Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  I mention the Chinese home, therefore, not to compare it favorably to the American home but to define the American home more sharply by contrast. As I think of that contrast, I see it first at the point of contact between the home and the world outside. A child in China finds the world inside his home. The world is indeed inside the walls of his house in all its generations. When he enters it he does not even come into a single house and garden. He comes into several or many courtyards and houses, depending upon the economic status of the family. Here in these separate or semiconnected buildings in these courtyards leading from one to the other live all the large family, the grandparents or eldest males and their wives at its head, and their children and grandchildren. Each couple has more or less private quarters for sleep, but the meals are often communal except where men eat first together and then women, and all during the day life goes on in common. Even a poor man’s house in China, if it be average, has as a matter of course more than one generation living in it.

  Therefore the Chinese child does not think of home as his parents and himself. He is in fact united with his parents in subordinacy to the elders of the composite household. These, with cousins and the inevitable servants, make up a group sufficiently large so that the Chinese child is never or very seldom aware of one single personality dominating the house, as for instance he is inevitably aware in the American home of the personality of the mother. He grows up an individual among individuals, many adults, many children besides himself, with not only the brothers and sisters he almost certainly has in as large a number as his mother can produce them, but all the children of his relatives. He learns to adjust to them, and so when he does leave home he already knows how to get along with people outside. He need not adjust to life because he has adjusted to it from the moment he was born in his own home.

  This home, moreover, provides the Chinese child with two other valuable assets: early emotional security and a foundation of economic security. Since the Chinese believe that marriage is a necessity for all and must be provided for everyone exactly as food and shelter are necessary and provided, Chinese parents as their children approach adolescence begin to consider their mating to suitable persons. This is usually not done entirely arbitrarily. The child’s temperament is carefully considered, and he is often consulted. In these modern times young people are even shown to each other and given some opportunity for acquaintance. But the expressed object is marriage, and the young people know it. If they like each other they agree to it; if they do not the parents look further. No one talks of love. That is expected to follow marriage, and usually does. This is the ordinary procedure of marriage in China today. It varies from the extreme of parental authority compelling children to marriage to the extreme of free love between certain ultra-moderns.

  When with the establishment of the republican form of government in 1911 many national schools were opened for boys and girls and co-education was a matter of course from kindergarten through college, it was inevitable that young people far more frequently than before arranged their own marriages by falling in love. The percentage of unsuccessful marriages among these was much higher than in the arranged marriages. Easy and private divorce was then established to deal with this situation. Chinese have always considered the individual’s well-being and happiness of first importance, and tradition changes quickly in that old country when it becomes inconvenient.

  Next to emotional security the traditional Chinese home offers economic security of a peculiarly comforting sort. No young man is expected to be able to support a wife at the time he should and does marry. He lives with her in his parents’ home and goes on with his education. Pride and family pressure compel him to find work as soon as he can, but family influence helps him even then. Moreover, the home continues its protection all his life. At any time if he loses his job his family helps until he finds another work. In his turn he takes care of his parents as a matter of course when they are old, and himself looks forward to a peaceful old age made secure by his own children’s care. There is no talk of the shame of dependence, for he has depended upon his parents and will depend on his children in the cycle of life and there is no shame in it. Thus in China the home and not the state provides the social security for the individual.

  When a Chinese child is born, therefore, he is born into the world, not into a nest feathered and shaped to him. It is, moreover, a huge going concern where many persons of all ages are already living busily and he is only one more—precious, loved, if he is a boy often spoiled—but he is always one of a group. By the time he is fifteen he is an adult. If the child is a boy, he has been since he was seven in the special care of men, chief among whom is his father. If the child is a girl, she has been under her mother’s special tuition. But each has his place and his work in the vast family institution to which he knows he must in time be a contributing member, but from which, too, he has security as long as he lives. This Chinese home accounts entirely, I believe, for the poise, equanimity, and general emotional stability and gaiety of the Chinese nature. The individual—man, woman, and child—feels himself secure in his place. Whatever the world outside thinks of him, the world of his home is always there, dependent not upon him or his parents alone but upon a group large enough so that if for a time one of them fails as an individual he has those who will help him and share his responsibilities.

  It can be truly said, therefore, that in China the home is the bulwark of Chinese national life and the center of Chinese civilization. As the other great democracy at present in the world, this should be of interest to Americans. For these Chinese homes have bred a nation instinctively stubbornly democratic. Chinese society is as fluid and free from hidebound caste as is our own. The log-cabin tradition is centuries old in China, only it is there called the grass-hut tradition. The Chinese admire the self-made man as much as we do, and most of their great men are self-made. But whether the home is a rich man’s many courts or a poor man’s grass hut, its traditions and customs are fundamentally the same.

  Our American home is wholly unlike the Chinese home. The triangle of man, woman, and child is its symbol. Man and woman separate themselves from all others into a solitude of two, and when the child is born he joins this close little world and, in a sense mystic, rapturous, and sometimes tragic, the three become one. The union is either deep and close or it is intolerable, and there is no escape from it except by separation. There is always escape in the Chinese home. If the man and woman are ill-mated, they can escape from each other into the larger family. They can, if they like, see almost nothing of each other. The child, too, can escape his parents easily and without being aware of it. The individual is more easily an individual in that large family. He escapes the hold of deep emotional ties, as well, perhaps, as their satisfaction. Certainly he escapes their almost inevitable overshadowing of his own personality. Nor does he lack affection. The Chinese are a warm race and demonstrative toward their children. Little children are greatly loved and have happy if not always hygienic childhoods. They receive love and approbation from many instead of two. Fortunately for health, the kiss is not a usual Chinese caress, or children would be kissed far too often for their own good.

  In the close, small American family, therefore, the primary problem, it seems to me, is the one of maintaining the proper balance between individual life and development and the union necessary to the most successful family life, and in relating the whole to the world beyond. For when the family is small—that is, mother, father, and child—the responsibility upon the parents is greatly increased. The care of the child, physical, emotional, and mental, depends entirely upon those two who have also their own relation to each other to consider and at the same time their own individualities. The many personalities in the large Chinese family undoubtedly have their frictions, but it is debatable at least whether the relations between them are not, from the very number of persons involved, more superficial and therefore less oppressive than the profound tie between a man and a woman wh
o for love choose each other and independently of all others make their life together. There is refuge in the variety of the Chinese family from any one personality; in the primary world of two there is no refuge from each other. Deeper the joy, perhaps, but deeper too the wounds, and more inescapable.

  Certainly the small American family does not, in its very structure, train the child so naturally and unconsciously for the world outside. The adjustment from home to outside life is much more severe for the American child than for the Chinese. The American home, indeed, forces the child into a peculiarly contradictory position. It provides a very deep and close emotional life and much and seclusive protection up to a certain age, and then ejects the child into outside life with an abruptness that would horrify the Chinese parent, to whom it would seem unjust to say, for instance, “You must be able to support your wife before you can marry,” who would never make a child ashamed at any time, however old he was, of returning to the home for shelter and temporary refuge. Nor on his side does the Chinese child dream of considering his old parents a burden. Their care is his unquestioned duty, as he hopes in his time to be cared for by his son.

  Upon consideration of these two types of home, I believe the American home is better and happier when it is ideal than the Chinese home is, but that on a lower scale of idealism the Chinese home meets more adequately the practical needs of the ordinary individual for economic and emotional security.

  But China is China, and our country our own, and, while contrast illuminates, it offers no actual solution to our American problems. We are definitely committed to our own way of life. We believe in our tradition of man and woman seeking each other in free mating, and alone and together setting up the home for the child. What can be done to make that pattern as successful as it can be?

  It is difficult to answer this question, for the American home is not like the home in any other country. It is still a pioneer home, a relic of days when the adventurous man and woman left the settlement and pushed into the wilderness. The ability to be solitary, independence, resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, were necessary for the pioneer home; and these qualities inevitably developed. And, since the pioneer became a symbol of Americanism, his home became the ideal American home. To go out for oneself, to build for one’s own, became American virtues; and fine virtues they are and not to be lost.

  But it is necessary to question whether or not the pioneer home fits our no-longer-pioneer times. The last ten years have shown us that, with the best will in the world, even well-trained young men cannot go out and find a place for themselves and their families. We have come to the place that other older nations have reached, of having to adjust our human beings and even their ideals to their times. Thus we have to come to the point of accepting the fact that the generations must help each other more, the elder helping the younger by making properly early marriage possible, and the younger helping to make old age secure. Either the home or the state must do this. China did it through the home and preserved thereby a great deal of individual freedom and independence. We are tending toward state care, and we do not yet know the effects this will have upon the home and the individual. Certainly it seems only reasonable to believe that, human nature being what it is, a person would be less demoralized by family aid than by state aid. He sees the sacrifice of others in the family, but state funds are remote and apparently inexhaustible, and persons soon learn to take such help for granted. Perhaps it should be taken for granted in the future state, but if it is, then the ideals of individual independence must change if character is not to deteriorate.

  As I proceed it seems to me that the real problem of the American home today is entirely comprehended in this lack of adjustment between its pioneer form and the no-longer-pioneer times. For of the three, man and child have proceeded with the times, but woman has not, and today the home is too peculiarly hers. Industrial development has taken man out of the home. His workshop is no longer there but in a place not only physically remote but spiritually remote from woman. She used to know, and so to some extent share, what man did when he cleared land, cut down trees, or worked at forge and harness and tavern. But now she not only does not share, she does not even know, what man does. She remains in the pioneer age and is today a creature almost totally alone.

  Even her child has been taken from her by the change of time. The child used to be her job, in addition to all her work of keeping the home, preparing food and clothing. She used to teach him how to read and write and always supplemented, as far as she was able, the inadequate pioneer schools. But the schools are no longer pioneer, and the child has moved with the school. He leaves the home at the age of six or earlier, compulsorily, and from then on is returned to woman only for a few of his waking hours.

  When women say, therefore, that their place today is in the home, it is a lonely place. The average American woman, especially in the home of average and above-average income, is far too much alone. It is a sharp and devastating loneliness. For woman was once a part of her world, and if it was a world of wilderness, still man and child were with her and together they made a comforting, companionable unit. But now she has not that companionship. She listens to as much as they will tell her, she reads as much as she is inclined, she potters about on the fringe of the world which really goes on without her, and comforts herself by having a good hot dinner ready at night, anyway. It is not enough. The feeling one has after coming to know American women is that they are starving at their sources.

  Let me quote from a letter just received from an American woman, a college professor’s wife. She says, “To those of us who have thought a good deal about woman’s plight it has become a truism that the work which made woman a productive force and gave her a feeling of importance has been taken from home. But the average woman does not realize this: she cannot understand why her housewifely state is not socially satisfying, and, consequently, along with her restlessness goes a destructive sense of guilt.”

  I believe this woman is right. For the quality of the American woman is high. She is natively intelligent, she has a better education on the average than woman has in any other country. She has, unless she stifles it with tradition, a sensitive conscience. She wants to be of use and to use her powers. But, having been left behind, she does not know what to do. She is not able to make now her home a part of the changing times.

  More serious to woman even than the removal of the need for her physical labor is the fact that she is no longer the spiritual and moral influence she was once to man and child in the home. A woman cannot be a source of spiritual power to those two who live apart from her in a vivid, changing world. Their problems are not hers. There is not time to tell her over again all that they have lived in the hours while they have been away from her, and she could not understand or share by mere listening, anyway. If woman is to recapture the lost companionship with man and child she must once more forget herself, as she did in the old pioneer days, and follow them into the world.

  I stress woman thus because I believe her peculiar situation is the main root of the problem in the American home today. The burden of a people’s transition is being carried mainly by her, and her restlessness and loneliness, whether she is aware of it or not, are irritants in the home and in the nation. In loneliness she puts forth appeals, in one way or another, for companionship from man and child, who are her means of life. They are, according to their natures, either irked or oppressed by these appeals. And yet she has been alone all day. Of course, no one except herself is to blame that she has been alone and lonely. But she does not see that, either. For the American woman has grown into certain mistakes. She has, for instance, grown into the mistake of accepting her separation from men. A young married woman said to me the other day, “We have had to take it for granted that we are married to perpetually tired men. The competition is so fearful these days that it takes all of our men’s time just to make a living.”

  She looked so plump, so healthy, so little tired, that I could not
forbear saying, “But why don’t you work, too, so that he isn’t so tired and so that you can enjoy each other?”

  She said, laughing, “Oh, well, it seems as though everything were organized the way it is—it’s hard to change things.”

  If this is the spirit of many American women, then of course they will simply drift into further segregation and into real uselessness and end in some future age in harems and zenanas, and our civilization will be degenerate and ended and democracy dead. For no country is a true democracy whose women have not an equal share in life with men, and until we realize this we shall never achieve a real democracy on this earth. But no country can so much as hope to be a democracy whose women do not even want that share.

  I cannot believe that such is the spirit of most American women. The pioneer blood in them cannot be so dead. For the pioneer was willing to leave all he knew and go out and build the world he wanted. Change did not frighten him. There must be women in our country of spirit enough to want to grow with the nation and to stay beside man as he struggles to build. If there are not, then I say that the average woman in the home is the weakest link in American democracy, and by her weakness she drags at the man and hampers the child. By her very love and devotion to them she does this, if that love and devotion are not great enough, not intelligent enough, to comprehend the necessity of sharing their lives with them outside the home as well as the few precious hours within it.

  The average American woman ought now, therefore, to be awakened and stimulated and urged—frightened, if need be—into becoming aware of herself and of what she has allowed the world to become because she has not stayed a part of the life of the world as it went out of the home.

  And American men, or perhaps I imagine it, would welcome the change in her. It has come to be my conviction, based on observation and conversation and experience, that the more intelligent an American man is, the more troubled he is by the present relationship between man and woman. He would like to have women intelligent and responsible, but he does not know how to get her to want to be. I happened to be sitting at dinner the other night in Washington next to an unusually intelligent congressman. He said, as we talked of this, “The truth is, we give women what they think they want. They want to be babied so we baby them.” The depth of contempt in his voice, of which I am sure he was unconscious, made me cringe.