MEN, WOMEN AND SEX
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would fundamentally seem to share with our society its low estimate of
the female role. And when she asks that each sex
be
indulged in its
special work-aptitudes, she is not restoring to women their lost pride
in
their female function, she is merely attempting to minimize the
contradictions between her case for sexual differentiation and her true
feminist preference.
One does not mean, of course, to press on Dr. Mead the female-ist
position which is the logical outcome of her own social observations.
It is a hard logic for any mature woman to have to face in our culture,
but especially for the professional woman who has already accepted,
however much she may question their worth, the "masculine" privileges
granted her by feminism. But it is important to remind both Dr. Mead
and her readers that there is all the difference in the world between a
society which
permits
such of its women as have other than female
capacities to pursue extra-domestic lives, and a society which virtually
compels
its women to seek extra-domestic occupations in order to feel
valued. The latter is the situation in our own society, with results that
are wide and fearful. The woman with talents other than for wifehood
and motherhood is driven to prove, by all sorts of artifacts--of demeanor
and deportment; even by natural childbirth and breast-feeding her
babies-a femininity which she mayor may not truly possess but which,
so long as there is a biological sexual difference, she feels required to
flaunt as part of her human equipment. The woman of no special gift
for extra-domestic work is driven to contrive one-like the maid I once
employed who, in order to feel that she too had a career, used the salary
she earned doing my housework to pay another woman to do her house–
work.
If
there is a single cause to which we can assign the particular
nervous restlessness of the modern woman it is this refusal of our
culture to allow her to feel that to be a woman is to be
enough.
But this is only the woman's side of the problem-the effect upon
the one sex of the undesirable pressures which arise from our undif–
ferentiated upbringings. The effect upon men is equally disastrous, as
Dr. Mead realizes. Perhaps even more than women, men feel impelled
in adulthood to prove a specific sexuality which they never learned as
children. No less than women, perhaps even more, they suffer the
results of being trained in an aversion from their physical selves. The
whole canon of D. H. Lawrence's work, but in particular the essay "Men
Must Work and Women As Well," is a study of this modern condition,
in
its social and political as well as its personal consequences. But
Lawrence's insight, now so unpopular, is of a kind to which Dr. Mead,
the child of her times, dare not aspire-it would, indeed, be hard to
