22
PARTISAN REVIEW
In 1934 Thurber's documentation of woman's unquenchable will
to victory in the battle of the sexes was one of our happiest social
records. Today it would be about as funny as a series of cartoons
ridiculing the idea of Moscow gold or showing Bolsheviks hiding
bombs in their beards! Eighteen years have altered the relationship
between men and women as drastically as the relationship between
Russia and the United States. In the instances I know best, marriage
has changed from a battlefield to a mental hospital. Our one-time
fighting wives are now psychiatric nurses; our once-beleaguered hus–
bands have achieved the dominance of invalidism. This is a private
institution, mind you-maybe a bit like Doctors' Hospital-and it
costs the husbands plenty to be humored and "understood" by their
nurses: but they seem to like it. As to the wives, they complai "
about their lot- doesn't even a nurse have her humors?- when
they get together with the girls in the rest-room, but they do
nc~
actively, consciously think of their new role as a defeat of the will.
Nursing is the career they persuade themselves they have elected–
husband-nursing, child-nursing; they fancy their robes of office the
most becoming costume of their sex. At last they have given ove"
all this militancy and become truly female.
There is much I could say on this subject and no doubt shall.
Today it comes to my mind because of an experience over the
weekend with a little girl who came to visit
J.
They had been play–
ing peacefully side by side. Suddenly
J.
leaned over and put his arms
around the little girl who began to cry. The mother intervened
quickly. "She doesn't like to be touched," she told
J,
firmly. "She
doesn't like to be touched by
anyone."
J.
subsided and the little
girl resumed her play, smug in her inviolability.
These were out-of-town visitors; I know as little of this woman's
marriage as I do of the marriages of the various women with whom
I am acquainted in the park-I haven't the slightest idea whether
the nurse-patient relationship describes their relations with their
husbands. But the narcissistic untouchability which this mother was
encouraging in her infant daughter is completely familiar to me as
one aspect of the handling of almost all the little girls in my com–
munity. The differential treatment accorded the baby males and
females in my park is not to be missed. Let a little girl suddenly
