Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  I do not in the least blame her for being a gunpowder woman. I can only sympathize with all her small daily explosions, her restlessness, her irritability, her silliness, her running after this and that in heroes, in arts, in clothes, in love, in amusements, her secret cynicism and her childish romanticism, her fears and her little explosions, too, of daring, which accomplish so little because they never go far enough. She is unpredictable, not from a calculated charm, but because she really does not know what to do with her inner self.

  And why should she know? Why should so much more be demanded of her, if she does anything, than is demanded of a man? A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated—and turned out to grass. The wonder is not that she is unpredictable but that she is not insane. Nothing is arranged for her as it is arranged for the man, who, under the rule of society, by a series of efforts combined with ability has his life laid out for him. I say that if a gunpowder woman with no boss to tell her what to do, with no office to schedule her days and force her to activity, with no financial necessity compelling her, no creative demand driving her, no social approbation urging her—if this woman can be her own taskmaster and fulfill herself by some accomplishment, then she is a creature almost superhuman. It is too much to ask of her very often, and when she achieves something she ought to be greatly praised.

  For consider, please, the advantage a man has in our country over a woman. I repeat, for it is the key to all his success: a man must work or he starves. If he does not actually starve, at least society looks down upon him and makes him ashamed. But a woman within her home may live an absolutely idle existence without starving and without being despised for it. Yet an idle woman ought to be despised as much as an idle man for the good and happiness of all women if nothing else. Anyone who takes food and clothing and shelter for granted, even though it is given by one who loves to give it, and makes no return except privately to an individual, ought to be despised. A woman owes something to the society which gives her husband a chance to earn for her, and social pressure should compel her to make that return.

  And yet this woman has not even the help of that social pressure. Society pays no attention to her so long as she “behaves herself” and stays at home. She is that most unfortunate of persons, idle because nothing is demanded or expected of her, and yet unable to be happy because she is idle. No wonder discontent is her atmosphere, that discontent which a visitor from Europe once said when he landed in the United States struck him like a hot wind. What is discontent but spiritual gunpowder of the fullest inflammability? Only the stupid woman can avoid it.

  When I consider this handicap of privilege, then, which has produced these gunpowder women in my country, I cannot find a single word of blame for them. I know that men would never have risen to their present pre-eminence in all fields if they had had such a handicap—if, in short, they had not had the advantage of the compulsory discipline of work. I am sure that men would behave certainly no better than women if, after the wife was off to office and the children to school, the man were left alone in the house. If he could sit down and read a mystery story at ten o’clock in the morning he, too, would do so, although a busy world hummed about him. He would curl his hair or waste an hour on his fingernails if there were no one to tell him it was not the time for that sort of thing. He would, it is true, have as she does a deadline to meet in the late afternoon, but with no one to check on him to see how time-wasting he was in getting there, he would waste as much time. He could even be as poor a housekeeper as she sometimes is, and no one would blame him very much. His wife would merely work a little harder so as to be able to hire a cook. No, without the discipline of regular labor, of fixed hours, of competitive standards, the man would be where the woman is now. If women excel in nothing, therefore, it is at bottom as simple as this and not because men’s brains are better than women’s.

  It is a pity, for these gunpowder women are as much a lost source of power in the nation as are the flood waters that rise and rush over the land to no useful purpose. Spoiled, petty, restless, idle, they are our nation’s greatest unused resource—good brains going to waste in bridge and movies and lectures and dull gossip, instead of constructively applied to the nation’s need of them.

  “What can we do about it,” some of them cry at me, “if that’s the way things are?”

  “Nothing,” is my reply. “Nothing at all, unless it happens you also want to do something. Nobody will make you do anything. It all depends on how much of a self-starter you are whether you can overcome your handicap or not. Nobody will help you to set about finding out what you want to be or help you to be it. For I don’t want to stress doing something as much as being what you want to be. Mere activity is the occupation of monkeys and lunatics. Still, unfortunately, doing and being are very closely tied together, and unless you are doing what you secretly want to do, you aren’t able to be the sort of person you want to be.”

  Yet perhaps it is too much to demand of women that, without any help or encouragement—and, indeed, often with active discouragement and ridicule—they put aside privilege and take their place in the world’s work as ordinary human beings. The Manchus could not do it. They, too, went on helplessly living in their palaces and houses, and then one day the Chinese realized there was no use in feeding them any more since they were no use to anybody, and so they put them all to death in a quiet, matter-of-fact way, and that was the end of Manchus in China.

  Of course, exactly that will not happen to women anywhere unless some too-enterprising scientist succeeds in creating life without the help of the female. Women would then doubtless have a very hard time convincing the invincible male that there was any real reason for their further existence. But I hope that long before then the gunpowder women will have come to such a unified state of combustion that they will refuse to tolerate their condition of privilege any longer out of sheer boredom.

  For the vital difference between the privileged Manchu and the privileged American woman is that the clever Chinese allowed the Manchu no modern education. He was born into his ivory tower and never left it. But the privileged American woman enters hers when she reaches her majority, and she takes with her the influences and the memories of a world in which she had a vital part in her youth and school years, and consequently she never becomes quite tame. If education improves enough, or if society suddenly develops a new need for women, the gunpowder may work more quickly than it is working now merely through the medium of individual discontent.

  The best thing, of course, that could happen to American women would be to have some real privation and suffering come upon us because we are women, instead of all this privilege. But we have had no such suffering and are not likely to have any. Everything has been too easy for us and is too easy now. We do not feel the wrongs of others because we have never been severely wronged, except by all these privileges.

  As things are, the only real hope for the progress of women generally is in those women who, because of some personal necessity, do work and take an active share in the life of the world, and who are participants and not parasites. The working woman—may her numbers increase!—will not perhaps ever fight for women, but perhaps she will fight to right a wrong near her, and by her work at least all women are brought more actively into the life of the world.

  For I am convinced there is no way of progress for women except the way men have gone—the way of work or starve, work or be disgraced. A good many women are plodding, willingly or unwillingly, along that way, learning to take what they get and do with it, to live with hazard and competition, to push past failure and begin again, to keep their mouths shut instead of spilling over into talk or a good childish cry—in other words, they are becoming mature individuals in their own right.

  It is a hard road for long-privileged creatures, and one is alternately amused and angry to see many of them avoiding it and retreating again into the home. The newest generation of women, frightened by the realities of depressi
on and economic struggle, are clamoring afresh for marriage and the home, and today marriage competition is keener than ever. Women’s interest in work and a profession has not been lower in the last half century than it is now. Indeed, it seems that women, having seen a glimpse of reality in the depression years, are in definite, full retreat into the safety of femininity, into the easy old ways of living to please one man, and catching him and persuading him to do the work for two. Mind you, there are ways and places and times when a woman can find a full job in her home. But to one such woman there are fifty who do not and cannot, and there is no use in pretending they are earning their keep as human beings.

  “Why work if I don’t have to?” someone asks. Well, why not, if not simply to see if women do not feel happier, as men do, in using all faculties and capabilities? I am always glad when I hear a woman has to work to earn her own living. I scorn the usual talk, “Poor thing, she has to go out and work after all these years of being provided for!” Who gave anyone the right of being provided for all those years when everywhere in the world people have to work? Yet this is not the important thing. The real point upon which a woman is to be congratulated when she does have to work is that at last compulsion is upon her to exert her body and mind to its utmost, so that she may know what real fatigue is and honest exhaustion and the salutary fear that maybe she is not good enough for the job which brings her bread, and, above all, that she may know the final inexpressible joy of complete self-forgetfulness which comes only in soul-fulfilling work.

  Work is the one supreme privilege which too many Women in America, with all their extraordinary unearned privileges, never know. And yet it is the one privilege which will really make them free.

  I am uncomfortably aware of women who will cry out at me when they read this, “Why don’t you tell us what to do? It is easy enough to say something is wrong, but the useful thing is to say what will right it.”

  To which I answer: Nothing will right it for everybody at once or, for some women, ever. The most tragic person in our civilization is the middle-aged woman whose duties in the home are finished, whose children are gone, and who is in her mental and physical prime and yet feels there is no more need for her. She should have begun years before to plan for this part of her life. Her mind at least should have been working toward it all the times when her hands were busy. It is as difficult for her to begin something now in middle life as it would be for a middle-aged man to change his profession. How can she re-educate herself at fifty?

  And yet I do not know that she is more piteous than the many young women, educated for nothing in particular, who now out of school are trying to find out what they are for. For the most part, of course, they occupy themselves in the enormously competitive marriage business which they carry on, unaided, in spite of their inexperience. If they marry, they follow the path the fifty-year-old woman has gone and arrive at the same dead end. The gunpowder group is made up of all of them, young and old.

  “But what can we do?” When they are pricked, thus they bleed.

  Well, what can women do in the United States, women who do not have to do anything and who can, if they will, do anything? The question seems idle, a mere evasion, in the face of the condition of the world today. If man, conditioned to war, cannot provide a society which sees war at its beginnings and stifles it, can woman not try at least to help him here? Is she forever to go on blindly giving birth to sons that men may go on blindly killing them off? There is a possibility of a better sort of life than this, but to it she gives no thought. It is easier to breed, as beasts do, careless of what befalls the progeny.

  And who said men’s brains are better at politics and government than women’s? A few weeks ago an able woman, working for her political party, sat in my office and told me disconsolately that women were given only petty offices in the party, assistant something-or-other, vice-presidencies on small committees, where their only duty was to obey the man above them.

  Why should obstetricians be men, or dentists or scientists or architects? I have heard a famous gynecologist say that gynecology could never be perfected until women entered the field seriously, for no man could ever understand completely what childbearing was or a woman’s needs at that time.

  Business has been built basically without the constructive hands of women. If women had not been so hidden in the home we might never have had this accursed relation between capital and labor.

  But her influence has everywhere been lacking. Whatever has developed in the life of the nation has developed without her brains and her effort. I do not put much stock in this matter of her inspiration of man in his home. It seems not to have had much actual effect. He has done as he wanted to do, with or without it. I suspect woman’s inspiration of man has been a good deal of what men call “kidding the little woman along.” How can one inspire when one does not understand through participation?

  Of course, if women’s work in the nation has scarcely begun, I am too much of a realist to believe that, were it all done, the nation would be completely changed for the better. Some things would be better and some might be worse. The great change would not be in what women accomplished. It would be in the women themselves—that is, the gunpowder women. The talented woman and the homemaker would be about as they are. Nothing will change them much. But the gunpowder women would no longer be fussing and fretting. Their energies would be happily released elsewhere than on harassed husbands and overwrought children.

  And I refuse to be too cynical. I believe the whole nation would be better off if women would do the work waiting for them to do, not only because these women themselves would be happier and their relations with men more satisfying than they now are. I believe that by using the brains now idle and the energy now disintegrating in that idleness, women could immeasurably improve all conditions in our country, if they would. It is perfect nonsense for any woman to ask what there is for her to do. There is everything for her to do. If she wants a small job, let her look around her village or her neighborhood. If she wants a big job, let her look around her state or think as largely as her nation, or even realize that there is a world beyond. Not to see the infinite number of things to be done is to prove the damage that privilege does to the perceptions; not to do after she sees is to prove the damage already done to the will.

  Is it hopeless? For the women resigned to privilege it is hopeless—for these women who give up even discontent and so pass into nothing. It is not necessary to give them a group to themselves. Having died to life, they simply await burial.

  But for the gunpowder women there is every hope. I listen to their discontent with all the excitement and delight that a doctor feels when he hears the murmur and feels the beat of an uncertain heart, however fluttering and unstable, beneath his instrument. I know this, at least—as long as a woman complains, she is a gunpowder woman, and still alive.

  And yet who can blame man if it is the gunpowder woman who makes him feel there are too many women in his world?

  5. MONOGAMY

  Polygamy is, of course, ubiquitous, for it is the only solution men have yet found to the problem of too many women. There is no country in the world without polygamy. So far the only question has been whether it is to be recognized or not. The Western people have on the whole decided it should not be recognized, and the Eastern people have decided that it should. France was a compromise between these two points of view, of which the United States is one extreme and China the other.

  Curiously, I cannot think of a point upon which the ideas of these two peoples, the American and the Chinese, are further apart than upon this point of polygamy. Otherwise we are much alike. Our geographical environments being so similar, we have, in spite of the wide difference in the space of our two histories, developed into amazingly similar peoples, which is doubtless the reason why we instinctively like each other. But in this matter of recognizing polygamy we are opposite. Americans are furiously shocked at the idea of a man’s having legally more than one wife
at a time. Chinese are equally shocked at the idea of the illegitimate children of whom we have so large a number. To the Chinese it is repulsive and immoral for society to visit upon a helpless child the punishment due to adults.

  This difference in point of view upon polygamy comes from many causes. There is the Puritanism still rampant in Americans, though subdued and denied, and the naturalism which long human experience has given to the Chinese. There is the romanticism in the Americans, still young and demanding love as an essential to marriage, and there is the realistic common sense of the Chinese, who by now are born old, and who know what the young will not acknowledge—that romantic love does not last. There is, moreover, a love of liberty in the abstract in American men which forces them to compromise with themselves to the extent of allowing their women to have with them equal education and opportunity, though they are often angry if women make use or take any advantage of their education and opportunity, and the Chinese practicality which says calmly that everybody is better married and, since polygamy is the only way that everybody can be married, it is better to make polygamy legal so that all children can be born equal in status and with equal claims of inheritance, and since polygamy and the equality of women with men are incompatible, the equality had better be given up.