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PAHISAN REVIEW
Appomatox-perhaps because their victory would be still too shocking
to most readers. The consensus, however, of nearly all his other
cartoons, and of nearly all other witnesses, is that woman is really
winning the war. Women already own seventy percent of the wealth
and direct ninety percent of the purchasing power of America. And
she has already won a more decisive victory in that crucial battle
sector: the family. Since Mother has the leisure to attend lectures
and read books, she appears as the font of wisdom at home, while
Father is so absorbed in making a living for the family that he can
only cut a ridiculous figure as a crude ignoramus. The young boy
growing up in this atmosphere can nourish his natural Oedipal
feelings with a generous dose of contempt. So he is given another
great push to identify with Mother and to find her feminine role
more interesting, attractive, and powerful. A few years later the
young boy becomes a young man in a world where women are (just
like his mother, but unfortunately not his mother) open and ag–
gressive competitors. Already staggering under the burden of an
excessive attachment to Mother, he is supposed to approach sexually
these other females who compete with him in every field, and to
playa masculine role toward them. The denouement may be left
to the reader's imagination.
Great waves of homosexuality have come and gone in the past,
sometimes coinciding with exceptional levels of civilization, as in
Greece, Florence, Elizabethan England; what is novel in the Amer–
ican situation is that the present wave has come in a culture where
woman has been accorded an unprecedented status of equality, on
the basis of which she has already moved ahead to secure dominance.
We seem to be in transition to a matriarchy, and the present period
may be only the temporary interregnum of maladjustment. Already in
an enormous number of ways women in America have become more
like men, and consequently men more like women- so that in certain
circles of a metropolis like New York one can now see evolving
before one's eyes a society of neuters, where men and women are,
respectively, less masculine and less feminine in comparison with the
couples of other nations and cultures.
The great experiment may fail, as Freud gloomily prophesied,
but in the meantime one can still admire the American race in this
new domain of its adventuring abroad. A nation of pragmatists, once
