Anatomy of Female Power

by Chinweizu

  My husband preferred the role of playmate to the kids when they were young, rather than accept his share of the disciplining. I felt like the ogre.60

  If the wife became the overt head of her own nest, she would have to do all that for herself; and she would have to do far more. There is an Igbo "Widow's Lament," based on farming life, which details the six occasions when a widow recalls the death of her husband and cries uncontrollably. The first three are when she needs him for farm labour (planting, tending and harvesting), for each of which she now has to hire and pay labourers. The fourth is when there is a meeting of the kindred: with her husband dead, "who will inform the widow of the deliberations?" The fifth is when there is a festival, and she has to buy her own fowl to cook for the feast. The sixth "is the day she is drenched in her unrepaired thatched house; that day she knows nothing is as painful as losing a husband."61

  Let us consider the fourth job listed in that lament: his job as her political emissary to the arena of public affairs. It entails much more than reporting back what transpires in the assembly. As the ostensible head of her nest, he participates in politics in order to protect her and {74} her nest from those dangers, social and natural, which her society combats through public measures. When it becomes necessary to protect the society by violent means, he goes to battle and even dies that she may live on in safety. As her voice in public affairs he contributes to deliberations which make laws that serve her interest.

  In Western societies in the days of male franchise, the husband, as voter, was his wife's political emissary. He used his vote to elect male law makers who passed laws in his wife's interest, laws which often punished the natural inclinations and delights of men, and helped to trap men in nest slavery. Some of these laws, passed by all-male legislatures, are monuments to female rascality and misandry. For example, long before women got the vote in the USA, there were laws against prostitution, a service which men needed to lesson the tyranny of frigid or sex-striking wives. Also, there has long been an anti-husband bias in the marriage and divorce rules of the Western World, a bias which, in some cases, gave the family house, custody of the children, etc. preferentially to the woman. Women did not have to have the vote, did not have to become the majority of lawmakers, for such misandrous laws to be passed. They were passed by male law makers, who were elected by male voters, all of whom acted as instructed by their wives and mothers! Oh yes! How readily a man will sacrifice men's interests for women's once his patriarch's ego has been puffed, or his penis has been twisted!

  But why does the average woman prefer covert to overt matriarchy? Just consider the matter from her standpoint. Overt leadership would give a woman duties which expose her to too many pressures and risks.

  As she well knows, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. She therefore concedes that onerous role to the patriarch, and saves herself a lot of hassles. She makes him the formal leader of her nest, and shifts unto his shoulders the burdens of decision-making, the anxieties of wielding authority, the dangers of defending her honour and her life through lights, lawsuits and wars. When she declares that she is weak, and lays her head on his chest and weeps to prove it, and lets him make the decisions, she simultaneously massages his ego and exploits him. She offloads high-pressure -and high-risk jobs unto the patriarch, and takes for herself the superior but safer position of the power behind the throne. Thus, behind the patriarch stands his matriarch: she runs her world by running the man who runs the world for her.

  Under this arrangement, a woman has everything to gain and nothing to lose, except little vanities. Being far more down to earth, she {75} prefers the substance to the shadow, the power to the glory, the rewards to the exertion.

  Behold the matriarch, the great queen bee, in all her power. Hers is the power to manipulate from hidden and protected places. She is the back seat driver, giving instructions from the owner's corner. She is the supreme executive, excellent at delegating the most burdensome and dangerous jobs to her chief lieutenant, alias the patriarch.

  And the patriarch? He is simply her foreman, a glorified foreman, who oversees the work in the fields. With his ego well massaged by the trappings of nominal leadership, he gladly supplies his matriarch, to the best of his abilities, with wealth, honour, status, and fame. Each day he spends eighteen hours or more as her agent in the great, wide, rough-and-tumble world; for an hour in the morning, and an hour and a half at night, she inspires and instructs him to make forays into the world for her. And while he is in his office, working up hypertension or a coronary, she lounges at her sauna or her hairdresser's; or she enjoys herself shopping, spending his money, or nattering away with her fellow queen bees at the bridge table. His are the risks and hardships; hers the leisured enjoyment of the rewards. Her motto, in effect, is this:

  O patriarch, O husband mine!

  Suffer the burdens of leadership,

  But hand me its choicest fruits.

  Should he ever tire of being a figurehead, or should he, horror of horrors, threaten to quit his job, the little wife has fine ways of intimidating her huge, figurehead leader. In a letter to her daughter, one British wife demonstrated just how easily a wife can quell a rebellion by her husband should he even hint at it. Writing to her daughter Kate, she told the following story: {76}

  On that evening your Dad leaped out of his chair at 8 o'clock, collected his wee bag full of empty Coke bottles and I thought Oh Christ - here we go again - lemonade, big spender. I said I didn't want any - that did it, he said he would get pissed by himself and for three hours the air was Blue. I got the usual old guff about how the daughters I loved have spent years pleading with him to leave me - owing to me being sick in the mind, but he couldn't leave me because A) he is the loyal type and he made up his mind to make the best of me and B) he was worried about leaving his children in my care. He was roaring with laughter telling me he had put in his resignation and was leaving his job on December 31st and once he got that gratuity in his hands, life was going to be all women and gambling, I would get nothing out of it. All the people I think are my good friends, he said, have all advised him to leave me. I thought it all over for two days – not having said one word that evening - on Sunday night I said to him very quietly - 'You are not going to do what you said you would with your gratuity and savings - I sweated blood all those years for you, to save and see that you never went without anything.' I said, 'you just try it mate and I'll get a heavy mob (Kate's feminist friends) on to you, that will leave you so that you won't look in a mirror for the next twenty years and you tell me just one more time that I'm sick in the mind and I'll kick your teeth so far down your throat that they will come out the other end.' I banged the table saying 'do you understand?' He was literally shaking like a jelly. Since then he has been very nice and I'm almost certain his shouts about leaving the job (my fault) were a come-on to get his own way. Anyway as I said, everything is now very pleasant.62

  Yes! When this nest-slave threatened to abscond with some of the proceeds of his life-long toil (the gratuity and savings), he was brought to heel by his owner. So much for the notion of the husband as boss to his wife!

  But why do men settle for a patriarchy that is, alas, a mere façade? The answer is quite simple. A facade is the most that their rulers will allow them; and a facade is the least that will make the male ego feel good enough to endure the burdens of his alloted role. Furthermore, should men try to subvert matriarchy in order to substitute a genuine patriarchy, women will thwart them. Men, therefore, settle for a figurehead patriarchy simply because they must. {77}

  10. The Double Standard

  Feminism does propose - as antifeminists accuse - that men and women be treated the same. Feminism is a radical stance against double standards in rights and responsibilities, and feminism is a revolutionary advocacy of a single standard of human freedom.63

  - Andrea Dworkin

  One law for ox and lion is tyranny.64

  - William Blake

&nbs
p; Women who complain about the double standard almost always point to the general tolerance for male philandering and the contrasting censure of female philandering. Feminists additionally cite such things as unequal pay for equal work, as well as the traditional assignment of unpaid housework and child rearing to women, and of money-earning work outside the home to men. But are these all there is to the matter? In what other areas of life does the double standard operate? And who, on balance, gains or loses more from the overall double standard – men or women?

  Here are a few other areas, from the symbolic to the substantive, where the double standard operates:

  1) In the Western World, the wife of a king is queen; but the husband of a queen is not necessarily king. Otherwise, why is Prince Phillip, husband to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, only a prince and not king? And why was Prince Albert, husband to Britain's Queen Victoria, only a prince and not king? Such is the double standard in royal nomenclature.

  2) The rites of love require that if a man loves a woman, he show it by giving gifts to, and doing things for, her; however, if a woman loves a {78} man, she is expected to show it by accepting gifts and services from him.

  Thus, for him, it is better to give than to receive, while for her, it is better to receive than to give.

  3) Men are expected to provide economic support for women, but women are not expected to support men. Indeed, in nearly every culture, a man supported by a woman is looked upon with considerable disapproval. Whether in marriage or outside it, a kept woman is all right whereas a kept man is not. This double standard is enshrined in some Western wedding vows in which the man's pledge "all my worldly goods with thee to share" is not reciprocated by the woman. This non-reciprocity was long enshrined in law in the USA. There, the husband was legally obliged to support his wife, regardless of her income and wealth, but the wife had no obligation to support her husband. Her income was entirely her own, to spend how she pleased. She had no obligation to contribute money to support her family, unless her husband was unable to earn a living, and would otherwise become a public charge.

  4) A mother and a father are not equally responsible for the financial support of their children. The responsibility is primarily with the father; only if he died, or was manifestly unable to support them, would the responsibility become the mother's. This is so under US law, and customary in many other lands.

  5) Beauty and virginity are valued in women; but physical strength and economic ability are valued in men. Moreover, if a man cons a girl out of her virginity, it is viewed with disapproval: in fact, where pre-marital loss of virginity is deemed to dishonour a girl's family, a man could be murdered by her vengeful relatives. But if a woman cons a man out of his wealth, neither a crime nor an act calling for vengeance is deemed to have been committed. The fellow is simply dismissed as a fool, while the girl's acumen may be greatly admired. Without the double standard, both acts would either be censured or commended.

  6) Everything possible is allowed (such as adverts with images of nude females in provocative poses, as well as live women in scanty dresses on the streets) which puts men in a state of sexual unrest; but little or nothing is allowed into the environment which would similarly disturb women. Thus, the environment is polluted into a sexual stimulant for men, but is left sexually serene for women.

  7) Men are trained to initiate sexual contact; women to be restrained, and even to offer coy resistance to sexual advances from {79} men. This difference in conditioning puts control of sexual encounters in the hands of women, for the one who needs sex less (or who makes a good show of needing it less) gets to control the encounter.

  8) Whereas the world of high risk is reserved for men, the world of maximum safety is reserved for women. This is most blatant in war, where women are exempt from the risks of bearing arms, risks which are obligatory for men. Even in those extreme cases where endangered societies have felt it necessary to prepare their entire population, male and female, for war, women are rarely obliged to share frontline duty equally with men. This double standard grants men the sweet privilege of being killed off in early youth. And if a city is sacked, the men's usual fate is to be put to the sword. As for the women, their lives are usually spared and, at the worst, they are married or enslaved by the victors. In any case they live on.

  9) In the division of labour, within each class, women get the lighter and less risky tasks, whether in the home or outside it. Outside the class of the idle rich, in which neither husband nor wife need work at all, both do work in the home. Lest we forget, the husband's housework includes physically maintaining the house, or even building it; mowing the lawns, mending the fences, splitting firewood and guarding the compound from intruders. All this is in addition to whatever he does outside the home to earn income for the entire family through farming, trading, or salaried employment. As for work outside the home, in the poorer classes, both husband and wife have to earn income. In the "working" and middle classes, the wife has the option not to earn income, but the husband does not. In the upper classes, it is not respectable for the wife to earn income. All this too constitutes a double standard that is to women's advantage.

  10) It is also an example of the double standard that male chauvinism is declared sexist, but female chauvinism is not. In fact, female chauvinism goes largely unrecognized and uncriticised.

  This list could be much extended; but the general picture should now be clear: the brunt of the double standard is borne, not by women, but by men. Yet, those women who gripe about "the double standard" do not point to the cases here outlined; and feminists who claim to be crusading for equality don't demand equal treatment in these areas.

  Incidentally, on closer examination, even the notion that men have more sexual freedom than women proves to be illusory. Since it takes {80} two to tangle, men, as a group, cannot have even one more instance of coitus with women than women have with men! If there are more philandering men than women, then the average philandering woman philanders more than the average philandering man! Why, then, is there the belief that men are more promiscuous than women? In part, this may be due to men's tendency to boast. But, as we have just shown, that men boast more does not mean that they fuck more. The arithmetic is against that! Also, the average promiscuous woman tends to keep quiet about the matter. She conducts her multiple affairs with great discretion. The result is an illusion that men are more promiscuous than women. Thus, women's complaint about not having equal rights to sexual promiscuity turns out to be a complaint about appearances, not about realities.

  And even in this matter of promiscuity and infidelity, where the double standard ostensibly works against women, they manage to turn it to good use in controlling men. A wife turns it to her advantage in this way: "No philandering for me?" she asks. "Okay, then. If I am to stay faithful, you must pay my price. You must meet my every wish. If you don't give me all the money I want for my pleasures, I'll get it from other men. Your failure will force me to it. It would be your fault." Terror at the prospect of his wife prostituting herself for what she wants keeps many a man toiling away, like a galley slave, to support her in whatever lavish style she would like.

  The plight of such a husband ought to be compared with what happened when a young woman, Solange, threatened to go into prostitution if her mother, French novelist Aurore Dupin, alias George Sand, refused to support her in the style to which she aspired. Her mother simply called her bluff, and in very revealing words.

  Solange had separated from her husband, and was living in a convent on an allowance from her mother. She wanted an increase in her allowance to enable her start a new and better life in Paris. Solange, therefore, wrote her mother, Aurore:

  Having to live in this isolation, with the sound and movement of life all around me - people laughing together, horses galloping, children playing in the sunshine, lovers being happy - it is not so much a matter of being bored as of being made to despair. People wonder how it is that girls without minds of their own
or any sort of education allow themselves to drift into a life of pleasure and vice! Can even women with {81} judgement and warm affections be sure of being able to steer clear of all that…?65

  Faced with this subtle blackmail, Aurore promptly wrote back:

  The only thing which will console you is money... and a great deal of it... I could only give you what you need by working twice as hard as I do now, and if I did that I'd be dead in six months, since even my present programme is beyond my strength - besides, even if I could work twice as hard and keep at it for a few more years, what is there to say that it is my duty to turn myself into a galley slave or a complete hack merely to supply you with money to burn? What I can give you you shall have.

  So you find it difficult, do you, being lonely and poor, not to step into a life of vice?... It is all you can do to endure being cooped up within four walls while women are laughing and horses are galloping outside? 'What a horrible fate!' as Maurice would say... All right then, just try a little vice... just try being a whore. I don't think you would make much of a success of it... a woman has got to be a great deal more beautiful and more intelligent than you are before she can hope to be pursued, or even sought out by men who are eager and anxious to pay for her favours... men with money to spend want women who know how to earn it.66