Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  But she knew uneasily that this was not true of the man. Where he got this habit of dreaming she did not know, but he had always had it. Perhaps the freedom of his life gave it to him, the long hours of roaming in shadowy forests alone or with other men as free as himself. Now merely to drag him past the entrance to Heaven was not to make him free from the danger of his desire.

  And so she found it as time went on. For, unable to discover what angels really were, he went on dreaming about them; and out of this came an idea so foolish, so sentimental, so mad, that when the woman first heard of it she merely laughed. It was simply this: that she make herself into an angel for him.

  “Then, you see,” he explained with luminous eyes, “I’d have an angel in my home. You would be my inspiration. I could dream about you.”

  She stopped laughing abruptly. She had an idea of her own. If she secured his dreams to herself instead of having them wandering over earth and heaven, would not all her troubles be solved? He would then always come home to her, and away from her he would be guided by his worship of her. For once something practical might come of a dream of his. But she was still a little cautious, never having seen an angel herself.

  “What would I have to do?” she asked.

  “Be beautiful,” he said rapturously. “Be lovely and pure and good and gentle. Stay at home and make your skin soft and white and be always waiting for me when I come back.”

  “But if you don’t bring home the meat?”

  “I will, always, if I know you are dependent on me alone,” he said. “To feel your dependence will bring out the best in me.”

  She said no more at the time but after thinking it all over she decided she would try it, and from then on she tried to become an angel–that is, what the man thought an angel was, for he had never seen one either, so that to her being an angel meant simply that she struggled to be what he wanted her to be.

  That struggle has now gone on for ages. It is a crisscross, twofold sort of struggle in which woman fights not man but herself. For secretly she never really wanted to be an angel. She loves practical life, its hurly-burly and come-and-go, its strife and struggle and success and failure, and all that goes to make the everyday world. She watches man go off to that world in the morning with pangs of envy. But angels, he still tells her, cannot go into the world without losing their angelic qualities. Indeed, the man says to her as he kisses her good-by in the morning, “I like to think of you as being safe at home, my angel.”

  She smiles at him in the way she has learned he thinks is most angelic. But the moment he is gone she stops being an angel. She yawns, saunters about the house, does what she has to do when she has to, for being an angel has demoralized her and she does not work as she once worked. She talks over the back fence with other angels, brings her fingernails to a state of high perfection, reads in feminine magazines what angels are wearing this year and how they are doing their hair and what are the latest tricks angels use in charming men, and is nevertheless on the whole a good deal bored with the whole business.

  But she does nothing about it, bored or not. For the effect of being an angel for centuries was that long ago woman began to think she was an angel and then to believe that being a woman and an angel were the same thing. When that complete falsity appeared to her as truth, she became a creature so befogged about her real being, so lost in the mists of man’s legend about her, that today she has no knowledge of what she is or ought to be. The world has marched on while she has been out of it. Today as an angel she is an absurdity, and she knows it, and yet she has been an angel for so long now that she does not know how to stop. Her crown is tarnished and askew, her wings are useless and merely ornamental, since she never goes anywhere on them, and her whole appearance is antiquated; but, still, what else can she do but go on being an angel? She is trained for nothing else.

  There is no denying that women now present a somewhat ridiculous aspect as the result of all this. They are neither women nor angels nor human beings. They cling rather pathetically to the viewpoint of angels, though they know it is out of date, for they are loath to give up both the security of being angels and the confidence it gives them of their moral superiority. And we women of this generation are suffering most acutely of all because of this reluctance. Our mothers made a foolish mistake in trying to gain their rights as human beings without giving up the privileges of being angels. There was that laughable business of the female vote, for instance. The old angels actually gave as one of their arguments for women to vote that women would purify politics and uplift, by their angelic qualities, the affairs of men. The poor creatures had been told so often by men that they had these uplifting qualities that they believed it at last themselves and thought that merely by their presence they would uplift, as angels must.

  It was a complete confusion between women and angels, and now women can never live down the folly of it. They should have demanded their rights as persons and forgotten themselves as angels. Angels have no place in politics or practical life. They are a nuisance, and they impede progress. Men have to remember to take off their hats to them and be polite to them and give up their seats to them and not curse and swear and spit and loaf where they are. Angels are sensitive creatures, moreover, accustomed to their own perfection, and they cannot take the criticism that people must take when they enter active and public life; and whenever they are foolish and incompetent, as angels usually are when they are out of place, they do not want to be told so. When they are so told, they develop nerves and temperament. The truth is that heaven is their home and they ought to stay in it. They should never have asked for the vote nor got it. Angels ought not now to be allowed jobs outside their homes, and certainly they should not be given public offices.

  But women are another matter entirely. They ought to have the vote, not because they will purify or better anything, but because they ought to have it. Why should they make anything better of politics than men have? There is no more obligation upon them to do so. Any woman not bemused and befuddled out of her senses by all this nonsense of being an angel would have known in the beginning that woman in politics would behave as other human beings do, and moreover that she ought to assert her right so to behave. She should have said, “I will have the vote and anything else there is merely because I, too, am a human being.”

  Of course, if she secured rights as a human being it would be dishonest of her to claim privileges as an angel. Here is still woman’s greatest mistake. She wants to be human, but she does not want to give up the privileges of an angel. It would be wrong if I pretended that in this matter women at the moment are anything like unanimous. They are not. There are many women—perhaps an increasing number, perhaps not—who hate angels and will have nothing to do with being angels. There are others who love being angels, first, because they cannot bear to think they are not, but also because it is the easiest way to get their bills paid and so they will not give up being angels, only furbishing themselves up to look as modern as possible. There are plenty of men who like angels, and so angels still have their reward. And just at the moment they are feeling triumphant, for both Hitler and Mussolini are bringing angels back into fashion again, and we have always taken our fashions from abroad. And, lastly, there are the young females who cannot decide whether to walk out of their eggshells as women or to flutter forth as angels. They are waiting to see what men think they want just now.

  It is absurd and laughable and touching and tragic beyond any tragedy, and men are not helping women at all in their predicament. Men are impatient and scornful and critical of women today as they never have been, as they ought not to be, for they were properly to blame in the first place for the present ridiculousness of women. What business had men to dream of angels? What business to dream at all? The absurdities and inconsistencies of life in all our world have come from dreaming men. A man dreamed that by dying on a cross he could save sinners. But the world is full of sinners. A man dreamed that the strong ought to bear the burde
ns of the weak. But the weak are oppressed now as never before. A man dreamed of a country where all would be free and equal, and for many there is neither freedom nor equality. A man dreamed of slaves set free by a stroke of the pen at the end of a bitter war, and today the children of these slaves suffer indignities and injustices untold because their skins are black and for them there is still no freedom. A man dreamed of communism, and in the name of communism there is an oppression more horrible and more cruel because of the dream never made true. A man dreamed of a society of nations where the weak could be free to live and the strong would not oppress them, and today as never before the weak are despoiled and the strong are tyrants.

  It is this eternal dreaming that ruins the world because dreams are only dreams and men will not make them come true. Man the dreamer, sentimental, unstable, emotional, impractical, is unable to make his dreams come true, and because of this the world is in turmoil. Either man ought to dream more largely so that his dream can encompass reality, or he ought to be practical as woman is, who, if she seldom dreams, does not consider a dream complete unless it accomplishes her purpose.

  There is a sense in which man has suffered more than woman from his own impractical dreaming. Because woman has allowed him to dream of her as an angel, because she has let him put her aside into a shrine, he has lost her. Our nation is effeminate from false femininity created by man. The balance and benefit which woman should have given she has not given. Women have become useless as human beings because of it. The devastating effects of man’s sentimental worship and her isolation as its result have weakened her whole being so that what was moral worth in her has become self-righteousness, and what was capacity for honest emotion has become only capacity for sentimentality, and what was sturdy and independent and reasoning has become a cringing, crying insistence on angelic privileges. And now man does not like what she has become, though he forgets it all began with his wanting an angel of his own on earth, and he is no longer inspired by her, and her attempts to “uplift” him he finds only disgusting. For all of which he cannot be blamed, except that he is fundamentally blamable. Through centuries he has defined femininity and compelled women to be feminine by the strong force of his disapproval founded always upon his economic power over her.

  This is the real injustice of men toward women, and it is so appalling that women cannot escape dangerous bitterness except by one comfort. It is that such injustice may compel women to reconsider their whole position and to give up the folly of trying to be angels any longer and so begin in earnest the task of being women. They have lost valuable centuries which cannot be retrieved. Against this loss they will have to work as men have never worked. They will have to destroy the whole angelic tradition, not only among men but in themselves, by repudiating all that is angelic. Women are not better than men. They should not be, they must not be, for the good of men and women in their life together. Women are not even naturally more delicate than men nor more “spiritual-minded” nor less human in any way than men are. Such notions still come from the angel tradition. Women are practical, hard-working, sensible, ordinary human beings. They are by nature less sentimental and less romantic than men. They are skeptical, often to cynicism. They are fearless, literal-minded, and tough in soul. They dislike and distrust all dreams, as well they may. Whether they will ever recover sufficiently from the evil they have suffered from men’s idle dreaming cannot be prophesied, but if they do they will be careful not to dream beyond their power of performance, and the world could do with a little of that.

  But the real problem women will have when they decide on any large scale to give up being angels will be the problem the individual woman has already found in the same decision. It is the immediate effect that this decision will have upon men. For a time women must expect from men a sort of collapse. What men have worked for will be gone. The little woman in the home, the wife whom it was the struggle of his life to shield from hardship and suffering of any kind, all those angels whose smooth faces and fur coats and diamond rings and well-kept mechanized homes were his prop and his pride and proofs of his success as man, will be removed. A real woman wants none of the false femininity of the angel about her. She likes work at least as well as the man does, she thrives on hardship, she enjoys a practical problem to be solved, she loathes the hours she has to spend keeping wrinkles out of her face, she despises having to waste time on the foibles of fashion. She wants to live and to enjoy herself and man and to feel her good brain working keenly and awarely in all she does. She is hearty and passionate and by nature an earth-loving creature when she gets the angel out of her system. She likes politics for the same reason man does, because it is an exciting and dirty game. She wants no privileges.

  But man will have to be re-educated to the truth about women. He is used now only to angels. The idea of women instead of angels terrifies him. He at once begins to howl with Hitler that women ought to be locked into the home and kept pregnant as much of the time as possible. One of the most pitiful proofs of the weakness of any man as a man is when he begins that familiar yelp. It is a cry for protection. “For God’s sake,” he gasps, “get the women locked up!”

  For men were weakened, too, when they made angels of their women. It is not the femaleness of woman that weakens and makes soft, but the femininity that man insists upon in the angel he wants to worship that ruins him. When will men be able to see their foolish inconsistency in adoring the “feminine” and not understand that this is the very femininity that they foster which is weakening themselves and the nation? The true female influence is hard and honest and realistic, as anyone knows who has observed a matriarchal society at work. There is nothing soft about it. Man has himself created the softness in our life by insisting on having angels around to worship and to worship him, to bolster his pride as a strong man, to provide solace at home for defeats outside, to make him sure of his doubtful strength.

  Yes, if women decide to give up being angels, man is in for a hard and lonely time for a while. Who will tell him how wonderful he is, whatever he does? Who will subtly steal the smart out of defeat and make him feel sure of success next time? Who will keep his feelings from being hurt and maintain the fiction of his overwork and of his importance to the big boss, and his whole general indispensability? Nobody. It is going to be hard for him.

  But women will have a still harder time for the same while. For it is, of course, inevitable that when women decide to stop being angels and just be ordinary human beings they will have on their hands a lot of unhappy, neurotic, terrified men, who will see nothing but the horror of a world run by women—or, let us say, a world not run solely by men. Men will be sulky, ferocious, and impossibly rude to women. “If women want it,” they will say savagely, “let ’em have it!” And they will proceed to behave toward women as they would not dream of behaving not only to angels but even to other men. Women must expect this. And they will deserve it, some of the time, for, being inexperienced as human beings, they will make silly mistakes. They will be too bossy, for instance, because, having only men as their examples, they will think that bossiness is a proof of competence and superiority. And man will be properly infuriated, for he has so long been the boss. It is only natural that nothing makes a bossy man angrier than a bossy woman. Neither is to be blamed, but they will have to learn together that nobody needs to boss before happiness will come to them.

  But before they can learn it there will be such a bad time that there will be individual women who will relapse into being angels out of sheer inability to go through with it. There may be many, for being angels for so long has weakened women’s fiber, too. But real women will go through with what they must and bring patience and intelligence to work, and then there may come a day when men will find other things to spend their efforts upon that are better than fur coats and diamond rings for angels–world peace, for instance, and justice between races, and the economic stabilization of nations. And then he may find that he can dream greater dreams than he
has ever dreamed before, and in true romance discover at his side, working with him, not an angel but a woman.

  … Did I write it down a little while ago that women never dream? I was wrong. We do.

  7. WOMEN AND WAR

  Women have for too long left men to struggle alone with the problem of evil in the world. And what is the problem of evil except the problem of wicked and ruthless individuals, the gangsters in a community, whether that community be a town, a nation, or a world? Protected by the walls of her home, busied in the peaceful pursuits of cooking and caring for children, woman has taken no responsibility for the control of wicked men, with the result that we see in the world today. In her security she has been too sentimental even to her own children. Women’s sons stand at this very moment behind the machines of aggressive war and kill millions of innocent people. Women’s sons are murdering and looting on a scale never before known in history. Is this not colossal proof of the failure of women to create moral character in her sons while they are in the home? If woman cannot create moral character in her sons while they are in the home, then she must help man to control evil character outside. For clearly it is beyond man alone to cope with evil, now that the will to evil of even a single man can be so magnified by modern weapons of war.

  If we are ever to have peace, it will be accomplished not by vaguely organized individuals passing resolutions. It will be accomplished only by bitterly determined men and women who will study and use every means in their power to enforce and indoctrinate the ideas and performance of peace. But the first step toward peace as the foundation of human relations will be a complete knowledge of what war is. We shall all have the knowledge of how war works when it breaks and what its effects are—that will be enforced upon us. But we need to know how it begins and who begins it and where and when.