But what he said was true. American women can have what they want. It is not man who keeps woman where she is in our country, but woman herself. Then I was angry. Why should men allow women to become so much less than they could be? Was this not the voice of Adam again, speaking against Eve to accuse her in the matter of the apple? But before I could speak for Eve I remembered how women, too, belittle men. They belittle men when they behave toward man as if he were a protozoa made up of stomach and sex. Read a woman’s magazine, a woman’s column, and see if there is a reference to be found to any other part of a man’s being. And yet there must be more to him, for how otherwise are the affairs of the world managed? It is true that it would be easier for woman if man were all stomach and sex, for then he would stay happily at home with her. That he spends very little of his time with her ought to teach her something about him, but it does not. Instead she only changes her hairdresser and buys new clothes and perfumes and concocts new foods.
Actually the whole business is silly. Men baby women because they think women want it, and women baby men because they think men want it, and in all this mutual babying it is forgotten that men and women are not babies but adult human beings who can find happiness only in the full use of their developed energies.
Yet, whatever the cause, woman at least has now come to a place where she is helpless unless man helps her. He must first help her, for she has so long been trained in the idea of her inferiority that it may be she has no initiative to make any fundamental change in herself. He, at least, is self-confident. And the only way he can help her is by demanding more of her. And where he must demand more of her is first and most in the home. Any American man who marries a vigorous, alert, well-educated girl, a girl eager and anxious to make a success of herself and of wifehood and motherhood, and lets her become the average woman she too often does become, is equally to blame with her. For woman is pathetically eager for man’s approval, and far more than she should she patterns herself to his wish. I do not excuse man in his vanity about supporting his wife and paying all the bills, in his degenerating too often into sulkiness and irritability from fear of what people will think of him if she works outside the home, in his giving so little of his real self to his marriage and his home.
Man seldom helps woman. Yet it has suddenly become urgent that he do so, for unless he does he will lose woman altogether in the slave she will become and has become if democracy changes overnight into fascism. If American men value democracy, let them look not only to fifth columnists and pro-Nazi sympathizers. A greater threat to democracy than these lies in the way men think about women, in their ignorance of her true female nature, in their carelessness of her development, in their contempt for her great abilities, in their ignorance of her much-needed and now almost entirely lacking influence in the affairs of nation and world, an influence which if it were there would supply the balance which we have not now. Until woman contributes her share to all of life we shall not find the balance between men and women which will conserve life and improve life conditions. Only this balance can provide the true foundations for peace. We shall have no peace until men and women work together outside as well as inside the home, not because either is superior to the other, but because life is designed on such balance and evil results when the balance between the sexes is lost. It is not meaningless that the dictators have risen in countries where woman became subject.
We have in our country a pulling and hauling between national ages, the medievalism of women and the modernity of man. Between them is the child, emotionally pulled back by the mother, intellectually hauled forward by the father. How can we expect him to be a harmonious being? The average young American is not harmonious in himself. He is dazed, uncertain whether to be progressive or reactionary, his fine character and true idealism destroyed by this uncertainty; and he is bewildered as to its causes. And within her own self woman is both medieval and modern, and thus torn again. She is educated to be modern and then put back into traditional life. And man is full of impatience with her, not understanding why or what is the matter with her or what it is in God’s name she wants, when it seems to him he is a sacrifice already to her whims—as too often, indeed, he is. He must realize that she does not now know what she wants and that it is he who must teach her what she is and what she can and ought to be to him and to the world.
But how can there be space for such comprehension of each other in the hurried hours of early morning and late evening? The day separates man and woman, and the separation has to be mended, and there is left to them only the night. How many marriages are begun with full determination for comradeship and equality, and how many are destroyed merely by the separation of man’s day and woman’s day and its inescapable consequences! And night cannot mend the separation, for night is not enough. The closest intimacy of flesh is not intimate enough for comradeship and equality, and when in desperation men and women try to make it enough, the flesh itself sickens and so all is lost.
No, the trouble with American men and women is that they do not live together. For the eternal triangle of life is not the two women and a man or the two men and a woman which novels and plays hold dear as the material of plot. The real triangle of life is made up of three equal sides, and they are man, woman, and child. And the perfect equilibrium of these three as individuals and the balance in their relation to each other makes up the true stuff of human life. It is a triangle in which all human beings are involved in one of the three ways at least, and usually in more than one. It is rare that the triangle is perfectly equilateral. More often one side is long and strong and the others short and weak, and then the triangle is an inharmonious thing. Sometimes two lines of it are equal, and the connecting third is dwarfed by them and it is still inharmonious. And yet the triangle of man, woman, and child ought to be equilateral, for only when it is are these three complete as individuals and complete as a whole.
3. THE AMERICAN MAN
Physically groomed and shaped to similarity by mass production of garments and general education and by that horror of anything which tends to draw attention to his looks or to seem finicking and peculiar which is a vestige of pioneer times, the American man is never happier than when he knows he is looking perfectly ordinary. But inside that carefully ordinary exterior there is astonishingly often an independent, thinking mind and a warm, though essentially prudent and conservative, heart. This prudence does not at all contradict a generosity seldom found anywhere else in the world, particularly toward women and children. American men enslave themselves not to their families, to whom as a matter of fact they give little time, but to their own impulses of generosity, which it seems they cannot restrain even for their own good.
The compound of this generosity is a matter for pondering. It is more than a simple wish to bestow goods upon the beloved. If it were the impulse only of devotion, such great love would make it impossible for a man to spend nine-tenths of his waking time away from those he loves so much. The American man sees less of his family than any other husband and father in the world, and accepts this separation with a tranquillity which ought to be alarming to woman but is not, for she bears it with equal tranquillity. This mutual tranquillity in accepting lives almost completely separate is only another proof of what seems to me to be a fact—that in our country men and women do not enjoy each other as much as they should, or else they would find more ways of being together.
Why, I have long asked myself, are American men so materially generous to their families? Why do millions of them spend their lives to give women and children—but especially women—every possible comfort and luxury? Why is it that when a man does not do this he immediately loses caste? Why do men take it for granted that women must have those comforts and luxuries? Is it true that women demand them, or are women ever given the choice between a man’s time and companionship and his money?
These questions have no complete answer, of course. It would take a poll more delicate than any yet devised to answer them
truthfully. Perhaps the truth is not so important—often it is not, if the effect of truth is evident and can be examined. Whatever the cause of this astounding generosity of men to women in providing material goods for them to the extent of devoting all their time and energies to the task, the effect is not so much of unselfish generosity as of generosity at a price. A price for what? A price for freedom from home and the responsibilities of rearing and training children. American children are reared almost entirely by women. Men excuse themselves from it as once they excused themselves from responsibility for conception. Actually they are as inexcusable in the one matter as in the other. They have an equal responsibility with women for the development of the children they beget. It sounds naïve and ignorant to say that they have not. So they say instead that they are too busy making a living for the family.
This masculine escape from the responsibility of children is the root of the so-called overfeminization of our American civilization about which men have hued and cried so loudly of late. I read these noisy he-man shouts with wonder at their illogicality. Who, pray, is at fault for this overfeminization? Women have had to do the best they can alone with the children. The inside of the average home is a place fairly familiar to us all, for most homes are alike. Man is not there, and woman copes with hearty, rebellious, demanding growing children almost entirely by herself. The whole day is shaped toward peace if possible when man comes home. If it is simply not possible, man takes a loud, brief part in compelling it, not to train the children, but for his own peace and comfort. Woman pores alone over books of child care and goes off to hear lectures on adolescent psychology and avoids as far as possible annoying man with the problems of their children, partly for his sake, partly to shield the children from his sudden angers and commands, and partly because she seldom can make him understand the real problem and so cannot agree with his too-easy solution of it. The price man pays for his immunity from the cares of family life is his generosity in comfort and luxuries.
Of course, he gets his satisfaction out of this generosity, aside from irresponsiblity in the home. The measure of luxury in the making and maintenance of his home is the measure of his success as man—that is, the size of his income. Money in the bank is hidden, but it is splendidly displayed in a fine house, a good car, two if possible, and in fur coats, diamonds, and private schools. It is just as well displayed in a different stratum in a good Ford, an electric refrigerator, a set of overstuffed furniture in the parlor, and store clothes.
These are all good things. I shall never cease to feel the fine meaning in the sight of the parking space around the small factory in the village near which I live. I stop often and look at all those cars. The factory workers here come to work in their own cars. Our own hired man comes to work on the farm in his car every day. It is a wonderful, an exciting thing. I am used to a miserable line of human beings creeping into a Chinese factory at dawn, to come forth exhausted after dark, small children often among them. The children of our factory workers live in the healthy little village on top of the hill and play on tricycles and roller skates after they come roaring home from the neat schoolhouse. It is all infinitely better than factory life in China.
Still, I am not only thinking of the overfeminization of which our society has been accused. It is perfectly true that women do not see enough of men here, and that the children suffer from the lack of the influence of men upon them in home and school. But men lose more. They lose very much when they relegate home and children to women. They lose fun and the excitement of growing, developing life—life which they have had a part in creating. But they lose something deeper than that. They lose touch with the source of life itself, which is deep in the very process of living with a woman and the children a man has created with her. When he lives not there but in his office, in his work, among other men, he is strangling the roots of his own being. If he can comprehend fully the one woman and can help her to comprehend him, they are both fulfilled. When they enlarge this mutual comprehension to include children, then the universe is within their grasp and they cannot be disturbed. They have life in their time.
As it is, woman struggles to do her work and man’s, too, in the home; and of course she fails. And when she fails, man is impatient with her, and she feels an inferior creature.
The truth is that women in America too easily accept the idea of their inferiority to men—if not actually, then in order to curry favor with men, who imagine it easier to live with inferiors than with equals.
I know quite well that any American man hearing this will laugh his usual tolerant laughter, though tolerant laughter is the easiest form of contempt. He always laughs tolerantly when the subject of a woman is broached, for that is the attitude in which he has been bred. And immaturely he judges the whole world of women by the only woman he knows at all—his wife. Nor does he often enough want the sort of wife at whom he cannot laugh tolerantly. I was once amazed to see a certain American man, intelligent, learned, and cultivated, prepare to marry for his second wife a woman as silly and unfit for him as the first one had been, whom he had just divorced at great expense and trouble. I had to exclaim before it was too late, “Why do you do the same thing over again? She’s merely younger and prettier than the other one—that’s all. And even those differences are only temporary.” To which he growled, “I do not want a damned intelligent woman in the house when I come home at night. I want my mind to rest.”
What he did not see, of course, though he found it out later, was that there could be no rest for him of any kind in such a woman as he had chosen. He was soon irritated by a thousand stupidities and follies and beaten in the end by his own cowardice. He died a score of years too soon, exhausted not by work but by nervous worry. His two wives go hardily on, both headed for a hundred, since he left them what is called “well provided for.” Neither of them has ever done an honest day’s work in her life, and he literally sacrificed his valuable life to keep them alive.
And yet, going home that day from his funeral and wondering how it could have been helped, I knew it could not have been helped. He was doomed to the unhappiness, or at least to the mediocre happiness, with which many if not most American men must be satisfied in their relationships with their women. For if he had been married to an intelligent, superior woman he would have been yet more unhappy, since, with all his brilliance as a scientist, he belonged to that vast majority of American men who still repeat today the cry of traditional male pride, “I don’t want my wife to work.” Which may also—I dare not say how often—be translated, “I do not want my wife to be interested in anything except ME.”
That is, he wanted a woman who would contain herself docilely within four walls for him. With a stupid woman he was bored, and yet he feared that an intelligent, energetic, educated woman could not be kept in four walls—even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls—without discovering that it is still a prison cell and that sooner or later the prisoner, even though with love and kisses, turns upon the jailer.
For no home offers scope enough today for the trained energies of an intelligent modern woman. Even children are not enough. She may want them, need them and have them, love them and enjoy them; but they are not enough for her, even during the short time they must preoccupy her. Nor is her husband, however dear and congenial, enough for her. He may supply all her needs for human companionship, but there is still more to life than that. There is the individual life. Woman must feel herself growing and becoming more and more complete as an individual as well as a wife and mother before she can even be a good wife and mother. I heard a smug little gray-haired yesterday’s woman say not long ago, “No, I don’t know anything about politics. It takes all my time to be a good wife and mother. I haven’t time to keep up with other things.” Unfortunately, her husband, successful doctor that he is, has time to keep up not only with his practice and with being what she calls a “wonderful husband and father,” but with another woman as well. But that, too, is one of the things she knows nothi
ng about. Yet who can blame him? He is clever and full of interest in many things, and his wife is dulled with years of living in the four walls he put around her. It is a little unfair that he so encouraged her to stay in the walls that she came to believe in them completely as her place.
But tradition is very strong in this country of ours. We Americans are not a backward nation in the making and using of machines, but we are backward in our attitude toward our women. We still, morally if not physically, shut the door of her home on a woman. We say to her, “Your home ought to be enough for you if you are a nice woman. Your husband ought to be enough, and your children.” If she says, “But they aren’t enough—what shall I do?” we say, “Go and have a good time, that’s a nice girl. Get yourself a new hat or something, or go to the matinee or join a bridge club. Don’t worry your pretty head about what is not your business.”
If she persists in being interested in things beyond her home we insist that she must be neglecting her home. If she still persists and makes a success through incredible dogged persistence, we laugh at her. We even sneer at her, and sometimes we treat her with unbelievable rudeness.
And yet, vicious circle that it is, I cannot blame Americans for distrusting the ability of their women. For if the intelligent woman obeys the voice of tradition and limits herself to the traditional four walls, she joins the vast ranks of the nervous, restless, average American woman whose whimsies torture her family, who spoils the good name of all women because she is often flighty, unreliable, without good judgment in affairs, and given to self-pity. In short, she becomes a neurotic—if not all the time, a good deal of the time. Without knowing it or meaning it, she falls too often to being a petty dictator in the home, a nagger to her husband and children, and often a gossip among her women friends. Too often she takes no interest in any matters of importance and refuses all responsibility in the community which she can avoid. She may be either a gad-about and extravagant, or she may turn into a recluse and pride herself on being a “home woman.” Neither of these escapes deceives the discerning. When will American men learn that they cannot expect happiness with a wife who is not being allowed to develop her whole self? A restless, unfulfilled woman is not going to be a satisfied wife or satisfactory lover. It is not that “women are like that.” Anyone would be “like that” if he were put into such circumstances—that is, trained and developed for opportunity later denied.
Of Men and Women Page 4