Educating Women in a Man's World

1

WE in the United States claim to be developing “complete” men and women—men and women so aware of the best that has been thought and felt by mankind, and so familiar with the path our race has traveled, that they are worthy members of our common pilgrimage. Yet in fact our colleges and universities have almost entirely disregarded the interests, aptitudes, and accomplishments of three vast and overlapping segments of mankind: (1) the Orient, (2) the nine tenths of humanity who until recently were socially submerged, and (3) women. To phrase the matter differently, our education has been designed for the Occidental male aristocrat. The geographic, democratic, and feminist revolutions, which have remade the world in which we live, have scarcely begun to affect our formal preparation to live in that world.

Global peace is not going to be had by setting American students to reading Sakuntala and the Tao Te King any more than our entry into war with Italy and Germany in 1941 was prevented by the high esteem in which Dante and Goethe are held among us. But it will hardly be denied that many of the miscalculations of our foreign policy towards Asia, blunders for which we have paid and shall continue to pay in blood and gold, are in part traceable to the fact that we Americans limit our horizon with the blinders of a North Atlantic education which gives us no understanding of the ancient, proud, and in many ways sophisticated peoples whom we face across the Pacific. If we insist on reading Great Books, possibly a list compiled from the non-Occidental traditions might do us more good at this particular moment of history when our power seems so greatly to have outrun our competence. Limitations of a student’s time, and of the funds of most colleges and universities for curricular expansion, will make the process of change long and slow. But even a small college has a duty to break the shell of the Occident with a rich offering in either Islamic, Indic, East Asiatic, or Russian studies, and to encourage students to prepare themselves a bit better to become citizens of the world by taking a few courses outside the circle of their own cultural tradition.

It is ironic that the thin upper crust of cultivated Orientals is already getting a global education still unavailable to most Americans. The educated Syrian reads his Koran and Voltaire; the Chinese knows Mencius, Dewey, and Bertrand Russell; the Hindu is familiar with the Bhagavad-Gita and Dickens. At times this produces a mere glib cosmopolitanism, but those of us who are fortunate enough to meet a good many educated Asiatics often have an uncomfortable sense of being intellectually outclassed: they have encompassed more of human experience than we.

Until less than two hundred years ago a “liberal” education was valid in the sense that it was truly fitted to the pattern of life of the upper classes which monopolized it. But from the later eighteenth century onward there has come a seismic movement which Ortega y Gasset has called “the revolt of the masses.”At its best it is democracy, but both fascism and communism are corrupt expressions of it, since both, like democracy, are anti-aristocratic.

We Americans have achieved so coherent a set of social attitudes and economic habits growing out of “the revolt of the masses,” we have given every individual such status (or at least every white individual), that we recoil from such words as “the masses” and even from the hint of condescension in such phrases as “the common man.” We have the world’s oldest and most consistent equalitarian society.

But have we rethought our education in terms of our breach with the aristocratic tradition? In quantitative terms the answer is clear: we have made available all levels of education, and particularly that of the colleges and universities, to a larger part of the population than ever before enjoyed them in any nation. This has been done not merely by setting up a vast network of taxsupported institutions but also by establishing hundreds of independent colleges and universities. Their general endowments, which reduce the cost of education to all their students, are supplemented by special endowments of scholarships for needy persons, on a scale unknown elsewhere.

2

IN ONE sense, then, we have democratized higher education. But in another and more important way we have not done so. The “liberal" education which was worked out to meet the needs of the old aristocracy of priests and nobles was essentially contemplative, focused on understanding things rather than doing things. Such an education was fitted functionally to their position in the world: they gave orders, and to give clear and wise orders they needed “trained minds” — that is, minds trained to think clearly, weigh evidence, and grasp all aspects of a problem. Since, by and large, they did not have to carry out orders, training in the specific ways of doing things was irrelevant to them.

The democratic revolution, together with the growth of technology so intimately connected with it, has destroyed the old simplicities which made legitimate a sharp distinction between “liberal” and “vocational” education. The whole idea of a purely vocational education is aristocratic and patronizing because it implies that some people are fit for nothing but to be trained to work. But democracy is grounded in a bold faith that every man is capable of rising to the level of political judgment which once was expected only of the aristocracy. Moreover, while the old ideal of the “gentleman of leisure” has fallen into disfavor, the forty-hour week has given most Americans an amount of leisure which to former generations would have seemed as fantastic as our political responsibilities. A democratic education must therefore above all else try to develop those capacities for thinking, understanding, and enjoying which have been the goals of traditional “liberal" education; for the democratic revolution has ennobled us all.

On the other hand it has made workers of us all. Even men who might be able to live on their investments generally make at least a pretense of working, in order to avoid disapproval. But more important for our educational thinking than this new attitude towards work is the fact that jobs have become so specialized and intricate that increasingly the preparation for them is being transferred from the level of apprenticeship to that of formal schooling. What once were trades are becoming professions.

Indeed the three traditional “learned” professions of divinity, medicine, and law would seem to offer the pattern for a truly democratic higher education because they have always combined liberal education with vocational training, emphasis on skill in doing things with a sense of the importance of grasping the implications of what one is doing.

Now that we have abolished inherited class distinctions and functions, we are all masters and all servants. We must create, and indeed for the first time in history we are in a position to create, an education embracing and interpreting the entire experience of mankind, including that of labor.

This means that technology in the broadest sense must be included in general education and studied in a humanistic mood on a par with art, religion, science, politics, literature, and every other major concern of the race. It will not be easy, for the gulf between liberal and vocational education has been so deep that our technologists still normally have only the attitude of servants towards their work: that is, they are so involved in the immediate job to be done that they seldom ask the meaning of what they are doing, or speculate about its significance in the total framework of human life. Such narrowness impoverishes all of us.

To be as concrete as possible, we shall not have built a new liberal education in democratic terms until we can give in our colleges a course on the internal-combustion engine as humanely conceived as a course on Shakespeare’s plays.

We must not neglect our Shakespeare, but the average American — even the average educated American — has far more frequent and intimate contact with automobiles and airplanes than with the theater. The people clustered around a new model of car parked by the curb, the way they lift the hood and peer at its entrails, show an instinctive grasp of the value of skill which has been omitted from the education they receive. If that education enabled us to see in every such engine a monument of an ongoing tradition, a record of human gropings, stupidities and genius, a symbol of our debt to a host of ancestors and a sermon on our duty to serve the age, humanistic attitudes might be more easily inculcated than at present.

The core of traditional liberal education has been the understanding and appreciation of the experience of values. In America we have made a gigantic effort to extend to all the people the liberal education which was once a perquisite of privilege, yet the degree of real personal cultivation which we have achieved is disappointing. We have failed because our humanism has not been humane enough to include the experience of the value of skill which has always been, and which remains, more vivid to the bulk of mankind than any other value, and which, if properly understood, would serve as guide to the other values cultivated traditionally in our schools. The democratizing of education is far more than a matter of sending everybody to school: it involves reshaping the educational inheritance from the aristocratic age and expanding both its content and its sympathies to meet the needs of our time.

3

IN addition to our educational neglect of the Orient and of the once voiceless masses of mankind, we have overlooked in our schools the specific interests and activities of women. Since it is to the advantage of men to live with women and learn to like them, the masculine bias of our education cheats men as well as women. But it is harder, much harder, on women than on men.

A woman must be educated to handle options more fundamental than any which ever confront a man. The pattern of a man’s existence is fairly simple. He is born; he is educated partly to be a person and partly to earn a living; he earns a living, gets a wife, begets children, and works until he dies. The pattern of a woman’s life today is essentially different. After she graduates from college she is faced with her first major choice: family or career (although “career" is a glamour word for the kind of jobs most women can get!). If a man marries he must work harder than ever at his career; there is no conflict. Yet, despite all the brave phrases which are currently fashionable, a married woman who tries to combine the two usually has either a token career or a token family, at least so long as her children are young.

Moreover the woman who marries and takes her family seriously must be prepared to face a second distinctively feminine option. Twenty or twentyfive years after marriage, when normally she is in her forties, she may still have a husband about the house who needs some care and affection, but the children, who have taken the bulk of her time since she left college, have grown up and established their own homes. What is she to do with her released energies and intelligence during the next three decades? For the second time in her life she must choose as a man never chooses; for even to do nothing is to choose.

The failure of our educational system to take into account these simple and basic differences between the life patterns of average men and women is at least in part responsible for the deep discontent and restlessness which afflict millions of women. But this inadequacy in our schools presents merely one part of a much wider problem, the outline of which has only recently begun to be seen. We are learning that the leaders of the feminist revolution, which during the past three generations has so largely changed the way men and women think about each other and treat each other, did not understand the forces which led them to revolt. They refused to recognize that some of their weapons in the battle for reform were boomerangs. They failed — forgivably! — to foresee the less happy results of their enthusiasm.

American feminism has achieved much; but beneath the surface of the seeming freedom which women enjoy in the United States, there is in the hearts of millions of them a strange sense of bondage. Whether American women as a group are more unhappy than the women of other countries is a question which cannot yet be answered. But it is certain that American women are much more deeply discontented with themselves and their lives than are American men.

America’s deepest spiritual malady is lack of respect among its women both for themselves as persons and for themselves as a group. We have accepted the theory of equality between women and men, but we are far from achieving the substance of it. The task will not be complete until women respect women as much as they do men, until women by achieving respect for themselves win the full respect of men, and until women are as glad to be women as men are to be men.

What has gone wrong in our own nation that so many of our women should doubt, resent, or repudiate their womanhood? The heart of the trouble lies in the fact that within the last one hundred fifty years industrialism and the urban growth which accompanies it have largely taken from women their former economic productivity and have forced upon them the pair of difficult choices mentioned above: first, of family or job; second, what to do when the children grow up.

In the pre-industrial world of peasant villages and of small towns serving an agricultural hinterland, a woman worked as hard as her husband and, like him, kept on working until death. Because the work was done at home, or near-by, there was no contradiction between rearing a family and laboring to feed and clothe it. Work was decentralized and therefore compatible with the family. When the children grew up and married, they usually lived close by, and the economic and social unity of the family remained unbroken.

The factory-and-office system of centralized labor, the feverish and infinitely wasteful rush and counter-rush of commuters from home to work and back again, have made it very hard for a married woman with children to add to the family purse as once she did habitually, even though she may have the best of will to do so. So much has been said in recent years of “career women" and “woman’s increasing place in economic life" that the primary fact is overlooked that less of the world’s work is done by women today than ever before in history. Until industrialism and the growth of cities prevented most women from working, every woman was a “career woman.”In a pre-industrial society a man needed a woman economically as much as a woman needed a man, but under the conditions of modern mechanized city life this reciprocity between husband and wife has been unbalanced.

4

THE differences between men and women are as significant as their similarities, and the two sexes cannot properly be measured with the same yardstick. Physically, this is obvious. To point out that many a high school boy has broken the women’s international record for throwing the discus is like remarking that very few men nurse infants. Such observations have nothing to do with one’s opinion regarding equality, or the lack of it, between the sexes. Even the assertion that women are physically “superior” to men because of their greater life expectancy may be rejected as putting too much stress on the mere durability of women. Most of us are prepared to accept the notion that in bodily structure and function women and men are incommensurable but equal in dignity. It would seem that if women are to restore their selfrespect they must reverse the tactics of the older feminism which indignantly denied inherent differences in the intellectual and emotional tendencies of men and women. Only by recognizing and insisting upon the importance of such differences can women save themselves, in their own eyes, from conviction as inferiors.

What this conclusion implies for our present structure of women’s higher education is obvious, and to many it will be painful. Both on coeducational campuses and in women’s colleges we have assumed that for educational purposes a woman is a man in disguise. Our few women scholars have had to fight so hard for professional acceptance that as a rule they have passionately embraced the male standards of accomplishment according to which they were required to strive for recognition. So profoundly masculine is our whole tradition of higher education that at the present time a woman tends to be defeminized in proportion as she is educated.

Our women’s colleges have done little more than our coeducational institutions to explore and develop a distinctively feminine higher education. Indeed, the women’s colleges are a remarkable illustration of the pervasiveness of the masculine dominance in our society. It may have been necessary in the historical context of the past century to prove that women were intellectually tough enough to undertake the same studies men did, and certainly the proof was produced. But it is clear that the leaders of women’s higher education on the northeast seaboard thought that they were doing their full duty in making women’s colleges as much like men’s colleges as possible. The symbol of this attitude is the blessed word euthenics (presumably a label for family studies — although no Greek would have understood it so!) behind which Vassar tried to conceal its belated and embarrassed recognition of the fact that it is girls who study at Poughkeepsie. That Radcliffe, which is in curricular bondage to Harvard and which got around only in the autumn of 1948 to appointing the first woman professor to its faculty, should be regarded by otherwise perspicacious women as anything but a piteous example of female docility, indicates how rudimentary our thinking in these matters remains.

Men and women are remarkably like each other, and remarkably unlike each other. Since men, often with malicious intent, have generally stressed the differences, the feminists battling against masculine domination naturally emphasized the identities. Surely if we are to achieve the American ideal of equality in dignity between men and women, it must be an equality of differences as well as an equality of identities. We must agree with the feminists that “women are people,” yet hold to the supplementary truth that “people are either women or men.” The sex differentiation is fundamental. If we are to rear our daughters to be proud that they are women, we must end our present peculiar habit of educating them as though they were men.

A higher education specifically designed for women would in no way limit the opportunities of the individual girl to learn and do what she wishes. The fact that she is a girl does not make her less an individual. Lise Meitner’s calculations played a critical part in the release of atomic energy, and the Meitners of the future must be encouraged by every possible means. But the fact that there are, and (according to many psychologists) probably will always be, far fewer women than men in the ranks of great mathematicians should not lead a girl to esteem herself and her sex less highly. As a people we have vastly overrated cultural creativity. Our uncritical acceptance of “progress” as good in itself is the measure of the masculine dominance in our culture.

It is as important to cherish as to create, and the one takes as much intelligence as the other, although perhaps of a different kind. The Chinese, who have thought more deeply than we about such matters, and particularly about relations between the sexes, have abstracted these two life-permeating activities as the coequal principles of Yang and Yin, which in turn they identify with man and woman. A steam engine needs not only a boiler but a flywheel. Our higher education must redress the balance in its judgment of values. It must encourage those who wish to conserve, as well as those who wish to originate, what is good, true, beautiful, useful, and holy. Only in such an intellectual atmosphere will girls learn to accept themselves as fully the equals of men.