Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  But practically he demanded righteousness of women, because it is inconvenient for a man to have an unrighteous wife. For one thing, if she is unrighteous he cannot be sure that he is the father of his sons, and there is fury and inconvenience in this. An unrighteous wife may bring trouble of all sorts in the home, and man cannot have trouble when he comes home at night. Indeed, women have had so little practical benefit from their superior righteousness that the sensible woman ought to discard righteousness altogether and take man’s standards for her own. This would put men and women on an equal basis of moral worth and would do them both good. Men would see women as they are, and women could be rid of the degenerating effect upon them of a false valuation which they have taken far too seriously.

  For, incredible as it may seem to the rational mind, many women do really believe that merely because they are women they are more moral than men—“nicer,” if you like, more fastidious and purer and more spiritual. I cannot pronounce that word “spiritual” aloud. I have not done so in years. It arouses such feelings of repulsion and ferocity in me that I feel my tranquillity menaced. For, content with their so-called spiritual superiority, women have let their souls rot into pettiness and idleness and vacuity and general indifference in a world crying and dying for want of real superiority of spirit and moral worth, so that the spectacle does not bear contemplation. If women were really superior to men in righteousness or spirituality, could they sit blind and deaf and dumb, knitting their interminable knitting, crocheting and talking and going to teas and bridge parties and knitting again, and filling the theaters day in and day out, and rolling bandages and knitting again, and exchanging recipes and knitting, and re-arranging their furniture and curling their hair and painting their nails and going to style shows and knitting, knitting, knitting, while the world goes down to darkness and dismay through lack of bold goodness and moral integrity and real unselfishness? Where is this moral superiority that will do nothing but knit while heads roll off in revolutions and war crashes upon our great cities so that ruins are all that we shall have left if the world goes on as it now is?

  Women have no moral superiority to man so long as she will not come out of her selfish retreat and by man’s side work out with him the sort of democratic organization that the world must have if we are to live. We shall have no change for the better until she does. We shall have only increasing chaos and trouble as new wars release new weapons upon us. For man has gone as far as he can without woman. The constant repetition in our life proves it. Man by himself has not been able to make war obsolete, as it should be among civilized people. Habituated to war, conditioned to it as an inevitability, trained to consider it as opportunity for his highest heroisms, man can scarcely be expected to look cold-bloodedly at what has for so long been his best chance for excitement, freedom, and glory. The Nazi belief in the catharsis of war for men may be partly true. It is a human necessity to find a certain release of self in sacrifice of self. Anyone is happier who does not live for himself alone.

  This loss of self is easier for woman than for man. However complex and selfish a woman is as an individual, when she has a child she goes down into a simple and elemental experience which drives self away, which divides that self into another and brings all of life into its simplest primeval terms. There never was a woman who was not the better for it, however inadequate she may be afterwards in nurturing and training her child. Women are cleansed in soul by this return to the elements of death and life that make childbirth, and any woman who has not had the experience is and feels incomplete. Sublimation there may be, but she searches for it, aware of her incompleteness.

  But in our changed world man has no such opportunity left him any more for return to the elemental. Once he had it, perhaps, in the hunt, the chase, the risk of death. For the loss of self carries with it always the risk of death, and death has a fearful and endless charm for the human creature. It is as though in the dark places of his being there hides always the awareness of his end, and that awareness leads him, as moth to candle, to approach death again and again. The risk of death in childbirth exalts the woman. She goes down to the gates of death and she comes back triumphant over death. But man has no equivalent of this experience, and his being craves it and he devises it out of war. Generation after generation he devises it in one way and another, and as it approaches he dreads and fears it, and when it is come he welcomes it and exalts himself through it.

  For war to man, like childbirth to woman, is simplifying in its emotions and activities. All the real problems of life can be put aside while the one thing is done and little thought is needed to do it. He gives himself up to the familiar process. There is for him an actual relief in having an expected war break. His hatreds can be expressed without censure, he can let his emotions run free, he can behave as dramatically, as heroically as he likes, and no one laughs at him. It is almost impossible for a man to behave heroically in the cool and ordinary times of peace. But in war anything is allowed him, he is praised and applauded and made much of, as women are excused and allowed for in pregnancy. It is inevitable then, in a world controlled by men without women, that we shall have wars and disorders recurrent. Only when women take their full share in the directing of history can there be a balance which will then do away with such disturbances.

  What can be offered to man as a substitute for the blood bath of war? Where shall he go for glory? That question man must answer for himself. The skies are open to him with all their stars and suns, the earth is beneath him full of materials he does not know. The very air in which he moves is waiting with its secrets for him to plumb. How necessary is the blood bath for men and women? Civilized women by the million these days must do without the elemental experience of childbirth. Only a return to polygamy could give children to all women. It may be not too much to ask that civilized man do without war.

  But war, of course, carries to men sweets beyond itself. War automatically puts men in places of power. All men who wish women to retreat, love war, for war helps them. Every war sets women back a generation, and this in spite of industrial gains for them. For those gains are in small places, and women have to give a good share of them up again when the men come home. They would be called ungrateful if they did not; and, besides, they may as well, for laws would be devised to compel them. Psychologically and emotionally, war sets women back both in man’s mind and in their own. For man comes home from war a spoiled creature, and one too often weakened by self-pity and conceit. He has had to be pampered and praised into considering himself a hero so that he would be a hero, and everyday life is flat after war, and his wife must go on with the pampering and praising or he will feel her unappreciative. It is for him amazingly like childbirth for the woman. She behaves like that after she has successfully had a baby.

  Men and women will have to work out some sort of compromise on this matter of having wars and babies. They manage to negate each other as it is. Women fulfill themselves in having the babies, and men fulfill themselves in destroying them. There ought to be some other more profitable form of pleasurable sacrifice for the human race than this sacrifice of the innocents.

  8. THE EDUCATION OF MEN AND WOMEN FOR EACH OTHER

  Equality, of course, is no easy matter except for talk. Only careful education can make people equal. There is no equality in indivduals, that we know. But how can man be persuaded that woman is his equal until he is educated in that knowledge, and how can woman be persuaded that she can and ought to be man’s equal except by education in that knowledge?

  It is perhaps timely at this moment for men and women to consider this question of their basic relationship to each other, since the actual danger of fascism inevitably is that, in one way or another, with or without war, all the world will be affected by it. Brain touches brain, and emotion stirs emotion; and even in a determined democracy we shall not escape some infusion of fascism. That infusion will run and spread in the channels of traditionalism, and we Americans are nowhere so traditio
nal as in the relationship between men and women.

  My own anxieties about fascism have less to do with women than with men. For when woman goes back to medievalism she never goes back alone. She always takes man back with her. In proportion as she becomes a slave, he becomes a slave owner, and of the two the slave is the less harmed. Slaves develop great qualities of character, endurance, philosophy, diplomacy, humor, secret strength of resistance, and the ability to keep their own counsel even to the point of slyness. Out of all this they learn to rule, and they gain, if they have any wits, the real ascendancy over their masters.

  Thus the consequences of fascism for men are very serious, and the more serious because there are so many American women who look with longing at the comfortable restrictions of fascism which would take beyond woman’s power of decision the difficult question of whether or not her place is in the home. For women have long had to be devious creatures, as we all know, and many a woman would welcome the possibilities for power which slavery gives her, and secretly many a woman would enjoy the power joined with total lack of responsibility which a slave has. A slave need not worry about improvements in society or in the community. She can leave all that to her owner, man. She need not worry even about her food and drink, her clothing, or the roof over her head. These are provided to slaves as a matter of course. She has her little labors well defined each day, but there are no laws for slaves to compel them to speed or to standards of production; and, above all, in slavery woman has entire mental leisure. The world is not her affair. She can devote all her powers to thinking up new means to have her own way and so to become man’s ruler.

  I am alarmed for American men in this approaching wave of fascism because they have been so foolish as to grant all the privileges of freedom and democracy to women without compelling them to share any of the practical responsibilities in return. Here society requires no real service from women, though it extends to them in fullest measure its advantages and protection, even to the point of giving them education. All this ought to terrify any thinking man, for when the wave of fascism hits him and he succumbs to it, probably unaware for the moment that he has done so, he will have in the nursery, the kitchen, the church, no ignorant peasantlike creature sharpening her few wits as best she can, but a clever, subtle being whose development, body and mind, has long been the equal of his own and whose energies are often superior to his. I am glad I am not a man in America.

  The truth is that under no form of government and in no civilization has the relationship between men and women been entirely satisfactory to man. One of woman’s most hateful qualities has been that she can make the best of anything and somehow emerge to be an annoyance, and man suffers. I have never seen a country, and I have seen many, where man was not in some way or another annoyed by woman, by her inferiority and by her superiority. The one possible solution for the problem of woman has never been tried. It is simple equality with man. This seems never to have occurred to him.

  I was forcibly reminded of this a while ago when I was being called upon by the benevolent middle-aged president of a midwestern college for women, who came to ask help in educating his “girls.” He said, looking the picture of innocent manhood:

  “It is my aim to educate women to be the partners of men.”

  I could not repress a groan. Here was the same old notion of inequality.

  “But who,” I inquired, “is educating men to be the partners of women?” For, I thought, how can men and women be partners if they are not being educated for each other?

  We parted irrevocably upon that, for he could not see what I meant and I could not blame him. The education of men and women for real equality with each other has now become extremely difficult, not only to perform but even to think about, because of their long education away from each other. And yet in this strange pause before the tidal wave of fascism hits us, I recommend men to take thought of what may befall them under that wave and to consider how to force women to equality with them—equality of responsibility, equality of knowledge—lest they assume again man’s old yoke of subservience to a creature ignorant and selfish and fundamentally irresponsible to anyone but herself.

  I use the word “forcibly” with purpose, for I repeat that I discern in an alarming number of women a yearning for the fleshpots of slavery. Nothing has brought this more clearly home to me than a certain poll taken some months ago among the students of a woman’s college, ironically enough an institution founded by a woman for the education of women. Those students put themselves on record as overwhelmingly against any woman’s being considered as eligible for the presidency of the United States, the vice-presidency, or even the office of Cabinet member. Their reasons for this return to medievalism are even more amazing than the act itself. They said with apparently calm self-abasement that women lack the necessary physical and emotional stability; that women have not sufficient experience in public affairs; and that women cannot “escape the pettiness of life.”

  The only reason I can guess for this extraordinary document is the venom that women seem to have for women in the competition in a society where there is neither freedom nor the fixed pattern of traditions between men and women. I have not yet found a satisfactory explanation for it. The only possible one is that in a free society such as ours where women may do as they like if they have the courage to change old traditions, they have only themselves or each other to blame if they fall short of their potentialities; and, being human, they will scarcely blame themselves. In Japan, for instance, women are quite tenderly loyal to one another; for there, as in the newer fascist countries, women have been given limits beyond which they may not go. Thus none need envy another’s irritating progress. All must stop at the same point. Women’s jealousy of women there is of the small and harmless sort found between two women contending for the same man in a household. It does not reach out, as it does here, in such large prejudices as affect government, industry, and learning, illustrated in such ways as the unwillingness that women show in seeking professional services from women, and in the hostility they show instinctively toward any woman above the average in achievement. Indeed, it would not be surprising if women here would prefer never to have a woman president of this country merely because she was a woman, or perhaps because only one of their number could sit in that seat of honor and responsibility. In the Orient poison would be the weapon used or a dagger in the dark under the left breast of a sleeper.

  It will take a good deal of wisdom on the part of man to realize his danger as fascism approaches him, and after he knows it will take even more self-control not to give way, as German men have, to his natural inclination to lock women up. The American man will be especially tempted because he does not like women nearly as well as, for example, the Chinese man or the Frenchman does. He has already suffered too much from them through his ignorance of them; and, moreover, his sense of humor is not so sophisticated as that of the French and Chinese. What he must somehow bring himself to remember is that if he locks women up he is going to suffer more and in far more important ways than he does now. He is going to be undermined as the Chinese man has been undermined, and as has the Frenchman. If he realizes his danger and keeps woman free, of course he must still not think of liberty and equality as the rope with which woman will hang herself, for she will not hang herself in any case. She is too smart for that. But only through liberty and equality will woman be forced to share man’s responsibility in the world so that she can no longer enjoy the easy and irresponsible life of the slave, and only then perhaps can there be hope that after sufficient education man and woman can begin to live as they ought to live, with the burden of life divided between them fairly to the benefit of both.

  Perhaps then man will like woman, for she will be likable as she never has been, and when woman feels that man likes her, her present discontent will be gone completely and permanently. For woman feels the dislike of man as she feels nothing on earth, and it shakes her to the very core of her being. She i
s made utterly insecure by it, and no other security can make her feel safe because when man dislikes her she has no confidence in herself, and because she has no confidence in herself every woman enters into a tremendous rivalry, though she may not know it, with every other woman. Thus she is pleased and delighted when her lover tells her, as every man does tell some one woman, that she is not like any woman on earth. For a while she hopes and believes this is true. It is a very brief while, and few there be who can delay its end, and sweet though it is to the man it is sweeter to the woman. Sooner or later he perceives that she is after all only a woman, and the cloud of his dislike of woman begins to temper and to shadow even his love, and she is desolate or cynical according to her temperament.

  There are, of course, innumerable mild-mannered American men and gentlemen who will protest that they have never disliked women—on the contrary, and so forth. It is platitudinous to reply that one often harbors a feeling without being aware of it. It is only just to agree that there are exceptions. But if there could be a poll delicate enough to measure the things people will not tell, the mass of men’s dislike for women would mount much higher than their liking.

  I am constrained to this conviction as an observer by mere evidence piled on evidence, by the frank private conversations of men with each other when they “always except those present,” by executives who complain of the women in their employ for faults in women which are not noticed in men or seem less considerable in men, by husbands who find their real pleasure and relaxation away from their wives rather than with them, by sons who sentimentally adore their mothers to the point of hatred and who obey them through fear without healthy rebellion, by the general and far from tacit opposition to women’s rising to any place of important executive power in business or other organizations, by the usual practice of giving a woman employee less money for the same work a man might do, by boys who believe themselves better than their sisters and all girls, and who grow up into men who think themselves better than their wives and all women merely because their physical shape is not quite the same, by the common jokes of a people which always betray them. We laugh at exaggerations of the truth, but there must be truth or we do not laugh. And there are too many jokes made upon the subject of the naïveté and folly of women in America for me to discount their meaning and significance. But time fails to tell of all evidences of man’s dislike for woman. They are here for all to see who will use impartial eyes.