Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  War is, of course, endemic as yet in human society; and, like all endemic diseases, given certain conditions, it becomes epidemic at regular or perhaps irregular intervals. Those conditions are, if one reads the history of wars, two: first, discontent in a human group, that discontent being in the main economic; and, second, the rise to power of a certain type of mind. That type of mind is endemic, too. It is atavistic, cruel, simple, or cunning. But whatever it is, it is basically uncivilized. Thousands of years hence, unless such minds have destroyed us all, the creatures of a wiser age than ours will look back and recognize them for what they are—the persistent traces of our beginnings in the animal world from which we have so newly sprung. We are not free yet of the wild; the love of blood and the kill is still in us. Here is our true enemy, the enemy of us all, whatever our race and nation. These atavistic minds, hostile to kindness, resentful of slights which anyone must accept in life, remembering even the mishaps of childhood, resort to violence inevitably as their means of vengeance. We are too soft toward them. We are too apt to forgive them, saying, “Ah, if their childhoods had been better, they would have been better.”

  There is no proof of this. On the contrary, many of the best, the kindest, the most civilized and humane of men and women have suffered cruelly in childhood. But they were better for such suffering. They forgot it as they pressed on, or remembered it only to see that others were spared what they had suffered. They did not want to make all the world suffer because they once suffered, or dispel their youthful frustrations by machines of war crushing the bodies of the innocent and unknown. The suspicious jealousies of an ignorant tyrant who kills his intellectual superiors is an evidence not of an unhappy childhood, but of an atavistic and undeveloped mind; and, however shrewd and cunning and clever that mind may be, it is undeveloped if it proceeds against human society in tyranny and war. Let us not deceive ourselves. We have rightly discarded the old idea of Original Sin. And yet there is a truth in it. We are sprung from dark and earthy sources, and the mud clings to us yet in these atavistic minds who resort to animal force to gain their ends, an animal force heightened a million times when it extends itself through machines of war and death. These are dangerous minds, born dangerous first through confluences of blood and heredity we do not understand, made more dangerous by certain environmental conditions, and reaching their final climax when they are able, through finding at certain times, as they do, an environment suitable to them and an economic situation which they can exploit. War is the inevitable result of this meeting of the atavistic individual and the environment of general surrounding discontent.

  What are we to do with such minds? Discern them, watch them, and bar at every step their rise to power. Let them function as individuals in a democracy, and never as officials or demagogues. How discover them? As children in school, as youths in college, as men in life. There should be psychiatrists’ reports on them, and heed should be given the reports. We were all shocked a few years ago by a peculiarly brutal and it seemed aimless murder committed by a young man of some genius. That murder could have been prevented if a psychologist’s report made upon him years before had been kept in mind. “This child,” the report read, “will one day resort to violence.” He did.

  The minds which lead us to war are few. It would not be difficult to stop their rise to power. But it takes a method, a watchfulness, an energy for action which only determination for peace can provide.

  To discover and to watch and to prevent the rise to power, therefore, of the atavistic individual is the first necessity for peace. Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler—the mind is the same. It is as uniform as the symptoms of a known disease. It can be recognized, it can be prevented, and half of the basic cause for war eliminated.

  The other half of the basic cause for war has to do with economic adjustments in a nation and between nations. Population pressures, unequal treaties, unjust tariff, the unfairnesses of trade, deprivation of raw materials, make national and international discontents which provide breeding places for war. There is full information on such places in newspapers, magazines, books. Foundations make constant research into such conditions. But nobody uses the information with the aim of discovering possible sources for war. We need as clear, as cold, as sacrificial a spirit for this as doctors have when they determine to eliminate a source spot of yellow fever or Asiatic cholera which threatens the world. War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.

  There must be a reason for this delay. It is to be found, I believe, in the mistaken estimate which men have made and still make of war when they do not see it as the inescapable result of certain knowable and removable causes. It is not possible to prevent war when all the causes which produce it have been allowed to flourish. But the causes can be prevented. That they are not prevented, that war is still accepted as a possible fate and destiny, even a glorious one, is the false notion which men still hold. The habit of men’s minds is toward war. It may be that men alone can never make an end to war.

  But women do not share the glories and pleasures of war. They are the ones who are left behind. They do not have the joy of comradeships, the excitement of adventure, the possible glory of victory or death. None of the glamour of war is theirs. They remain at home alone, that for which they lived gone. They take up the drab work in factories and fields which men have left. And when the men do not return, theirs is the burden of the postwar world. If the men do come back, nothing is the same, for no man goes through a war without being deeply wounded in spirit. Women have no illusions, or should have none, about what war is.

  I believe that it is women who must end war if it is ever to be ended. It is women who must determine, by whatever ways of reason and deep emotion that they can use, that they will not go on having their work of bearing and rearing wasted by war or even the fear of war. Such determination is the first step. With it anything can be accomplished. Without it, we shall go on endlessly, generation after generation, with the sort of thing which faces us today.

  To end war by the discovery and elimination of its individual and economic causes—here is a task great enough, human enough, useful enough to invite all women.

  Hard? Yes, but not as hard as war!

  Difficult to organize women? But not more difficult than to organize for war.

  An international task? Yes, but do not imagine women anywhere like war any better than we do.

  A complex job? Yes, but not more complex than war.

  It would bring women into national and international affairs? Why not? She is able.

  A long and slow job? Yes, but how endlessly long and slow war is, when its effects are felt generation after generation!

  And what aim more suited to woman’s creative nature than the bringing about of peace through the control of the two chief causes of war, the maladjusted individual and the depressed social group? Here is a field in which woman would have no competition with man, through which she could penetrate into thorough understanding of human problems, by means of which she could, if she would, influence government, by active participation or by group pressure. It is said too often that women have made no notable contribution to humanity except to bear children. Yet to continue to bear children only to have them slaughtered is folly. But to take as a solemn task the prevention of war would be an achievement unmatched. In the process women would become inevitably concerned in human welfare, to the betterment of all society as well as of themselves. It is the only hope I see of the end of war.

  And it would give woman a job in the world. Actually women are becoming less and less necessary to the running of the world. It takes no great wisdom to see that woman is increasingly on the periphery of management. She was once the center of it. But those were the days when the center of civilization was the home, and she was the center of the home. Those were her days of power. In the whirl of centrifugal motion whic
h is the movement of the human race the center of civilization has changed. Rather, it is changing. Where it will pause none knows yet, but it is now veering in the direction of the state. It will not end there finally, for it is in ceaseless motion. In history that center of civilization has been in many places. For long it was in the church, for long it was in universities. In pioneer countries it was always in the home. In periods of great industrial development it was in industry. In periods of expansion the center of civilization passed even into exploring. This is the political age, and human thought is centered in the ideologies of governments and in the organization for power, and never has woman been so remote from the vital growing centers of life as she is now.

  For she is still struggling with the old, old question of whether or not she should stay in the home, without perceiving that the home as the center of life is already gone. Its roof is there and its four walls. Her beloved bric-a-brac is there, and the utensils for eating and sleeping and listening to the radio, which are the few necessities of life today. Yet even the necessities of life do not center in the home any more. Eating can be done anywhere at little cost and no trouble, and hotel beds are clean and comfortable and maybe less expensive than one’s own. The truth, dreadful to women, is that the home is more and more of a luxury these days and less and less of a necessity except as a place to put women to keep them out of the way. Unless it can be brought back in some more necessary way, some day men are going to find that it is cheaper just to keep women in cells and cages or barracks or harems whence they can be summoned when service is wanted or the state needs new recruits. Women have always been relegated whenever men have relapsed into thinking that the sole important functions of women are to service men and to breed children. Those are the times when the nonessentialness of women is evident on every hand.

  I have had a cold foreboding since the day I heard an important executive in New York fume against the appointment of a woman to a government post in Washington. “But we’ll soon change all that,” he exclaimed. “We don’t want any women cluttering up things in Washington now.”

  In other words, when action is required women must be got out of the way because they have no part in the vital and actual work of the nation. All that they do can be dispensed with in strenuous times except breeding and possibly caring for the sick and wounded. They enter industry, it is true, in menial ways when men are called out of it for war, but when men return they must again withdraw. In the days of highly mechanized industry which are inevitably ahead of us there will be no use for women at all. More than ever in that future women will have to knit, and not only knit but unravel and knit again, just to have something to do. The managerial age is approaching, and unless woman can somehow educate herself to take her share in the management of the world she will be relegated entirely. She is very nearly relegated now.

  I do not feel disposed to blame men for this state of affairs. I should be glad to hate them, for that would be the simplest way of fixing blame. The simplest way of starting a reform for women always is to begin by an attack upon men. Actually, the fault, if there is a fault, lies in women themselves. The fault does not in every country lie with women. Obviously one cannot expect the Japanese woman, for example, oppressed by centuries of chatteldom, to take her place now by man’s side, especially when the last thing a Japanese man wants is a woman at his side instead of under his feet. The recent announcement in Japan that women are to be kept out of all public office since their place is in the home is merely a laughable imitation of Japan’s big brother for the hour, Germany. Japanese women never have come out of the home. It is significant, however, that no such announcement has come from China, and certainly in our country woman has had a good chance to take her place by man’s side. Many men have waited for her to take it. She has had the liberty to do so.

  But hers has been the fatal weakness of hesitation. Hesitating upon the threshhold of her home, uncertain whether to stay in or come out, she has tried to make her individual decision, not upon the basis of woman’s worth or ability, but upon what man wants or would like. She has doubted the strength of her femaleness. She has been afraid of losing her femininity. And she has feared, if she lost it, that she would have nothing left wherewith to hold man’s heart or attention. Instead of going boldly forth to join him, confident of the eternal female strength in her, sure of her own undying power to attract him when she wished to do so, she has settled back into her home and shut the door and waited, how often in vain, for him to come to her. Or she has sallied forth in shamefaced fashion, apologetically, as though she, too, thought she belonged at home, or she has come forth with hostility and hardness, and those are ugly traits.

  The truth is that if a woman is a real woman and proud to be one, nothing can quench the essential femininity of her being. She may sit upon a throne and rule a nation, she may sit upon the bench and be a judge, she may be the foreman in a mill, she could if she would be a bridge builder or a machinist or anything else; and if she were proud of herself as a woman her work would be well done and her femininity deepened. It is when women undervalue themselves as women that they ape men and become mannish and arouse dislike in all their fellows, men and women. No kind of work can spoil the quality of a woman unless she has first spoiled it herself by wishing consciously or unconsciously that she were not a woman. This undervaluation of herself has made woman uncertain when she leaves the security of the familiar environment of home, and in her uncertainty she has too often imitated man, whom she fears, and she alternates in her behavior between repulsive mannishness and an apologetic, over-exaggerated, false femininity that is equally repulsive.

  For the real female quality is something tough and strong and resistant. Women are not weak, except when they are uncertain of themselves. Once they are certain, they are whirlwinds of power and wells of strength. If they could have some sort of certainty that their femaleness was natural and right and ought not to be changed or quenched, they could and would take their places willingly by man’s side. But they have for so long heard their qualities derided, they have for so long been called the weaker sex, they have for so many generations been told that they have no head for business and no understanding of government, that it would be more than human to expect them to have resisted the subtle degeneration of self-doubt.

  The one good that men have conceded to women is moral superiority. Men have, or have pretended that they have, always expected women to be morally superior to them. So now, when a few independent women have gone out into business and government and have made use of the financial and legal and political tricks which men employ as a matter of course, there has been loud indignation that women are as dirty in business and politics as men are.

  “What’s the use of having women in politics,” these furious males inquire, “if they are as bad as men?”

  What use, indeed, are bad women anywhere, or bad men, or liars, male or female, or thieves or robbers or murderers, men or women? And what of the possibilities of good women, if woman were working at man’s side, or are good women too troublesome outside the home?

  This moral superiority which men have so generously given to women is as a matter of fact a very degenerating influence upon women. For, having no other superiority allowed her by man, she snatches at this poor rag of righteousness which he throws her out of the abundance of his strength and power over her, and she tries to make it cover her nakedness. If man had wanted to keep moral superiority, too, of course he would have done so. But he found it inconvenient in everyday life. To be as white as snow is not practical in business. Every little spot shows. It was a man cook I once had in China who conducted an earnest campaign in my house for several years to persuade and finally to force me to yield in the matter of dish towels of black instead of white linen. It would, he said, spare us both—me the trouble of incessant worry over dirty towels, and him the trouble of washing them every day. We parted at last, he male and I female to the end, on this matter of purity even in so
utilitarian a matter as dish towels.

  So have men always parted from women on practical righteousness. There is much to be said for men. Obviously it was easier for women to be good than men when women were shut up at home away from temptation to any of the major sins. If they developed the minor ones of laziness and pettiness and indifference and small lies and gossip, these became feminine weakness and did not greatly interfere with the bolder outlines of chastity and—I find I cannot think of another virtue for women, so let it go at chastity.

  But why should men be astonished when woman coming forth at his side seems to be much the same stuff as he? The wonder is that she is not worse than he, because her righteousness is, after all, a hothouse thing, untried and untempted; and she has no real strength of her own to resist. She has not even his strength of experience to help her. He at least has sinned often enough to know the folly of sinning beyond a certain point. But she has had so little experience of sin that she cannot be blamed for folly or failing.

  Besides, her righteousness, so long imposed upon her, has had very little reward. All the real rewards of goodness man has still kept for himself. Thus, though she is the angel, he is the priest, the prince of the church. It is he who addresses God, not she. She, poor thing, though so good that even he says she is better than himself, must sit in the pews and listen while he preaches, and she must bow her head when he prays to God on her behalf, and she must put in her bits of money when he passes the contribution box. I have always thought women got small reward from the church for all this righteousness of theirs. It does seem as though at least in the church, where moral worth is supposed to be required for entrance, woman ought to have some power. But no, man even devised a means of escape there. Though he demanded righteousness of woman he invented a religion which excused him from it. Righteousness was after all but filthy rags if one trusted to the blood of Christ for salvation, he proclaimed. The forgiveness of sins was made the great mercy of God, so that in a sense the greater sinner a man was, the more glory to God for washing him clean and accepting him as spotless. Thus did man make superiority out of his inferiority.