846). And the Room For The Life philosophy tells women not to pander to the male norm or lose themselves competing in male terms, but to find empowerment from within, from being woman - 'Woman is Beautiful'.

Lost in your men and the games you play.
Trying to prove that you're better, woman.
But you needn't get heavy with them.
Like it or not, we were built tough,
Because we're woman.

[tannis]

KATE BUSH: Uncaged Tweetie-Pie...

Night after night in the quiet house,
Plaiting her hair by the fire, woman,
With no lover to free her desire,
How long do you think she can stick it out?
How long do you think before she'll go out, woman?
Hey! Get up on your feet and go get it, now.
Like it or not, we keep bouncing back,
Because we're woman.

"Five years ago it seemed clear that emancipation had failed: the number of women in Parliament had settled at a low level; the number of professional women had stabilized as a tiny minority; the pattern of female employment had emerged as underpaid, menial and supportive. The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out. The conclusion was that the cage door ought never to have been opened because canaries are made for captivity; the suggestion of an alternative had only confused and saddened them."
~ The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer, 1970

I: Are you a feminist?
KB: "Yuck! God, I hate that word. It's like calling someone a Sadist! I think it's really unfortunate that that word has been so associated with very extreme...extremist persons. Radical behavior. And I think although it probably had to be put in a bit at the beginning, I think all women are rather offended by that term now. What really has power is when you get people like Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French up there doing something really good, as women, being people, just being women. Women just getting on with it and doing it, and doing it well. Which I think a lot of women are doing now. And there's not such an alienating process going on between men and women."
~ Greater London Radio, with Janice Long, October 1989
gaffa.org/reaching/ir89_gl.html

Do you consider yourself a feminist?
KB: "I really react to that word..."
Hot Press, "The Private Kate Bush", November 1985
gaffa.org/reaching/i85_hp.html

Reaction Formation: In Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, "reaction formation" is a defense mechanism in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions are replaced by their direct opposites. The ego reacts to the impulses of the id by creating an antithetical formation that blocks repressed cathexes. For example, someone who feels homosexual desire might repress that desire by turning it into hatred for all homosexuals [or feminists!]. "Reaction-formation" is often seen in those with obsessional character and obsessive personality disorders.

A lot of people are not going to like what they hear Kate Bush saying in her new album THE KICK INSIDE, about being a woman in the Seventies. And perhaps even more are going to object to the way she says it, for in many of her songs she treads on a territory (sex-as-sex-as-sex) long held to be a male preserve. She does so with the same brisk authority and self-possession that has characterized at least some British women since the days of Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragist -extraordinaire-, and for this reason she will surely offend a great many men.
But probably as many women will be equally upset by Kate Bush's candor and honesty, though for a much different reason, the gallingly accurate one given by Germaine Greer in her book "The Female Eunuch". Greer says that as far as women's rights and equality are concerned, they are an accomplished fact, that indeed for the last fifty years the cage has been open, -but the bird has refused to fly out-. Bush's frankness and sense of what a female friend of calls "gut nooky" will hardly endear her to those women who still cling to the perch while making complaining Tweetie-Pie denials of their own sexuality.
What is different, however, about Kate Bush -- and what makes her songs important -- is not agitprop but excellence. With such songs as "Room For The Life", "Feel It", or "L'Amour Looks Something Like You", listeners know that they are in the presence of a real person, a real woman who lives in the here-and-now dealing with life as it is being lived, not as it is -supposed- to be lived in the perfume ads. Bush's females are fully as hungry as males are -- not in the angry, doomed, and rather dreary way of the romantic-gone-wrong of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, but simply as healthy, alive human beings with sensual and sexual appetites to satisfy. And they are as guiltless about expressing their hunger as most males have been for years.
Consider this from "Feel It": "Feel your warm hand walking around/I won't pull away, my passion always wins/So keep on a-moving in, keep on a-tuning in/Synchronize rhythmn now..." Or this from "L'Amour": "I'm dying for you just to touch me/And feel all the energy rushing right up-a-me/ L'Amour looks something like you." Bush performs these songs with a direct sincerity in an appealing, rather quavery, high-pitched voice that communicates not lubricity but the joy of satisfactory love-making...
Probably the strongest song in the album is "Room For The Life", which in one way is a call to those still-caged Tweetie-Pies and in another is a simple statement of the perils of freedom, liberation, and independence in the life of any Seventies woman: "Night after night in the quiet house/Plaiting her hair by the fire, woman/With no lover to free her desire/How long do you think she can stick it out/How long do you think before she'll go out, woman/Hey get up on your feet and go get it now/Like it or not we keep bouncing back/Because we're woman."
Nobody's said it better than that in quite a while -- not even Katherine Hepburn, who was asked a few years ago if she missed having a home life because of the demands of her career and replied, "Well, we can't have it all, can we?" Kate Bush seems to know and to believe and, most important, to communicate that what women can have, if they are honest with themselves, is quite enough. You've come a long way, Emmeline baby!
Stereo Review, The Kick Inside review, "Kate Bush: Uncaged Bird", Peter Reilly, 1978
gaffa.org/reaching/i78_sr.html

[Barry SR Gowing]

Sept 15, 2008 22:10:13 GMT tannis said:

A lot of people are not going to like what they hear Kate Bush saying in her new album THE KICK INSIDE, about being a woman in the Seventies. And perhaps even more are going to object to the way she says it, for in many of her songs she treads on a territory (sex-as-sex-as-sex) long held to be a male preserve. She does so with the same brisk authority and self-possession that has characterized at least some British women since the days of Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragist -extraordinaire-, and for this reason she will surely offend a great many men.

Well, I think we men were able to cope just fine.

I do wonder whether Kate might come full circle on her next album and re-explore some of the Kick Inside themes, but this time from the perspective of a mature woman rather than a teenager.

--Paul--

[tannis]

Sept 16, 2008 21:24:30 GMT Barry SR Gowing said:

Sept 15, 2008 22:10:13 GMT tannis said:

A lot of people are not going to like what they hear Kate Bush saying in her new album THE KICK INSIDE, about being a woman in the Seventies. And perhaps even more are going to object to the way she says it, for in many of her songs she treads on a territory (sex-as-sex-as-sex) long held to be a male preserve. She does so with the same brisk authority and self-possession that has characterized at least some British women since the days of Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragist -extraordinaire-, and for this reason she will surely offend a great many men.

Well, I think we men were able to cope just fine.

Yes, King, Mitchell and Simon made the confessional female singer-songwriter genre exciting for men and women alike. And the cover to Carly Simon's No Secrets (1972) may have inspired Kate Bush's cunning "Leotard" plan...

No Secrets, Carly Simon, 1972
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA4TptuON_I
Carly Simon- We Have No Secrets

Moving Cover photo and design by Gered Mankowitz
eil.com/shop/moreinfo.asp?catalogid=6897
www.ultra-pop.org/images/band/bush.jpg

REILLY'S REVIEW BAR

The "Kate Bush: Uncaged Bird" (Peter Reilly, 1978) review kinda trips up on itself. Reilly quotes Germaine Greer, but then jokingly refers to her canary metaphor as Tweetie-Pie. To add insult to injury, Tweety is and has always been a male character! Reilly then praises Room For The Life, but ends on "Emmeline baby!" ...

[Adey]

Baby Song

From the private ease of Mother's womb
I fall into the lighted room.

Why don't they simply put me back
Where it is warm and wet and black?

But one thing follows on another.
Things were different inside Mother.

Padded and jolly I would ride
The perfect comfort of her inside.

They tuck me in a rustling bed
- I lie there, raging, small, and red.

I may sleep soon, I may forget,
But I wont forget that I regret.

A rain of blood poured round her womb,
But all time roars outside this room.

THOM GUNN