Though subordinate to men, women can reframe even their most subservient behaviors to resistant ends. Thus Michaela, the ideal deferential listener, plays the role of executioner to the men whose trust she wins by flattery and manipulation. Although most of the women in the novel do not go as far as Michaela does, they are hardly resourceless victims. While they cannot fully escape their subordinated status, they do find ways to challenge their subordination. Aaron remarks, “This business of letting them have pocket money, and making exceptions for flowers and candy and romance media and bits of frippery was forever leading to unforeseen complications… astonishing how clever women were at distorting the letter of the law!” (16–17). Women thus use an exception meant to keep them contented in ways never anticipated: to exert small bits of female control and thus sabotage, without directly challenging, male rule. The practice of incremental change is another popular tactic of resistance. Making small changes over long periods of time, changes that are so small that they escape male notice, women frustrate the men while exerting their own control. Even if all they do is annoy the men, they are also putting them on notice that their control must be maintained.
The women adopt the stereotypes men hold as covers for their own subversive activities. Needlework, that quintessential female activity, is used to disguise the women’s serious strategy sessions: “‘Crochet, Natha,’ [Susannah] directed. ‘That is what we women do… ask the men and they will tell you. Any time they come here, they find us chatting and needling away. Frittering our time’” (249). Because sewing is assumed to be useless and a waste of time, everything associated with it, including conversation, is assumed to be harmless. The women of Chornyak House frequently remark that the image of frivolity and stupidity provides the best defense against the men of the household. Under these assumptions the men neither look for or see the evidence of conspiracy, of the teaching of forbidden women’s history, of the women’s medicine, contraception, and abortifacients. Some women even use the most stereotypical of male/female relations — romantic love — to manipulate, and thus resist, men. Michaela ruminates:
Thomas, now, she felt no love for, any more than she’d felt love for Ned. She had turned her attention to convincing him that he had seduced her, because she knew his power and respected it and she knew no other way to make use of it. But she felt no love for the man. Loving someone who considered you only one small notch above a cleverly trained domestic animal, and made no secret of it — that is, loving any adult male — was not possible for her. It would be a perversion, loving your masters while their boots were on your neck, and she was a woman healthy of mind. (258)
Although women are quickly disabused of their belief in romantic love, they continue to rely on it as a source of resistance, a way to remain useful and convenient to men.
Perhaps the most extreme version of female rebellion in the novel is found in Belle-Anne, who functions as an effective foil to Michaela. Belle-Anne’s specific rebellion is to refuse pregnancy at all costs, but in such a way that force won’t change anything. As the doctors observe, “‘You insert a sperm in that young lady, no matter how you go about it, and she just twitches her little butt and the sperm dies. Dead. Gone’” (127). Her ability to sabotage her own reproductivity enables her to escape both marriage and living among men. Unfortunately, it also makes her appropriate as a sacrificial lamb when Aquina botches her attempt to make Nazareth barren and thus accelerate her entrance to Barren House. Belle-Anne confesses to poisoning Nazareth in order to forestall the search that would inevitably expose all the women’s secret sources of resistance — linguistic, social, and medicinal.
Since resistance can be produced from within patriarchy, patriarchy must be continually reproduced. The eternal small battles between the men and women demonstrate that gender hierarchy and sexual enslavement must be continually maintained through a variety of tactics. The most common tactic used at Chornyak House is the simple and expedient one of keeping the women busy. Thomas advises the head of another Line, “‘Double their schedules, Andrew. Give them some stuff to translate that there hasn’t been time for. Hell, make them clean the house. Buy them fruit to make jelly out of, if your orchards and storerooms are bare. There’s got to be something you can do with them, or they will literally drive you crazy. Women out of control are a curse’” (86). This rationale also allows the women their Encoding Project (16). By assigning them amounts of work unheard of outside the Lines, the men assume the women won’t have either the time or the energy to scheme. The women, of course, counter this with traditional women’s activities that double as subversive covers, such as needlework and the ingenious recipe-code.
Another primary tactic for controlling women is the manipulation of information. The men manipulate history in order to eradicate a precedent of female autonomy by reinterpreting through the contemporary trope of male indulgence: “‘Men are by nature kind and considerate, and a charming woman’s eagerness to play at being a physician or a Congressman or a scientist can be both amusing and endearing; we can understand, looking back upon the period, how it must have seemed to 20th century men that there could be no harm in humoring the ladies’” (72). This form of manipulation seeks to control aspirations. Another kind of linguistic manipulation seeks to grant women the illusion of control and input while strictly circumscribing the options they can exercise. During one argument, Thomas says “‘Rachel,… it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you approve or not. It would be pleasant if you did approve, of course. I make every effort to consider your personal wishes with regard to my children whenever I can. But when you refuse to be reasonable you leave me no choice but to ignore you’” (148). Women’s supposed autonomy is thus predicated on their fundamental agreement with men.