Adornment, decoration, have not lost their symbolism. Woman, the creature of seduction throughout her epochs of slavery, has sought to give the personal decorative arts some semblance of dignity beyond the obvious degrading truth, but it has only been a game. The profoundest discussion of this fact will be found in the pages of The Second Sex, where the writer brilliantly destroys all myths of woman’s choice in becoming an ornament; and the charm of it is the photograph then on the dust jacket which presents a quite lovely brunette woman, in necklace and nail polish—Simone de Beauvoir. Nor need we despair for the promotion of beauty anywhere. Scent, jewelry, rouges have undoubtedly assumed some cultural identification with womanhood that, hopefully, will henceforth be independent of an association of the centuries of slavery which has been the lot of woman. Such a time does not exist, however, at the moment. And one longs to see official indictment against the fierce meaning of the “seductive” woman emerge from the Soviet Union before its women are humiliated by returning to the “way of women” in the eyes of the disparaging capitalist nations. There is implicit in the “return” the suggestion that woman liberated was a mistake. The rest of the world’s women cannot afford that suggestion.
American Communists have possessed the leisure (their social programs in other areas have for obvious reasons been limited as far as the reality of action is concerned in recent years), and a not-to-be-underestimated impetus (in the form of a collection of what must be the most vigorous and insurgent women anywhere in the world—American women Communists) to lift the woman question beyond the ordinary sphere of the “battleof-the-sexes” -type nonsense which is so tragically popular in our country. It is only conjecture, but one cannot help but feel that though the American woman is far from enjoying anything remotely akin to “equality” with men in her nation she is, subjectively speaking, possessed of a liberated attitude that must have a great deal to do with her historical experience in the New World. (Distinguished, however, from the rest of the “New World” excepting Canada perhaps, where the women of our America, chic and modern on the streets of Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro, are nonetheless tied to a Latin and Catholic spirit of oppression that is horrifying to the most backward of the women of the United States.) We have been creatures of the frontier adventure; we have been the peasant girls off the ships from Ireland and Poland set loose in the industrial chaos of our social order; we have been even the black slave woman paradoxically assuming perhaps the most advanced internal freedom from a knowledge of the mythical nature of male superiority inherent in our experience as chattel. We have been the Jewish woman finding liberty in picket lines. We have not voted long, but we have a freedom in our gaits on the pavement that suggest almost an intuitive awareness of how that franchise was won. It is this multi-experienced class from which American Communist women must be drawn then, and it is they who have noisily, unscientifically, improperly, harmfully, hysterically, neurotically—and heroically—battled to place the question of the status of women in its proper place in the consideration of the most advanced thinking section of American political action and thought. That so much of the fight against “male supremacy” in the American Communist movement can be so negatively described is not the fault of women. It is the fault, as Beauvoir would insist, of situation.
Nor should this imply that there has not been a decisive acceptance and encouragement of advanced ideas from that part of the American Communist movement which is male. Indeed at this time within the Party there are attitudes and official programs which allow for special consideration of work with and for women.2
It was perhaps a mark of the insignificance in which the estate of woman is actually held that there did not appear, to my knowledge, a major work challenging the precepts of Simone de Beauvoir, either in our country or in Europe.3 It would be a mistake to believe that the absence of any real negative furor is some indication that the American intelligentsia held out its arms with love to The Second Sex. It seems more intelligent to suppose that, on the contrary, the ideological struggle to maintain the male-dominated society felt no real threat in a work which was not going to ever reach those masses of women who might most effectively make use of it because:
(1) The overwhelming majority of American women (like the overwhelming majority of American men) do not read books, beyond a thin slicing who will forsake more popular materials occasionally in behalf of a “historical romance” or, less frequently, a contemporary “sensational” novel;
(2) That microscopic section of our people who might be called the American woman intellectual—or even embracing the middle class woman with enough intelligence (leisure she has) to read—were [not expecting] to find a volume purportedly dealing with their problems in the alien idiom of a scholar, a thinker, and an essayist. One feels (with all respect to the translator’s intrusions or aids, as the case may be) that she is not less enamored of words than ideas, and we are a people, as oft noted elsewhere, who have grown accustomed to thought reduced on the tabloid sheet far below its least common denominator.
Still for all of that, a great woman has made a great study and written, qualifications aside for the moment, a great book. And the world will never be the same again.
It remains for the writer who can with superior theories attack and demolish the forlorn and difficult roots of some of the existentialist thought of Mlle. Beauvoir, where it needs attack and demolition, and hopefully such a writer will necessarily emerge from the ranks of those who embrace a more far-reaching historical materialist view of life than Simone de Beauvoir. Until then The Second Sex will remain beyond the vague and shabby criticism of dogmatists of all persuasive shades.
AN AMERICAN MYTH: “WE DON’T WEAR NO VEILS.”
Surely for the students of the history of the development of the proletariat, there are few moments when the monumental haphazard of history can be more acutely felt than when one first learns that once workers, baffled and outraged at their clear oppression and desiring vengeance somewhere, first turned their fury not on the owners of the machines—but on the machines. Man—angry, frustrated, seeking his enemy, groping, attacking what seems. The picture comes to us of our ancestors bent over the fields in ancient times of famine, cursing and beating the earth with their fists.
It is a telling commentary on the nature of man’s history that we have in due course learned not to attack our tools or the earth—but as regards the relationship between men and women (and, of course, between human and human) we yet see one another as the enemy.
Elsewhere can be read accounts and statistics of the truly primitive status of women in most of the world. It is, regardless of all other questions barring peace and liberation of the world’s working classes and colonial peoples, the greatest social question existent; its depth and horrors and universality sometimes overlapping, even certain of those paramount issues mentioned above. Women, it cannot be said too loudly or too often, are half the human race and their condition sooner or later we must see as the more accurate measure of the distance we have come from the age of nothingness which was our beginning.
It would seem that the modern world has largely come to accept the woman of the United States as the symbol of the “free woman.” Her reputation appears far more dramatic and expansive than that, for instance, of the Soviet woman, the reality of whose life might more justifiably claim the title, perhaps. Along with other almost mysterious stereotypes, the foreign attitude on the American woman always seems to have to do with her height; her chicness (often, the stereotype insists, without real beauty); her angularity; and her freedom. The writer is reminded of a time in Buenos Aires when she was in the company of a young Argentinean woman lawyer who, though not out of her twenties, had circled the world a couple of times and was currently playing a major and politically important role in the peace movement of her nation. Preparing to make a meeting somewhere I drew on a suit jacket and tossed a shoulder strap bag across my shoulders and stood waiting for our departure in low-heele
d plain pumps. At any time I should have considered the costume an unflattering one and to be explained by the chaotic nature of that visit to Argentina and by the necessities of shortly notified travel. I will not forget the eyes of the Argentine woman traveling the length of my frame (I am not a tall woman, really) and noting the outfit, and perhaps the stance, and saying aloud finally from the reaches of her shawls and earrings and long, flowing hair: “Ah, la norteamericana tipica!” It was neither a compliment nor altogether an insult; it was a remark of wonder. Multitudes of United States women would have been offended by the association of my particular unattractive outfit of that afternoon with the essence of North American womanhood, and with good reason. Yet for all of it, there was a kernel of the recognition of a characteristic that is not without foundation. The tailored suit, the shoulder strap bag and the flat-heeled or low-heeled shoe is the mark of the fashion-indifferent woman who desires freedom and utility of movement and service in wearing apparel. It is the mark of women in the past who have believed they had something to do in the world other than “sit around and look pretty.” It is not an empty stereotype in that such modes of costume have in the past been inextricably identified with the feminist; the woman professional; the radical woman; and, of course, the lesbian. Each of these classes of women have seen in fashion, ornament, its true meaning and have forcefully rejected it to the horror of both male and female society. The argument is far from over.
This writer, for instance, finds the drab, colorless garb of men as distasteful as any other outrage of arbitrary fashion and is inclined to feel that the decorative traditions of woman’s wear, whatever their origins, lend a desirable and attractive quality to life, to existence—insofar as such fashions do not intrude on comfort, health, or safety.4 However, to feel thus is not an excuse to disparage the truly advanced views of women who before and since George Sand have rebelled against the insanity of much of feminine attire; or not to take issue even with Simone de Beauvoir when she declares:When one fails to adhere to an accepted code, one becomes an insurgent. A woman who dresses in an outlandish manner lies when she affirms with an air of simplicity that she dresses to suit herself, nothing more. She knows perfectly well that to suit herself is to be outlandish . . . a woman who does not wish to appear eccentric will conform to the usual rules. It is injudicious to take a defiant attitude unless it is connected with positively effective action: it consumes more time and energy than it saves. A woman who has no wish to shock or to devaluate herself socially should live out her feminine situation in a feminine manner; and very often, for that matter, her professional success demands it.5
We may well consider this to be perhaps the most “reactionary” paragraph to be found in the pages of this book. It is well to remember that even though the author might herself demur or take offense at the description, Simone de Beauvoir is a soldier; it is a mistake not to see her as an angry woman because she has properly and successfully divorced herself from the “anti-man” precepts of her historical feminist forebears. As a soldier she is occasionally given to the expediencies of warfare. Whole chapters are given to the demolition of the myth of “the feminine,” the social origins of this arbitrary phenomenon. Thus she willfully will accept concepts of dress and behavior for women in order to do battle with more fundamental areas of their oppression. However, if one may separate the argument for the moment from the matter of the woman question, we may consider that “insurgency” as such is hardly a destructive attitude in life—even keeping to the question of fashion. It seems in the matter of clothes that in the heat of summer a short trouser for men is clearly desirable to a long one, but at the outset of the popularity of the “Bermuda” short for men (in our eastern cities, at least) the occasional revolutionary who appeared on the streets in such apparel was the source of amusement, ridicule, and open contempt (places to which he could and cannot yet be admitted, though, needless to say, his “essentials” are well covered, if that is what society cares about!) Today it is not unfair to note that the legions of the formerly amused drop with relief and gratitude into these sensible kinds of apparel. This applies also to sandals, open shirts, etc.
Mlle. Beauvoir is actually careless rather than reactionary when she implies that the initial martyrs of a cause do not serve an essential and inexpendable purpose. If this writer prefers as a matter of perhaps misguided tastes certain of the more frivolous habits of feminine dress, it is but a matter of taste and not to be defended at the expense of those women, historical and contemporary, whose stouthearted campaign to dress as they please, now make it possible for this writer or Simone de Beauvoir to appear freely on the streets (at least, in the U.S.) in slacks, if the mood so compels us. It is another measure of freedom not to be discredited. It may be such an attitude which has lent itself to the flat-heeled, giant-striding stereotype of the American woman. In that sense, with all respect to the women of France and Latin America, the women of the United States have no cause to apologize for the stereotype. I have had the opportunity to see and live for short periods among women of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and good numbers from the Caribbean, and it may be said that at this moment in history the women of this country possess an objective circumstance of relative freedom which is unknown to other women in our hemisphere.6
Thus when one speaks comparatively of anything, the compared is liable to assume whatever dimensions its opposite does not possess. As long as an observer is able to report passages like the following speaking of our own times, it becomes clearer on what rests the celebrated “equality” allegedly enjoyed by the American woman:I recall seeing in a primitive village of Tunisia a subterranean cavern in which four women were squatting: the old one-eyed and toothless wife, her face horribly devastated, was cooking dough on a small brazier in the midst of an acrid smoke; two wives somewhat younger but almost as disfigured, were lulling children in their arms—one was giving suck.... As I left this gloomy cave . . . in the corridor leading upward toward the light of day I passed the male, dressed in white, well groomed, smiling, sunny. He was returning from the marketplace, where he had discussed world affairs with other men; he would pass some hours in this retreat of his at the heart of the vast universe to which he belonged from which he was not separated. For the withered old women, for the young wife doomed to the same rapid decay, there was no universe other than the smoky cave, whence they emerged only at night, silent and veiled.7
Not to even become involved in the variants on the place of woman which the world’s religions may or may not alter to one degree or another as is the case with Islam or Christianity, Catholicism or Protestantism, etc., we may still suppose that woman condemned to stay indoors through the hours of light would have been of little use in helping to clear the American fields or sowing grain. Similarly today American journalists try to find a desperate amusement or frivolity in the fact of the liberation of the women of China from the most barbaric forms of their former oppression. They cannot see that, suspending the liability to “Communist sympathy” for a moment, a nation in fertile birth, or in a renaissance, be it young America or ancient China, cannot afford the traditional misuse, and therefore virtual uselessness of half its people. The frontier demands work, hard work, and a dedication to the future. There is not the time to clutter it with the worthlessness of the uselessness of women. Nothing could better indicate the artificial nature of their oppression to begin with. If the Communists of China have indeed ideologically elevated woman to a place of dignity which is beyond her mere economic status, this is hardly a point of jest, but one of the more inspiring developments of modern history.
I have remarked heavily upon the sociological roots of the comparative equality of American women because such sources are not to be confused as having come from some benevolent features of our principal religious ethic drawn as it was from the Judeo-Christian doctrines of the Mediterranean which set woman as firmly as ever in the encasement of subservient immanence.
Today in the United States our nation
al attitude toward women and their place, or finding it, is one of frantic confusion. Women themselves are among the foremost promoters of the confusion. They have been born into a cultural heritage which has instructed them of a role to play without question and in the main they are willing to do so. And yet, therein hangs the problem: housework, “homemaking,” are drudgery; it is inescapable, women flee it in one form or another. They do not always understand their own rebellion, or why they want to rebel or why they deprecate, more than anyone else really, what the rest of the nation will always insist, so long as it does not have to do it, is the “cornerstone” of our culture, the “key” to our civilization, and the “bedrock foundation” of our way of life. As for the housewife who has to endure it, she floods her afternoons with soap operas; buys a fantastic percentage of the pulp escapist literature that is produced in this country; eats too much for her health or figure; and invariably persists in exploding the entire myth day after day on the radios and television programs of America by shrugging a little, and saying, when asked, “And what do you do?”—“Oh me, nothing—I’m just a housewife....”
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