What's Wrong With the American Woman?

by DON CORTES

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THERE can be no doubt about it any more. A big black cat has been let out of the shopping bag. Within the last twelve months, first Look and then Life have pried open the lid of America’s Pandora’s box and disclosed another AWFUL TRUTH. Along with the late-lamented five-cent cigar, the receding hairline, mounting crime, polio, what to do about Junior, fluoridation, moral tranquilizers, Elvis Presley’s new wiggle, and Mr. Dulles’ latest faux pas, we have a new problem on our hands — the American Woman. We have a nostalgic memory of what she once was. We have an omnipresent notion of what she now is. And we have a romantic vision of what she might be. But the three are not at all the same.

The situation is paradoxical, to say the least. For never in history was Eve better cared for than today in the United States. The American woman, Mr. Russell Lynes assures us, is (or should be) “the envy of every woman from Zanzibar to Minsk. (She certainly gets around!) She has learned to steer a shrewd course between the Scylla of inhibited Victorianism and the Charybdis of rampant feminism. She has become the mistress of the purse, the arbiter of taste, and the umpire of consumption. She has infiltrated her sinuous way into every corridor of government and proved herself a formidable work horse at the grass-roots level. She outvotes the American man by some 2.4 million votes an election, she outlives him by seven years a life, and she outbuys him by 400 per cent a sale. She outdrives him on the freeways, if not on the fairways. She outdives him on the springboard and outchalks him on the blackboard. She matches him Martini for Martini, Camel for Camel, Wrigley for Wrigley, and bet for bet. She consumes one third of the United States work pie, including quite a bit of the crust. She earns 50 per cent more than she did fifteen years ago, and she retains a healthy appetite for more.

Her triumph has been even more sweeping at home. She has domesticated Adam into ungrumblingly changing the diapers and perambulating the pram. Her house, bulging with some $1750 worth of machinery that makes it as efficient as an engine room, is the admiration of the universe. Her daily life is passed in melodious luxuriousness with the leitmotif of the drier answering the recitative of the washer. It costs $8 billion a year to clothe her, $1.3 billion to preserve her, and a mere $400 to $600 a week to remove a pound of her exquisitely mortified flesh. The variety of her youthful good looks exceeds the supply available in any other country on the globe. In a word, she’s the best-dressed, most luxuriously housed, effortlessly propelled, lavishly cosmeticized, painlessly obstetricized, tenderly husbanded, and most protected, respected, supported, and petted woman in the world. She has everything she could possibly desire, unless it’s that ultramodern, feminine-designed house built around a central kitchen with a shiny new stove fitting neatly into the sink.

And yet, unbelievable as it may sound, there’s something wrong. The Garden of Eden (lighting by GE, locomotion by GM, sets by MGM) is here, but Eve herself is unhappy. The trouble, Mary Ellen Chase would have us believe, is that she is trying to drown a sense of marital dissatisfaction in a frenzied ocean of volunteer work. For Margaret Mead the trouble is that the American woman is still up on her famous pedestal at a time when that household object has become a sociological antique. Emily Kimbrough, on the other hand, is of the opinion that the American woman’s life is an unknit whole and that she needs years of grace in which to “sew up the seam between her house and her outside activities.” Phyllis McGinley thinks that all the hubbub would quickly die if men only stopped being Peeping Toms trying to take psychological snapshots through what is left of her veil, Cornelia Otis Skinner, for her part, is convinced that she has won the battle of the sexes, heels down, but still refuses to believe it. As for the psychiatrists (who are men), they claim the whole trouble is due to the fact that the American woman is too masculine and the American man too feminine.

These sophisticated explanations build up to an awe-inspiring pyramid. It is, I suppose, a rash thing to lumber in where daintier feet have dared to tread, but I feel impelled to say that, authoritative though they may seem, these elaborate ratiocinations complicate an essentially simple problem. The truth is closer to earth — so close indeed that the editors of Look inadvertently tripped over it when they noted that “the American woman of today is taller and less hippy and lives longer than her grandmot her.”

Yes, we can forget all that stuff about antiquated pedestals and volunteer charily work. The basic trouble is really physiological and dietary. The trouble with the American woman is simply that she is brought up on milk.

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THE first thing we must get out of our heads, if we are to appreciate the American woman’s present predicament, is the idea that milk is fattening. The truth is that milk isn’t fattening; it’s elongating. Just think of the calcium a pint of it contains! Ever since the turn of the century, when the American woman adopted the milk bottle as a serious post-pubescent pastime, she has grown steadily more calciferous and longer-boned. The statistics tell us that the average American woman today is almost half a head taller than she was in 1900. That means that she has been elongating herself at an approximate rate of one inch a decade! And because she has been elongating herself at this frightening pace, she’s been losing those lush, baroque contours which Man has found so irresistible ever since the first scales fell from the first Adam’s eyes.

Last summer an Englishman created a sensation at the Harvard International Seminar by getting up and saying, “The American girl is like a Jaguar: she’s very fast at first, but then she suddenly breaks down and won’t move another inch.” We can be grateful to our transatlantic cousin for speaking his mind with such John Bullish bluntness. But at the risk of striking a nationalistic note, I must say that he’s got his similes confused. The American woman isn’t like a Jaguar at all; she’s like a Thunderbird — sleek, streamlined, difficult to maneuver, and with comfortable room for only one passenger next, to the driver.

There was a time, in the robust prelacteal days of John Singer Sargent, when the American woman gloried in the plenitude of an ample bosom and resorted not unwillingly to the seductive camouflage of “gay deceivers.” But those days are gone. The contemporary model of American womanhood is of a radically different design. She has a pencil-slim silhouette. Her bust has been ironed out and her hips flattened. She has that slinky, vertical line, best emphasized by slacks and sandals, which Vogue and other arbiters of taste have made so fashionable in recent years.

This physiological revolution has had two farreaching consequences: it has defeminized Eve and demoralized Adam. For with the gradual change in her silhouette there occurred a subtle change in Eve’s ideals. One day she discovered, while looking at herself in the mirror, that corsair pants looked much better on her streamlined figure thim the old bouffant skirt: so she took to slacks. Then sin noticed, like Alice in Wonderland, that she was growing markedly taller; so she went into low heels and cut her hair short. It only remained for the collegiate bobby-soxer to take the final, logical hmge: she climbed into blue jeans and a man’s shirt and has stayed there ever since. The revolution WaS over.

That is, the physiological revolution was over; the real revolution had just begun. For, having tried on Adam’s clothes, Eve decided to try on the rest. She threw out the sidesaddle and put on breeches. She ripped off the veil and donned a welder’s helmet. She swam the Channel and she flew faster than sound. She went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She scrapped her flutelike soprano and developed that froglike croak that she has kept up in every musical comedy since Oklahoma! She started throwing the discus and putting the shot. She has even been threatening of late to eat her apple unaided and to experiment in parthenogenesis. The only thing she hasn’t done so far is to drive locomotives and shovel coal — like her Russian cousin — but who can tell how long it will be before she adds these refinements to her lengthening repertory?

And what did the American man do? Well, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. He had to take what was offered. Some American men took to drink. Others took to pin-ups. Daydreaming at the pedestal of Marilyn Monroe’s rotund femininity was the only protest he was allowed to get away with. You can explain this penchant of his as some sort of deep-rooted atavistic trait. It certainly goes to prove that the American man is nowhere near as up-to-date as the American woman, and that deep down within him he’s just a retrograde old sentimentalist, with a secret hankering for Eve’s old line — a hankering he can only indulge nowadays in brief, stolen moments of vicarious voluptuousness.

Yes, it’s a sad story — this demoralization of the American male. Back in the gallant days of. let us say, Edgar Allan Poe, when Eve was placidly content to sit and “be” and didn’t want to “do” and “become,” the American man had quite a way with the ladies. He did, it is true, place her on a pedestal, but he kept the pedestal well tended. He was full of respectful admiration for the way she tinkled the upright and stroked the harp. He paid her outlandish compliments on her downcast eye and Gioconda-like smile. He laid extravagant bouquets at her exquisite little feet, and he compostal touching, if sometimes heavy-footed, sonnets in her honor, which she received with the reclining grace of a Madame Récamier. But all that went under the sofa when she took to milk and became an activist. It requires a real act of will to oiler (lowers to a welder’s helmet, to turn a delicate compliment on a thirty-foot shot-put, or to compose an ode in honor of a Waring Blendor. The poetry went out of the American home, and with its flight Yankee matrimony became a mechanized model of what A. P. Herbert once called “holy deadlock.”

And so little by little the American Adam forgot how to treat his Eve. He still opens the door for her and he carries her bundles, but he does it in what Dr. Vance Packard has described as a “hypnoidal trance,” The old fire has gone out of him. He no longer pays Eve compliments on her ripe femininity and he’s lost his old touch with the sonnet. She, for her part, no longer knows what to do when — once iti an aging moon — she is told that she is as lovely as Venus. I sually she says “Now, now! or “Don’t hand me that line!” or else It’s nice of you to say so,” or simply and most crushinglv “Thank you,” as though you had just passed her the salt.

This sorry state of affairs can give rise to unfortunate misunderstandings. Let us take, for example, what happens when she goes down to Mexico for a visit. The second day, outside of American Express, she makes the acquaintance of Manuel, whose dark, liquid eyes captivate her. Thai night, if he’s a practical, down-to-earth sort of fellow, he says to her after a quarter of an hour, “You are the most beautiful Señorita I have ever seen! After a half hour he exclaims, “You are the amor of my vida!” And after an hour: “Un besoto, nada más! — Just one little kiss!” If, as is just as likely, he’s a bit of a romantic, he will be more flowery. “You have the voice of a nightingale and your eyes arc like the Milky Way,” he whispers into her ear before the first fifteen minutes are up. Another quarter of an hour and he sighs, “My Cleopatra, when you move, it is like a ship in full sail!" And after an hour: “Your lips are like a blushing rose. Queriila, will you be miner”

When she gets back to her hotel late, very late, that night, Mary Anne’s heart is pounding like a m am bo drum and sleep is out of the question. So she sits down and writes her mother:

DEAREST MOM,
I’ve fallen in love with this heavenly country. It’s so full of music, color, romance.Vnd the men! What MEN! . . . Oh. and I must tell you. I’ve met the most, fascinating Mexican. He has dark flashing eyes that are enough to make you want to swoon, and he says the most beautiful, poetic things. . . . His name is Manuel, and he is passionately in love with me. . . .

Three days later Mary Anne comes back to her hotel room, her heart no longer pounding like a mambo drum, and writes:

DEAR MOM,
This has been the most hectic week, and Elsie and I are exhausted. There have been so many things and people to see. . . . We ve decided not to stay in Mexico City any longer, but to go down to Yucatan to see the Mayan ruins and to rest up a little. . . . I still love Mexico, but Elsie and I are beginning to think there’s some truth in that old saying aliout the Latins being lousy lovers. . . .

What, has happened in the interim? Simply this. The dav after being introduced to Manuel, Elsie says to Mary Anne at breakfast, “Oh, Mary Anne, do you know what Manuel said to me last night while we were dancing? He said the most beautiful things— that I had a voice like a nightingale and eves like the Milky Way; that I looked like Cleopatra and ... oh yes, that I had lips like a blushing rose! He’s passionately in love with me. . . . And guess what? He even asked me to marry him!”

The next day Mary Anne and Elsie pack their hags and leave — without Manuel — for Yucatán.

Yes, it’s a sad story all right. But then, what can you expect? You don’t have to consult Omar Khavvám to realize that it’s just the sort of thing that’s bound to happen when girls start drinking milk.

I write, mind you, as one who has no Latin, Persian, or any other ax to grind in this matter, and as one who has few illusions as to what the “cowed and eunuchoid males” of America (to borrow John Fischer’s phrase) ran do about it. But as a dispassionate student of history I can’t help recalling Schopenhauer’s famous definition of the fair sex as “that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, short-legged race. It’s easy, at this late date, to dismiss him as a misguided, negative-thinking Teuton. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on the sour old sage of Frankfurt; he was, after all, an unreconstructed and unhomogenized early Victorian, who never got a chance to visit Atlantic City and this land of triple-decker sundaes. And so we can’t really blame him for having, like so many of us, underestimated the American woman’s extraordinary capacity for growth.