Femininity (31 page)

The point is this: While the sentiments of motherhood are designed to collect the
ambitions a woman might hold in her heart and direct them toward the goal of nurture,
even the nurturing woman can be too ambitious and powerful for the public good. Aggressive
nurturance looms as yet another unfeminine fault, or perhaps as a contradiction in
terms. Although managerial direction of the career of a husband or child has produced
some important reputations in art, music and literature, the Stage Mother who encourages
her offspring’s talent and the Professional Widow who works tirelessly to keep her
husband’s work in the public eye are still perceived as unpleasantly pushy.

When it comes to her own success, it has never been becoming for a woman to try hard.
Sweat under the arms, a clenched jaw, an unladylike grunt—these are, after all, the
unavoidable signs of straining effort. A man may keep his nose to the grindstone,
but a woman had better stop now and again to powder hers. Appearance, we are told,
is more feminine than result. Unremarkably, the tiny handful of ambitious careers
with certified feminine allure remain those glamorous big dreams with a slim chance
for realization (actress, singer, model, interviewer on television) in which looking
attractive is a part of performance, so the desire to be noticed can be partly excused.

But not totally excused. Not long ago a lady was someone whose name appeared in the
papers only at birth, marriage and death, and a castrating bitch was a woman whose
competence equaled a man’s. Despite the celebrity mania of the last few decades, unreserved
approval of an outstanding woman is still debatable in the public mind, and when asked,
she is expected to profess as an article of faith that her husband and children come
first, or would come first were she lucky enough to have them. Talent, ability and
intellectual promise integrate uneasily with a feminine ideal romantically connected
to the superior accomplishments of husband or lover. A lust for power, status, money
or immortal fame stands outside the framework of womanly
values on the grounds of brash immodesty and selfish indulgence, if not high romance.

Metaphoric reminders of the feminine ideal are doubly instructive when they cast the
ambitions of women in a monstrous light. Think of the glamorous facade on a chilling
Faye Dunaway in
Network,
the sugary frosting on a poisonous Anne Baxter in
All About Eve.
As a frightening image of femininity abandoned, the ugly witch with her crooked nose
and hairy chin is all the more Satanic when she rides her broomstick at midnight,
subverting the trusty symbol of loyal housewifery, the moral goodness of sweeping
clean, to nefarious ends. In A
Tale of Two Cities
Madame Defarge makes sinister use of a nurturant task, her knitting, to implement
her vengeance. Childless and driven, she embodies the terrifying excesses of the French
Revolution. Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler, possibly the two most ambitious and destructive
females in theatrical history, are childless women; a third, Medea, destroys her children
in an act of revenge. Well into the Sixties, before the new feminist movement, it
was conventional in books, movies, plays and psychoanalytic writing to ascribe success,
achievement and, especially, destruction, in women to motherhood denied and nurturance
thwarted.

By contrast, as we are forever reminded, the ambitions of men, their manly striving
and competitive struggles, find inspiring metaphors in the acts of erection, copulation,
ejaculation, in seminal fluid itself, and in a fairy-tale picture of the physiology
of conception in which eager, aggressive, adventurous sperm are imagined to elbow
each other out of the way in their dash to reach an impassive egg. (As it happens,
the swimming motions of sperm are random, not directed. They are actively transported
upward through the female tract by estrogen-induced secretions, cervical filaments
and muscular contractions along the passage. Sperm of unusual size and shape are shunted
aside, destroyed and discarded. Scientific information, however, is slow to catch
up with popular myth, particularly when it contradicts a cherished bias.)

Motherhood and ambition have been seen as opposing forces for thousands of years.
Largely because of the new
feminist movement, the internalized conflict as well as the external reality recently
have become a subject of renewed attention. For many women, perhaps most, motherhood
versus personal ambition represents the heart of the feminine dilemma. In the work
of psychologist Carol Gilligan, ambivalence in making and sticking to some hard decisions
(abortion, career choice), long considered a feminine weakness, has been shown to
stem from the ethics and responsibilities of motherhood—the importance of “caring
relationships”—as women perceive their role.

But if ambition and motherhood have been in conflict, femininity and motherhood have
not had a happy conjunction either. The swollen belly, edema in legs and feet, the
heaving flood tide of birth, the breast as a lactating organ, and the fatiguing chores
of child care are not glamorous, sexy, delicate, romantic, refined or passive, as
these words are usually defined.

The desire to be a mother can be a powerful ambition, too, especially when the opportunity
is slow in coming. Responsive to the ticking of the biological clock, the motivation
to produce and raise a child of one’s own (for whatever reason, and the reasons are
legion) and the gratifications that a child may bring are spurred by an urgency that
is as unique to femaleness as motherhood itself. On the other hand, motherhood is
so universally perceived as the ultimate proof of the feminine nature and the intended
purpose of female existence that few women have the courage to admit that they do
not have the gift for it, or that given a choice, they would rather marshal their
energies, their sensitivities and their gratifications in other directions.

Duality of purpose is built into female biology in ways that are hard to resist (and
without the freedom of contraceptive choice, in ways that are hard to avoid). The
single-mindedness with which a man may pursue his nonreproductive goals is foreign
not only to the female procreational ability, it is alien to the feminine values and
emotional traits that women are expected to show. The human sentiments of motherhood
(goodness, self-sacrifice and a specialty in taking care of the wants of others) are
without question desirable characteristics for the raising of children, but I would
argue strenuously that women do not possess these traits to a greater degree by biological
tendency than men.

Without a radical restructuring of a social order that works well enough in its present
form for those extremely ambitious, competitive men whose prototypical ancestors arranged
it, and who have little objective reason, just yet, to change the rules, what hope
is there for a real accommodation of dual-purpose ambition? The corporate hierarchy
has no compelling motivation to modify what it demands of its career employees, and
the prizes at the top of the heap go to those who pursue them with single-minded devotion.
Pursuit of achievement in literature, science and the arts is a single-minded ambition
that will never be restructured, for the competition, understandably, is fierce. Whatever
form it takes, satisfying work that earns a decent income is always in short supply,
and men are right when they say that the required expenditure of time and effort leaves
little room for life’s other rewards. Yet a man, if he wishes, may acquire a woman,
or a succession of women, to provide him with the rewards of emotional support, practical
nurturance, a home and a family. A woman responding to the same needs and desires
must split in two and become the traditional reward herself, at least that part which
is firmly rooted in biological fact.

Is it unfair for a woman to expect that her desire to be a full-time mother should
be accommodated for an unspecified number of years? Should another woman avoid motherhood
entirely in order to secure the full chance that any man might have for economic autonomy
and satisfying work? Does a society that understands the need for successive generations
have a moral obligation to ease the way for a third woman intent on fulfilling both
aspects of her dual-purpose ambition? Should one set of expectations be viewed as
a predictable retreat into a feminine tradition of dependence, another as a singular
expression of unfeminine aspirations, and the third as an admirable solution possible
only for the extremely ambitious, extremely energetic few, or for those who are lucky
to live with more mildly ambitious, nurturing partners?

There are no easy answers to these questions.

M
Y AIM IS NOT
to propose a new definition of femininity, one that better suits the coming decade
or one that lays claim to moral (or physical) superiority as some sort of intrinsic
female province, but to invite examination of a compelling esthetic that evolved over
thousands of years—to explore its origins and the reasons for its perseverance, in
the effort to illuminate the restrictions on free choice.

Historically, as I have attempted to show, the fear of not being feminine enough,
in style or in spirit, has been used as a sledgehammer against the collective and
individual aspirations of women since failure in femininity carries the charge of
mannish or neutered, making biological gender subject to ongoing proof. The great
paradox of femininity, as I see it, is that a judicious concession here and there
has been known to work wonders as protective coloration in a man’s world and as a
means of survival, but total surrender has stopped women point-blank from major forms
of achievement. However femininity is used—and if one fact should be clear, it is
that femininity
is used
—all approaches toward what men have defined as proper masculine pursuits are set
up with roadblocks and detours that say, “For Femininity, Turn Here,” or “For Femininity,
Turn Back,” and the lonesome traveler who wishes to ignore the signs still proceeds
at her own risk.

During femininity’s own cautious movement through centuries of social upheaval, at
least three nostalgic objectives—woman as symbolic aristocrat, woman as humble servant,
and woman as glamorous plaything—became melded into a prettified composite that understandably
shows its strains. In whatever
terms the divisions are cast—the lady and the whore; the provocative and the chaste;
noble, altruistic nurturance and childlike dependency—the embedded contradictions
leave every woman uncertain: Has she correctly followed all the instructions? Additionally,
the conflicts that are rife in ladylike refinement, a submissive demeanor and dazzling
allure guarantee that women will be divided among themselves, suspicious of other
women as they seek to master an impossible formula to win the approval of men.

There is no denying that femininity’s dependence on established traditions, be they
styles of dress or codes of behavior, offers a psychological grip on one’s sexual
identity, particularly for those whose dimorphic characteristics fall within the statistical
overlap that is biologically normal, yet far from the cultural ideal. (This holds
true for masculinity as well. An androgynous appearance may be fine for a person of
androgynous persuasion; it is not so fine—and can be devastating—when androgyny is
not the intention.) What happens next is that certain arbitrary cues and symbols—a
hair style, an inflection, an attitude toward work—become the social determinants
of gender, and they in turn act as conservators of outworn social values and as levers
against social change. In the great cultural need to differentiate one sex from the
other with absolute clarity, there are burdens of proof on each side of the aisle,
but while the extremes of masculinity can harm others (rape, wife beating, street
crime, warfare and a related inability to concede or admit defeat), the extremes of
femininity are harmful only—only!—to women themselves in the form of a self-imposed
masochism (restraint, inhibition, self-denial, a wasteful use of thought and time)
that is deliberately mistaken for “true nature.”

Most hurtfully, perhaps, femininity is not something that improves with age, for girlishness,
with its innocent modesty, its unthreatening impudence and its promise of ripe sexuality
in the rosy future, typifies the feminine principle at its ephemeral best. Women who
rely on a feminine strategy as their chief means of survival can do little to stop
the roaring tide of maturity as they watch their advantage slip by. No doubt a sociobiologist
would argue that this female misfortune is, after all, the way things are
supposed to be, for the cultural clock merely reflects the biological clock and ticks
off the years of reproductive readiness that are finite in number.

This will not do. Gender does ultimately rest on how the species reproduces, but while
femaleness will continue to be defined by the XX chromosomal count and its reproductive
potential, many women have ceased to define themselves by their reproductive role.
(Men were never constrained, anatomically or philosophically, to see themselves primarily
as fathers, for reproductive biology is not demanding of the time and energies, and
consequently the commitment, of males.) Earning a living, however much the neo-Darwinians
would like to frame it as male-against-male competition and survival of the fittest,
has become something other than that. Increasingly it is a necessity for both of the
sexes, with parenthood fitted in optionally as a gratifying interest, not as service
to the species or moral duty (or perpetuation of one’s genes). The post-reproductive
years grow longer and longer, putting into perspective an emerging truth: the problem
is not that some women are feminine failures, but that femininity fails as a reliable
goal.

So much for theory. Women still remain emotionally and financially needy, and understandably
they will grasp at strategies that seem to have worked in the past and that appear
to be working for some right now. Even as they reintroduce themselves to the higher
heel, the shorter skirt, the thinner brow, the longer lash, and step back with that
inimitable, feminine self-conscious absorption to admire the effect and scrutinize
for imperfection, they are thankful they need not put up with the full armature of
deceits and handicaps of earlier generations. For things do improve, and progress
is made, and they are, in their awareness if not yet in their freedom to choose, a
little closer to being themselves.