Of Men and Women

by Buck, Pearl S.

  In a society where woman’s place was completely fixed, as it was in the old China, the exceptional woman, of course, did not appear at all. In a society completely democratic she will not appear more often than the exceptional man, because there the level of the average woman would be so high that many who now seem exceptional would not be so then. In a complete democracy where woman was free to achieve according to her ability, she would not be remarkable, as she is now merely because she is woman.

  As things are today in the half-free, half-traditional state in which American women find themselves, the exceptional woman is too remarkable. She is a creature admired and despised, praised and pitied. If she deserves most of this, in Christian charity words should first be spoken for her. She is to be pitied, for it is her misfortune, so far as her personal happiness goes, that she is endowed with unusual intelligence and energy, neither of which she particularly needs for the demands of society upon her. She may even have some particular talent which, in the same measure as though she were a man, keeps her restless and dissatisfied if she is not exercising it. She cannot, however, exercise it as man would. Marriage, which she craves as naturally as he does, makes demands upon her time and thought which it does not upon him. A gifted man can develop his gift, heedless of house and child, so long as he earns enough to pay for these things. But even if a gifted woman earns, still the actual physical responsibility of house and children are hers. No one, whatever her gift, takes them from her shoulders. She does not want them lifted from her heart, but there is no freedom for her from the traditional tasks of womanhood. Man has not been educated to consider that her gift, however great, can be equal or superior to his own. He has not been educated to weigh the measure of his individual gift and hers. He keeps his freedom whether or not it is worth much to anyone. Woman, if she is so unfortunate as to have the gift, must do with it as best she can while she tends the house, the child, the man. To the callous and careless query as to why she marries and why has the home and the child at all, the answer is simply that, being a woman, she is not fulfilled unless she has the life of a woman. She is often enough as it is accused of losing her womanliness.

  Sometimes the accusation is true. It cannot be denied that too many of our exceptional women are mannish, hard, ruthless, and without grace. But who can blame them? By the time woman has made her way as near to the top as she can against tradition, she has been so laughed at, so criticized, so heaped with contempt, both good-natured and ill, so soiled with the anger and envy of those less successful than she, both men and women, that she is often all that she is said to be. She could scarcely have survived otherwise unless she had been that true miracle of a woman so full of pure grace that she could have kept herself intact. But why make superhuman demands upon women that are not made upon men? The average successful man is also selfish, arrogant, and hard, and nobody blames him for it.

  And yet I cannot but acknowledge that the exceptional woman, as she sometimes is, is not a likable creature, nor does she inspire other women to emulate her in any way. She is assertive. She is ruthless in her behavior to other women and cares nothing for their well-being as a group. Her entire life and energy are absorbed in the effort to keep her place among men. These men she treats rudely if they disapprove of her, sentimentally if they approve. They admire her cautiously, hate her secretly or openly, fear her profoundly, and respect her unwillingly. She stands to them as a living argument for keeping women in the home and out of the way. Though she is more often than not both healthy and handsome, no man in his right mind would want her for his wife. It would be like marrying Cleopatra and the Statue of Liberty rolled into one, with the asp and the torch in the mixture. Though she gathers all eyes to herself when she enters an assembly, she is a solitary and restless creature, for she can no longer find joy in small ordinary events and pleasures. Her humor, if she has any, is elephantine, ponderous and pretentious, and her gaiety is ghastly because it is so determined. Her discourtesy to all women and to any man except the few whom she thinks can help her is one of the spectacles of American life at which foreigners marvel. Brilliant, beautiful, and powerful, she is a monstrosity. She is an argument for fascism—the only one I know.

  Indeed, there are times, as one watches this exceptional woman, when one can understand the simple, hearty Germans. Perhaps such women as this had more than we know to do with the success of fascism. Germany had a good many exceptional women in that disconcerting gap in her history between the Kaiser and Hitler. The exceptional woman flourished in that social change. She came out of the home with a bang. If she could have come out instead with the quiet wisdom of the mature Chinese female creature she might have helped to keep liberty alive even in Germany.

  For I repeat that the truly female woman cannot be made unwomanly. Whatever she is doing, she remains feminine in every look and word and act. I have seen her marching in the armies of China in an old uniform and with a gun over her shoulder. She stands at machines in Russia. I have seen her once or twice in my own country, a judge upon the bench, a doctor in an office. Wherever she is she is herself, wise, capable, unaffectedly a woman, as feminine as though she had a child at her breast or stood at the stove in her own kitchen. It does not occur to her to prove that she is as good as a man. She knows she is as good, being woman.

  And yet it is true, and I have often puzzled over it, that an American woman loses her femininity more easily and quickly than do the women of other countries when she achieves some place outside the home. Why should this be except that American women, generally speaking, are undersexed? I can give no other explanation of why they are so worried about losing their essential quality as females or why they must protect so anxiously a femininity so feeble that to keep it alive they must protect it in the hothouse atmosphere of home lest it evaporate. Must women be kept continually at the grind of activities which are strictly traditionally female, lest they forget they are women?

  But how can this be, I ask in wonder? For the female instinct in a strong, true woman is imbued in all her brain and body. It is not to be expressed in vague sentimental emotionalism, in chatter and frills and curled hair, in painted nails and pen-wiper hats. It is not expressed only in cooking and housekeeping and giving birth. It may not be expressed at all in these activities. Plenty of women in homes and with families are not truly feminine. No, really feminine woman cannot be and is not afraid to do or be anything she likes. She is woman. Whatever she does is feminine and full of woman, and she could not ape man if she tried, for she is all woman and all her thinking and breathing and being are woman, and her femaleness is herself and it cannot be taken from her or be changed, nor does she want to be changed. She wants to be what she is, a woman; and as a woman she goes anywhere and does everything, secure in her own content and being.

  If women could somehow believe that they cannot cease to be women, if they are women in the first place—and if they are not deeply, truly women in the first place they are not feminine no matter what they are or wear—what a bogey would be taken from their path! It is not chastity that is the prized possession of women these days, but femininity. The two have nothing to do with each other. When a woman is cold at heart the matter of chastity is purely academic. She is incapable either of chastity or its opposite, and the number of her loves are only marks upon a tally stick.

  The exceptional woman in Germany, had, of course, far more to struggle against than she has in our country. She had the unshaken determination of man to be superior to her, an opposition in its crudest and most literal form, and this determination was upheld by average women. The exceptional woman is a reproach in her freedom to those less gifted or less energetic or less conscientious women who do not wish to undertake the responsibilities of freedom. Deep in her heart, woman knows she has accepted the privileges of freedom but not the responsibilities. If one woman can achieve so much, other women ask themselves uneasily, does it show that all women ought to be more? Rather than answer that question honestly, it is eas
ier to point fingers and cry out charges of unwomanliness and neglect of home and children and the absence of virtues which have for so long been woman’s excuse. Though statistically, of course, it has already been proved that the woman who works outside the home actually gives her children more time than the so-called home woman.1

  Pre-Nazi Germany was rather more burdened with exceptional women, however, than we are at present. There were over forty women even in the Reichstag. We have few women in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate. There were women in all German state legislatures and city councils. Women worked in high labor organizations and co-operatives. They were judges and doctors and technicians. They made valuable contributions to national housing and schools and carried through social legislation. They resisted with all their strength the rising Nazi power. And yet the exceptional women in Germany could save neither themselves nor the average women. Together they have been forced into retreat. Today in Germany all positions outside the home, except the unimportant and the menial, are closed to women. No woman can rise to any place, however lowly, which puts her over a man. Nor can she enter universities or receive higher learning of any sort. Thus she returns to the Middle Ages.

  No, the exceptional woman can save no one, not even herself, as fascism approaches, if the distance between her and the average woman is too great; and it is too great today in America as it was in Gemany. The distance is so great that the chief enemy of the exceptional woman is the average woman. And yet the exceptional woman deserves a good deal of this enmity because she allows herself to be cut off from other women by her selfishness in success, instead of using her success to lead others to better and higher places. This is folly for all, for the exceptional woman’s place is insecure when it is too far above the place of other women. No woman is high enough if all women are not. And yet if one rises she should not be hated by the others—rather should she be looked upon as a hope for all. That she is hated, is only another example of the axiom that civilization is no stronger than its most barbarous member.

  For there is danger in that distance between the exceptional woman and the average woman, and it is a danger for the whole people if they still have the wish to be democratic. Fascism creeps in through back doors. It is the weak, the unfulfilled, the discontented who are the back doors, and these are to be found too much among women. Anti-fascists busy themselves with commendable energy in discovering here and there in our midst a few Nazis and pro-Nazis; but they overlook the great source of danger in the masses of half-ignorant, half-idle, indolent, and discontented American women, already jealous of the exceptional women and envious too, and ready, as German women like them were ready, to pull the house down over all women if only these few could no longer be left to reproach them. These are the masses ready to run to the call of anyone clever enough to justify their futility and to sentimentalize their sex.

  The German women who ran to the Nazi flag were the ignorant women who did not even know the theory of the Nazi creed. Had they read and understood it as it was expressed by Alfred Rosenberg, when he said in his The Myth of the Twentieth Century, “It is clear that a perpetual public influence of the women, granted in principle, would be the beginning of a notorious decadence,” they might have felt alarmed. But only relatively few women were capable of reading and understanding such material. The ordinary woman avoided serious thought with its responsibilities for action. The first pro-Nazi leaders among women were those who had already taken a stand against women in government and indeed against women’s social and political emancipation. They were the anti-suffragists and the anti-feminists. “None of them,” says an exceptional German woman now an exile, “had ever participated in the struggle for recognition of women’s rights and dignity.”2

  Who were the other German women who favored Nazism? First among them were the young women. It is alarming, in view of the retreat among the young women of our own country, to realize that there was a similar retreat in Germany and that it led them to favor Hitler, not because they knew what he would give them, but because they wanted to be sheltered and to believe in him. My heart turned cold the other day and the chill of the possible future fell across it when I heard a young American woman cry, “I’m so tired of trying to know—I long only to believe!” It was the death cry of the young German women as they ran to put themselves under the Nazi power.

  There are other similarities between the pre-Hitler German women and the American women today. The masses of the German women then, like ours now, were of the lower middle class and cared nothing about politics. They thought only of themselves and their families and the small circle of their daily lives. To those lower middle-class German women, therefore, it was a pleasure to have all women reduced to the common level of the Hausfrau, and they approved the Nazi power which could pull them down and keep them there. These women were the strongest force among women to bring in the Nazi regime. The frightening thing is that they were the home women, the good mothers.

  But there were others. There was even a small group of “intelligent” women, so-called, who followed Nazism because, having tried independence, they chose retreat. They were the disappointed who had not achieved the success for which they hoped in the professions, and who had not married and were tempted by the Nazi promises to give marriage to every woman. It must remain a matter of wonder that these women, if they were really intelligent, did not question the sort of marriage that could be promised to all women. And yet it is true that in all countries there are disappointed women who would rather have any marriage than none. There will be these women as long as marriage remains the measure of woman’s success as a woman. These women would in America, as in Germany, vote for Nazi men if these were the men who held out the lure of marriage to them.

  But the most striking similarity between the German and the American women is in the women students. The vote taken by the women of an American college which I have cited could have come direct from Germany. It expresses exactly the attitude of those young German women students who voluntarily and consciously gave up the rights which women had won so hardly and so short a time before in Germany. True, the young German women, like the young Americans, had not themselves struggled for these rights. They accepted them as a matter of course and did not prize or even understand their value. And, like many other young women in the world today, they were discouraged by the difficulties they found before them in their longing for success. There was no sure and easy way to that success and in the face of the added obstacles of depression, always and everywhere heavier upon women than upon men, they took definite retreat into the home and the dependence upon men which Nazism offered them. They were young, let it be remembered, and the Nazis used the crassest means of emotional appeal-lights, music, mass singing and marching, and always handsome uniformed “he-men.” Weak women fell before all this as before armies, victims of emotion and sex. They have remained satisfied with little positions, often without pay but always with uniforms to make them feel important and to flatter their poor vanities and to lessen the consciousness of their inferiority as human beings and their real subjection.

  In all humility, as one surveys this spectacle, one must inquire whether the downfall of democracy, if it falls, will not be because we did not take sufficiently into account the weakness and folly of the masses of human beings, who know, poor, helpless souls, that they cannot achieve greatness and nobility and who, when the high demands and responsibilities of democracy are put upon them, flee from the knowledge of what they are, measured against what they are expected to be. Something like this I once saw in the eyes of a poor dull-witted fellow whom, to relieve his dire poverty, we took into our house to perform a few simple tasks. For a while he seemed happy. He was warm and he was fed, and though his mistakes were many he tried hard and no one blamed him when he failed, for we knew his limitations. But one day he came and begged to be allowed to leave. Had he another job, we inquired? No, he had no job, but he wanted to leave. Would he not so
on be hungry and cold and homeless again? Yes, he admitted, he would. We pressed him a little. Had we not been kind enough to him? A strange look came into his dull eyes. Oh, yes, we had been very kind, it was not that. Then what? we asked. The strange look struggled to express itself, “Ma’am, it’s this—you’re such thinkin’ kind of people.” It was the discomfort of the incompetent in the presence of the competent, the unease of those who cannot think in the presence of those who think because they cannot help it. We understood and let him go, but we have never forgotten him. There are millions like him whom democracy cannot comfort because it does not take cognizance of their real being.

  To take cognizance of the real being—this is all that is necessary for happiness. If men and women could really know each other, not only as the individuals they marry or as relatives and hirelings, but as human beings at work together on a job, that job being the managing of human society, they could take cognizance each of the other’s being. That is, each would demand of the other only what ought to be demanded, not more and certainly not less. As it is, they do demand too much of each other and at the same time too little. And their demands are based upon and shaped by tradition rather than upon that which each really should want of the other—a spontaneous and free co-operation which will give all individuals, men and women, the greatest freedom consistent with equal opportunity in life and work.