Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  Tradition, then, is the culprit. But what can be done about tradition? Only one thing—break it. Being dead, it is always breakable. There is only one question—how to begin to make a new one. Obviously, intelligent people will have to begin, for the unintelligent always cling to old tradition for security. I suppose it is fair to say that the greatest concentration of intelligence is in our schools. At any rate, schools are as good a place as any to begin.

  Let it be proposed, therefore, that, instead of men being educated solely for the industries, the professions, and the sciences, and women educated for nothing in particular, the primary aim of our schools and colleges should be to educate men and women for each other. There is nothing impractical or unreasonable in this; indeed, it is the only education that can be really education for life. Since harmony and understanding between men and women is the only basis for a tranquil and wise society, is it not folly deliberately to educate men and women away from each other, as we are now doing, actually if not consciously?

  I can hear anxious teachers crying out, “But what would be the program for such a re-orientation of education?” A teacher without a program is helpless. But I am no expert in teaching and no believer in programs, and I will only suggest the foundations upon which such a program can be built.

  First, men and women should go to school together from the day they start kindergarten to the last hour of the Ph.D. examinations. But they should not be graded, as they are now, according to their physical ages. They should be put together at their biologic ages when, male and female, they are closest together and most able to understand each other. A girl of six is the same biologic age as a boy of seven, and a girl of fifteen as a boy of seventeen or eighteen. When they are graded together as they now are, male and female, we work them harm. Who can tell how deep are the resentments which the boy feels against the girl, always apparently his superior in the school system? And there are those far deeper hostilities aroused when she in her fifteen-year-old urges presses her instinctive attentions upon the fifteen-year-old boy, biologically unready for her and therefore afraid of her and resentful of her frustration and repelled by her, and yet somehow degraded in his own eyes with mortification at his own inadequacy. Who can blame him if in later years he hastens to assert and to maintain his superiority, and who can blame her if she never wholly forgets his rebuffs and doubts forever the rightness of her own being? Biological age mating should begin with the kindergarten.

  Second, from the first day to the last of formal schooling men and women should be taught exactly the same things by the same persons. The whole body of knowledge, including all techniques, should be taught in exactly the same way to men and to women. The knowledge of home-making and child-care and all the realm of what has been mistakenly called women’s work should be given to men and women together, for theirs together should be the responsibility in the home as well as outside it. It is the only way to bring the home back, to make it again the mutual work of man and woman together. For what made the pioneer home so valuable to man and woman was that their work was done there together. The new education of man and woman for each other should aim at the creation again of a home for the modern family which can fill its needs in these times as the pioneer home did for its time.

  For it may be said and not altogether humorously, that our present unequal education has worked great hardship upon men. Many a man born to be a home-maker has been compelled by tradition to be something else. The injustice has been grave to women, too. No one will ever know what discoveries and creations have been suppressed because women who ought never to have gone near a kitchen were imprisoned there by the same tradition that forbade its delights to men. Such women should have had their children, but should never have cooked for them or cared for them. Their motherhood could have been far more valuably used in other ways both for the individual children and for society.

  For until scientists can discover the trick of heredity that will insure men’s being born with certain traits and women with others, we must still bear with the unfortunate fact that men and women inherit equally from their ancestors. The simple reason why women have not been as productive in the arts and sciences and professions as men have been is that they have not been allowed to be or encouraged to be, and the two are one. And the reason why so many homes are badly run and fussily managed is because the women who run them ought not to be there at all. Men with a genius for home management should be doing it. And yet few men and few women are endowed with sufficient courage to flout tradition and do what they ought and want to do as individuals.

  All knowledge in common, then, and taught in exactly the same way, should be the new education for men and women. Let there be no secrets between them, either of trade or sex. Roughly speaking, half of the curriculum should be devoted to trade knowledge, one quarter of it to study about women, and the other quarter to study about men, but all of it studied together under the same teachers.

  All of that great body of knowledge which I have crowded into the word “trade” must be taught with a new emphasis. Heretofore it has been mistakenly assumed to belong to man. But with this new attitude in education of men and women for each other, this, of course, must be changed. This common education for and with each other ought to remove much if not all of the strain now found between men and women. If women know that they are given the technical equipment of knowledge which men have, they will have a sense of security and self-confidence. If they do not or cannot marry, they can take care of themselves. Similarly, a man, if he knows everything about home-making, need not be anxious about his ability to hold a technical job. He may find his place in some good woman’s home, and with her work out the perfect partnership, unhampered and unshamed by the traditions of sex segregation.

  But curriculum subjects in themselves will have to be revised. History, for example, has always been taught entirely as the work of man. When woman appears in it she is either as a queen of little practical use, or a rebel smashing up furniture with axes or praying in saloons. The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past. In curiosity a few months ago I asked a haphazard score of women of my acquaintance if they had ever heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Only one had even heard her name, and she had no recollection of more. Yet only a generation ago Elizabeth Cady Stanton was called the greatest woman in the United States, and by some the greatest in the world. If women are as ignorant as this of themselves they can scarcely expect men to know more. But if the aim of education is to be the enlightening of men and women about each other, of course history must be taught truthfully about both, and truthfully rewritten.

  Psychology, as another example, should be taught with definite consideration of mental differences between men and women, with thought given and research made over a space of time as to whether such differences are based upon physiology or environment, and whether they are permanent. There should be anxiety to prove nothing between men and women, but merely to discover the truth about each other. This new education of men and women for each other would remove the tedious rivalry which now poisons so much of the relationship between the sexes. Women need not be anxious to prove themselves superior to men, nor eager to prove all women inferior to men because they fear they themselves are inferior. And men need not be anxious to prove themselves superior to all women out of the fear that they are not. It will be taken for granted that such superiorities and inferiorities are to be found only in individuals and that no one is doomed by sex.

  Psychology should embrace the whole important psychology of sex. We Americans are childishly interested in the least important aspects of sex because we are so ignorant. Nobody really teaches us anything about sex at home or in school. “Why are adults in your country so absorbed with sex?” is the frequent question of the foreign visitor to our land. The reply is obvious, “Because
we know so little about it.”

  Yet our interest, out of our very ignorance, extends scarcely at all beyond the physical, and we are ignorant indeed of sex in its complex and fascinating and important aspects. If one asks the principal of a school what is being taught his pupils about sex, he speaks of its most elementary terms. The essentials of the physical relation between the sexes as a preparation for marriage is simple and easily taught. It is to be summed up in the one axiom that is vitally important, which is that of the discovery of the cycles of passion natural to the two individuals concerned and the mutual adjustment necessary between them. Anything beyond that grows out of such adjustment and may or may not be taught as further technique. It is true that we have much to discover about passion in the woman and passion in the man. I venture a guess that, male and female, they are fundamentally much more alike than they now seem. Man’s apparent lack of rhythm might be changed to a rhythm as definite as woman’s if he had full opportunities of companionship with her in all of life. As it is, the physical relation between men and women is burdened and made too urgent with their need for completer union in all ways.

  But the whole delicate being of a man and the whole delicate being of a woman, how important that they be made known to each other, not only in terms of history and psychology, but through literature and especially through poetry and the novel! Why do men write more good plays than women do and stronger poetry, and why do women write the subtler novels and the lovelier verse, and what is music in the man and why has woman through the ages been so silent and who can free the music in her, since music there must be, God not having forbidden it to her? All of literature is an illumination of men and women in relation to each other and so it should be studied by them both together. For literature is not a thing in itself. It is not absolute. It is valuable only for what it reveals about men and women.

  But it is idle to enumerate one curriculum subject after another even in their most general terms in relation to men and women. The aim of the whole teaching of boys and girls should be the removal of the present antagonism between men and women, an antagonism caused by the difference of emphasis, by fear and mutual distrust, and these caused by ignorance. Not the least benefit of this change would be in that part of their life where men and women must remain eternally separate because they are male and female, where sex antagonism is now too often inevitable because there is no sex friendship.

  The result of this education for sex friendship would be the breaking down of the tradition which dooms woman to one sphere and man to another. Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession. As things are now they divide it into separate domains, and each strives to rule absolutely in his part, if not in the other’s. When either enters the domain not his, he must subjugate himself or herself, and no one likes a lifetime of subjugation, especially when it is not accompanied by love or even by friendship. Men and women must be educated out of that wish for power in any domain; and they can be, for the root of any wish for power is to be found in insecurity of some sort and in distrust of others through ignorance of them. We do not want to rule those whom we trust and understand.

  And when woman especially is educated mentally and spiritually beyond her little domain, as she has been in our country, without being given a share or taking a share for herself of a larger domain, her power becomes dangerously concentrated. She assumes, for instance, far too much responsibility for the children, who belong no more to her than to man; and this power extends over a far longer period than it should. She regulates too much and controls too long the lives of the children. Man allows this because tradition has given her this domain. Tradition is wrong, and men lose much through not sharing in the care and responsibility of children from their birth. But most of all the children are injured. I hear too many women say, “It takes all my time and thought to run my home and care for children.” It does because woman is usurping the power in the home. She ought not to run the house and the children. What business is it of hers to assume control over something so mutual to a man and a woman as their home and children?

  And yet man has been as ruthless in his own power over the domain outside. He has been responsible for the environment which surrounds children when they leave the doors of their homes, and that he has not made a very good job of it suggests that he might have done better had he insisted on woman’s sharing that responsibility. His children have suffered through him because he has kept woman out of his domain except in small subordinate ways.

  Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman. Children need their fathers at home and they need their mothers outside of it. That is, the work of the world needs to be done by men and women together. Who knows but that the influence of the man might solve the problems of the problem child, and who knows but that the practical and realistic brains of the woman might devise a way to discern and prevent early the causes of war? At least women know the long cost of giving birth to and training those children who as men can be killed in the fraction of a second. And men might realize some of the cost if they took their proper share in the care and the education of children which begin the moment a child is born. Of course, if this sort of mutual education were seriously undertaken women might have to go shoulder a gun, in a police army at any rate, but why not? Women in China fight in the regular army. And men might have to learn how to mix milk formulas for babies. A few have done so and retained their manhood. What men and women have to learn is that woman as a woman is not injured by doing any of the things tradition has assigned to man, nor is man as man injured by performing the duties tradition has assigned to woman.

  For the old bogey of the loss of sex or sex charm through doing a particular job in the world is nothing but nonsense, repeated once more by some individual for his own self-defense for something or other. I have seen girls who never went outside their homes except to go to church or the movies or the grocery or the drugstore but who never had any more sex charm than a guinea hen, and I have seen short-haired girls in soldiers’ uniforms who at the times they chose were so radiant with the famous sex appeal that men’s heads turned toward them as though a strong wind were blowing upon them all from the same direction, as indeed it was. Nothing and no environment can give sex appeal to the individual, man or woman, who does not possess the technique, God-given or taught. And the teaching of it should be included as a part of that education of men and women for each other, with full training in the proper times and places to use it. Then we would be relieved of this present tedium of a spurious sex appeal injected into everything. Sex charm is a valid and important thing, and its teaching should not be left to advertisements of all sorts of things from tooth paste to the week’s laundry. It is tedious to women to have to believe, as every influence tries to force them to believe, that man when he thinks of them thinks of nothing but simple sex. This belief by women removes from sex all the interest and excitement, the chance and question, the refusal or acceptance, not only of woman toward man but of man toward woman. And how tedious to the male if he believes, as he cannot be blamed for believing if he reads pages of magazines and advertisements written for women, that the minds of women are eternally fixed selfishly upon the appeal to that which he knows is only a part of his life and interest.

  For the joy of sex is in variety, and I do not mean variety of individual. Nothing is more stultifying, as a matter of fact, than passing from one individual to another, pausing only long enough to discover what is common to all. No, the excitement of real sex variety is that to be found within a single relationship, based upon deep security, where between the two individuals in that relationship there is continued chance and question and freedom to refuse or to accept.

  In short, sex ought to be made exciting again, and men and women should be so educated for each other that it is exciting and no longer merely a manifestation of adolescence to be kept alive as long as possible and repeated vicarious
ly when it is dead through the tiresome and repetitive “stories of young love” to be found in too many magazines and movies. Sex is exciting only when it is a subtle and pervasive part of the relationship between men and women varying in its forms from adolescence to old age, and it dies only with death if it is properly nourished in life.

  And, yet like any other part, sex loses its flavor if it loses its proper proportion to the whole of life. Antagonism between men and women is the inevitable result of the loss of this proportion between sex and the rest of their life together. Men and women must share everything in life, work at home and work abroad. Before the relationship between them can be complete and sex can take its proper proportion, they must give each other the right to do the same things if they like to do those things and can, instead of repressing each other by the old tradition that men must do one thing and women another. And so necessary is this complete relationship between men and women that without it the basic harmony of human life is lost, and discontents spring up everywhere like weeds.

  What we need in our country is not merely an amendment to the constitution insisting on equality for men and women, but a new education which will really bring it about, or, to use a pedagogical term, a new orientation and technique of education, so that all education is shaped toward mutual understanding and appreciation between men and women. In such an atmosphere tradition would disappear and amendments be forgotten. And men would not have to associate women with all the unforgettable no’s of childhood, and women would not have to bear the brunt of those memories, as she does now and so unjustly. And who knows if woman might not have an idea or two worth having about war and peace and the prevention of crime and the cure of poverty?

  9. WOMEN AND FREEDOM

  This education of men and women for each other might be helpful, incidentally, in the elimination of what is now known as the exceptional woman—that is, the woman who by reason of some talent and energy singles herself out or is in spite of herself singled out and, like a black swan among white, appears in those upper reaches of the arts and professions and executive offices where there are usually only men, and where her sex alone is more astonishing than anything she can possibly achieve. She is a phenomenon of the society which is peculiarly American. She does not seem singular in China, for there all sorts of women nowadays do what they please, and nobody pays any great heed to them. Only the other day some women in Chungking opened a bank—in the new and constantly bombed capital of China. If women in New York had opened a bank, what a fanfare of photography and reporting would have been the result! But these women in Chungking were not exceptional, as they would have been in New York.