Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  Nor can individuals hope to escape the effects of the larger despondency about them. There will always be plenty of romantically happy marriages begun in each generation. Whether a fair number of these will continue to be happy will depend not only upon the couples but far more than they realize upon the relationship of men and women as a whole in their time. Discontent between those who can be fully happy only when there is content between them will arise too often even between two who are individually content with each other. For man remains man to the end of his days, and woman remains woman; and too often it is true that these two never meet. It is a tragedy when they do not, because there is no joy like the joy of life when they do.

  And I do not mean only the meeting of marriage. For marriage is only one of the ways of meeting between the two kinds of human beings. Every part of life has the possibility of the joy of their full meeting. All of life is right for men only if women they value comprehend and approve them for what they are, and all of life is right for women only if men they value comprehend and approve them. Love may have something to do with this once or twice in a lifetime, but most of the time it does not, and to assume that it does is to limit at once the whole relationship between men and women to what is only one of its expressions.

  Of course men and women have some sort of relationship to each other from the moment they are born baby boys and girls to the moment that they die old men and women. They are never freed of each other, however great their love or dislike. For dislike is a relationship as valid as love, and true indifference is probably impossible. When indifference is proclaimed its very proclamation denies its reality. There is no use in pretending that men and women are not supremely important to each other, for they are, everywhere. A wise people recognizes this and provides for it in rational ways, and calmness in the national temper is the result.

  When the ancient Chinese deliberately chose and developed to its highest point the traditional pattern of life which kept woman within the walls of home they did all they could to help her. They bound the feet of women so that they could not hobble many yards from their own gates, but they bound their minds also with fetters of ignorance and decreed that women were not to be given the general learning that was given to men. Women as a rule were not allowed even the opportunity to read and write. The Chinese were wise and humane in this. Having decided definitely that the place of woman was in the home and that in the home she was to stay, they arranged to confine her mind there as well as her body so that she did not know for centuries that she was a prisoner. What exquisite horrible torture had they bound her feet alone and then liberated her mind! What agony to sit behind a wall beyond which she could not go and contemplate a world alive with activity and enjoyment and discovery but forbidden to her!

  But no, the Chinese, merciful to their women, spared them such torture. Women lived in their homes quietly and happily ignorant and embroidered pretty little shoes for their crippled feet, little shoes they never took off even at night lest men see the real deformity they hid. They made of their feet “golden lilies,” and men fondled them as acts of love and wrote poems about them. The tiny feet of Chinese women were for centuries sexual symbols. Men felt their passions stir merely at the sight of a woman’s embroidered pointed satin shoe, three inches long and the width of two fingers. And when modern times came, it was women who did not want to give up their little feet. They had for so long wielded their power over men by those little feet.

  Women had grown very powerful. Within the confines of their lives, narrow in space, they had gone deep and climbed high. They had come to understand completely the nature of men. They knew men’s every weakness and used such weakness ruthlessly for their own ends, good or evil. Lacking other education, they devised cunning and wile and deviousness and charm, and they had men wholly in their power, confounding simple men by their wisdom and learned men by their childishness. Men had to feed, clothe, and shelter them. Men had to work for them, fight for them, and protect them. Man’s one reward they gave him. It was to allow him a feeling of superiority because he was a male, and as they granted him this in seeming generosity, they hid their smiles behind their pretty embroidered sleeves.

  The greatest evil in this old Chinese scheme of life for men and women was that it was so unfair to men. As women in the home grew too powerful men were weakened and warped by them, and became helpless. For woman, confined to her home by long custom until she looked on it as her natural sphere and had no desire to go beyond it, became a tyrant there. If she were stupid she ruined man’s digestion by being too good a cook and by insisting that he eat all she cooked. Or she encouraged him to take his ease and not to exert himself and even though he gladly yielded he had his hours of uncomfortable remorse because he knew he was wasting his life. And yet the stupid woman in the house was not worse than the intelligent woman there, who by her restless energy drove man to do what he did not want to do and more than he wanted to do, compelling him to fulfill her rather than himself.

  The misfortune is, of course, that women are quite often born with brains. The scheme which limits woman to homes should provide some means against her inheriting an intelligence equal to man’s, which she does not need. If all women could be born with inferior minds and men with superior ones, the scheme of women for the home would doubtless be perfectly satisfactory. But unless that can be done, it is not satisfactory. Four thousand years of Chinese experience prove it. The eminently rational Chinese did everything they could to ensure harmony between men and women in the pattern of tradition. They kept woman ignorant and limited her to the home and its cares and to the breeding of children. They made having children woman’s chief duty and greatest glory. They heaped honor upon the mothers of sons. Moreover, they actually accomplished what has been so far an impossible achievement in the western countries such as the United States and England: the Chinese gave marriage to every woman. This, they thought, was only fair. They said, if society decrees that woman’s place is in the home, then it is but justice to see that every woman has a home to go to; anything else is unrealistic.

  But such justice they knew had to be made compulsory. It cannot be left to men alone. For, as the Chinese found a good many centuries before we did, too many men, left to themselves, will not marry. To marry, man discovered long ago, is a very serious matter for him. For one thing, it fixes the responsibility of fatherhood. If a man is not married to a woman, there is always the chance that he is not a father. But when he is the only man to whom the woman is accessible, there is no escape for him. He has to support his offspring and the woman, too. And a surprisingly small number of men are natural fathers, the ancient Chinese found. Far too many have fatherhood thrust upon them. It was in fact a disagreeable awakening for men in early Chinese history when they discovered indisputably that there was a definite relation between sleeping with a woman and an infant some months later. Women suspected the connection long before men did and then became convinced of it. But men only reluctantly came to believe it.

  When it was formally acknowledged to be true, however, the Chinese in their rational way organized their life around the fact. Since children came of men and women together, they must live together for the children. But man had no idea of giving up his private freedom to this agreement. He would feed the woman and child and provide their shelter. In that shelter they must stay, but he would continue to roam as he pleased. This was the beginning of home for the woman. And so woman stayed in it, century after century, and she was kept ignorant except of cooking and sewing and elementary child care, while man continued to roam—that is, he was educated for the activities of business, government, and the arts, and all the life outside the home.

  Thus marriage was made obligatory. This was not, of course, so stated. The Chinese are a subtle people. They do not make laws and expect people automatically to obey them. Neither do they believe in the efficacy of force upon human beings except as a necessity for some temporary occasion. They know that if people can be
persuaded to want to do a thing, it is the most permanent way of achieving that end. In order to make marriage obligatory, therefore, the Chinese encouraged ancestor worship. They knew that the human individual fears above all else the extinction of death, and they proclaimed the doctrine that if a man had sons he did not die. The worship his sons gave his spirit when his body died kept him alive, they said. Therefore a man ought to have sons, the more the better, since so many children inevitably died young. But that he might have legal sons, and sons he was sure were from his own seed, he must marry. The price of a man’s immortality was thus made to depend on marriage, and only when this came about did men take marriage as a necessity. Then fathers arranged for the marriage of their sons and women were encouraged to make breeding their chief duty so that when a woman was barren, if she were a truly good woman, she did not complain if her husband brought other women into the house. She even encouraged him to do so, denying her own heart that Right might be done.

  It was called Right, of course, or people would not have denied themselves to do it. The wise Chinese knew that nothing so nerves and strengthens the poor average human heart as a demand put upon it for noble self-sacrifice in the cause of some Right. So throughout the centuries many an ignorant Chinese woman with all her pitiful heart has bade her beloved take another in her place to give him the sons she could not give him. It is not easy—it was never easy. I have heard their sad stories of how the night through they have stuffed their quilts into their mouths, silk quilts, ragged quilts, so that men could not hear the sound of weeping. But they always believed their men were doing right.

  There was another wisdom in this custom, too. By some strange will of Nature, women are everywhere stronger in body than men are, and they can live when men must die; and so there are nearly always too many women. This grew dangerous in China, for the natural resistance of the female there was fortified by the handicaps of her existence. She was spared the coddling and dainty feeding and all that whole weakening process of spoiling that was given to the precious boys; and so girls lived, unfortunately, when boys died. Polygamy was the only resource if woman was to be kept in the home. Except the deliberate infanticides of girls, polygamy will be the only resource in any country that insists that women be kept in the home, and especially if warfare is to be the chief occupation of the men. In spite of the fact that modern warfare today kills more women and children than it once did, the death rate for men is still likely to be higher than it is for women. So polygamy was made legal in old China.

  All might still have worked out well enough for men and women in that clearly defined Chinese scheme of life if unfortunately women had not continued to be born with brains which no limitation, physical or mental, could subdue. There were too many clever women, too many intelligent women, everywhere in every household. These restless creatures, finding themselves ignorant and kept within walls, did not, as they should have done, subside into quiescence or content. Instead they occupied themselves with getting their own way and with becoming powerful in any fashion they could.

  “You do not know,” Reynaud sighed in fallen France only the other day, “to what lengths a man will go to secure an evening’s peace!”

  So has sighed many a man in China, returning to his home at night to face a strong, willful, intelligent woman whose whole too-able mind concentrates itself upon him. If she is beautiful, and she is more often beautiful than not, for she knows beauty is one of his weaknesses, he is lost before he ever opens the door to her chamber, and helplessly he knows it.

  Long before modern China gave to women complete equality woman in China was man’s superior. In fact, I have even suspected that when the modern revolution came he was glad to insist on her becoming only equal with him at last. It was a forward step for him, and she lost by it. She had to stop being a willful creature who made the most of her ignorance and who got all she wanted by pretending to be childish and irresponsible and weak and charming while actually she was strong, tough, executively able and mentally shrewd. It was man in China who hastened to write into the constitution that woman had to be equal with him and accept equal responsibility as an adult individual. He gladly threw open all schools and professions to her, and what must his satisfaction be today as he sees her take up her gun and march beside him to battle!

  Yes, for any nation contemplating the return of woman to the home, I recommend before taking the step a thorough study of the history of Chinese men and women, for there women had the best of it. They used their ignorance to confound men’s wisdom. As ignorant creatures, they had no necessity for rational behavior, and they early saw this. Tempers and tantrums, and fads and whimsies—what else, men said, could they expect from women? When they came home tired at night they yielded anything for peace.

  And being ignorant, women, though powerful, were not even good mothers to men. Too many of their sons died young and teaching them elementary child care did little good. For the uneducated mind cannot really be taught anything. It grows up preoccupied with its own ignorant ideas. It is convinced of its own rightness. Only the truly educated mind knows the possibility of error. And so the ignorant Chinese mother was always sure, secretly, that there was nothing in any new idea; and if she was stupid besides, then she was unteachable, and her beloved sons suffered from the very excess of her love.

  Thus do men always suffer when women are ignorant. They suffer more than women, not only because women are stronger than men and more resistant, but because men are peculiarly vulnerable to the damage ignorant women can do at the periods of their life when they most need intelligent and wise care: in infancy, in adolescence, in times of illness and mental and emotional crisis, and in old age. Wise Chinese saw this, too, and endeavored to mitigate the danger by taking boys out of the care of women early in childhood. Thus boys as young as seven were taken into the quarters for men. But fathers were often away from home and mothers were always there, and boys ran back to women who indulged and spoiled them and fed them with sweets—all with loving intention. Through loving intention century after century Chinese men grew weak at the hands of women.

  For men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom. China has found that out at last. Today every door stands open to men and women alike. This was true even before the war, but war has hastened the equalizing process. What will happen when war is over and the complex problems of peace begin once more? Who knows? But I do not believe that those gates will close again. If there is even any danger of it, the problems of peace being always more difficult than those of war, I believe that Chinese men and women will pause and look at each other and remember what life was like between them for four thousand years. “Anything but that,” they will say, and they will go on together to face the future that none today can see.

  2. THE HOME IN CHINA AND AMERICA

  The American home I know very well, partly from close observation of homes during the years that I have been living in my own country, but as much from my own typically American home in China. My parents were Americans, patriotic to their core, and simply and honestly convinced, as most Americans are, that the American home is the best in the world. To them American home life was even a part of the Christian religion which they felt it their duty and privilege to preach to the Chinese. I do not believe it ever occurred to my parents in the goodness of their saintly hearts to ask themselves whether or not the Chinese had a sort of home life which was perhaps as valuable in its way as ours, or at least better suited to China than ours was.

  Our home, therefore, was kept absolutely and carefully American. We had American furniture and American food, though all of us children liked Chinese food better, and only as a concession to our pleading did we have an occasional Chinese meal. Beyond that we satisfied our cravings by partaking heartily of the servants’ meals before our own and listening in guilty silence to our mother worrying over our small appetites. We got up in the morning and had prayers and ate porridge and eggs for breakfast and studied our Ameri
can lessons, and on Sundays a Christian church bell rang and we went to church, and the only difference was that the Christians in that church were Chinese instead of American. We were trained in all the ways of American homemaking, and spiritually we were kept close not to the Chinese about us but to our own loved land thousands of miles away that we had never known except through our parents’ eyes and words.

  So perfectly did they succeed in their determination to make us good Americans that, after half a lifetime spent away from my own country, I came back to it without any feeling of being alien or strange. All seemed my own, and I was native to it. For this I must thank my American home in China, for after my childhood I myself deliberately departed from American ways and plunged myself deep into China. I went into parts of China to live where few white people were ever seen and spent much of my time in Chinese homes where a white woman had never been before; and there, in long quiet talk with women whose lives had been shaped on a pattern totally different from mine, I learned again the inwardness of Chinese homes, as a woman now and not as I had when I was a child playing with Chinese children. One experience was as valuable as the other, and each throws light upon the other. I cannot say which I consider the better, the Chinese or the American home.