24
PARTISAN REVIEW
energy of an ego which , unlike ours, was licensed to thrust itself out–
ward upon the world . If we have experienced man's brute battle for
power as a terror, often visited directly on ourselves and our children,
we have also known this other powerfulness, not our own , set before
us as a measure of human aspiration . To have some link with male
power has been the closest that most of us could come to sharing in
power directly; to have no link with any form of male power, however
petty and corrupt, has meant that we lived unprotected and vulner–
able indeed. The idea of power has, for most women, been inextrica–
bly linked with maleness, or the use of force ; most often with both.
But we have also experienced, more intuitively and unconscious–
ly , man's fantasies of our power , fantasies rooted far back in his
infancy, and in some mythogenic zone of history. Whatever their
origins, for most women these male fantasies, because so obliquely
expressed, have been obscured from view. What we did see , for cen–
turies, was the hatred of overt strength in women, the definition of
strong independent women as freaks of nature, as
unse~ed ,
frigid ,
castrating, dangerous; the fear of the maternal woman as "control–
ling, " the preference for dependent, malleable, "feminine " women .
Margaret Mead suggests that the opening of the American frontier
required that a different kind of valuation be placed on female qual–
ities and that' 'strong women, women with character and determina–
tion , in fact women with guts , became more and more acceptable."
However, she acknowledges that women were still expected ro be
capable of "pleasing men"; and as the West was opened and a new
leisure class began to establish itself in the cities , the' 'strong" female
of the frontier declined in value , as Veblen and Emily James Putnam
make abundantly clear . That
all
women might at some profound
level be the objects of men's fear and hatred has only slowly begun to
melt into our awareness through the writings of some post-Freudians ,
and it is an insight which women still resist . Karen Horney remarks:
Is it not really remarkable (we ask ourselves in amazement) when
one considers the overwhelming mass of this transparent mate–
rial, that so little recognition and attention are paid to the fact
of men 's secret dread of women?
It
is almost more remarkable
that women themselves have so long been able to overlook it . . . .
She suggests that behind women's obliviousness of this male dread
