Women Aren't Men

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WOMEN have many careers but only one vocation — motherhood. As a result their most successful careers are motherhood substitutes such as teaching, nursing, social work, as well as medical, psychiatric, and other scientific professions that protect the child and the family. A woman confronting the world has no greater resources than those she finds within herself. Education can do no worse than to destroy those instinctive resources. It can do no better than to enhance them. When woman sublimates her mother-instinct, in a career, she can achieve a rich, beneficent, and rewarding life. But only if she follows her vocation can she live in the fullest sense of the word. It is for woman as mother, actual or vicarious, to restore security in our insecure world — not the economic security on which we now lean far too much, but the emotional security for which the world longs as much as it longs for its daily bread.

We should look critically at woman’s evolution in our industrial society, for the record that confronts us on every side as to woman’s influence is not reassuring. The mounting divorce rate, the appalling number of youthful crimes, the deliberate neglect of children in many homes, and the looseness of sexual morality among young and old — these are merely some of the inescapable signs of a decaying moral structure in areas for which women have a prime responsibility.

The industrial revolution which has transformed our whole society created a transformation in the life of women far more profound than in the life of men. Two world wars and a depression have uprooted family life and created a nation-wide turmoil whose disorders our public and private welfare agencies have tried in vain to counteract. At the same time woman’s traditional responsibilities were augmented by challenging social and political demands. She fought successfully for the vote, for equal rights in every field of endeavor. She was forced through economic necessity and through choice into the competitive maelstrom of our freeenterprise system. About 17 million women now have daily jobs and many more are doing part-time work.

It is no wonder that women have become confused and to a great extent disoriented. None of us — not even those of us old enough to date back to the stable pre-war society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which gave us a happy and secure childhood — have lived through the pandemonium of the later years without a tremendous internal and external struggle for integrity.

The shattering of the social structure has disastrously isolated the individual; it has also accelerated the spirit of competition inherent in our free-enterprise system to an almost unendurable intensity. To the extent that there is a world trend toward socialism, I am convinced, it is psychic as well as economic. Many people are tired and frightened to a point where they can no longer endure their social isolation and the burden of an individual destiny. Only the democratic nations have the vitality, the sense of responsibility, and the moral fortitude to accept the burden of individual freedom in a world shattered by two world wars. It is an exacting but never a dull life. It is a life of constant individual decisions, of irrevocable choices made every day, every hour, for good or for evil.

It is precisely because of this temporary moral, mental, and social isolation of the individual in a democratic society that the role of woman has become of crucial importance. For woman is the cement of society. Since time immemorial it has been woman who has held the family, society, and life itself together. She did it instinctively to protect herself during pregnancy and to protect her children during their long period of helplessness. Through this fundamental need for family solidarity it is woman who has developed the art of human relationships and an appreciation of the vital importance of human behavior. Whether the conditions were primitive or whether society attained the extreme refinement of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, it was woman who created the moral atmosphere of these diverse conditions. And today woman must look back with a clear comprehension to the moral force she once exerted in the social structure and realize that she can and must save our civilization from destruction by achieving new moral standards that will conform to the very different conditions of the present day.

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Now that we have amassed so much factual knowledge of the importance of the home as the basis of society, of the importance of marital relationships, of child guidance and education in general, the role of wife and mother has become infinitely more exacting and difficult. Instead of apologizing for being a “mere housewife,” as so many do, women should make society realize that upon the housewife now fall the combined tasks of economist, nutrition expert, sociologist, psychiatrist, and educator. Then society would confer upon the status of housewife the honor, recognition, and acclaim it deserves. Today, however, the duties of the homemaker have become so depreciated that many women feel impelled to work outside the home in order to retain the respect of the community. It is one thing if women wish to work or must do so to help support the family. It is quite another thing— it is a destructive influence — if society forces women into the labor market in order that they may respect themselves and gain the respect of others.

Women must boldly announce that no job is more exacting, more necessary, or more rewarding than that of housewife and mother. Then they will feel free to become once more the moral force of society through the stabilization of the home. Then the influence they once wielded in society instinctively and unconsciously will become stronger than it ever has been, because they will go about the task with mind and emotions, knowledge and experience, the conscious and the unconscious forces, working in unison. With all the scientific knowledge we have amassed, women can and should be the standard bearers of a civilization higher in every respect than any we have ever known before. But they can only do this if they will accept the fact that their functions as women are very different from those of men. What modern woman has to recapture is the wisdom that just being a woman is her central task and her greatest honor. It is a task that challenges her whole character, intelligence, and imagination.

If we look at the social scene about us we find very hopeful indications that women, especially the young married women, have begun to realize these fundamental truths. The high birth rate is in itself a promising symptom. But further than that, many of these young women are carrying out their duties toward their husbands, their children, and the physical maintenance of the home with joyous intelligence and great ability. It is fair to say that there have probably never been in any civilization so many ideal marital partnerships in which husband and wife respect each other’s sphere of activity, and in which both share the responsibility for the education of the children.

On the other hand, it is no less true that there have never been so many women who are dissatisfied with being women and therefore with being wives and mothers. There have never been so many women who are unnecessarily torn between marriage and a career. ’There have never been so many mothers who neglect their children because they find some trivial job more interesting. I know this from wide contact with neglected children. The most pathetic are those who come from well-to-do homes. The poor child whose mother has to work has some inner security because he knows in his little heart that his mother is sacrificing herself for his well-being. But the neglected child from a well-to-do home, who realizes instinctively that his mother prefers her job to him, often hates her with a passionate intensity. These are the children who frequently get into the worst difficulties because they are the most deeply hurt and resentful.

What ails these women who consciously or unconsciously reject their children? Surface influences of a competitive, materialistic world have obscured the importance of women’s role as the repository of continuity and of purposeful living derived from their biological and social functions. Our technological civilization has atrophied their emotions, and nothing is more horrible than a woman whose instinctive reactions have been destroyed. They are far more egotistical than men, more fiercely aggressive, more insensitive not only to the beauty but to the decency of life. They have become masculine without even knowing it. In their defense it must be said that they are the victims of a general decline of emotional spontaneity in our civilization. Our scientific age is afraid of feeling. Why else should there be such a flood of books on youthful crime and delinquency, which repeat with a monotonous insistence that what little children need most in order to become stable personalities is the feeling of being wanted by their parents? What kind of civilization have we built when fathers and mothers need to have it drilled into them by psychiatrists, sociologists, and other experts that they are creating social monsters because they do not love the children they have brought into the world?

I am not trying to drive all women back into the home. The married woman who is rebellious about family life does her children more harm by staying home in such a frame of mind than by leaving them to some kindly relative or sending them to boarding school. It is the frame of mind of such women that is wrong, that must be understood and changed. For these women are equally disastrous as an influence in their working environment. God protect us all from the efficient, go-getter businesswoman whose feminine instincts have been completely sterilized. Wherever women are functioning, whether in the home or in a job, they must remember that their chief function as women is a capacity for warm, understanding, and charitable human relationships. Women are throwing their greatest natural gift out of the window when they cease to function as experts in coöperative living.

It is distressing, therefore, to hear the oft repeated plaint that woman must be a personality first and a woman only secondarily. This cliché revives in a new form the dualistic conflict between nature and spirit, body and mind, the conscious and the unconscious, which weakens all personality, whether male or female, but is especially disastrous to woman at a time when an arid and strictly academic education has already dangerously widened the gap between her emotional and intellectual capacities. Are women people? Only to the extent that they fuse their inherited and acquired characteristics into a dynamic, harmoniously functioning unity which alone is worthy of being called personality.

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ANOTHER fallacy about women which is receiving far too much currency is the accusation that they have lost the adventurous spirit of “their older sisters” who battled successfully against male domination. Agnes Rogers recently wrote an article in Harper’s magazine and a similar one in the American Scholar deploring the fact that women are only too often content with minor positions in the business world. “Their willingness to accept the status of useful but humble cog in an enterprise directed by men is baffling to me,” she said. She wants them to conquer their “humility and lack of confidence.”

Now I fail to see any exaggerated humility in modern women. On the contrary, I find too much emphasis on success and too little upon service. In my opinion, humility is the greatest possible asset in any human being, particularly in women. True, humility is the understatement of a powerful personality. It is innocence triumphant, which Emerson has described as “the most powerful critic of all that passes through its alembic.”It is the ability to understand reality as it confronts us. This ability, so characteristic of woman’s inherent personality, to adjust herself to outward circumstances, to the husband in marriage, to the employer and fellow workers in business and industry, is not a sign of weakness but of strength. The woman who tries to control situations by force and by aggressively overplaying her hand in every human relation is the weak woman trying to overcompensate for her weakness.

These are the worried, restless, immature females who complain bitterly that there are not enough women in high executive positions in the business world and in government. These aggressive, frustrated women actually make the role of woman in business and public life more difficult because more suspect. They are precisely the female types under whom neither women nor men want to work. The balanced, mature woman who knows her inner worth does not run around the world complaining of the injustice of men. She is quietly expanding her area of influence. ’This wise, subtle, and effective type of woman meets with appreciation wherever she is active, not because she is demanding recognition, but because her gifts are recognized as extremely rare and invaluable. If I were asked to define the principal quality of such exceptional women, I should say that it is the capacity to accept the triumphs of life without pride and the sufferings of life without despair. The wisdom of these truly feminine and humane personalities is summed up in the words of St. Paul to the Philippians: “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound.”

But youth is only too apt to think that it has to be aggressive if it is to make its way in our competitive society. That is untrue for women, whether young or old. The Chinese poet Tu Fu expressed sublimely the natural aspirations of womanhood in a warring world when he wished for huge wings that could be stretched out over all sensitive, suffering humanity. What the world needs today is not more competition but woman’s native genius for sympathetic coöperation. Competition is so acute because society has crumbled and left the individual atomized and unprotected. Unless we women succeed in modifying this competitive spirit through more effective coöperation between public and private endeavor, between management and labor, between the contending religious sects, between the family and the community, between one individual and another, then there is little hope for our democratic civilization. This is women’s great opportunity — to ease the acute and dangerous tensions of American life.

I am not asking women to overdo self-sacrifice to a point of self-abasement. We all know extreme feminine types who use this masochistic weapon not out of a desire to serve, but to conquer and subdue their victims. Women must learn to keep self-respect and self-sacrifice, the social and the biological functions, in balance. Such women have the most friends because they defend their own personalities while giving free play to the expansion of other personalities. Those are the women who are called blessed because they constitute the happiness of their families and of the whole community.

Such women, moreover, are not concerned with the modern cry for equal rights because they are too sure of themselves and of what they have to give to the world. They seek not parity but partnership with men.

Women have been tempted to put too much emphasis on equal rights because the slogan was used by some admirable pioneers who won us the vote, equal pay for equal work, and other desirable objectives. In many respects, however, the cry for equal rights has been a pernicious doctrine, especially in two areas, those of sex and of marriage.

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THE freedom of women has brought the whole problem of sex into a new focus. The sexual morality of our nation has never been lower, because in seeking for equal rights women have dragged their standards downward. This sex freedom which so many women are practicing is a delusion. It is a pseudo freedom which ruins the lives of many young women before their mature life has begun, because they have no scientific understanding of the ramifications of sex in the female organism. For woman cannot get away from the fact that her biological, emotional, and psychic faculties are closely intertwined. Woman’s sexuality, if it is not to be destructive to her and to society, has to be more spiritualized than that of man.

Woman runs the risk of warping her whole personality unless she uses the post-adolescent years to develop her individual human traits, her character, her mind, and her platonic idealism as contrasted with her physiological equipment. If this period of sublimation is curtailed by premature sexual experimentation, it not only leads to disappointment but it will endanger what I have emphasized as woman’s greatest need, the harmony of the sensual and the supersensual aspects of woman’s character. By seeking change as in itself of value in her sex life, she also endangers her capacity for permanent human relationships and therefore her interest in a lasting marriage and lasting friendships. The woman who guards her sex life as intimately related to her development as a whole human being is the one who is likely to make few mistakes in her emotional relationships, the one who achieves the highest type of sex life, and the one who is apt to attract, to choose, and to hold the devotion of the right husband.

The adult world is wholly responsible for the fact that youth has little guidance today in the conduct of life in general and sex in particular. Too little attention has been paid to the sexual experimentation now occurring even among the very young, because the adult world is uncertain of its attitude toward the problem. What is youth to think when a Yale anthropologist, with all the prestige of science and a university professorship, declares that we shall accept premarital sexual promiscuity as a commonplace in another generation or two?

The Churches, on the other hand, have lost much of their authority over youth because they have refused to reinforce their religious sanctions and their traditional teaching with the scientific insights of physiology, psychology, and sociology. And parents, for lack of generally accepted sexual moral principles, have surrendered so much of their influence over the behavior of their children that they now blame the school for not handling the problem more effectively. The poor schoolteachers! In our modern society they are supposed to be clergymen, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, sociologists, and educators, all rolled into one — one fallible, underpaid public servant. Obviously sex films, with which the schools are experimenting, cannot make an important contribution to this most difficult of all problems. Sex is not a thing by itself and should not be emphasized as such. If sex as a physical manifestation is going to be taught in the schools it must be brought in naturally in the study of biology, and its higher aspects must be a by-product of the whole academic program.

In the meantime the unhealthy overemphasis of sex in literature, advertising, and the films makes sexual self-expression a matter of competition like everything else. Young women are afraid of being unpopular if they do not accept the low sex standards of today and refuse to run with the crowd. What matters is how many “dates” they have— the quantity, in other words, rather than the quality of their friendships. Sex has been vulgarized and reduced to a competitive pattern because individuals are too isolated to use their sex as the basis for all human relationships. Sex is not something we can take or leave. Sex permeates and illumines the whole personality. And despite the crude, unscientific Mr. Kinsey, it is not the physical aspect of sex, but the ability to translate it into higher manifestations of permanent value, that determines the quality of a civilization.

What we need today is not a negative, puritan asceticism but a positive enthusiasm for right conduct. The best answer to the present disorientation of sex life lies in the early development of our children. If the education of mind, emotions, and character is fitted to children’s needs in our complex technological civilization, the maturing boy and girl, the young man and woman, will have such vital interests that sex will find outlets in achievement and growth of personality. Too early and too great an interest in sex by adolescents is largely the result of poverty in other areas such as the love of learning, of adventure, and the development of creative imagination. Women should be the first to realize that to remain healthy the human spirit needs daily exercise just as much as the human body. Without spirituality, without the intuitive love of the moral, the mental, and the mysterious elements of life, woman loses her whole unique influence upon the course of civilization. And nobody suffers more than woman herself if she endangers the home and the stability of an orderly society upon which her whole security depends by renouncing her rightful position as the guardian of moral values.

Because woman, if only for self-protection, must preserve monogamy and keep the home intact, it is woman who should make herself responsible for the success of marriage. Never will we be able to decrease the divorce rate until modern woman faces and accepts this responsibility as her obvious duty. Making divorce more difficult will do no good. On the contrary, our divorce laws should be uniform and a divorce accessible by common consent in those cases where gross abuses make divorce unavoidable. But in most cases it would not be necessary if young women could lead lives that permit them to mature toward the balanced womanhood I have tried to describe, and chose their husbands not as a consequence of some infantile repressions or mere sex appeal but with a view to permanent partnership. If marriages are made purely on a basis of sex, they will be dissolved for the same reason, and that is a game which women cannot win. It is a threat to their whole status in society because it implies a disrespect for the importance of the marital bonds and of monogamy. Thus the mounting divorce rate is a sign that women as a whole do not realize that they are committing what can only be termed moral suicide.

The egoistic desires of women have been so accentuated by the indiscriminate struggle for equal rights that the discipline of marriage, the subordination of self that it entails, and the adjustment of personality upon which it depends have become increasingly difficult if not repugnant to them. Far too many women have not only lost their instinct for self-protection: they have lost their sense of joyousness and their sense of humor. What do these self-centered, egoistic women expect in the man they marry — a paragon of all the virtues and a wealthy one to boot ? Even though he be a genius or a millionaire, the husband of the neurotic, introverted female is doomed to failure. If she has the one, she will begin to yearn for the other. Her mean search for personal happiness never lets her decide whether marriage should be a feather in her cap or a feather in her nest.

As I go about my social research today, especially among uprooted families living in the vast new housing developments, I am often forced to the conclusion that there are more good fathers today than good mothers. The infantilism of selfishness, the desire for a false self-expression, and a consequent desiccation of instinct lead all too many women to despise the role of housewife, to reject their children and resent the father. I fear it is too late to change many of these women. When they seek a divorce they rationalize this supreme act of selfishness by telling themselves that their children will only suffer if they grow up in a divided household. Of course they will. It does not occur to such women that theirs is the prime duty to see that the household is not divided. And though occasionally divorce may be the only way out of a deadly impasse, nine times out of ten the wife who lets her marital relationship get into such an impasse has only herself to blame.

To be sure, there are external conditions today which seriously threaten the family and make the life of women extremely difficult — constant migration, inadequate housing, poor educational, health, and welfare facilities. To remedy these defects of our society is the duty of women whose children have grown up or who for other reasons are free to devote themselves to public service. The wide gaps which still exist between our social ideals and the sordid realities need not be discouraging if we see our shortcomings as a spur to greater effort. Democracy is, first and foremost, the perpetual revelation of greater capacities in the human mind and soul. It is the only form of government that sets no bounds to the possibilities of man. Its doors all open toward the future. It converts every end into new means. And it will not get the reverence it deserves the world over until America makes manifest that democracy is not earthbound but a divine quest for humanity’s spiritual perfection. Upon woman, who is biologically close to nature and all its sublime intimations, rests the chief task of reminding the country that democracy is not restricted to the desire for creature comforts but encourages an ever expanding concept of man’s destiny.

Is this call to the psychic defense and the moral rejuvenation of our society too exacting a role for American womanhood? No, and again, no. As I said at the outset, there are already numerous indications of the reorientation of woman’s thinking as evidenced among other things by many successful young marriages of the finest type, and by an avalanche of more and yet more babies. If it is difficult to carry out the high role of woman in our modern society, it is also a great honor to be a woman in this critical historical period. Now that destruction threatens us from within and without, woman’s role in society is again recognized as the fundamental, essential, and vital one that it always has been. For as mother, woman represents the focal point of time and eternity and the perpetual triumph of life over death.