But prejudice against colored blood is only one of the most obviously undemocratic aspects of our life. To say, therefore, that we are ready to fight to preserve democracy is not accurate, because we can scarcely fight for something we do not yet have. We are ready to fight, rather, to keep what we have—a national life of our own. It is a confused, contradictory, quarrelsome sort of life, and it cannot be called wholly one thing or the other; but it is ours and it is worth defending because it holds in it the possibility of change. We have not finished with ourselves yet, and we know it. The final pattern is not clear. If the white, Gentile, adult male believes that his nation is a democracy, let him remember that there are others—and perhaps nearer to him than he knows or cares to believe—to whom he appears only as a dictator. Free Englishmen see the face of their country in all the glorious brightness of democracy, but who can believe that in India the people, poor and oppressed, and kept ignorant and divided, can thus see the face of England?
To the Negro American the white American is a dictator and to the East Indian the Englishman is a dictator; and let us not pretend in our two great nations that we have not in our own selves the foul thing we would destroy elsewhere. There is only one thing more foul, and it is hypocrisy. And yet we have that hope which, when the crisis comes, will make the Negro and the East Indian fight on our side, or at least not against us. It is the hope, the possibility, of change. This is the germinal atom of democracy in us. Whether that germ is to grow and to bear flower and fruit depends on whether we are true men and women or hypocrites. Can we, will we, go on to real democracy, or will we let democracy remain a seed in the soil of our love of liberty? But a seed must grow or it will die, and seedless soil is barren earth, its potentialities unused.
Now love of liberty is the natural soil for democracy, and the only place where it can grow. It is right and inevitable that out of an individual’s love for his own liberty should shape gradually the divine notion of democracy. The process is simple enough. I love liberty and I must have liberty, says one; and he takes it. But I also, says another. Then do those two look at each other, measuring and in doubt. Can two be free? Will not the freedom of one forbid the freedom of the other? Weak and strong, they look at each other. The way of the dictator is for the strong to push the weak aside and maintain his own liberty intact. The way of democracy is for the strong to perceive that the love of liberty is in anyone, in the weak as in the strong, and he allows that liberty. When one encroaches upon the other, as he must, then the point is found and fixed where liberty is greatest for each and its sacrifices least to both. This point we may call democracy.
Individuals have found it, but as yet no nation. Within all nations the strong still insist upon their liberty being the larger. The difference is only in degree and change. In fascism there is no mechanism for change, and liberty belongs only to the rulers. In our country we allow for change, and the degree of liberty is changeable, but the point of democracy has not been reached because we are not willing to reach it. Neither the strong nor the weak are willing to reach it. That is, the strong do not recognize the necessity of yielding up their greater liberty to the point necessary to establish democracy, and the weak do not realize the necessity of developing themselves to the point of being able to use liberty. When I say strong in America, I mean fundamentally the white, Gentile, adult male and besides him those not economically depressed. When I say weak, I mean women, Negroes, Jews, and besides these all economically depressed persons. In every country the strong and the weak are different persons, and the only similarity is that in every country the strong are numerically a small group and the weak are many. The strong have another advantage anywhere. They have a solidarity which the weak have not. The dominant race, the male sex, power over money—these the strong always have. Even when, as in the United States, women actually own most of the money, yet their ignorance of how to use it puts the power over it into the hands of men.
But the weak have no solidarity. Of many races, variously handicapped, they are a motley crowd. They have nothing in common except their weakness and their helplessness, and this is increased by their division. They do not often help each other. They try, each for himself, to win against the strong, or to insinuate themselves with the strong, hopeful each for his own benefit. And yet only in the union of the weak can there be any real strength. As it is now, the strong by their very strength are not ready for democracy, and the weak by their weakness are not ready for it.
Thus in the United States neither man nor woman is ready for democracy—man by reason of his strength and woman by reason of her weakness. When I say they are not ready, I mean neither is willing to discover that jewel point where liberties will meet and the balance of liberty for both be found which is true democracy. For at that point man must give up his most precious possession: the belief in his own superiority merely because he is male. It is time he gave it up, of course, as a practical matter. Science tells us all that there is no proof of any sort to be found that sex alone determines superiority. But facts never had anything to do with human beliefs. A three-year-old son of mine one day, as he contemplated an engine, pointed to the sand dome.
“Smoke comes out of that,” he said.
“Smoke,” I said, “comes out of the smokestack.”
He turned large, calm blue eyes upon me. “I want to believe smoke comes out of the sand dome,” he said tranquilly, and believed it.
He is the male of the human race. In a democracy he will have to acknowledge, however, that smoke does come, actually, only from the smokestack, and that his belief has nothing whatever to do with the truth.
How to get him to that point is, of course, another matter. He will not arrive at it except by two means: his own intelligence from within, which alone may lead him to want to know the truth, and coercion from without on the part of woman, developing in her turn to the point of democracy. Since intelligence to the point of wanting the truth is rare, coercion may have to go on and do its work.
That is, provided woman can perceive what she has to give up for democracy. What she has to give up will be her present privileges, the privilege of remaining ignorant in spite of education, the privilege of mental laziness, of not having to think thoroughly through anything because she knows the ultimate decision will not rest on her, the privilege of being willful and capricious and irresponsible, the privilege of idleness and of having time to spend lavishly on self-adornment and amusement, and the privilege of escape from the problems of the world, which are now the real problems of life, by retiring from them into her home and considering that her whole duty is there. She has, in short, to become an adult creature ready for the responsibilities of liberty.
But first of all she must want liberty, and this she does not now. I am asked, “What is the chief difference between modern Chinese and modern American women?” It is this: that modern women in China passionately love liberty and modern women in our country do not. There is reason for the difference. Behind the walls of home the Chinese woman has dreamed of freedom to go beyond them and, starved by ignorance, she has hungered for education. When at last freedom was given her she had already grown to the measure of freedom and could not have enough of it. Will she ever have enough of it? Will the time come when that remembered life of walls and ignorance will seem sweet to her and safe? I think not. I feel sure, never. For she will remember other things, too. She will remember the long monotony of her days, the emptiness of a mind that many trifles, however heaped, could not fill. She will remember the oppression upon her of inequality with man so that never, even in love, did she feel the joy of equality; and above all she will remember the loneliness that was hers as a human being in that scheme which forbade her companionship in work with man, her natural companion. And she, having been for centuries prepared for freedom, will not turn from it.
But woman in America is different. She has had liberty given her in a way peculiarly unfortunate. She was given it with too much else one day on a Chri
stmas tree. It was handed to her tied up in red ribbons among many other beribboned gifts. Some of those gifts were courtesy and deference and all the mixed candies and fruits of chivalry which have bred in her an incurable taste for sweets. She was given a halo, too, to wear in her hair to make her look like an angel, and that she found so becoming she has never been willing to put it aside. She was given a blue ribbon for being the best mother, and a prize for being the best cook, and even a trip somewhere for being the best average woman. In a handsome leather-bound volume she was given the right to an education, and she was given a ticket to anywhere. She could come and go as she liked. She was given so many privileges that who can blame her if she overlooked the fact that a certain plain diamond, not set in anything, just a solitary hard pure diamond, was not there? But it was worth everything else put together. It was real equality with man in marriage and work.
She has begun to notice the lack now, for without that one thing she can make full use of nothing, not even of her liberty. For what is the use of courtesy that will not allow her to grow to her full powers if it interferes with man’s place in work and government, and what is the use of having an education if it cannot be used to fulfill its purpose but must be kept as a toy for dilettantism? What is the use of being the best mother in a contest if she cannot be the best woman she is able to be? Why have liberty at all when she has nowhere to go? But, having been handed all the sweets of liberty, she is surfeited and has no taste for bread and butter, that solid plain fare of work and responsibility which, had she had to labor for it as Chinese women did, would have satisfied and fed her and made the sweets sweeter.
Now she wants to go back. Afraid of the responsibilities of true liberty, she is in retreat. Home, she says, home is her place. When she says this, it is not because there is enough for her to do there nowadays. When a woman stays in the home today she stays there most of her life alone. Modern industry takes man away from home most of the hours of his day and most of the years of his life, and modern education takes the child away. So home is a place for about half the women in our country at least, where woman has food and clothes and leisure, which is leisure however indignantly she denies it and shows her little engagement pad to prove how busy she is—that sorry list of luncheons and games and knitting and hairdressing and movies and shopping that are all that statistics tell us 45 per cent of our women have to call life! Well, at any rate, she can sit and play with her toys there and put on her halo.
American women generally do not want freedom. Amazing, terrifying that this is so; and yet one is constrained to believe it true. Else why their retreat? Why have they not moved simply and naturally forward to do their work in the world beside men? Why are they uncomfortable and ashamed when they are not married, though the system under which we live does not provide for compulsory marriage and how else can every woman be married? Why are so few American women professional in their attitude toward work? Why do they rush to give up work and retreat when they succeed in securing marriage and a home? Marriage ought not to be a retreat from work but stimulation to new work because, emotional stability being thus established, the mind is really ready for work at last. Why is it that American women inherit some sort of curious medieval conscience about working outside the home and never feel really right with God until they can say, “I am devoting myself to my home”?
I cannot pretend to answer these questions. But the answer has something to do with that halo. I know it because I see that women never look really contented without their halos, and they wear them whether they are actually becoming or not. Why? Because men once long ago gave those halos to women and told them that when they wore them they looked divine.
The prejudice against women who dare to remove those halos is more articulate at this moment than it has ever been in the history of our nation. We are charged anew with being out of our place. The cry again today is that we must be returned to the home, taken out of industry except in small subordinate or wartime jobs, and above all taken out of public life and politics. We are charged with weakening the nation, with being a pernicious influence upon men, who, it seems, are not strong enough to withstand us. If we are not actually harmful in public life, at least we do not improve anything. Nothing is better in government for our being there, we are told, so why should we be there? We only clutter up the offices and we are a nuisance. We must be removed.
Not only in America is this rumbling going on today. The new Vichy government in France has also decided to remove women. In fallen France the number of women who may be used in any industry is to be restricted. Women are to be eliminated altogether from government bureaus. And yet surely woman in France had achieved the utmost in femininity. For generations merely to murmur “Frenchwoman” has brought visions of charm and style to men and women alike, the difference being only that to men the vision had excitement and to women it was slightly jaundiced with jealousy. Woman in France had achieved the high point of compromise with polygamy. Marriage was acknowledged to be her right, and for it she paid the price of allowing polygamy to man as long as it did not shake her possession of his name and property. France did in the French fashion what China did in the Chinese fashion, but the Chinese way was more honorable, more just to woman and child, more decent for man.
But all the price that woman paid in France and all her charm and femininity were not enough. Wife and mistress, she falls back with the German Hausfrau, and bears besides the blame of man’s weakness and degeneration and so the blame of France’s fall.
Yet before American women get angry at the plight of women abroad we ought to examine our own situation. Intelligent women are all more or less conscious not so much of change here as of the slow tentative spread of an atmosphere which allows the open expression of opinions toward woman which before fascism came into being abroad would scarcely have been spoken aloud and in public places or printed on authoritative pages. A good many women are discussing the matter and are trying to find an intelligent solution for the problem before it grows any more acute. They must recognize that there is, of course, much truth in what is being said about women. The charge that feminization weakens the fiber of a nation is true. Feminization weakens anybody it touches, women as well as men. That it happens to be called feminization is comment on the place of women. It has nothing to do with being female. Men do well now to be alarmed by feminization, especially after those distressing stories from France. There is a terrible and evil power in the femininized, and men ought to fear it and try to keep it within bounds, because it is their own weakness made flesh in women. History is full of the tragedy of one man after another who has prevailed against armies but has not been able to prevail against one feminized creature, because to prevail against her meant to prevail against his own deep and unconquerable weakness. Who knows but that Hitler’s secret lies in his own inner impregnability?
Whence came this feminine creature? She began in man’s dreaming. Somewhere on the uneven road that men and women have jogged along together through the ages, they came to a fork to the left. The sign post on it read, “To Heaven.” They stopped, plunged into indecision. The rough road ahead was unmarked and made no promises. Neither man nor woman knew where it had begun or where it would end, but to travel it was their daily life. But man was the incurable dreamer then that he is now. “Heaven,” he mused. “I’ve heard fine things about that place. It’s full of angels.”
The woman said nothing. She was by nature a practical, hard-headed creature who did with what the man brought her. Some days she had so much she did not know what to do with it all, and on other days she had nothing. She struggled with this major problem of their family life in two ways: she learned how to preserve meat, and she scolded the man about his tendency to dream. Dreaming, she had discovered, was what made the food supply irregular. On days when something started him dreaming he forgot to hunt, and he came home empty-handed. She saw the glimmer of a dream now in his eyes as he looked up the road to Heaven.
“Let’s keep on going the way we know,” she said firmly. “We might not like Heaven.”
“I’d like to see an angel,” he said with longing. He looked at the woman and saw what he had sometimes noticed before: that she was plain. She was dusty and hot, and her hair was tangled. The dream in his eyes deepened. “I’ve always heard,” he said, “that angels are beautiful.”
“I suppose you wish I were an angel,” she said angrily. “As if I had time to sit around combing my hair and playing a harp!”
She was, of course, mixing up mermaids and angels, but they were mixed up in her mind. Whenever the road led by the sea, the man’s eyes grew dreamy, too. To her the sea was a huge body of water full of dangerous waves and edible creatures. Her mind was on the possibility of eluding one and catching the other. She often stopped to hunt crabs and find oysters, especially if the man was having one of his dream days and looked for mermaids.
“Come on,” she said now, “the children are waiting for us.”
So she took him by the hand and she led him past the road to Heaven. She was a practical creature, tough and hard and secretly unsentimental, and persistence was her weapon. From the day of her creation she had been thus, for she had to do with birth and death and food and shelter and all the constant work of necessary things. She had no time to dream, and she had never learned how to do it. She had no need for Heaven, for she was perfectly happy as she was.
Of Men and Women Page 9