Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  When I look at these words which I have just set down I perceive that unaware I have arrived at a goal. I have not searched for that goal. I have wandered along the paths of freedom for men and women, of freedom from the burdens they have put upon each other, on the whole unwittingly. I have pursued the possibilities of happiness for both, whether these have been tried or not. All the ways and paths which have covered the earth in their direction from east to west lead me, I find, to this: that happiness for men and women is in the greatest freedom for both that is consistent with equal opportunity. Freedom without opportunity is meaningless.

  Free men and free women, working on equal terms together in all the processes of life—and what is this but democracy? For in our preoccupation with nations and peoples and races, let us remember again that there is a division still more basic than these in human society. It is the division of humanity into men and women. Men and women against each other destroy all other unity in life. But when they are for each other, when they work together, the fundamental harmony exists, the foundation upon which may be built all that they desire.

  1 Shallcross, Ruth: Should Married Women Work? Public Affairs Pamphlet, No. 49, Public Affairs Committee, Inc., New York, 1940.

  2 Some of the facts in this chapter are drawn from an extraordinarily interesting manuscript by Miss Toni Sender, which I hope will soon be published.

  EPILOGUE: WOMEN AND “LIBERATION”

  Thirty years have passed since I wrote this little book, Of Men and Women. Thirty years! It is the lifetime of a generation in China, the land where I was a child and grew to womanhood and maturity. That China is no more. Land and people–yes, of course they are still there, but how changed! Communism rules, and Communism has totally altered the relationship between Chinese men and women. For practical reasons Communism compels women to come out of the home and contribute their share to national labor and industrialization. The theory is that no nation can solve its industrial problems with half its human resources in brains and hands. The family system is considered too expensive. One woman can do more and must do more than care for her own family. Hence for the first time in centuries the family unit in China was broken up by Communism and dispersed. Children were put into children’s homes or day care centers. Old people, heretofore cherished by their families, were put into homes for the aged. The state became the first consideration.

  There was of course a political reason for this Communist attack upon the traditional Chinese family system. The family system there was the social stronghold, units consisting possibly of hundreds of individuals, to whom the safety and welfare of the family came first, ahead of patriotism, nationalism, and finally of Communism. It was essential, from the Communist point of view, that the family be broken apart, the children taken away as early as three years of age, the young adults put to work, and the old men and women, with their traditions and memories, segregated. How successful this fragmentation has been we do not know, since Americans have no direct access to mainland China. Rumor, however, points to the possibility that it has not been wholly successful and I am inclined to believe this to be true. Nevertheless, the experience that Chinese women have had under Communist direction will probably have changed them. Certainly the young women, who have known nothing except Communism, will not be like their mothers and grandmothers. Today they are not only working in modern industries, they are also serving in the armed forces, and since they were always strong and from birth and by tradition never pampered, it is the less likely that they will ever give up their independence.

  Yet, human nature being what it is, some sort of family life undoubtedly still goes on. I saw pictures by a French newspaperman taken recently in the city of Nanking, in the province of Kiangsu, China, a city where I lived for many years. It is a mighty city, the Southern Capital of China, famous through six thousand years of history. There are new high-rise buildings there now, but men still haul loaded carts as they used to do in the days when that city was my home. I wonder if the great city wall is there. I have not heard that it is gone. But I read in the article with the pictures that a great bridge has been built across the wide Yangtze river between Nanking and Pengpu, the river port opposite. Until recently, when this bridge was completed, great ferries carried people, freight, vehicles, even trains, across the river. Now the bridge is there and in constant use. It is not likely that the Chinese will ever go back to the old ferries. I use the bridge as a symbol. The Chinese will remain Chinese. Their life will continue as it has for thousands of years. But they will live in new ways and with new tools. Practicality will be the keyword rather than tradition.

  Here in my own country what have been the changes that have taken place between men and women in the last thirty years? How would I change now this little book I wrote so long ago, and so soon after I myself had changed countries and cultures? As I read its pages again, I am surprised how little there would be to change. True, the “gunpowder women” I wrote of thirty years ago are beginning to explode, as I foretold. Let me underscore beginning, for the women’s liberation movement has only begun the explosion. It may be only a flash—time will tell. Nevertheless, it is, I feel, a preliminary warning of much to come. To change the symbol, let me say there is a ground swell among women all over the world which will break into white-capped waves in one country and another. Two Prime Ministers, one in vast India, one in little Israel, are both eminently successful women. Human and humane, politically astute and fearless, they prove that women can achieve notable ends, yet without the traits of masculinity. Here in my own country, I sense, rather than know, a profound though not publicly expressed acceptance of the possibility of a woman as President. True, this will not be a fact in the near future, unless the right woman appears—and she might appear at any moment. I say future, not necessarily far future. Thirty years ago this was not true.

  I attribute this possibility to two changes that have taken place: one in woman and one in man. The change in woman is that women are less jealous of each other, more loyal to each other, and less inclined to believe in the leadership of men simply because they are men. I do not say for one moment that they value men less or like them less or consider them less necessary to life and happiness. On the contrary, indeed! I feel today’s women realize as never before the necessity of men’s love and companionship and they admire generously the achievements of men. But they are more selective about men. Women today tend, I think, to judge a man first as a human being, and only secondly as a man. Thirty years ago I think the reverse was true. This change is true, moreover, in women’s attitude toward women. Women are increasingly judging women first as human beings and only secondly as women—or to put it more precisely, as females.

  This change, seemingly simple, is in fact profound. If women and men judge each other first as human beings and only secondly as sex objects, then we are setting the atmosphere for true equality between the sexes. The change, of course, is the result of what has happened during the last thirty years—namely, a continuing war. The Second World War, the Korean War, the war in Southeast Asia, have forced women to become more and more self-sufficient, not only emotionally and psychologically, but in practical ways. Most women of this generation have had, for some period at least, to be both father and mother to their children. Many have had to go to work in offices and factories in order to eke out their incomes. They have learned to know themselves and their own powers. They have learned to recognize the good qualities of other women, and as a result of mutual admiration have lost much of their former pettiness. There is a camaraderie among women nowadays which is heartening and enlarging to all. True, women are still not in the highest echelons of administration, but the atmosphere is getting ready for progress there, too. If women can regard other women as human beings first and if they do not accord to an unworthy man, merely because he is a man, a position he does not deserve, that is progress toward a better future. I was pleased the other day to hear a certain daughter of mine, the young mother o
f three sons and two daughters, varying in ages from seven to thirteen, programming the week’s household work equally between boys and girls. Boys took their turns at dishwashing and girls their turns at bringing in wood for the fireplaces, for example. When I commented favorably on their mutual responsibilities, she remarked practically:

  “Men and women have to learn how to do everything nowadays. The old separations are gone.”

  Let me hasten to say next that men have changed, too. They expect more of women, they demand more of women. Male eyes follow a pretty girl as unfailingly as ever, but they are eyes that carry more than a sexual question. There is plenty of simple physical sex, of course—and physical sex is, by the way, essentially a very simple business in spite of all the books written on the subject–but there is in the male calculation a question and a demand for something more, if a relationship is to continue. Brains are surprisingly often appreciated. Men enjoy being amused, diverted, stimulated to thought and consideration of new ideas, and once having had this new and surprising experience with a woman, they learn to demand it. This has, of course, an important effect on women, leading them to further self-development.

  It remains to be seen what changes will take place in both men and women when we no longer have wars that separate them. We have had wars before, of course, but we have never before had long wars in Asia, and our men have never before had years with Asian women. Asian women are born wise and old in ways which western women know nothing about. Asia never had an age of Knighthood’s Flower and all that, Asian women were never pampered and made much of by men or by anyone else. When a girl child was born she soon learned to fend for herself and get what she wanted in any way she could, by force, cunning, or charm. The thousands of half-American children in Asia today, stateless because Asians consider the child the possession and responsibility of the father, attest to the successful tactics of the Asian women. But sex and money aside, what effect will the years in old Asia have on our American men? No one knows. On fact is clear: it is well that American women have had the experience of having to think for themselves and do for themselves, in this long interval when so many thousands of our men have been away.

  This new independence is already showing itself in several ways. The most notable is the new sexual freedom. It is still customary, although no longer necessary, for a man and woman who are going to live together to get married, for each is more secure with the ceremony—or are they? I have been shaken since I recently argued the case with a young woman, a very young woman, whose marriage, two years before, had broken up. She had, she said, been very happy the first year. Her husband was a senior in college and she had gone to work herself in order to pay the expenses of his last year. Then, one day when she was emptying the pockets of a suit before sending it to the cleaners, she had found a letter and a love poem from another girl. Confronted when he came home, he confessed that there was another girl. The wife then discovered that she herself was pregnant, and the marriage was patched up, the baby born in due course, a beautiful boy, and all this time the other girl clung to the husband, though promising not to do so. The upshot of it was separation—a divorce was too expensive—and after a period of indecision, the young husband confused and the young wife hurt and angry, the marriage apparently hopeless, the wife began to live with another young man, a kinder man, with a successful business of his own.

  “But a divorce—” I suggested.

  She shook her head. “I’m free anyway,” she said.

  “But does this man want to marry you someday?” I inquired.

  “I’ve never asked, he’s never said,” was the reply. “Besides, what’s the use of another scrap of paper? We’ll live together as long as we’re happy. I’m too depressed to live alone.”

  “But the baby—”

  “He’ll always have me.”

  “No family?”

  “Families are out,” she said flatly.

  Later, talking over the situation with another young woman, herself happily married thus far, I was surprised and saddened, though not shocked, to have her agree with the young mother.

  “Things aren’t the way they used to be,” she said.

  She summed it with a cliché, but she had summed it. The longhaired young men, the pants-suited girls, the immediacy of sex intercourse, its casualness, its lack of any connections with what used to be called love, the music, so strange with the wailing voices, one voice like another, the eternal strumming of guitars, lonely dancing, each individual apart from the other, man separate from woman—yes, it is true. Things are different. It is the music that conveys the difference to me more clearly than anything else—the return to the folk music, the primitive, the individual complaint, music revealing loneliness and confusion. It is historically true that in times of national disorder, there is in any people a tendency to revert to individualistic folk music. It is an instinctive music, an expression of profound dissent and discontent. Music is, of course, the revelation not only of individual fear, pessimism, and threat, but when it becomes as universal in its form and content as are today’s songs, beat and thrumming in the United States, not to mention other parts of the world where it is also appearing, then it must be observed as the revealing of revolutionary threat. It is to be taken seriously.

  I am reminded by all this of a previous era in my life—the revolutionary era in my Chinese life, which ended in the victory of Communism there. For I was born into that era. It was near the end of a dynasty, always a dangerous period through the centuries of China’s many dynasties. There were, of course, safeguards for maintaining order until a new emperor appeared from among the people. The process was democratic. Upon the decline of a dynasty, ending in the death of the last emperor, with no heir apparent left, young men of all classes throughout the empire gathered personal armies and fought each other until one young man emerged as the victor over all the others.

  During this process, which might be short or long, the people remained undisturbed and the functions of the government went on. Two strong forces made this possible; first, a highly selective and intelligent civil service, and second, the firmly established traditional and powerful family system. For centuries these two forces remained inviolable. The change came as a result of the impact of the West through colonialism and its arsenals of explosive weapons—such weapons as China had invented centuries before and rejected as inhumane and uncivilized. Her mistake, of course, was in not realizing the generation gap between nations, a gap as valid as that between individuals. At any rate, without going into lengthy description at this moment, let me say that the civil service fell into decay as a result of the stopping of the Imperial Examinations, and the traditional family system broke under the impact of the acquaintance of young Chinese with the Western peoples. Young Chinese were allowed to go abroad for education and they came back with new ideas.

  In fact, there is nothing new to me in the behavior of young people here in my own country at the present moment. I have been through it all before, but in China and in my own youth. The flouting of parents and elders, the uprisings and violence of students, the demand for freedom from traditional marriage and the demand for liberty in sex experiment—it is all old stuff to me. I have seen it before in its manifold forms in daily life, in revolutionary music, in revolutionary literature—I have seen it all and long ago. In China it ended in the overthrow of the government, centuries old, and then a vacuum of ten years of no central government—and finally Communism. It is easy to overthrow a government but very difficult to build a new one, as the young Chinese found. The result of their failure was that when Communism came in it found its work already half done. The civil service and the traditional family system, China’s two establishments, were gone. All the Communists had to do, once the world war was ended, was to set up their own political system and destroy the last vestiges of the family system.

  I recount in brief this long and dramatic story, which I observed through experience, because I observe and expe
rience here and now the same events, the same trends, that took place in China. I consider the breakdown of the family as most serious. When marriage is no longer considered necessary between men and women, when children are born without families to be responsible for them, then the end result is that the state must take over. Communism took over Chinese children, placed them in institutions, fed, clothed and indoctrinated them. They looked to the state as their protector and benefactor. The head of that state was and is their father figure. This happened in China, the oldest and greatest of civilized nations. It can certainly happen here in The United States, the youngest of the great nations, the least established in its traditions.

  I am not given to prophecies and warnings. I simply say, however, that what has happened elsewhere can happen here, if men and women in their new freedom with each other allow it to happen. The family system here, too, is beginning to weaken. Women demand equality with men not only economically, legally and socially, but also sexually. Before such demands are met, and they should be and will be met and this without doubt, let men and women, in equal responsibility, take thought of the child. A man and woman may not be a family, but with the birth of a child, wanted or not, the two become three and three is a family. A family, in my opinion and experience, must be a responsible unit—responsible for providing a stable environment for the child, who is the next generation, the human continuum.

  In short, and in conclusion, men and women, in all freedom, may be free only insofar as their freedom does not destroy the nation. There must be basic foundations for the security of the nation. Neither man nor woman is wholly free. Whether the individual wishes, declares, demands total freedom, it is impossible, for such freedom does not exist save in drug-induced dreams. The smallest pebble cast into a pool creates ripples which cannot, by the law of action and reaction, be stopped.