Conversations with women (over 40): Isabel Allende, 81
"You better train because old age is not for sissies. Be out there, work, be of service, be active, be curious, have purpose, engage, love, take risks… "
It won’t have escaped your notice that the women I get the biggest kick from interviewing are the, well, old birds (old broads, for the Americans amongst you). The women who’ve really lived and take absolutely zero prisoners, the women who personify wise but with a side order of ass-kicking. I can think of few women who fit that bill more than Chilean author Isabel Allende. A true revolutionary if ever there was one. (Isabel and I chatted back in 2022 when her memoir, The Soul of a Woman was published.)
About Isabel: one of the world’s bestselling authors - and self-proclaimed “passionate old woman” – Isabel has written 27 books including her debut, the global smash hit The House of the Spirits, published when she was 39, and two memoirs, one about the death of her daughter Paula, at the age of 29. After Paula’s death, Isabel launched The Isabel Allende Foundation "dedicated to supporting programs that promote and preserve the fundamental rights of women and children to be empowered and protected” and is the recipient of countless awards for both her writing and her humanitarian work. In her memoir The Soul of A Woman, she takes a candid look at her own life, sexuality and evolution as a feminist. (Isabel has been in self-imposed exile since 1975 and now lives in Northern California.)
Sam: Let's start at the beginning. You write that you've been a feminist since you were five years old.
Isabel: Yes, well without a name. I just had the anger and that was the seed of what later became feminism. But I was very aware that my mother's situation was way worse than any man in the family and I was aware of that very young. First because I was a very sensitive kid, I was the only girl, very close to my mother, and also because I lived in a weird household. My father abandoned my mother with three babies and my mother had to go back to live in my grandfather's house and my grandfather lived with his bachelor sons, so it was a house of uncles and a grandfather and they had cars, they had salaries, they had power and they had freedom, money. My mother had nothing. My mother had been raised to be a senorita, somebody's wife, somebody's mother and she ended up alone with the babies and no money, no nothing and because she was in her father's house she was a charity case really.
“It was never an issue that I would go to college. My brothers had to go to college because they needed a profession. I needed to shut up and be nice because maybe I would be able to lure a husband.”
And you could see the injustice of that as a small girl?
Yes, and I also saw how unjust the situation was of the maids in the house – there was a time when people had live-in maids in Chile, it's not like that any more but at the time – this was the 1940s – a household like my grandfather’s would have two or three maids living in and they lived in sort of cells in the back patio and they were poor, most of them illiterate, and they had miserable salaries probably. I didn't know the details but I knew that they were different from the family, there was a sort of invisible line that divided the front of the house where the family lived and the back of the house where the servants and the children and the pets lived. I’m not kidding. It was like that.
In terms of your mother, she wasn’t an equal in the house, so was she between the servants and your grandfather and uncles?
No, she was part of the family, of course, but she had no resources or her own and no independence, everything she had was given to her. I remember that one of the mantras of my grandfather was, “he who pays the bills gives the orders”, and I always knew very young that I had to support myself if I wanted any kind of independence because there's no feminism if someone is paying the bills for you.