Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  To say that either point of view is right and the other wrong is impossible. Each has its evil and its good, and it depends upon point of view as to whether evil or good weighs more heavily, as the modern Chinese are beginning to discover in their first efforts toward monogamy.

  For monogamy in modern China has not been any more successful than it has been in other countries—that is, it has not been successful at all if one means by monogamy every man’s having only one wife at a time. In China, of course, there were peculiar difficulties. Polygamy for forty centuries cannot be changed overnight into monogamy. There were hangovers, and one of them was the old-fashioned wife. For with the revolution in China came a new vision to men and women of each other as equals. They longed for companionship with each other as equals, a companionship neither had had under the old system. It is a hunger as old as the Garden of Eden and as new as today. The best among men and women of any race in any time dream of this companionship and know by instinct that only in such companionship can each be made whole.

  But when monogamy was made law in new China a whole generation of young men and women, though in the full romance of their youth, were already too old for it. They were married or betrothed, and betrothal in old China was as sacred as marriage, and these bonds were suddenly hateful. Young men ardent in the revolution were thrown with young women made free by equal ardor in a great cause. And though many were already parents, how could they fail to feel the demands of a love which they had never felt before?

  And in that time of transition, divorce seemed cruel, though it was made easy and private. There had been no need for divorce under the old system, for if a man’s heart changed, he simply enlarged his household by another woman. The first wife kept her place and position in the family. Nowhere was she displaced except in the most intimate relations to the man, and that society ignored. But when monogamy came the man did not even want her in the house. These two, modern man and modern woman, wanted to be alone.

  Those were days of heartbreak. Good women, young and old, were made homeless by monogamy. They were disgraced, they had nowhere to go and no place in society, and their children were motherless or, if they took them away, then fatherless. Many men were not ruthless enough and could not inflict the suffering upon their families necessary for monogamy. Nor were young women willing enough to be cruel. There was compromise. Old-fashioned wives “went to the country,” and there was no public divorce, though these poor souls were widowed, for modern love would not allow their husbands to visit them any more. So they lived apart, thousands of them, victims of the revolution and mourning the security and kindness of polygamy.

  But there came another problem. Centuries of polygamy had had its effect upon men and women. It had created in them two different attitudes of mind toward each other. It had given woman a feeling of indissolubility in her relationship with man, but to man it had given superficiality in his relationship to woman as an individual. He could not take woman as seriously as she took him. She had never been his whole life, as he had been hers. And this superficiality was native to him. With the best wish in the world toward one woman, the Chinese man found it difficult to think in terms of one woman when there were women everywhere around him. In some desperation Chinese women tried to be as modern as they thought they were, and the result was for a time a sort of monogamy that had all the evils of polygamy with none of its benefits. Men and women were sexually promiscuous and superficial in their emotions toward each other. Family life suffered disastrously, for the old was gone and the new not established. The security, economic and emotional, which polygamy gives to the whole, if not to individuals, was lost. Moral standards were gone between men and women because the definitions of good behavior were gone and conscience destroyed.

  The result of this was the loss of happiness. Men and women were terrified by their unhappiness together, and just before the war there was a definite return to old ways, not permanently but that the transition might be made less roughly and with less disaster. Parents were beginning to assume again a modified responsibility toward the marriage of their sons and daughters, without the old arbitrary method of arranging betrothals without acquaintance between the betrothed, but still without the new freedom of free mingling of the sexes and falling in love. For, as one famous Chinese has put it, it is a folly that at the one time in life when man and woman have the least ability to reason—namely, when they are in love—they should take the most important step in life—namely, marriage. Compromise, therefore, was the order of that day. The wisdom of the parents, it was said, should combine with the wishes of the children. Parents know their children better than the children know themselves. They should guide and persuade, at the same time accepting the child’s refusal. It was a civilized compromise.

  What war has done to that phase of a changing civilization cannot yet be known. There are other things more demanding in China today even than marriage. There is the simple necessity of remaining alive. Men and women are working side by side on the battlefield, in industry, in schools and hospitals. They are having a sort of companionship they have never had before. Equality has been forced upon both, not by the demand of either but by the necessity of keeping each other alive. What will happen afterward, who can say? But still I do not see the old polygamy as a relationship possible to them any more. There will be another way, and if it is successful monogamy it will be because this experience they are having together has educated them for each other.

  For the reason that monogamy has not been entirely successful so far in any country where it has been tried is that men and women have not been educated for it equally. Monogamy is a word lightly pronounced, an idea accepted by many people as only decent; and yet no civilization has been sufficiently advanced in democracy to achieve it actually as well as legally. For only under a complete democracy is monogamy possible on practical grounds, unless some means can be devised to limit the number of women. China tried for centuries to limit women by allowing girls to be killed at birth without considering it murder. Still there were too many women to achieve monogamy. Even the hardships, always greater than men’s, which women have had to endure, the hazards of childbirth, tremendously increased by ignorance, were not sufficient in China. In spite of all this, for centuries enough Chinese women survived in proportion to men to allow for one woman to every man, and enough surplus women to provide for polygamy.

  This is very discouraging. The resistance and toughness of women are embarrassing and complicate greatly all problems of the relationship between men and women. What shall be done with the inevitable surplus women if it is true that women belong in the home? So far monogamy has not been able to provide homes enough. When any American man begins the familiar growl of sending woman back to the home, where to his way of thinking she belongs, let him pause and consider where the home is to come from and who is to provide it. For to carry out that ancient scheme of every woman in a home, legalized polygamy will be a necessity. Monogamy can never provide a home for every woman.

  Even polygamy alone cannot stretch to such enormous provision—it will have to be helped by compulsory marriage. In the United States the population is still balanced enough so that the ratio of women to men is about equal, though this may not be true as time goes on. Men are destroying the balance even now by refusing to marry or by delaying marriage, and every time a man refuses to marry, even in God’s country there is a surplus woman. Men cannot enjoy the liberty to marry or not as they please which they now enjoy in Western countries and still talk about woman’s place being in the home. It would be pleasant for them to be able to enjoy such liberty with none of the consequent cares; but pleasure, unfortunately, always has a price. In this case the price is surplus women, restless, inquiring, eager, keen of mind, strong of body, demanding of their life some worth—surely a disturbing price to any peaceful, liberty-loving man!

  I have only once seen polygamy attempted on any large scale by an American, though in his own fashion every marr
ied man who has extra-marital relations is a secret polygamist. But Mr. Jones tried to regularize polygamy and make it decent. I feel sure his motives were good and even kind. I knew Mr. Jones as a small mild-looking traveling salesman of household soaps. He made too little to support his family, though he traveled five days a week urging his soaps upon the people of our rather conservative farming region. Mrs. Jones was a sweet-faced, dark-eyed young woman, and there was a two-year-old baby girl, and besides her the expectation of a son soon to arrive. It was a happy little family, and I know them because Mrs. Jones helped out the budget by doing odd jobs of sewing and washing for us.

  One morning when the three of them were sitting at breakfast together in their little bungalow the door opened, and two policemen walked in. Mr. Jones knew at once what was the matter. He wiped the egg off his mustache, rose and said affectionately to his wife, “Nellie, I’m wanted for bigamy.”

  Mrs. Jones, telling me of it, said she knew at once that he was guilty, even though he was the best of husbands and as moral a man as could be found, a church-goer, and one who never so much as glanced at a girl’s ankles even on the street.

  “How did you know?” I inquired.

  “He was a very accommodatin’ man,” she said sadly.

  And so it seemed he was, for when all was revealed the total was not two wives but three, with a grand total of nine children born and two expected. In his circuit Mr. Jones had divided his week regularly between his three homes. He had supported none of them wholly. Each wife had worked to help him out.

  His wives were all good women. They met together to discuss their common problem after Mr. Jones was settled in jail, and they talked with frankness and sense. All agreed that Mr. Jones was a good man and that it was not his fault. It was the old problem of the surplus woman. These women wanted homes of their own. They were eager to be put back into the home. Many women are. Nine out of ten women working for their own bread today are longing to be put back into the home. Mr. Jones, being an accommodating man, yielded to the demand. Each woman said honestly that she had “led him on.” When all had been revealed, the two younger women looked at each other and agreed to give him up to the first Mrs. Jones, who was after all the oldest and had five of the total of children. The last I heard those two were actually contributing to her support while Mr. Jones was serving his sentence. It is a long one, and he is still in jail. All of the women feel there is something unfair about it, though they do not exactly know what. As the third Mrs. Jones said to me with vague distress in her pretty eyes, “There’s something wrong somewheres when after all nobody meant any harm.”

  What she means is that they were all obeying perfectly decent instincts. Mr. Jones was not a libertine, and none of the women were wanton. They would not for anything have knowingly borne illegitimate children. The proper words had been said over all of them. As for Mr. Jones, the few times I saw him he seemed a man full of a gentle resigned philosophy. Probably he believed that women did belong in the home and had already decided rightly that monogamy could never achieve it. In his own way he was therefore not only a reasonable man but a practical man and a pioneer, a real benefit to society; and to put him in jail has been no solution either to his own problem or to the problem of surplus women as a whole. Indeed, as the little Mrs. Jones I know said, “We’d all have ruther gone on the way we was, without knowin’. After all, we had our homes, and now we haven’t nothin’.”

  No, the only way to make of monogamy a practical accomplishment is to make of marriage a possibility but not a necessity. Woman must give up the futile notion that some man will certainly ask her to marry him and realize that nowadays a good many women are never asked. Many good women and even some pretty ones never have the chance to get back to the home, and if monogamy goes on their number will increase. The only sensible course, therefore, is to educate women into independent human beings, ready to take their place in the work of nation and world, and to educate men in allowing them to do that work. For the only other alternative is polygamy, the recognized and legal polygamy of the East or the furtive American polygamy of illegal relationship which brings Mr. Jones to jail and leaves three women again homeless and a large number of children illegitimate.

  As things now are, it is woman who makes some sort of polygamy necessary when she demands marriage as her only real happiness and work, and at the same time makes of marriage such a heavy economic burden that modern man grows despondent. The slightly skeptical look habitual to the American man whenever he contemplates woman is the outward sign of his inward question, “Is she worth it?” In all fairness, it can scarcely be answered that she is. Much that she used to do is now done. Even laundries will darn and mend, and home cooking is to be found at the lowest possible rates in public eating places. Perhaps woman herself realizes her slight practical worth to man, and that is why she tries to make up her weight in charm, like a very small present tied up in fine ribbons. Unfortunately, a little charm goes a long way, usually too long, before she knows it. This is her predicament. She must create new values in herself for man.

  How? I suppose by finding out if she can be what he really wants. That may be impossible, for it is doubtful if a man knows what he wants inside a woman any more than outside. He likes, however, a good ensemble; and at present woman’s inner ensemble is too often composed largely of scraps—scraps she has heard from her mother, scraps that women tell her in secret, scraps she reads from women’s pages in magazine and newspaper, scraps she gets in lecture halls and movies. She is lucky if she has any spiritual and mental ensemble whatever.

  Would marriage be worth having if it were between two human beings who were equals and who had like responsibilities toward themselves and society, and if it were no longer economic escape for the woman? It would have some advantages for the man, at least. He could be sure that the woman loved him for himself and did not accept him for the sake of a home and security from breadwinning for herself. He could feel that he had a partner and not a dependent. If he fell ill or the times were bad, she could carry the family more easily than she does now. Moreover, if she were educated as a responsible and independent human being, he need not be harried by a false pride, as he now is, in being ashamed to have his wife work lest people think him unable to provide for her. Marriage would be a finer relationship between man and woman if it could be separated from false social standards and economic benefit and the degradation which such benefit brings to the one who receives it and the one who gives it, too.

  And what a relief it would be to woman to have the burden of necessary marriage taken from her! How fine a thing she might make of marriage if she could choose it and not be compelled to it for economic support or social standing! And sweet would be her liberty if she could fall happily in love without fearing that if she chooses home she must give up a work she enjoys and is trained for; if, like man, she could know that life and love were big enough for both home and work, and the dreadful choice, so glibly and foolishly expressed in the phrase “home or career” need not be forced upon her, if by nothing else than by the censure and self-satisfaction of other women limited in their own abilities. If economic pressure and social stigma had nothing to do with marriage for woman, we would have the possibility of real monogamy at last, and the only possibility.

  But the American man needs education for monogamy as much as the woman does. Like the Chinese man, polygamy has become more or less instinctive to him. He does not often attempt to solve a national problem as bravely as Mr. Jones did, but in his secret heart he is not often willing to allow woman an equal place beside him outside the home, and when he is not he prevents monogamy by compelling women to marriage as their only resource. The reason for his reluctance is, I suspect, partly because he is afraid it might mean an equal place beside her in the home. He knows somebody has to keep the house clean and look after the children, and if his wife helps with the work outside, he will have to help with the work inside, and when he comes home he does not want to be both
ered. There are men to whom this is the chief objection to allowing women out of the home. They would not mind having women work outside, but it stands to reason they cannot work both inside and outside at the same time. Many of them have to, of course, but the result is satisfactory to no one, and women must be educated out of attempting such impossibilities.

  But deeper still in the heart of man is his desire to be pre-eminent in the management of the world. When we get down to the bone, this is the truth.

  6. WOMEN AS ANGELS

  Democracy is not to be confused with liberty, nor the love of democracy with the love of liberty. Who does not wish to be free and who does not love liberty? But democracy is another matter. Our forefathers founded the nation on love of liberty. It is doubtful whether they understood much about democracy. If they did, it was to envisage it in terms of individual liberty.

  But democracy is not individual liberty. It is very nearly the opposite of that. There must be serious curtailment of individual liberty in a true democracy. Whole groups of people must submit themselves to the decisions of the majority. Every four years even in our imperfect democracy such groups must resign themselves to an order directed by a person they do not want and controlled by policies they disapprove. They endure it because they have the hope and the machinery for change, and these are the great strengths of the democratic form of government. It provides for the revolutionary instincts of the human race, just as freedom of speech provides for the need for individual liberty. So long as a person can say what he thinks and feels when he is impelled to express his ideas and emotions, he will allow himself to postpone action. To speak, to criticize, has been a safety valve.

  Do we want a real democracy? There will have to be some vast changes if we do. Negro Americans, for instance, would have to be given real equality with white Americans. No one can give them this equality to the point of removing race prejudice from the minds of ignorant and insensitive persons; but the government at least would have to recognize the equality of all Americans with each other, and it would, if we were a thorough-going democracy, be compelled to remove all discrimination against the Negro. Thus there would have to be forbidden the Jim Crow color lines wherever they are found. They are undemocratic and would have to be declared illegal. Hotels, restaurants, theaters, churches—all public institutions would have to allow everyone equal place regardless of color. Wages would have to depend upon ability and skill, and not upon color. And restricted areas in real estate could not exist.