30 years ago ... WOMEN AGAINST THEMSELVES.

from the January/February 1971 issue

"Women were better off when the only taste they got of the competitive world was in cutting each other's throats over a cup of tea."

"Women are already ahead, and the best they can get out of `liberation' is a setback."

"Woman respects man for his strength.... Should a wife become her husband's equal, she would lose some of that respect and he would lose his self-respect."

"I don't care for women's liberation. I prefer the strong arms of my husband about me."

"I would rather that my husband have more prestige at his career, and I be only the lady of the house."

"Everything about us man has made--not woman. [Women] have got to be kidding when they say they want to help run this world. They are fighting a losing battle if they hope to equal men."

These are all actual quotations from women of our own time and place. One is from that sterling example of shrinking femininity: Shirley Temple Black.

When women marched for equal rights last August, a female group in New York gave "Adam's Rib" awards to men "for discriminating against women," and a St. Louis dissident proposed that the semicentennial celebration of woman suffrage be transformed into "be nice to a man day."

Why?

How do these women who don't want to be considered fully responsible human beings, with equal rights and opportunities in a democratic society, get that way? Why does a psychologist conclude from a study of college women that "women are prejudiced against female professionals and ... firmly refuse to recognize them as the equals of their male colleagues"? Why does Leslie Ford remark that "women would rather be taught by a third-rate man than a first-rate woman"?

It goes back a long, long way, and it's going to take more than demonstrations and conferences to undo it. And since in this country women make up 53 percent of the population, and most men are indifferent or opposed, we'd better try to understand those Women Against Themselves.

Theirs is the view of the female sex as secondary, ancillary, what Gillian Tindall calls "the humble we-live-only-through-men attitude." Woman to them is primarily sexual, a walking incubator, her true function to serve men and rear children. You can't even call them Aunt Thomasinas, for (aside from the fact that people who think Uncle Tom liked being a slave have never read Uncle Tom's Cabin) I have never heard of a slave who approved of and advocated slavery. Nor were there any German Jews who thought the Nazis were right and that Jews deserved to be put in concentration camps and gas chambers. Nor, outside of mental hospitals, are there any destitute people who consider their poverty the proper order of society and who would rather be poor than prosperous.

Yet here we have a sizable proportion of articulate American women who honestly believe that they are inferior, that the male should be dominant, that the husband and father should be the family "king," that wives should obey their husbands, and marriage should be a dictatorship instead of a partnership. They also believe that women ought to be paid less than men for the same work (otherwise they might pull all wages down, and then they themselves would have less to spend), that women ought not to aspire to administrative or executive jobs, and so on, through all the rest of the tenets of the patriarchal system.

They prefer to deal with men (and men expect to be dealt with) by indirection, evasion, subterfuge, by the "power behind the throne" syndrome--a classical symptom of self-hatred. And when they are challenged, they have one answer: it's a necessary consequence of the differing biological makeup of male and female.

Only it isn't: it's deep-rooted, it's millennial, it's massive, but it's purely sociological. It has its origin not in muscle but in mind.

Since every human being has both a father and a mother and inherits from both, the infant son or daughter is first a human, only second a member of his or her sex. In other words, if we are to discover why so many women complacently or enthusiastically accept and advocate an auxiliary role, we must determine whether the dichotomy apparent between the sexes is biological or social, inborn and inescapable, or the product of conditioning.

Only an imbecile would deny that there are obvious biological differences between the sexes; if there weren't, we would still be reproducing by fission. The catch is that those differences, outside the primary sexual characteristics, are statistical. They refer to averages only. To put it another way, most men are physically larger and stronger than most women, but some women are larger and stronger than some men. And the same thing applies to mental bent.

Fifty years ago, in that faulty but brilliantly suggestive book The Dominant Sex, Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting pointed out the very illuminating fact that, whichever sex is dominant in a given society, the characteristics of that sex are supposed to be those we in our patriarchal society call masculine, while those of the subservient sex are supposed to be those we call feminine. We say men are adventurous, freedom-loving, free-ranging, daring; women are home-loving, conservative, timid, devious. What we mean is that dominance and subjection--not nature--breed such traits. Anthropologists (for example, Margaret Mead) have confirmed this since. The truth is that in an equalitarian society these traits would be individual not sex-determined.

Our training started in infancy. It started in the infancy of our remote ancestors. It is a social and educational hangover from the days when cavewoman couldn't join her mate as a hunter (unlike the lioness) because half the time she was pregnant or nursing a baby. Gradually, to quote Emily Jane Putnam, "He delegated to her all the menial and unpleasant tasks, reserving for himself the pleasant and congenial ones." (Later on, if he himself was exempted from labor, he made of her a sex object and a show window.) He still does one or the other: does anyone give up power gladly? But today we have labor-saving devices and the pill.

Then why didn't women rebel long before they did, and why do many still fail to rebel? Partly because, in Clara Claiborne Park's words, "People may grow up lazy and without commitment if they see no scope for the demanding virtues expected of the dominant group." It is certainly easier and pleasanter to let someone else work for one's keep. It is easier and pleasanter not to have one's leisure destroyed by duties and obligations (as any reluctant schoolchild will tell you). Very many human beings--male and female--are lazy, self-indulgent, and greedy. The males are forbidden or discouraged to be that way; the females are not. Only the really mature can extirpate or control such atavistic traits, and unfortunately most of us mature physically but not psychologically.

But the contented housebound woman will say, "That certainly doesn't apply to me. I work hard, and `man's work is from sun to sun but woman's work is never done.'" Quite true: only a tiny minority of women live in pleasurable otiosity. But ask any one of these hardworking housewives whether, all in all, she wouldn't have preferred (other things being equal) to have married a man who could have afforded her such a self-indulgent life; if she has respect for the truth, she will have to admit it.

And the girls who go to coed colleges with the conscious or unconscious intention of finding a husband, the girls working because they have to but consciously or unconsciously marking time until they can corral a man into matrimony--whereupon they will leave their jobs, promptly and forever--are just as much conditioned to being members of "the second sex," ancillaries and dependents instead of full participants in life, as is any Gigi trained to achieve comfort and luxury as a kept woman. They may be more respectable but they are equally male-oriented and male-subordinate. They are planets revolving around a sun, who would rather revolve than be suns in their own right. A young woman with an important editorial position told me she was leaving her job to be married. "And is your fiance leaving his job because he is getting married?" She looked at me as if I were insane.

Of course, there are many anti-feminist women who aren't lazy or greedy. They are victims of their conditioning. A character in one of John Wyndham's novels calls them smug:

   Smug women are the worst; their profession is being women and they hate any
   women who make any other kind of professional success.... [They are]
   willing to be nothing better than second-class citizens, taught to go
   through life as appendages instead of as people.

Laziness and greed are minor factors. Lifelong teaching is the main culprit. From the time they were old enough to understand words, separateness of the sexes was dinned into their innocent ears. "Play with your doll, Mary, and leave Johnny's toy engine alone." "You mustn't hit Johnny--girls don't fight." And when they suffered scrapes or bruises, Mary was expected to cry, Johnny to bear it stoically "like a man." The one big aim for them both was never to be taken for a tomboy or a sissy.

At school, Mary was expected to be good in reading and Johnny in arithmetic; Mary was taught sewing and cooking, Johnny carpentry or mechanics. Mary was supposed to help Mother, to make her bed and set the table; Johnny was free of such household chores. They were both accustomed to seeing Daddy come home from work and sit down and read the paper or watch television until Mother had dinner ready, even if Mother had an outside job, too. Their high school counselor discouraged Mary from any interest in engineering or medicine or law; the highest to which she could aspire was to be a Girl Friday to a male employer. Above all, she must conceal any "unfeminine" achievements or interests or the boys wouldn't like her--and the most important thing of all was someday to have a husband and be a mother.

It all led up to the day when Johnny and Mary, both college graduates, went hunting for their first jobs, and Johnny was assured that he could rise as high as his ability would let him while the first and often the only question asked of Mary (unless she planned to be a teacher) was, "Can you type?" Or if Johnny and Mary belonged to a blue-collar family, Mary gravitated naturally to a place as waitress or salesgirl; even if she had demonstrated an eccentric aptitude for electricity or plumbing, the union wouldn't have let her in.

If you take any child of either sex and inculcate in it from infancy the idea that it is inferior, that it should be submissive, passive, acquiescent, frivolous, then that's the kind of adult you'll get. And that's the way 99.75 percent of these Women Against Themselves were reared.

Don't blame Mom, that poor old scapegoat. Mom herself had a mother, and she had a mother, and so on back to prehistoric times. It is going to take a long, long struggle to re-educate the products of that biased rearing. But it has got to be done if we are ever to have a truly human society. Perhaps the rebellious generation growing up today will accelerate it--though hippie girls seem for the most part to obey the dreary old rules.

Gore Vidal is one man who has put it in a nutshell:

   It is to be hoped that men and women will be able for the first time [to
   be] equals, no longer reacting to the sick game in which the man thinks the
   woman means to trap him ... and the woman thinks she is being natural to
   want to capture him and sign herself up for a life of dull subservience.

Or in the words of that fine old pioneer, Jeanette Rankin: "Men are not the enemy. It is the woman's responsibility to free herself."

And she never will until she has opened the minds of the Women Against Themselves.

Miriam Allen deFord was a distinguished essayist, biographer, novelist, journalist, historian, and poet; author of Up-Hill All the Way, a biography of her husband, Maynard Shipley (one of the original signers of Humanist Manifesto I); and a crime reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.