This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Whenever the established equilibrium between the sexes is shattered and the heretofore suppressed sex has the opportunity to rise, it imitates the behavior and mannerisms of the formerly superior sex. We have examples of this tendency in certain primitive communities. It may be during such a period of declining matriarchal structure that one peculiar form of behavior is observed-and often misunderstood and misinterpreted-namely, couvades. After the birth of a child, the father took the baby with him to bed and stayed there several days, while the mother had to perform all the household tasks and take care of father and child. It seems that the man tried to imitate the female role. Where women are dominant, everything typically feminine may appear desirable to men. One wonders whether men in that period would not have tried to bear children, too, had nature permitted.
Similar contemplations may explain the behavior of women today. In some levels of the population, smoking has become more popular among women than with men, and men have to resort to pipes in order to maintain some kind of distinction. The old American habit of women smoking pipes may have characterized social changes and an early emancipation of women during the time of American pioneering, which gave women tasks and rights they had never had before. There was more factual equality between men and women than in the old countries. The impulse, which may even counteract an initial dislike for smoking, stems from women’s longing for masculinity, as it expresses in youngsters the desire to feel grown up. Other characteristic signs of our present state of transition are tendencies among women to assume masculine attire or hairdress. All these imitations do not signify actual equality, but indicate only an attempt by women to accentuate the change in their status.
The Function of the Sexes
Each individual develops a certain conception of the role of his own sex, the acceptance or rejection of which modifies personal attitudes and affects almost every phase of everyday life. A woman’s attitude toward domestic work, for instance, is a good test of what she conceives the role of women to be. The arguments pro and can must not deceive us. We can hear reasons why domestic work is desirable and why detestable-all equally good. The number of women who prefer housework to any other job is gradually diminishing. Many women resent this kind of “profession” because they consider it inferior or humiliating; they associate it with the derogatory conception of the feminine role.
This association also keeps many men from participating in house duties. Housework has been the responsibility of women for so many centuries that it will take quite some time before men and women can look objectively upon certain duties necessary for the welfare of all.
During the period of their complete suppression women were to a certain degree excluded from artistic productivity. Actresses and dancers were socially degraded as indecent. Many women who look for their place in society now accentuate their interest in art, music, drama, dance, etc., to a point that art becomes almost a feminine prerogative. Is it not the privilege and duty of any human being, regardless of sex, to participate in artistic activity?
Many men have yielded to women their interest in the arts. A boy who is interested in studying the piano is often called a sissy. Women frequently find it difficult to induce their husbands to join them in reading books, in attending lectures or concerts, or in visiting museums and exhibitions. In fact, some women do not even try sincerely, because they are proud of this distinction between their respective interests. And men are only too delighted to pay this small price for the continuation of their supremacy.
The general concept of the masculine role seems to be that the man’s job is primarily to make money. This conception is dangerous. It places exclusively in the hands of man the power which money still maintains. At the same time, it impedes man’s appreciation of culture and general knowledge which could modify and temper his economic power. The danger of unscrupulous misuse of this power increases with the neglect of man’s cultural development.
If women continue to be deluded by the advantages of convenient support, they will prolong their dependency.
The tendency to divide the social duties between the sexes is not based on biological factors, and specialized duties are fundamentally neither inferior nor superior. They are merely human obligations. In the distribution of work, certain tasks are allotted to each sex by custom and habit; they are considered as pleasant or distasteful according to the social position of the sex which performs each particular function. For the maintenance of marital life, the task of doing housework and that of earning money are of equal importance. If one earnestly believes in equality, one will be ready to do whatever is at the moment most necessary and most constructive and attach little importance to what is generally considered the proper sexual role. Despite all their nice words, few men or women are as yet ready to practice equality. The present problems of masculine and feminine adjustment cannot be solved merely by separating masculine and feminine activities and by establishing the respective competence of any sex in one well-defined field. Such a decision might relieve the competition temporarily, but it postpones the establishment of cooperation between equals.
