On Growing Up Tough: An Irreverent Memoir

by Taylor Caldwell

  Aunt Pollie, the Queen, a gentle and lovely wife, a “dependent” wife with no ambitions to do a man’s work in the world, would have been despised by feminists and the Liberation Ladies. But Aunt Pollie was truly a woman, and not a grotesque neuter full of envy of the male sex—who have always had it much harder than women, with much less physical stamina, and have been conned by women for endless centuries to make life soft for them.

  Unlike our brawling household, Aunt Pollie’s house was a place of sweet quiet refuge for a tired girl like myself. Even at the cost of having to go with Uncle Willie to his grim Scots Presbyterian Church on Sunday evenings, I would visit Aunt Pollie for the soothing joy of being in a real home, among soft voices and gentle music, among fragrances and graciousness, and topping it off a real British Tea, produced apparently without effort. And I observed that Uncle Willie was masculinely deferential to Auntie’s femininity, elaborately courteous to her, and overwhelmingly loving, while she cosseted him daintily in her female fashion.

  Aunt Pollie was a discreet Scots-woman, so she did not criticize my parents and the back-breaking labor she knew I was doing all the long hours of the week. But once she said to me, seriously, in her beautifully modulated voice, “Janet, the only way out for you is more education and then … and then breaking away.”

  It was to Aunt Pollie that I took my literary efforts—written long after midnight and before my rising at six A.M. She would read them closely and carefully, then gaze at me with her tender thoughtful eyes, and repeat my need for more education. So, I went to night high school five nights a week. And believe me, kiddies, at fifteen—a “child,” to use modern parlance—I had very little time to sleep or eat after that! There were no adolescent “difficulties” or “traumas,” either, no “turmoils,” no “rebellions.” Life had become a stern business of surviving each day and working and living for the future. The rage still lives in me that despite the financial comforts of my family I was expected to do a boy’s and man’s work, and “no nonsense about you being a girl, either.” All I wanted to be was a girl, and then a cherished woman! Alas.

  While I worked and studied, my dream of being the Cherished Woman—like Aunt Pollie—grew stronger in me. But all the hard work I had had to do since I was a child, and the living I had had to earn since I was fifteen, and all the exhortations I had had to listen to at “home,” gave me too much independence of manner, too much self-assurance, too much of an appearance of confidence. This definitely put off men who wanted a Queen for their houses, a soft and yielding gentle sweet creature like Aunt Pollie, a charming hostess pliant and soothing and full of musical laughter and kind wit. For such a woman men were ready to work their poor hearts out, considering themselves blessed. But a girl like myself, who knew hard labor, and knew how to earn a buck, and had a sharp and independent voice and manner, was not attractive to them. They did not want a “partner,” and a fellow wage-earner. They did not believe that a “woman can do anything a man can do.” They were right, of course.

  So, I did not attract the manly men I secretly adored, the masculine strong men, the cherishers of women, the protectors of women, the admirers of women, the men who believed it was their duty to provide for wives and children, the men who built nice houses for their women, who guided them against the evil brutalities of living. I attracted the weak sisters among the men, who subconsciously recognized that here was a girl who would earn a living for them, take care of them, protect them, and be the man of the house, while they indulged their “sickly” physiques and their “ailments” and their delicate psyches. They clung to me, the creeps, begging for instant marriage—with an eye on my pay check—while the men I yearned for married helpless little creatures who knew nothing of “business” except it provided them, via men, with the luxuries and comforts of life, and the protection. But, of course, they had not had my own dolorous life, and had not had the parents I had.

  At eighteen I fell desperately in love with a true man, a man of strength and masculine vitality and courage. He was attracted to me, too. But then one night he said to me, “Janet, you aren’t the gentle little woman my mother was. My father worshipped her, and no wonder. You are too strong, yourself, and too independent for me. There’d be conflict in the house. You wouldn’t be satisfied just to be taken care of; you’d want to do something on your own, and be a ‘partner’ to me. It’s just no use.”

  I was struck dumb at this horrifying statement. I wasn’t very articulate then. He gently picked up my hands and shook his head at the old callouses, and as gently put them down. I wanted to cry out at him, “But I want to be like your mother! I want you to take care of me and deliver me from my hateful daily job! I want you to cherish me! I want only to be your wife and have your children and keep your house! I don’t want a career or anything else. I just want you.”

  But I couldn’t say it. I had no words. My rearing silenced me. And so I never saw him again. But I saw the creeps, all right! They hung on me like leeches. Charity prevents me from elaborating on the matter. After all, a girl has to marry someone, doesn’t she, when her yearning for love and protection overcomes her. And believe me, unless she is a dyke or a Liberated Commie, that yearning is natural and heart-breaking.

  I am too old now to have dreams, or to hope for them. It was only very recently, however, that I had to abandon the old desperate yearning to be a wife only, loved and cherished and protected, guarded by the serene walls of her house and her devoted husband, her days full of calm and sunlight and leisure, with no infernal damned career to follow, with no one dependent on her earnings for sustenance. And I look on the ladies who have never been forced to work as I have been forced, the ladies who are adored by their husbands and provided for by their husbands, who garden placidly and drive out for lunches, and shop, and know nary a moment of financial anxiety and never the pressure of making a living for “sick dependents.” I envy such women. I envy them as I never envied another human creature. They tell me, with simpers, how they “envy” me, and “how much you have accomplished, famous and all, while I am just a housewife,” and I hate their complacent guts. Not one of them would exchange her life for mine, “fame” or not. They were brought up to be tenderly dependent—and they reap the rewards now of that upbringing. They lie in their teeth—and I don’t blame them, really—when they tell me wistfully that they wish they’d had a career, too.

  I told my daughters: “Marry men who will not permit you to work after marriage. Marry strong men who will take care of you and cherish you, and not tell you their business, and will refuse your ‘help.’ I had told them from the very beginning that unless a woman is powerfully (and by birth) motivated to the arts and the sciences and the professions, and is deeply gifted and cannot be denied, she should refrain from going out into the market places with mediocre abilities. Once she has earned a paycheck, I told my daughters, she is practically doomed—unless she can persuade a man that that paycheck is only a stop-gap before marriage, and she is only too happily willing to throw it over. She must then keep to her resolution: Never again to earn money outside her house. Never again to be a “partner, shoulder to shoulder with her man.” Never again to be independent. In short, she should play the Big Con Game with her husband as shrewd and intelligent women have done for centuries.

  I have accomplished the one success of my life: I have brought up daughters who have manly and cherishing husbands, who have never wanted to earn money outside their pleasant homes, who have concentrated on the sole and natural business of women: To be good wives and prudent mothers, soothers of the masculine brow, good cooks, pleasant companions, and truly feminine. I wish I’d had a mother just like me.

  I fear that men are beginning to suspect that we women conned them through the centuries. I fear they are asking themselves—to women’s terrible hurt—why they should support an able-bodied woman who can earn a good living, too, and why should they be responsible for providing a home for women. Why can’t women be architects and bricklayers
and plumbers and stonemasons and lawyers and doctors and business women, too, and pile up a fat bank account to be inherited by husbands? Why should a man give his ex-wife alimony and child-support checks, when she is just as capable, if not more so, of rolling up her sleeves and getting on the 8:30 bus of a morning for an arduous day in the factory or the office?

  After all, men whisper among themselves, women in Russia are treated exactly as men, and are farm-laborers plowing and seeding and harvesting, and they manhandle big machines in factories, empty garbage and shovel snow, learn to be bricklayers and steelworkers as well as doctors and lawyers, serve in the armies, drive trucks, wear felt pants, dig sewers and lay pipes, clean chimneys and work in the forests, and do the heaviest of manual labor.

  The men listen to modern “Liberal” doctors who say—the cads—that women are much stronger and healthier than men, have more stamina, can do much more prolonged work, can bear children with ease and nonchalance, are healthy as horses, and therefore should do the heaviest of work and “take their places in the world, man to man.” Too, women are now “sexually free,” and so there is no need to marry them for amorous reasons. Most women, the men say, are eager and willing and aggressive, and ready for sport at all times, and are more zestful than men. So, who needs a wife, a bedmate, a woman to bear children? Let ’em work!

  That’s what men are already saying. They, too, have been listening to the Liberation Ladies, and the majority of them chuckle and slyly approve. The Liberation Ladies will lead to generations of women willing to support a tired husband, and provide for his old age. He can be snugabed in the morning while she pounds off in her thick boots to her job, or carries a briefcase to her office. And when she comes home at night—she can cook his dinner, too, and wash and iron his shirts. She can do the housework, while he watches TV and complains of the pain in his back—which she will eventually rub away at bedtime. Women wanted careers, didn’t they? They can do a man’s work, can’t they? Well, let ’em do it, and be glad they were able to get a husband besides, even if they have to take care of him!

  Men, in short, are licking their lips and, for the first time in history, are readying themselves to be exploiters in their turn—to be the soft gentle creatures in the house, the soother of exhaustion, the serene person who has nothing to worry about in his pleasant life. Mom’s out there, plugging and “fulfilling” herself, and why should Pop worry? He’s had it coming to him since Eve.

  Pick up any woman’s magazine, particularly a certain one which was once run by men who promoted good articles and fiction and which was read by as many men as women. Read there the articles by shrewd sly gentlemen who proclaim a woman has as much “right” to a job or a career, as much “right” to be head of the household. Those boys know what they’re up to: The real enslavement of women.

  Tragically, such near-men and the Liberation Ladies can never crush the longing of a woman’s heart, to be cherished, to be protected, to be guarded, to be honored, to be loved dearly and devotedly, to be a true helper, to be a complement, in her femininity, to the masculine nature; her longing to be the patroness of beauty and tranquility, to be the dear mother of respectful children, to be, as the Holy Bible says, “a good woman whose price is above rubies,” the adorner of life, the civilizer, Godly, with beauty of spirit long after her youthful beauty has gone.

  It is a woman’s nature to make a sanctuary of love and delight in her home. That is the true “career” for women. Alas, alas, that so many multitudes of women are now forced—or choose—to abandon that career, and to become imitation men in society. The true men won’t marry them. The creeps will throng about them. They will reap the bitterness I have had to reap—though I never wanted a career, never wanted to be “stalwart.” I just wanted to be a woman.

  You really can’t change human nature, and the instincts of that nature, for good or evil. I know a prosperous young man in New York, in his early thirties, who has a “pad” in a penthouse, and is up-to-date on everything, including Ladies Liberation. He highly approves of it. It is time, he told me, that women “stopped being parasites” and worked to the day they dropped dead or retired, as men do, and not expect a man “to support them.” He is very enthusiastic, too, about women’s “sexual liberation,” and always managed to get a girl who, the dupe and dope, heartily agrees with him. “After all,” says the young man, “women get as much fun out of it as men do, so why should a man feel obligated to them, or give them more than a drink and a dinner in exchange? I’m all for this new freedom for the girls.”

  He belongs to a Key Club. You know the kind I mean. When I was in New York recently he invited me to meet his “newest girl” at the Club. The “girl” happened to be a member of an advertising agency, a smart pretty cookie with swinging hair, and bright cheeks and eyes, and good manners, and an engaging way with her. Only her eyes were vulnerable, and soft and tender as she gazed at my young masculine friend. The lovelight shone in those eyes, deep and passionate and devoted. I thought these two hit it off wonderfully well, and I thought, too, what a wonderful marriage they would make and what handsome and intelligent children they would have. After all, the girl came of a good family, had a Master’s degree in publication and advertising, and money of her own. And I could plainly see that marriage was fixed in her own ardent wishes and hopes.

  When she went to the “powder room” I said to my sophisticated, progressive, and with-it young pal: “Are you going to marry Sally soon?”

  He looked absolutely shocked! Suddenly the primitive man was there and not a “modern” man in a dinner jacket and black tie, in a Key Club with bunnies running around and the smell of winey cooking in the air. He was aghast. He said, “Excuse me, but you can’t be serious, can you? Sally’s all right. But, after all, she is a modern girl—she likes a romp as well as I do. No inhibitions.” He paused. Then he said, “Playmates for play-time. But only maidens for marriage!” And he laughed.

  When I still stared at him cynically he got a little mad. “Let’s face it,” he said. “The liberated girls have made their own public bed and they can lie in it, and we men love it. But if they think we are going to marry them they’re due for an awakening. No man wants a woman who’s been out on the town with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. When we marry we don’t want a ‘modern’ woman.” He laughed again. “Oh, we encourage the women to be ‘liberated!’ It’s cheap for us, and we get all the free sex we want before we settle down with a decent girl.”

  Sally came back, glowing at the boyfriend, her heart in her eyes. No one ever told Sally that she was being used, that her womanhood had been cheapened and degraded by her sister-women in the name of “liberation.” Sure, Sally had her “identity,” as they wickedly call it, and her “freedom,” and she was being fulfilled all right, all right! She had her good job and her independence and her nice little apartment … and she was twenty-seven years old and she would soon be middle-aged, and all she could marry then (and even now) would be some “Liberal” creep eager to live on her salary and permit her to support him.

  The young man now opposite her, with his urbane manner and excellent income and ambitions, would never marry Sally. He would marry some sweet untouched creature who would not “stand shoulder to shoulder with him in the battle for life,” but who would make him a pleasant little wife of whose decency he would be proud, and who had never heard the phrase, “women’s liberation.” Well, I suppose, it serves Sally right and all her deluded and pathetic sisters who sprint off to work every morning and take care of themselves and are as “free as men.” But deep in their deprived hearts they know how tragic they are.

  Girls, the men are catching on—through your sister-women who have been “liberated”—that they have been victims for ages of the Big Con Game, and the first thing you know they will be demanding Civil Rights and Equality for themselves, too! It’s up to you, in behalf of future generations, to lull them back and to again become superior. Who wants Equality with men? No woman in her right mind!
>
  Remember this: The strongest sign of decay of a nation is the feminization of men and the masculinization of women. It is notable that in Communist nations women are exhorted, and compelled, to do what has traditionally been men’s work. American women, some of them, feel triumphant that they have broken down the “barricades” between the work of the sexes. I hope they will still feel triumphant when some commissar forces a shovel or an axe into their soft hands and compels them to pound and cut forests and dig ditches. I hope they will be “happy” when a husband deserts them and they must support their children and themselves alone. (After all, if a woman must be “free” she shouldn’t object to men being free too, should she?) I hope they will feel “fulfilled” when they are given no more courtesies due their sex, and no kindnesses, but are kicked aside on the subways and buses by men, and jostled out of the way by men on busy sidewalks and in elevators.

  I hope that no man will extend mercy to them because of obvious pregnancies, but will rudely tell them that that is no excuse to shirk a day’s heavy labor, and they should be like Russian women. I hope they will be proud when some court demands that they support “delicate” husbands for a lifetime, and pay alimony. I hope, when they look in their mirrors, that they will be pleased to see exhausted and embittered faces, and that they will be consoled by their paychecks.

  The decay and the ruin of a nation always has lain in the hands of its women. So does its life and strength, its reverence for beauty, its mercy and kindness. And above all, its men.

  12 T.L.C.—Keep Your Paws off Me!

  As I am an enthusiastic hypochondriac, I had, a few years ago, worn to the very bone the local physicians and their catalogs of diagnoses. So, armed with brand-new symptoms, I went to another city which has a famous clinic, and entered its hospital for tests. I wasn’t ill; I was simply curious to know what I had this time and if my own diagnosis would pay off to the discomfiture of my home doctors who had declared I was remarkably healthy.