There is a basis for this dislike, of course. Psychologists have already given us one very sound one. As society is organized in the United States, our children, boys and girls alike, receive almost all of their early discipline from women, and to the child discipline means refusal. Those first refusals are very important, for they are never forgotten. The memory of those first no’s, great and absolute, sticks in the subconscious. And the American mother says most of them because the American father is not at home much. Then a woman schoolteacher says them because American men consider primary-school teaching beneath them, though this is true in no other country to any such extent. American boys and girls have to reach high school before they associate discipline with men.
And woman has another disadvantage. Man comes to her too much as a suppliant, and a suppliant he remains too long, and it adds to his dislike of her that this is so. If he forces her against her will, she who thus accedes has subtle and fearful weapons of revenge, and the more sensitive the man the more he is wounded by her. Whether he is aware of it or not, his earliest life is shaped by a woman, and the core of his happiness, his poise, his satisfaction with himself and with all else in life, if it does not actually depend upon a woman, is so entwined, or so entangled with her, that to a degree he is helpless without her and helpless with her, and so what can he do but hate her for this? The more illogical, the more unreasonable, the more ignorant and foolish and incompetent she is, the more he hates her because she is a power over his memory and his life. The individual woman who has him at her mercy for the moment becomes for him a symbol of all women. For only in the brief hour of romantic love is the average man convinced that one woman is essentially different from the others. The rest of his life he enjoys a grim or gay compensatory humor at her expense, and it pleases him to repeat that it is just like a woman to be—whatever he thinks she is, a gad-about, a time-waster, an incompetent, a cat, a nagger, a whore, or a dangerous and unreliable automobile driver.
And yet when she is none of those things, when she is brilliant and able and competent, he dislikes her in a more subtle fashion because then he is afraid of her, and fear is added to the power of those childhood shapes.
Such is the situation between American men and women, summarized. It assumes new acuteness in view of the great changes which fascism forces upon the relationship of men and women anywhere. It has already been so augmented by traditions of Western chivalry, which have imposed false standards of sex upon men and women alike, that in spite of new acuteness one is tempted to leave it alone. After all, the lover of laissez faire may say, the primary requirement for the sexes is the production of children, and nature cunningly compels men and women to this whether they like each other or not.
Unfortunately human beings seem to require something more than physical reproduction of themselves for their happiness and well being. Procreation occupies too little space in the normal span. There are years before it begins and after it is over. And, besides, at no time in her life is any woman not feeble-minded content with merely having children; and under a monogamous system such as ours man deserves more satisfaction than the physical even with one woman. In polygamous society it is true that a man, if he is so inclined, may keep himself fairly occupied in the simple repetitive ways of physical sex provided he is not too intelligent and asks for nothing beyond. But if he is intelligent even then the repetition palls. I have known polygamists of subtle taste and intelligence who actually found their real excitement in discovering women with whom they had no physical relations whatever, who found their keenest satisfaction in the varied exchange of ideas and feelings, an exchange permeated as they made it with the essence of sex. But I must confess that the men as well as the women in these cases were unusual, as all artists are unusual, and so should be passed over in any general discussion of men and women. And yet my memory returns to them because of the extraordinary pleasure they found in each other as men and women.
For the unfortunate result of the present relationship between American men and women is that, since they do not much enjoy each other, both are missing the core of life—the zest, the sharpness, the contrast, the gaiety which mutual appreciation and understanding between two differing persons gives them both. Reforms cease to press upon those who are gay and well content, and how many crises would never come about if men and women were educated to appreciate and understand each other can be imagined merely by reading the daily newspapers.
The question still to be answered, however, in this search for the satisfying relationship between men and women is, does woman need to be educated? Fascism of the German type and certain of the Oriental civilizations say not. We in our own country have never been much influenced by others, and need not be now were it not for the ripplings of the wave of fascist thinking already to be found here and inevitably to increase as war atmosphere increases, even though it be only defense preparation for war. The question may therefore answer itself in our country. In spite of the willingness of many women to retreat from the responsibilities of full equality in citizenship with men, most American women have perhaps been given too much liberty to enable them again to be slaves. It is easy to set slaves free, and there is also the pleasure of having performed an act of righteousness. But to make slaves of the free-born, how difficult that is and what specious reasoning must be invented and enlarged upon to provide the sense of justification so necessary to a moral people like ourselves! It would be revolting to American men, too, to think of restricting and enslaving a group to which their mothers belong. Even though they might not object to a fait accompli if it could be accomplished without their being responsible for such ungallantry, their dislike for women as a whole is nearly always tempered with sentimental regard for some “little woman.”
And there is that other unfortunate result which they could not hope to escape: that women, when they are kept ignorant and enclosed, relapse into superstition and primitiveness, and inevitably they infuse into their sons the attitudes of mind natural to such states. No later education, as anyone knows who is familiar with people who keep their women socially and politically subordinate to men, can undo this unfortunate result of early years when for physical reasons even male children must stay for a time with their mothers. Men never recover from the ignorance of their mothers. It is true in the profoundest sense that the progress of a people is in direct proportion to the development of its women as human beings. Here may be the Achilles heel even of fascism.
It seems scarcely practicable, therefore, unless women themselves insist upon it, to force American women to return exclusively to the nursery, the kitchen, and the church. Even those lazy women who would like the return might refuse if they realized how many of their privileges would be taken from them. Women in the nursery-kitchen-church sort of society cannot come and go as they like, or say what they please, or enter into a tenth of the pleasurable pastimes which American women take as a matter of course. Moreover, women would have to give at least lip service to the male who owns her and after all these years of speaking her mind that might be the most difficult part of the subjugation, both to exact and to endure.
American women have been, of course, in what is locally called “a soft spot.” Nothing is expected of them except what they wish of their own will to undertake, they have no real responsibilities for the nation or to the nation, and they may come and go as they like. This sounds perfect and would be except for the fact that with it all women have not somehow won men’s real liking or even their respect. Because of this one fact women lack everything, for without the liking and respect of men the life of women is tasteless to them. And out of woman’s consequent discontent flow a multitude of evils.
What is the solution for our situation? Simply this—a new education, the education of men and women for each other. We need an education which would enlighten us about each other and would have as its object the removal of the separation between men and women by educating them as true equals. The emphasis by tradition
upon our different functions as men and women has made and kept us separate. There has never been any real research into the much-talked-of necessity of differing functions in men and women. So far as we actually know the only exclusively male function is the begetting of children and the only exclusively female function is the conception of children, together with their birth and suckling. This is the sole premise for the education of men and women for each other. Beyond that all is surmise and the result of prejudice for reasons far from the facts.
Where should the education of men and women for each other begin? First, in the complete rejection of the idea that the two great and inevitable groups of human beings, male and female, should have their activities predetermined by the automatic criterion of sex. We inveigh against race prejudice and yet what we say to women is what we say to the Negro: “Because you are thus, you shall forever be barred from every activity except housework and the care of young children. If you enter the industries it shall only be in the lowest positions and at whatever pay you can get, regardless of what men are given for the same pay. If you enter the professions, you shall be continually held back from any important advancement.” Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother’s Days and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.
There was once, of course, every reason why the activities of men and women should be sharply divided—the man to the outdoors, the woman to the indoors.
Has woman, then, no function left in the home? In comparison to what she once had, no, in a practical sense. Emotionally, yes, as much as ever. That is, she has the important work of giving to child and man the feeling of home and security where she is. She is still their center, though home is not. They must feed upon her as their source of comfort and upholding love. In the old days this was easy for her, for material activities gave her the means of expressing what she was to them. They depended upon her for bread and for love, and she made both together. But now love and comfort must be expressed through bakers’ bread and refrigerated food, through garments bought at department stores, and bedtime stories on the radio. Words are all she has left of her own, and words are not enough for the full expression of the love she feels.
Her attempts to supply moral teaching, too, are obviously inadequate, as the state of the world now proves. Indeed, as a teacher of morals women must confess their failure. It takes a boy very little time after he leaves the home at six to realize that the world outside the home has standards very different from those his mother gives him. He soon learns to leave her teachings at the gate, and to live according to what he finds outside. Nor does he take the trouble to explain this to her. Perhaps he could not explain if he would, since the knowledge is instinctive and is learned so young. Explained or not, it goes with him through life, and has been known for centuries as the double standard. All that woman has gained from her endeavor to be man’s moral teacher has been the lonely task of practicing what she preached. Man has expected her to do that, while he has considered her teachings impractical for himself.
And man is right in so far as he declares her teaching impractical. How can she teach him standards which she herself cannot test and try in the world where his life is? How dare women ask or expect of men codes of behavior perfectly possible only to women, shut into the isolated security of home but impossible perhaps to anyone in a man’s world? Women can ask nothing, expect nothing, in moral improvement in the world unless they go out into that world and take their share in its work. Nor can they prepare their children morally for a world which they themselves do not know by actual sharing of its responsibilities.
Woman must follow into the world those activities which once were hers in the home. She must busy herself again with problems of food and housing and education and religion and government. Her task of creating an environment for her children she must go on doing in the community, in the nation, in the world, since home has ceased now to be the real environment for man and child. She must follow man and child and live where they live if she is to continue to be to them what once she was in the preservation of life and the stimulation of mind and spirit.
Until she does this, moreover, she cannot find in herself the springs which feed them. For woman has no supernatural qualities, no direct connection with heaven. She is a fumbling human creature, as easily inclined to discontents and peevishness as any other; and she cannot achieve character or nobility alone within four walls full of plumbing and electricity. She can only achieve it today as she used to achieve it, through work and equal responsibility with man. In those days she could and did speak with authority, for she knew what she was talking about. Now it must be confessed she talks too often without knowing. Her functions and duties, in short, even though they remain the same, are no longer exclusively in the home. They are waiting, undone, in the nation and in the world. When she does them we shall know the difference.
But she will not do them in her present state of mind. That state of mind is, as I have said, uncertainty. That phrase, “Woman’s place is in the home,” exhausted as it is from repetition, nevertheless carries a significance beyond its literal meaning. For modern women who have no idea of remaining literally shut up in the home still take cover under the phrase. Though they go forth to office and to pleasure every day, they leave their minds behind them at home, tied up like little dogs to bedposts. They go forth, brightly vacuous, to tap typewriters, to sit in hairdressers’ booths, to dawdle through department stores or to clerk there, or only to lie on sun-soaked beaches. But they leave their minds at home, and with no sense of any responsibility they come and go, seeing poverty and maladjustment everywhere and relating it never to themselves or to what they could do. Still, sometimes they do keep their hearts in their bodies and then in pity they undertake vast charities and good works. But what is really wanted is their minds, and these they keep at home. Minds, intelligent, determined minds, are what the world needs today; and women have them exactly as much as men do, if they would only bring them along when they go out from home.
Who can persuade them of this? No one, I think, except men. I have told how in China, when the anti-foot-binding reform was going on, it was women who refused to give up foot-binding. Mothers dared not take the risk of not binding their little daughters’ feet, lest at sixteen and seventeen men might find them ugly and so unmarriageable. It was only when men themselves began to like girls with natural feet that the reform was real. Chinese men found it fun to have women at their sides in work and play instead of hobbling about courtyards. So American men might find it fun to have their women really at their sides in work as well as play if women had their minds with them. But until American men discover this, as the Chinese did, I fear women will not dare to bring their minds out of the home. Whether they should or not, women still shape themselves by what men like, at least until they have secured their goal of marriage.
The trouble with this idea of woman’s shaping herself to man’s wishes is that she can never quite do it, at least in America. She is not being educated for it. If man is to be the superior he wants to be, then everything ought to be shaped to a dictatorship of man—that is, women ought to be trained and taught only to be what man wants woman to be, and men ought to be trained to want only certain attainable things in women. Character, for instance, ought not to be expected. It is unreasonable to expect women to develop character without responsibility. It is impossible, in fact. Character remains pure theory unless there is opportunity to exercise it. Intelligence, too, if it is to develop, must be allowed scope. It atrophies when it is not used. This is why so many women have little character and less intelligence by the time they reach a certain age, however promising they were up to twenty-five. It is not because they are women that they have become effeminate, but because life has made too few demands on them. Men in like circumstances become as eff
eminate. If men want women to be different, they must demand it.
Do women want to be different from what they now are? Under their layers of vanity and childish sensitivity to anything which questions their perfection as angels, do they not? The American woman is so natively intelligent, so potentially able, so filled with fine energy, that it seems inevitable that she would like to feel herself used to the height of her capacity, as certainly she is not now. What is happiness if it is not the knowledge that all capacities are being fully used? And what is woman’s tragedy except the knowledge that what she has she cannot give, what she is she cannot be?
Yet how can man know what he wants in woman when all that he can know is what he has had and that has too often irked and wearied even while it charmed him? Men and women are in an impasse as regards each other. And yet actually the trouble is the same. Each is bound by tradition, the tradition of woman in the home.
Of Men and Women Page 13