“Plenty of men are denied opportunity, too, nowadays,” someone may murmur.
Yes, but the times have done it and not tradition. There is a difference. And one man has as good a chance as another to win or lose, even in hard times. But no woman has even a man’s chance in hard times, or in any times.
I am not so naïve, however, as to believe that one sex is responsible for this unfortunate plight of too many American women. I do not believe there is any important difference between men and women—certainly not as much as there may be between one woman and another or one man and another. There are plenty of women—and men, for that matter—who would be completely fulfilled in being allowed to be as lazy as possible. If someone will ensconce them in a pleasant home and pay their bills they ask no more of life. It is quite all right for these men and women to live thus so long as fools can be found who will pay so much for nothing much in return. Gigolos, male and female, are to be found in every class and in the best of homes. But when a man does not want to be a gigolo he has the freedom to go out and work and create as well as he can. But a woman has not. Even if her individual husband lets her, tradition in society is against her.
For another thing we Americans cannot seem to believe or understand is that women—some women, any women, or, as I believe, most women—are able to be good wives, ardent lovers, excellent mothers, and yet be themselves in the world, too. It is true that as yet only the exceptional woman can accomplish this task, for man is not educated for fulfilling his responsibilities in the home. But did he take his responsibilities so that she could have only her own, we would see many more women living a rounded life to the benefit of everyone, both inside and outside the home.
That we do not as a matter of course allow her to do this seems strange, for as a nation we have fitted woman to be an individual as well as a woman by giving her a physical and mental education and a training superior to that of women in any other nation. But when she comes eagerly to life, ready to contribute her share not only to home but to government, science, and arts, we raise the old sickening cry of tradition, “This isn’t your business! Woman’s place is in the home,” and we shut the door in her face.
I am aware that at this point American men here and there will be swearing and shouting, “You don’t know what you’re talking about! Why, we give our women more than any women on earth have!” With that I perfectly agree. American women are the most privileged in the world. They have all the privileges—far too many. They have so many privileges that a good many of them are utterly spoiled. They have privileges, but they have no equality. “Nobody keeps them back,” the American man declares. Ah, nobody, but everybody! For they are kept back by tradition expressed through the prejudices not only of men but of stupid, unthinking, tradition-bound women. Here is what I heard a few days ago:
A young woman wanted a new book to read and her father offered to send it to her. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Anything, only not one by a woman,” she said carelessly. “I have a prejudice against books written by women.”
“Why?” she was asked.
“Oh, I dislike women,” she said. What she really meant was that she despised women so much and with such jealousy that she actually disliked women who did anything beyond the traditional jobs that the average women do. There are thousands of women who uphold medieval tradition in America more heartily than do men, just as in China it is the ignorant, tradition-bound women who have clung to foot-binding for themselves and their daughters. No, women have many enemies among women. It goes back, of course, to the old jealous sense of general female inferiority. Tradition, if it binds one, should bind all, women feel.
Sometimes, I confess, I do not see how American men can endure some of their women—their imperiousness, their peevishness, their headstrongness, their utter selfishness, their smallness of mind and outlook, their lack of any sense of responsibility toward society, even to be pleasant. As for laziness—look at the motion picture houses, the theaters, the lecture halls, crowded all day with women! The average house, even with no servant, must be no full-time job or they could not be there in such hordes, they could not be there at all. But children go to school as soon as they stop being babies, and electricity cleans and washes the house and clothing, and husbands are away all day. So what is there for the restless woman to do? She goes to the show and comes home, if she has any sense, to wonder what life is for and to think that marriage is not so much, after all, though if she had not been married she would have been ashamed of herself. For tradition works there, too, and it would have made her seem, if unmarried, unsuccessful as a female.
“But what are we going to do?” the harassed American man cries. “There aren’t enough jobs now to go round. And women are getting into industries more and more.”
This in itself is nonsense and a masculine bugaboo, though merely getting a job is not what I mean. The truth is the number of women in industries is increasing at so slow a rate, and wars only temporarily quicken that rate, that it is shocking when one considers how long women have had an equal chance with men for education and training. In the last fifty years—that is, half a century during which education for women has enormously increased—the percentage of women in industry and the professions has increased from 14 per cent only to 22 per cent. That means millions of women have been made ready for work they either had no chance to do or never wanted to do.
As to what men are going to do with women, I do not pretend to know. But I know I have never seen in any country—and I have seen most of the countries of the world—such an unsatisfactory relationship between men and women as there is in America. No, not even in Japan, where women as a class are depressed as Chinese women never were. For even the Japanese are wiser in their treatment of women than we Americans are, though certainly far more severe than the more humane Chinese were. They keep women down from the beginning so that they never hope for or expect more than life is to give them. Japanese women are not restless or neurotic or despotic, nor are they spoiled children. They are patient and humble and resigned. They have not been trained for equality, and they do not expect it. Nor have they apparently the subtle powers for inner development that the Chinese women had. Japanese women know that they are upper servants, and they fulfill their duties gracefully and ably, and perhaps even thus are happier on the whole than women in America. To know what one can have and to do with it, being prepared for no more, is the basis of equilibrium.
No, what is wrong in America is the way we are educating women—that is, as long as things still are as they are, and life for the American woman is still controlled by old traditions. For men do think of women, if at all, in the old simple, traditional ways. Then women ought to be prepared for this sort of life and shaped through childhood and girlhood for what is to come. The root of the discontent in American women is that they are too well educated. What is the use of it? They do not need college educations nor even high school educations. What they ought to have is simple courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and advanced courses in cosmetics, bridge, sports, how to conduct a club meeting gracefully, how to be an attractive hostess, with or without servants, and how to deal with very young children in the home. This last course, obviously, should be purely optional.
But all this present higher education is unfortunate. It has led American women into having ideas which they can never realize when they come to maturity. A college education may, for instance, persuade a girl to become interested in biology, which may lead her into wanting to become a surgeon. And yet she will never have the chance to become a first-rate surgeon, however gifted she is by birth. People will not allow it; not only men but women will not allow it. They will look at her tentative little shingle and shrug their shoulders and say, “I don’t feel I’d trust a woman surgeon as I would a man.” So after a while, since she has to earn something, she takes her shingle down and accepts a secondary position in a hospital or a school or goes into baby-clinic work, su
pplemented by magazine articles on child care—or she just marries a surgeon. But inside herself she knows she still wants to be a surgeon, only she cannot. Tradition does not allow it.
Or a college education may lead a girl into wanting to be a banker. It is natural for women to be interested in finance, since they own about 70 per cent of America’s money. But it is unfortunate if a woman thinks she can be a real banker. I have talked with a good many women who work in our American banking system. Not one is where she hoped to be when she began, and a very fair percentage are not where they should be with their high executive ability, or where they would be if they were men. As one of the most brilliant of them said to me bitterly, “I know if I were a man I would, at the age of fifty-five, and after thirty years of experience, be a bank president. But I’ll never be anything but an assistant to a vice-president. I reached the top, for a woman, years ago. I’ll never be allowed to go on.”
A good deal is said, too, about the profession of teaching for women. There are a great many women teachers in America, many more in proportion to men than in other countries. The truth is that men here allow women to teach in lower schools because they themselves do not want to teach in anything less than a college. And even the best men do not like to teach in women’s colleges nor in co-educational colleges. The finest teaching in America, I am told, is done by men for men.
As for the arts, I know very well that the odds are strongly against the woman. Granted an equally good product, the man is given the favor always. Women artists in any field are not taken as seriously as men, however serious their work. It is true that they often achieve high popular success. But this counts against them as artists. American men critics may often show some respect to a foreign woman artist, feeling that perhaps the foreign women are better than their own. But they cannot believe that anyone belonging to the species they see in department stores, in the subways and buses, or running to the movies and lectures, or even in their own homes, can amount to anything in the arts. Indeed, American men cannot think of a woman at all, but only of “women,” so foreign is it to them to consider woman as an individual. And the pathetic effort of American women to improve their minds by reading and clubs have only heightened the ridicule and contempt in which their men hold them. For culture is not contained in what a person knows, but in what he is and does.
To educate women to think, therefore, so that they need the personal fulfillment of activity and participation in all parts of life is acute cruelty when they are not allowed this fulfillment. They should be educated not to think beyond the demands of simple household affairs or beyond the small arts and graces of pleasing men, who seem always to want mental rest. The present method is not only cruel, it is extremely wasteful. Good money is spent in teaching women to do things for which there will be no need. Men strain themselves to furnish educations for their daughters which the daughters would be happier without, and not only happier but better women because they would be more contented women.
It is not only wasteful but dangerous. To educate women as we do for our present state of traditionalism is to put new wine into old bottles. A good deal of ferment is going on. And if we keep this up, more will come of it. No one knows the effect upon children, for instance, of so many discontented women as mothers. Amiable, ignorant, bovine women make much better mothers than neurotic college graduates. And a woman does not need to complain aloud to let her children know she is unhappy. The atmosphere around her is gray with her secret discontent, and children live deprived of that essential gaiety in which they thrive as in sunshine. So few American women are really gay. This must have an effect.
So, though I am impressed with the fact that American women do not, as a group, seem happy, privileged as they are, I am not surprised. I know that happiness comes to an individual only as a result of personal fulfillment through complete functioning of all the energies and capabilities with which one is born, I do not for a moment mean that all women must go out and find jobs and “do something” outside the home. That would be as silly and general a mistake as our present general clinging to tradition. But they should be trained and ready to work anywhere that their capabilities lie. They should not be doomed by the accident of birth to a “sphere.”
Let us face the fact that as a nation we are in a medieval state of mind about the place of women in society. Let each man ask himself—he need not answer aloud—where he really wants his woman. The majority, if they are honest, must acknowledge that they would like contented, adoring women who want no more than their homes. I do not quarrel with that. What is, is. All I say is, let us realize facts. Tradition rules the relation of the sexes in America. Women are not welcome outside the home except in subsidiary positions, doing, on the whole, things men do not want to do. The great injustice to women is in not recognizing this frankly and in not preparing them for it.
But of course there is the chimeralike possibility that we might change tradition. I do not see anyone capable of changing it unless men will. But they do not even want to talk about it. They do not want the woman question stirred up, having, as they say, “enough on their hands already.” To them, of course, women “stirred up” simply means nervous, illogical, clamoring creatures who must be placated in one way or another. They cannot conceive of woman as a rational being equal to themselves and not always fundamentally connected with sex.
For, as has been truly said, emotionally many American men are adolescents, kind, delightful, charming adolescents. “He’s just like a boy” seems to be considered a compliment to a man in America. It ought to be an insult. This horrible boyishness lingering on in persons who should be adult is as dismaying as mental retardation. It is responsible for our childish tendencies to “jazz things up,” to “make whoopee,” to think of being drunk, of removing “inhibitions,” of playing the clown, as the only ways to have a good time, to the complete destruction of adult conversation and real wit and subtler humor. It certainly is responsible for wanting women to be nothing but wives, mothers, or leggy relaxations for tired businessmen. Even a pretty college girl said despairingly not long ago in my presence, “You can’t get anywhere with men if you show any brains. I have to make myself a nit-wit if I want dates. Oh, well, that’s the way men are!” There are too many nice and rather sad American women who patiently accept even their middle-aged and old men as perennial “boys.” “Men are like that,” they say, at least as often as men say, “Women are like that.”
And how often do women tell each other that a wife must be a mother, too, to the husband! In secret truth no self-respecting woman wants to be a mother to her mate. She longs for the equality of adulthood between them. Another woman has been her husband’s mother. It is repellent to her, or should be, to take that place. There is something very faulty in the relationship between man and woman when the mate in woman must be subdued to the mother. And certainly this perpetual mothering degrades the man and hinders his development into his fullest manhood.
Nothing could show a greater misunderstanding between men and women than this frequent fatalistic remark, therefore, that one or the other is “like that.” Neither men nor women are like that, if “that” means what they now seem to each other—childish, misunderstanding, fundamentally uncomprehending of each other’s needs and natures. With such attitudes, how can men and women enjoy each other? They meet stiffly for social functions, drink together in an earnest effort to feel less inhibited, play the fool guardedly, and feel queer about it afterward. Or they meet for physical sex relations in the home or out. And they jog along in family life. Of the delights of exploring each other’s differing but equally important personalities and points of view, of the pleasure of real mutual comprehension and appreciation and companionship there is almost none. Tradition decrees that after marriage real companionship between persons of opposite sex must cease except between husband and wife. Tradition decrees that all companionship, indeed, between men and women is tinged with sex. Such an idea as interest in each other
as persons aside from physical sex is almost unknown. Women, talking of this among themselves, say, “Men don’t want anything else.”
I am inclined to think they are right. The average American man demands amazingly little from his women, nothing much except to look as pretty as possible on as little money as possible, to run the home economically with as little trouble as possible to the man when he comes home tired. What educated, intelligent, clever, gifted woman is going to be satisfied with that? What average woman would be satisfied, even? Ask the average man if he would change places with a woman, any woman—the idea horrifies him! Yet women are far more like him than he knows or wants to know, and modern times have done everything to make her so.
No, our men, perennial boys, too many of them, will not do anything about changing tradition. They do not know how, absorbed as they are in the games of business and war, abashed as they are in the presence of sex as anything except simply physical, and afraid as they are of women. They are, naturally, afraid of women, or they would not cling so to tradition. They were afraid of their mothers when they were children—their imperious, discontented mothers—and that fear carries over into fear of their wives and fear of all women, in industry as well as at home. It leads to the attitude of petty deception which so many perennially boyish men maintain toward their women. It led them long ago to invent chivalry, and by that admirably clever chicanery to remove women from all possible competition with men as human beings by making them into angels. Incidentally—or was it incidentally?—chivalry made a solemn duty for men the boyish pursuits they best loved: tournaments, processions, jousts and battles, and dressing up in armor and plumes. What were the Crusades themselves but a fine chance to get away from responsibilities at home and to go gallivanting off to foreign countries? It had to be made a holy war, of course, to make men feel right about it and to convince women that it was all God’s will. Women would never have let men go if it had not somehow been made a matter of conscience for them to do it.
Of Men and Women Page 5