Words of Fire (25 page)

This writer, for instance, finds the drab, colorless garb of men as distasteful as any other outrage of arbitrary fashion and is inclined to feel that the decorative traditions of woman's wear, whatever their origins, lend a desirable and attractive quality to life, to existence—insofar as such fashions do not intrude on comfort, health, or safety.
⁴
However, to feel thus is not an excuse to disparage the truly advanced views of women who before and
since George Sand have rebelled against the insanity of much of feminine attire; or not to take issue even with Simone de Beauvoir when she declares:

We may well consider this to be perhaps the most “reactionary” paragraph to be found in the pages of this book. It is well to remember that even though the author might herself demur or take offense at the description, Simone de Beauvoir is a soldier; it is a mistake not to see her as an angry woman because she has properly and successfully divorced herself from the “anti-man” precepts of her historical feminist forebears. As a soldier she is occasionally given to the
expediencies
of warfare. Whole chapters are given to the demolition of the myth of “the feminine,” the social origins of this arbitrary phenomenon. Thus she willfully will accept concepts of dress and behavior for women in order to do battle with more fundamental areas of their oppression. However, if one may separate the argument for the moment from the matter of the woman question, we may consider that “insurgency” as such is hardly a destructive attitude in life—even keeping to the question of fashion. It seems in the matter of clothes that in the heat of summer a short trouser for men is clearly desirable to a long one, but at the outset of the popularity of the “Bermuda” short for men (in our eastern cities, at least) the occasional revolutionary who appeared on the streets in such apparel was the source of amusement, ridicule, and open contempt (places to which he could and cannot yet be admitted, though, needless to say, his “essentials” are well covered, if that is what society cares about!) Today it is not unfair to note that the legions of the formerly amused drop with relief and gratitude into these sensible kinds of apparel. This applies also to sandals, open shirts, etc.

Mlle. Beauvoir is actually careless rather than reactionary when she implies that the initial martyrs of a cause do not serve an essential and inexpendable purpose. If this writer prefers as a matter of perhaps misguided tastes certain of the more frivolous habits of feminine dress, it is but a matter of
taste
and not to be defended at the expense of those women, historical and contemporary, whose stouthearted campaign to dress as they
please, now make it possible for this writer or Simone de Beauvoir to appear freely on the streets (at least, in the U.S.) in slacks, if the mood so compels us. It is another measure of freedom not to be discredited. It may be such an attitude which has lent itself to the flat-heeled, giant-striding stereotype of the American woman. In that sense, with all respect to the women of France and Latin America, the women of the United States have no cause to apologize for the stereotype. I have had the opportunity to see and live for short periods among women of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and good numbers from the Caribbean, and it may be said that at this moment in history the women of this country possess an objective circumstance of relative freedom which is unknown to other women in our hemisphere.
⁶

Thus when one speaks comparatively of anything, the compared is liable to assume whatever dimensions its opposite does not possess. As long as an observer is able to report passages like the following speaking of our own times, it becomes clearer on what rests the celebrated “equality” allegedly enjoyed by the American woman:

Not to even become involved in the variants on the place of woman which the world's religions may or may not alter to one degree or another as is the case with Islam or Christianity, Catholicism or Protestantism, etc., we may still suppose that woman condemned to stay indoors through the hours of light would have been of little use in helping to clear the American fields or sowing grain. Similarly today American journalists try to find a desperate amusement or frivolity in the fact of the liberation of the women of China from the most barbaric forms of their former oppression. They cannot see that, suspending the liability to “Communist sympathy” for a moment, a nation in fertile birth, or in a
renaissance,
be it young America or ancient China, cannot afford the traditional misuse, and therefore virtual uselessness
of half its people
. The frontier demands work, hard work, and a dedication to the future. There is not the time to clutter it with the worthlessness
of the uselessness of women. Nothing could better indicate the
artificial
nature of their oppression to begin with. If the Communists of China have indeed ideologically elevated woman to a place of dignity which is beyond her mere economic status, this is hardly a point of jest, but one of the more inspiring developments of modern history.

I have remarked heavily upon the sociological roots of the comparative equality of American women because such sources are not to be confused as having come from some benevolent features of our principal religious ethic drawn as it was from the Judeo-Christian doctrines of the Mediterranean which set woman as firmly as ever in the encasement of subservient immanence.

Today in the United States our national attitude toward women and their place, or finding it, is one of frantic confusion. Women themselves are among the foremost promoters of the confusion. They have been born into a cultural heritage which has instructed them of a role to play without question and in the main they are willing to do so. And yet, therein hangs the problem: housework, “homemaking,” are drudgery; it is inescapable, women flee it in one form or another. They do not always understand their own rebellion, or why they want to rebel or why
they
deprecate, more than anyone else really, what the rest of the nation will always insist, so long as it does not have to do it, is the “cornerstone” of our culture, the “key” to our civilization, and the “bedrock foundation” of our way of life. As for the housewife who has to endure it, she floods her afternoons with soap operas; buys a fantastic percentage of the pulp escapist literature that is produced in this country; eats too much for her health or figure; and invariably persists in exploding the entire myth day after day on the radios and television programs of America by shrugging a little, and saying, when asked, “And what do
you
do?”—“
Oh me
,
nothing
—
I'm just a housewife
....”

The ripened confusion as regards what women “ought to do with themselves” (and as distinguished from the blatant undiluted male supremacist ideology found in another sphere to be discussed later) is typified by the mixed-up if clearly well-intentioned speech given by a woman, Agnes E. Meyer, at the 47
^th
Annual Meeting of the American Home Economics Association in June, 1956.

After quoting Emerson's dubious and ambitious remark to the effect that “civilization” is “the power of good women,” she spoke of the rebellion of women against “what seems” to them “the boredom of family responsibilities; others complain that not enough women have high positions in government and industry....” She then proceeded (with only indirect justification, if any) to lay blame for much of woman's frustration at the door of the feminist movements of the past which, she declared, “taught women to see themselves as the
rivals
of men rather than as partners.”
⁸
(Agnes
Meyer's emphasis.) Mrs. Meyer then summed up, unwittingly, in a single paragraph what amounts to the very essence of the confusion:

Somewhere it has escaped the attention of the most intelligent, active sections of American women, which Mrs. Meyer certainly belongs to, that there exists in the nature of “homemaking” an indestructible contradiction to usefulness. Housework, care of the family, is but humankind's necessity of function.
They are the things requisite to existence; to allowing oneself to do something else
. The human impulse, if we may believe the obvious in history is to
produce
, or to
transform
nature. Simone de Beauvoir speaks of it:

Then she is explicit:

From this we may consider the further remarks of Mrs. Meyer, “No wonder the average housewife is confused. She is no longer sure what society expects of her.” Therein hangs the fallacy. It is all too clear that “society” in this instance would be all too willing to “expect,” permit—in fact, demand—of woman that she stay quite where she was in the dark ages. It is woman herself who has wrought the changes in her condition: she has demonstrated and gone to jail; chained herself to the capitol gates of London and Washington for the right to vote, own property, and alter
divorce laws. Failing that she has made the life of man miserable in pursuit of these and other goals. What, Beauvoir insists, woman desires is freedom. She is a subjective being like man and like man she must pursue her transcendence forever. This is the nature of the human race. The problem, then, is not that woman has strayed too far from “her place” but that she has not yet attained it; that her emergence into liberty is, thus far, incomplete, primitive even. She has gained the teasing expectation of selffulfillment without the realization of it, because she is herself yet chained to an ailing social ideology which seeks always to deny her autonomy and more—to delude her into the belief that that which in fact imprisons her the more is somehow her fulfillment.

However, that woman is a creature of potentialities beyond those ordinarily prescribed for her does not today escape some of even her confused spokesmen. Mrs. Meyer in the same speech attacked the “insidious” attitude “which tempts women to . . . a preoccupation of glamor.” Says she:

This last has been placed even more strongly than might seem necessary. But the sense of refutation of the shallow values imposed upon women is beautifully apparent. The wholesomeness of such a view is sharply contrasted with the tenor of the new (and not so new) male sex publications where the glorification of woman as sex object has reached a new and inglorious height. In these publications men are encouraged and even shown how to relegate an entire sex to the level of one long, endless, if one is to believe the fantasies (and one might add, boring), animal relationship.