Words of Fire (24 page)

(3) (It is not only fair but interesting to note the reverse: that among men dedicated to equality the book seemingly achieved respect and stature that many women have been unable to accord it.)

In connection with the first point I have seen clear thinking, crisp American types of women (women intolerant and contemptuous of the more blatant codes of a male supremacist universe) puzzling briefly and inadequately over the work and then dismissing it. There is the attractive, young
unmarried scientist who is vague but feels the author talked too much about “sex” somehow; there is the married-new mother-engineer in her mid-twenties who has already contributed to the invention of breathtaking calculus machines but who was offended by the brutal and revolutionary discussions of motherhood and marriage—“All she seems to respect are career girls and lesbians.” And so on until one wonders where the author might have begun.

These, however, are far from the sum total of feminine reaction to
The Second Sex
. To be sure, there was the play wright-actress who kept it open upon her backstage dressing table reading aloud between curtains to the feminine half of the cast and “indoctrinating” them, in the outraged and distressed opinion of the male director. There is the woman reviewer writing in the
Daily Worker
a shamefully brief and limited but nonetheless exuberant and intelligent review. There is the young, lovely blonde and vaguely literate secretary sitting in her apartment with the weighty thing propped upon her thighs, dictionary but inches away, forcing herself with passionate dedication to endure and, as far as possible, absorb seven hundred pages of what she describes as her “liberation.” And then, of course, there is the twenty-three-year-old woman writer closing the book thoughtfully after months of study and placing it in the most available spot on her “reference” shelf, her fingers sensitive with awe, respect on the covers; her mind afire at last with ideas from France once again in history,
egalité, fraternité, liberté
—
pour tout le monde
!

Let us consider first of all the reception within the American Left, which will take little space, sadly enough. As with the Negro question it seems American Marxists, Communists in particular, have been far in advance in the western world in their
recognition
of the “woman question.” (One modifies to “western” here because reports from and of China are gratifying if erratic and in some ways suspicious.) Certainly whatever foresight the American left may dare to credit itself with now might possibly include early misgivings about the realities of the experience of life for the Soviet woman. That she has been economically liberated (in Beauvoir's view also) seems no longer to be a question of conjecture. However, we have been obliged for years now to shift uncomfortably in our seats at those endless stories about small Soviet boys who demurred on becoming doctors when they should grow up because that was something or other thought of in their country as “woman's work.” Granting the charm of the stories in our land where the medical profession's hostility to the female sex persists with an avidness that belongs to another century, we cannot help but wonder in which age of the socialist miracle will the concept of
anything
(beyond childbearing)
¹
not be thought of as “woman's work.” Similarly, this writer has never been impressed with the official photos from the USSR, which continue to show a representation in the officialdom of the nation in which
there is no reflection at all of the fact that in that nation also half of the population are women.

As regards the theoretical bounty of literature on the question from the first socialist country in the world—one may search in vain for material of depth and stature. Pamphlets giving accounts of this or that experiment in child care, birth control, etc., do not miraculously supplant heavy theoretical work which would indicate a serious approach to the woman question in the Soviet Union. In fact, the dearth of such material seems but a primary indication of the state of the question within the Soviet Union. Moreover, who can be impressed by the reports of the primitive official attitude of urging women to become “seductive” again, which is paraded in our American press with what seems justifiable mirth, alongside of photographs of stoic-faced Russian women in the “new” fashions which would be assigned to memories of the corny thirties in our own over-fashion-conscious nation.

Adornment, decoration, have not lost their symbolism. Woman, the creature of seduction throughout her epochs of slavery, has sought to give the personal decorative arts some semblance of dignity beyond the obvious degrading truth, but it has only been a game. The profoundest discussion of this fact will be found in the pages of
The Second Sex,
where the writer brilliantly destroys all myths of woman's
choice
in becoming an ornament; and the charm of it is the photograph then on the dust jacket which presents a quite lovely brunette woman, in necklace and nail polish—Simone de Beauvoir. Nor need we despair for the promotion of beauty anywhere. Scent, jewelry, rouges have undoubtedly assumed some cultural identification with womanhood that, hopefully, will henceforth be independent of an association of the centuries of slavery which has been the lot of woman. Such a time does
not
exist, however, at the moment. And one longs to see official indictment against the fierce meaning of the “seductive” woman emerge from the Soviet Union before its women are humiliated by returning to the “way of women” in the eyes of the disparaging capitalist nations. There is implicit in the “return” the suggestion that woman liberated was a mistake. The rest of the world's women cannot afford that suggestion.

American Communists have possessed the leisure (their social programs in other areas have for obvious reasons been limited as far as the reality of action is concerned in recent years), and a not-to-be-underestimated impetus (in the form of a collection of what must be the most vigorous and insurgent women anywhere in the world—American women Communists) to lift the woman question beyond the ordinary sphere of the “battleof-the-sexes” -type nonsense which is so tragically popular in our country. It is only conjecture, but one cannot help but feel that though the American woman is far from enjoying anything remotely akin to “equality” with
men in her nation she is, subjectively speaking, possessed of a liberated attitude that must have a great deal to do with her historical experience in the New World. (Distinguished, however, from the rest of the “New World” excepting Canada perhaps, where the women of our America, chic and modern on the streets of Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro, are nonetheless tied to a Latin and Catholic spirit of oppression that is horrifying to the most backward of the women of the United States.) We have been creatures of the frontier adventure; we have been the peasant girls off the ships from Ireland and Poland set loose in the industrial chaos of our social order; we have been even the black slave woman paradoxically assuming perhaps the most advanced internal freedom from a knowledge of the mythical nature of male superiority inherent in our experience as chattel. We have been the Jewish woman finding liberty in picket lines. We have not voted long, but we have a freedom in our gaits on the pavement that suggest almost an intuitive awareness of how that franchise was won. It is this multi-experienced class from which American Communist women must be drawn then, and it is they who have noisily, unscientifically, improperly, harmfully, hysterically, neurotically—and
heroically
—battled to place the question of the status of women in its proper place in the consideration of the most advanced thinking section of American political action and thought. That so much of the fight against “male supremacy” in the American Communist movement can be so negatively described is not the fault of women. It is the fault, as Beauvoir would insist, of situation.

Nor should this imply that there has not been a decisive acceptance and encouragement of advanced ideas from that part of the American Communist movement which is male. Indeed at this time within the Party there are attitudes and official programs which allow for special consideration of work with and for women.
²

It was perhaps a mark of the insignificance in which the estate of woman is actually held that there did not appear, to my knowledge, a major work challenging the precepts of Simone de Beauvoir, either in our country or in Europe.
³
It would be a mistake to believe that the absence of any real negative furor is some indication that the American intelligentsia held out its arms with love to
The Second Sex
. It seems more intelligent to suppose that, on the contrary, the ideological struggle to maintain the male-dominated society felt no real threat in a work which was not going to ever reach those masses of women who might most effectively make use of it because:

(1) The overwhelming majority of American women (like the overwhelming majority of American men) do not read books, beyond a thin slicing who will forsake more popular materials occasionally in behalf of a “historical romance” or, less frequently, a contemporary “sensational” novel;

(2) That microscopic section of our people who might be called the American woman intellectual—or even embracing the middle class woman with enough intelligence (leisure she has) to read—were [not expecting] to find a volume purportedly dealing with
their
problems in the alien idiom of a scholar, a thinker, and an essayist. One feels (with all respect to the translator's intrusions or aids, as the case may be) that she is not less enamored of words than ideas, and we are a people, as oft noted elsewhere, who have grown accustomed to thought reduced on the tabloid sheet far below its least common denominator.

Still for all of that, a great woman has made a great study and written, qualifications aside for the moment, a great book. And the world will never be the same again.

It remains for the writer who can with superior theories attack and demolish the forlorn and difficult roots of some of the existentialist thought of Mlle. Beauvoir, where it needs attack and demolition, and hopefully such a writer will necessarily emerge from the ranks of those who embrace a more far-reaching historical materialist view of life than Simone de Beauvoir. Until then
The Second Sex
will remain beyond the vague and shabby criticism of dogmatists of all persuasive shades.

Surely for the students of the history of the development of the proletariat, there are few moments when the monumental haphazard of history can be more acutely felt than when one first learns that once workers, baffled and outraged at their clear oppression and desiring vengeance
somewhere
, first turned their fury
not
on the owners of the machines—but on the machines. Man—angry, frustrated, seeking his enemy, groping, attacking what
seems
. The picture comes to us of our ancestors bent over the fields in ancient times of famine, cursing and beating the earth with their fists.

It is a telling commentary on the nature of man's history that we have in due course learned not to attack our tools or the earth—but as regards the relationship between men and women (and, of course, between human and human) we yet see one another as the enemy.

Elsewhere can be read accounts and statistics of the truly primitive status of women in most of the world. It is, regardless of all other questions barring peace and liberation of the world's working classes and colonial peoples, the greatest social question existent; its depth and horrors and universality sometimes overlapping, even certain of those paramount issues mentioned above. Women, it cannot be said too loudly or too often, are half the human race and their condition sooner or later we must see as the more accurate measure of the distance we have come from the age of nothingness which was our beginning.

It would seem that the modern world has largely come to accept the woman of the United States as the symbol of the “free woman.” Her reputation appears far more dramatic and expansive than that, for instance, of the Soviet woman, the reality of whose life might more justifiably claim the title, perhaps. Along with other almost mysterious stereotypes, the foreign attitude on the American woman always seems to have to do with her height; her
chic
ness (often, the stereotype insists, without real beauty); her angularity; and her freedom. The writer is reminded of a time in Buenos Aires when she was in the company of a young Argentinean woman lawyer who, though not out of her twenties, had circled the world a couple of times and was currently playing a major and politically important role in the peace movement of her nation. Preparing to make a meeting somewhere I drew on a suit jacket and tossed a shoulder strap bag across my shoulders and stood waiting for our departure in low-heeled plain pumps. At any time I should have considered the costume an unflattering one and to be explained by the chaotic nature of that visit to Argentina and by the necessities of shortly notified travel. I will not forget the eyes of the Argentine woman traveling the length of my frame (I am not a tall woman, really) and noting the outfit, and perhaps the stance, and saying aloud finally from the reaches of her shawls and earrings and long, flowing hair:
“Ah, la norteamericana tipica!”
It was neither a compliment nor altogether an insult; it was a remark of wonder. Multitudes of United States women would have been offended by the association of my particular unattractive outfit of that afternoon with the
essence
of North American womanhood, and with good reason. Yet for all of it, there was a kernel of the recognition of a characteristic that is not without foundation. The tailored suit, the shoulder strap bag and the flat-heeled or low-heeled shoe is the mark of the fashion-indifferent woman who desires freedom and utility of movement and service in wearing apparel. It is the mark of women in the past who have believed they had something to do in the world other than “sit around and look pretty.” It is not an empty stereotype in that such modes of costume have in the past been inextricably identified with the feminist; the woman professional; the radical woman; and, of course, the lesbian. Each of these classes of women have seen in fashion, ornament, its
true meaning
and have forcefully rejected it to the horror of both male and female society. The argument is far from over.