The Female Eunuch (10 page)
A single fact lies at the source of all deviations, viz., that the child has been prevented from fulfilling the original pattern of his devel- opment at the formative age, when his potential energies should evolve through a process of incarnation…thus welding the acting personality into unity. If this unity is not achieved, through the substitution of the adult for the child or through a want of motives of activity in his environment, two things happen: psychic energy and movements must develop separately, and a ‘divided man’ res- ults. Since in nature nothing creates itself and nothing destroys itself, and this is especially true in the cases of energies, these energies since they have to work outside the scope designated for them by nature become deviated…They have become deviated above all because they have lost their object and work in emptiness, vagueness and chaos. The mind that should have built itself up through exper-
iences of movement,
flees
into fantasy.
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The flight into fantasy is sanctioned in our culture, because it is part of the limitation of self-development
which we call civilization. Although some aspects of it, like fetishism and masturbatory practices, are deplored, in general it is seen as a necessary and even pleasant concomitant of repression. Whole the- ories of art have been built up on the assumption that the proper function of art was to provide a harmless fantasy expression of tendencies which would otherwise have been destructive or anti- social.
So far we have not adduced anything about the repression of psychic energy in children which would apply to girls more than to boys, for both are treated in the same way up to a certain age. Dis- crimination does begin fairly early, however, despite the staunch refusal of British educators to distinguish between boys and girls in their primary schooling. Some baby girls are still dressed in pink rather than blue, are put into frilly, fragile dresses and punished for tearing and soiling them. Some have their hair curled up and bows put in it, and are told that they are pretty and Daddy’s girl and so on. Even for the little girls who have rompers and no fuss with hair and Curly-pet and other infantile cosmetics, a system of rewards and encouragements begins to operate fairly early on. No one wants to bring up a child who doesn’t know what sex he is, and in default of any other notion of female sexuality the styles of femininity are inculcated almost imperceptibly from the beginning. The baby soon discovers how to be coy and winsome, how to twist Daddy around
her little finger.
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When little boys discover the advantages of coyness
they are eventually shocked out of them when their baby curls are shorn, but the little girl is praised and encouraged to exploit her cuteness. She is not directly taught how to do it, she simply learns by experience. It is an odd reflection that while we hear voices raised in protest against the destruction of innocence occasioned by showing sex films in the junior school, no voice is heard exclaiming at the awfulness of being flirted with by a three-year-old.
For little boys, a time eventually comes, soon or late, when the umbilical cord is finally broken, and the
relationship with Mother becomes more distant. Where that does not happen, as it does not in strong matriarchies like the Jewish family, the result is what Philip Roth lamented in
Portnoy’s Complaint
:
Ma, ma, what was it you wanted to turn me into anyway, a walking zombie like Ronald Nimkin? Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was
obedient? A little gentle- man
? Of all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires! ‘Alex,’ you say, as we leave the Weequahic Diner—and don’t get me wrong, I eat it up: praise is praise, and I take it however it comes—‘Alex,’ you say to me all dressed up in my clip-on tie and my two-tone ‘loafer’ jacket, ‘the way you cut your meat! the way you ate that baked potato without spilling! I could kiss you, I never
saw
such a little gentleman with his napkin in his little lap like that.’
Fruitcake
, Mother. Little
fruitcake
is what you saw—and exactly what the training programme was designed to produce. Of course! Of course! The mystery really is not that I’m not dead like Ronald Nimkin, but that I’m not like all the nice young men I see strolling hand in hand
in Bloomingdale’s on Saturday mornings.
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What happens to the Jewish boy who never manages to escape the tyranny of his mother is exactly what happens to every girl whose upbringing is ‘normal’. She is a female faggot. Like the male faggots she lives her life in a pet about guest lists and sauce béarnaise, except when she is exercising by divine maternal right the same process that destroyed her lusts and desires upon the lusts and desires of her children.
Little boys can get out of their mother’s way, eventually want to and are encouraged to. Little girls are not. It is agreed that ‘girls take more bringing up’ than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired
result is to ensue.
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A girl is early introduced to her menial role, as
her mother teaches her household skills (
mirabile dictu
!) and her recoil from external reality is reinforced by the punishments she gets for wandering off on her own. While little boys are forming groups and
gangs to explore or terrorize the district,
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she is isolated at home,
listening to tales of evil-minded strangers. Her comparative incarcer- ation is justified in the name of protection, although the home is the most dangerous place there is. She is taught to fear and distrust the world at large, for reasons which are never clearly stated. As a form of forearming this forewarning is notoriously unsuccessful. Sexual desires are not so lacking in resource that they cannot attack little girls as they go upon those errands and journeys that are sanctioned by Mother. When a little girl who missed her bus rang her mother from the bus-stop one evening, so spending the sixpence that would have been her fare for the next one, her mother told her to walk home because she didn’t have the car. The child went on her way weeping and terrified, and was accosted by a smiling stranger who abducted, raped and strangled her. The commonest result of the dark warning system is that when little girls do meet an exhibitionist or do happen to talk to a stranger who does something odd to them, they are too frightened and guilty, as well as too worried about the effect on their parents, even to tell them. It is a contributing factor in the pattern of child violation that little girls think of themselves as victims, and cannot even summon the energy to scream or run away. Because they are prevented from understanding the threat, they can have no adequate defence. The bitterest irony is that the child violators are themselves products of the same clumsy condi- tioning.
While little boys are learning about groups and organizations, as well as the nature of the world outside their homes, little girls are at home, keeping quiet, playing with dolls and dreaming, or helping Mother. At school they use their energy to suppress themselves, to be good and keep quiet, and remember what they are hearing and doing. At home they perform meaningless physical rituals, with no mental activity attached to them. So the sensual and intellectual are even more widely separated in them than they are in their brothers. If the sensual retains its hold. they prefer to work with their hands,
cooking, sewing, knitting, following a pattern designed by someone else. The designers, the master-cooks and the tailors are men. If women become ‘intellectuals’ they are disenfranchised of their bodies, repressed, intense, inefficient, still as servile as ever. Some geniuses have broken right through the chain reaction and have seen it for what it was, but most creative women bear the stamp of futility and confusion even in their best work. Virginia Woolf saw some of the way, but it cost her too much; George Eliot was one of the few who burst right through her straitjacket. The difference may have been one of the energy of the psyche, or of intelligence, or simply that Eliot was plain and Virginia was graceful and lovely. Whatever the case, the foundations of the conflict were laid in their infancy.
I would not be doing justice to girls if I were to imply that they ac- cepted all their enculturation without a struggle. The heaviness of maternal pressure in little girls to be neat and sneaking is very often met with the same degree of resistance. The growing girl may refuse to keep her room neat, may insist on mucking about with boyish affairs, even to the extent of joining a male group and fighting to maintain her place in it by being twice as tough as any of the boys. She may lose all her hankies and hair-ribbons, rip her knickers climbing trees, and swear and swagger with the best of them. This
A girl whose spirits have not been dampened by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always
be a romp…
Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p.87
is patronizingly referred to as going through a difficult phase, but we may find evidence of the duration of this kind of resistance over years and years, until puberty delivers the final crushing blow. The
tomboy
as this energetic rebel is pejoratively called may be of any age from five to fifteen; she may not be a tomboy all the time, either because she enjoys the coddling that neat, pretty little girls get, or because she has come to realize that it is advantageous to operate in the favoured way, or because she is simply denied opportunity or
incentive to discover how vigorous she could be. Generally it is the little girls who are given presents of pretty things and spoilt and flattered who capitulate to the doll-makers earliest. The pattern of reward is kept up: at first it might be sweets and dolls’ clothes, then dresses and shoes, and even the occasional perm and eyelash dyeing, and then pretty clothes for being seen at weekends in, outings, movies and all that.
However, even the little girl who gives in to the pressures applied by her mother and the rest of the feminizers is subjected to conflicting influences. At school her pretensions to jewellery and cosmetics are severely frowned on. She is required to do some form of physical exercise for a fixed period every week, despite Mother’s notes pleading all kinds of delicacy and indisposition. She is given respons- ibilities, made to join in team efforts, all activities which, if her fem- inization is proceeding at good pace, she finds very unattractive. She would rather gossip and giggle with her confidantes in a corner of the playground than play soft-ball, even if soft-ball is a feminized form of a masculine sport. She does not like to get sweaty and dirty. Although her teachers praise her manners and her neatness, they lament her increasing dullness, and she may even feel the contempt of the more ‘masculine’, that is, active, girls in her class. She may be reviled as a cissy, a sook, a teacher’s pet, a namby-pamby, a sneak. But if Mummy’s darling has trouble at school, the successful and active members of the school community run into trouble at home. Out of school, there is not the scope for team activity and adventure that school provides. Housework seems intolerable, and domestic conflicts can become a source of serious anxiety, so that many a teacher has discovered that a good pupil comes back from the summer holidays changed beyond recognition, principally by the abrasion of her training at home. As she grows older she finds her activities more severely curbed; innocent exertions are ruled out because she is ‘too big for that sort of thing now’. Sometimes she
feels
that she is being catapulted into a sort of shameful womanhood, and resists desperately, to the point of regressing into infantile and destructive behaviour. She may become unaccountably sullen or clumsy, long before the approach of puberty makes such changes explicable. Many of the changes thought to be intrinsically connected with puberty are actually connected with the last struggles of the little girl to retain her energy. The primary school has educated her as a person, making no distinction between boy and girl. We may expect the conflict to arise when she moves up to the junior school to find that, as a capitulation to womanly objections about the im- position of the masculine model of education on to girls, she has the unenviable options of studying dressmaking, domestic science and so forth. The bitter irony of having been inducted into a masculine- contoured form of education is counterpointed by
Girls sometimes wish they were boys—You can see what man does—His work is wonderful—What is greater than man’s work? Man—Who made the man?—Made by mother’s training—Abraham Lincoln’s mother—Great responsibility to train future President—Cannot tell what any child may become—No greater work than child training—The wife may think the husband’s work greater than hers—Her work monotonous and tiresome—So is business—Women’s work is not less than a man’s—What Ruskin says about the wife—Man’s success dependent upon woman—His health depends on his wife’s cooking
—The fate of a nation may depend upon a wholesome meal—If both man and woman were in business life would lose much brightness—Woman makes social life— Moral life—Keeps man thinking—Values of home education—Daniel Webster’s table manners—Woman embroiders man’s life—Embroidery is to beautify—The embroidery of cleanliness—Of a smile—Of gentle words.
