Deutsch herself, despite her pretensions to intellectual stature, was deeply in love with the feminine stereotype. She drew an extraordinary picture of woman as the ideal life-companion.
…if they possess the feminine quality of intuition to a great degree, they are ideal collaborators who often inspire their men, and are themselves happiest in this role. They seem to be easily influenceable and adapt themselves to their companions and understand them. They are the loveliest and most unaggressive of helpmates and they want to remain in that role; they do not insist on their own rights—quite the contrary. They are easy to handle in every way—if one only loves them. Sexually they are easily excited and rarely frigid; but precisely in that sexual field they impose narcissistic conditions which must be fulfilled absolutely. They demand love and ardent renunciation of their own active tendencies.
If gifted in any direction they preserve the capacity for being original and productive, but without entering into competitive struggles. They are always willing to renounce their own achievements without feeling that they are sacrificing anything, and they rejoice in the achievements of their companions, which they have often inspired. They have an extraordinary need of support when engaged in any activity directed outward, but are absolutely independent in such feeling and thinking as relate to their inner life, that is to say, in their activity directed inward. Their capacity for identification is not an expression of inner poverty but of inner wealth.11
This is nothing more than a blueprint for the approved woman and as such it presents an artificial unattainable ideal. Such a woman cannot be a person, for she does not exist in her own terms at all. Her significance can only be conferred by the presence of a man at her side, a man upon whom she absolutely depends. In return for renouncing, collaborating, adapting, identifying, she is caressed, desired, handled, influenced and occasionally desired in vain. It is a bad bargain for a man for she makes no attempt to excite or interest him, so he cannot expect to be handled or influenced by her. The whole structure could be toppled by a wart on the nose, for Deutsch cannot keep words like lovely out of her prescription. What right can this creature have to demand ardent love and desire, seeing as she is powerless to offer it? She is a vain, demanding, servile bore. Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of the success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen. And this is the norm described by the ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, a farrago of moralism and fantasy unillumined by any shaft of commonsense. Deutsch’s crass prejudice has not been significantly questioned by more recent psychoanalysis: Bruno Bettelheim argues that ‘we must start with the realization that, as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers’.12
Erik Erikson invented the lunatic concept of an inner space in a woman’s somatic design, a hole in the head, as it were, which harbours the commitment to take care of children.13 Joseph Rheingold restated the position of the mad captain in The Father as recently as 1964.
When women grow up without dread of their biological functions and without subversion by feminist doctrine and therefore enter on motherhood with a sense of fulfilment and altruistic sentiment, we shall attain the goal of a good life and a secure world in which to live it.14
The women who do enter upon marriage and childbearing with optimism and romantic sentiments are most vociferous in their disappointments, and their children suffer most by their mother’s obsessive interest in them. Childbearing was never intended by biology as a compensation for neglecting all other forms of fulfilment and achievement. It was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance. Feminists cherish a sanguine hope that the conclusions of Masters and Johnson that the vaginal orgasm is a myth have routed the Freudian fantasm forever, when they established that all female orgasms originate in the clitoris. It is not however beyond the scope of these theorists to argue that all the women tested by Masters and Johnson were infantile products of improper conditioning, and that the fact that all the orgasms in their samples were clitoral does not disprove that vaginal orgasm ever existed, could exist or ought to exist. Basically it all comes down to the same fact: the Freudian system describes the status quo as a desideratum of the nineteenth-century middle class. Facts are irrelevant to what is basically a value system. If we are to place our strongest values in external reality, we can reject the premises of Freudian psychoanalysis as extra weight in the auto-repressive process, relying instead upon our own observation, and the results of our own experiments with our environment. Not only is the Freudian construct arbitrary, it doesn’t work as a pattern for living. We cannot have all the children we might need to arrive at the condition of mental health as understood by Freud, however much we might want to. If women were to be barefoot and pregnant all the time, as Mark Twain suggested, their number would have to be decimated.
There have been other statements by the fathers of psychology about the role of women, from the mumbo-jumbo of Jung to the notions of human normality derived from watching apes cohabiting in the battleground of the jungle. An anthropologist like Margaret Mead seeks the ratification of her academic theories of sex in her observation of primitive communities so that despite her apparent radicalism, she defends the concept of passive femininity. Her position is still that of Krafft-Ebing, who believes of woman that
If she is normally developed mentally, and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and family impossible. It is certain that the man that avoids women and the woman that seeks men are abnormal…nevertheless the sexual sphere occupies a much larger sphere in the consciousness of women than that of men, and is continual rather than intermittent.15
Freud would have told him how to interpret his latter observation in terms of the former. Women do have sexual desires and if it is a function of normal mental health development and good breeding to destroy it, let us try some abnormal mental development, rejecting our breeding. If marriage and family depend upon the castration of women let them change or disappear. The alternative is not a brothel, for brothels depend upon marriage and family for their existence. If we are to escape from the treadmill of sexual fantasy, voracious need of love, and obsessiveness in all its forms we will have to reinstate our libido in its rightful function. Only then will women be capable of loving. Eternal Eros is imprisoned now in the toils of the sadomasochistic symbiosis, and if we are to rescue him and save the world we must break the chain. What after all was Deutsch describing in her impassioned rhetorical phrases but this?
The passive form of the symbiotic union is that of submission or…of masochism. The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel of another person who directs him, protects him; who is his life and his oxygen as it were. The power of the one to whom one submits may be inflated, may he be a person or a god, he is everything, I am nothing, except inasmuch as I am part of him. As a part, I am a part of greatness, of power, of certainty. The masochistic person does not have to make decisions, does not have to take any risks; he is never alone—but he is not independent; he has no integrity; he is not yet fully born…the person who renounces his integrity, makes himself the instrument of somebody or something outside himself; he need not solve the problem of living by productive activity.16
In pushing the masochistic role as the proper role for woman, psychology reinforces the infantilization which has gone on ever since she was born. Her sufferings do not stem from her failure to grow up into mature womanhood, but from her striving against what prevents her from living and working with her own powers. From the time she was born she has been subjected to a pressure to return to the womb, from her first hour bound into a cot to her last straitjacket. Th
ere is only one way to return to the womb, via death. The same pressures that bind with briars a woman’s joys and desires are the pressures that will destroy the world. If half the world is to remain hostage to Death, then Eros must lose the battle to the total weapon. What is the arms race and the cold war but the continuation of male competitiveness and aggression into the inhuman sphere of computer-run institutions? If women are to cease producing cannon fodder for the final holocaust they must rescue men from the perversities of their own polarization. The struggle may be long and even more painful than capitulation. It will be a struggle in the dark, for none of our vaunted knowledge, scientific or not, can describe the alternative possibility. Is it worth it?
The Raw Material
Despite all the arguments about the effect of conditioning on the developing woman, the suspicion might persist that women do have some congenital mental deficiency by reason of their sex. Given the bias of observers involved in testing for suspected or assumed tendencies we might not be surprised to find that there were ‘proven’ sexual differences in mind. The remarkable fact is that no such differences have ever been established. Methodical investigation into the sex of mind has been going on for more than fifty years. It is known that sex hormones do enter the brain, but no correlation between the physiological fact and mental capacity or behaviour has ever been established, although it has been assumed. It was thought that the relative lightness of the female brain argued lesser mental powers, although it was pointed out that women have a heavier brain considered relatively to the total body weight. In any case brain weight is irrelevant, as was swiftly admitted when it was found to operate to male disadvantage. If the frontal lobes are to be considered as the seat of intelligence, then it must also be pointed out that the frontal area of the brain is more developed in women. So we may discount that kind of statistic as well. The brain is so imperfectly understood that we simply do not know enough about its physiology and function to deduce facts about performance.
Thus women’s secrets I’ve surveyed
And let them see how curiously they’re made,
And that, tho’ they of different sexes be,
Yet in the whole they are the same as we.
For those that have the strictest searchers been,
Find women are but men turned outside in;
And men, if they but cast their eyes about,
May find they’re women with their inside out.
‘The Works of Aristotle in Four Parts’, 1822, p.16
Rather than attempt to deduce behaviour from physiology it has seemed more logical to establish behaviour patterns from the observation of behaviour. There are problems attached to that too. It is impossible to control experiments which are conducted among subjects undergoing the continual chaotic conditioning of normal life. Unconditioned subjects do not exist, and the conditioned ones are not uniformly so. If such tests did reveal intellectual inferiority in women we could discount them, but in any case they do not.
In 1966 Eleanor Maccoby assembled the results of fifty years of testing in her book The Development of Sex Differences under an extraordinarily comprehensive range of subdivisions. Those relating to cognitive abilities were particularly interesting. According to Gesell and others (1940) and Terman (1925) girls speak before boys. All the further studies of the development of articulacy show that girls proceed faster than boys although boys perform better in situations requiring enterprise and lack of shyness, like speaking out in class, especially in the older age groups. Girls seem to have a wider vocabulary, although the differences do not seem very significant. Girls are better at grammar and spelling, although tests of reasoning produced a variety of results. Reading tests showed the same pattern. Nonverbal cognitive abilities like counting, mathematical reasoning, spatial cognition, abstract reasoning, set-breaking and restructuring, perceptual speed, manual, mechanic and scientific skills have all been tested, and no significant pattern of difference has emerged, except this slight pre-eminence of the girls, who may have this advantage for reasons connected with their enculturation, more time spent with adults, more sedentary habits, greater obedience and credulousness. Of the tests of total IQ eleven show no difference, three find a difference in favour of women, and three in favour of men. Given the amorphous nature of the faculties tested and the arbitrary character of the test situation itself, we must refrain from assuming anything about the female psyche from such evidence, except that the sex of mind is still to be demonstrated.1
There is a basic confusion in the test situations between creativity and getting good marks at school. In Lewis Terman’s studies of genius, which consisted in following through the careers of a group of gifted children, he is very much hampered by his own limited concept of genius. One girl, Sarah, is highly praised by Terman, who includes this poem as evidence of her extraordinary gifts:
The Virgin
Her pride subdued by shyness, or by art,
The maiden walks; the whispers of her heart
Only betrayed by the elusive rose
Upon her cheek. Through all her being flows
A consciousness of happy innocence
And youth more sweet for its impermanence.
Eager to live, yet fearing to be caught
On life’s rude turbulent flood, wise though untaught,
Aware of all she is designed to be,
She savours and delays her destiny.2
This pompous doggerel is not irradiated by one genuine insight. The tradition in which it is written perished ignobly a hundred years or more ago. All that such an opusculum can reflect is young Sarah’s facility in emulation. Nevertheless, the testers do distinguish some tendencies which may be of help to us in understanding what it is that happens to the girl when she is gradually outstripped by her male rivals, and finally leaves school before reaching any appreciable standard of literacy, or taking a job qualification. Despite the confusion between induction and education in the minds of the testers they were able to observe a tendency which goes a long way to explain what eventually diddles girls:
A Man ought no more to value himself for being wiser than a Woman, if he owes his Advantage to a better Education, than he ought to boast of his Courage for beating a Man when his hands were bound.
Mary Astell, ‘An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex’, 1721, p.18
For both sexes there is a tendency for the more passive dependent children to perform poorly on a variety of intellectual tasks, and for independent children to excel…3
Children who ‘refuse to accept authority’ do well in a variety of tasks, as do those who resist ‘conformity pressures’.
Mothers who were less nurturant towards daughters during pre-school years had the more academically successful daughters…
For girls by contrast [with boys] the crucial factor in the development of IQ appears to be relative freedom from maternal restriction—freedom to wander and explore.4
The failure of women to produce great works of art and all that can be explained in terms of this statement. In so far as she escapes or rejects her conditioning, the little girl may excel in those kinds of intellectual activity that are called creative, but eventually she either capitulates to her conditioning, or the conflicts become so pressing that her efficiency is hampered. Maccoby does not see why the development of sexuality must have such a deleterious effect on girls’ performance, although she has earlier quoted McKinnon’s opinion on the relation between repression and mental capabilities.
Repression, McKinnon argues, has a generalized impact upon thought processes, interfering with the accessibility of the individual’s own previous experience. An individual who is using repression as a defence mechanism cannot be, to use McKinnon’s term, ‘fluent in scanning thoughts’. McKinnon has evidence that creativity is in fact associated with the absence of repression (as indicated through personality assessment tests) and Barron reports that originality is associated with ‘responsiveness to impulse and emotion’.5
Fro
m all that has been said, it is apparent that we cannot speak of inferiority and superiority, but only of specific differences in aptitudes and personality between the sexes. These differences are largely the result of cultural and other experiential factors…the overlapping in all psychological characteristics is such that we need to consider men and women as individuals, rather than in terms of group stereotypes.
Anna Anastasi, ‘Differential Psychology’, 1958, pp.497—8
Certainly, McKinnon’s view goes some way towards explaining the gradual fading of the young woman’s hopes, as she takes over the repressive processes that her parents and superiors have demonstrated and continues them on her own behalf. What she began with cannot be proved to be in any way inferior to the raw material of which male genius is fashioned but from what we can observe it seems that girls can only prove that point by open intellectual rebellion.
The Female Eunuch Page 10