STEREOTYPES
STEREOTYPES
BY FLORENCE GUY SEABURY
If Clarissa Harlow could have stepped out of her pre-Victorian world to witness some of the women stevedores and “longshoremen” now at work along the New York water front, she would certainly have fainted so abruptly that no masculine aid could have restored consciousness. If we can believe the 1920 census, a goodly number of Clarissa’s timid and delicate sex are toiling gloriously in the most dangerous and violent occupations. Nor are they only engaged in handling steel beams and freight, running trucks and donkey engines, but as miners and steeplejacks, aviators and divers, sheriffs and explorers—everything, in fact that man ever did or thought of doing. They have proved, moreover, as successful in such a new occupation as capturing jungle tigers as in the old one of hunting husbands, as deft in managing big business as in running a little household.
But the census bureau, compiling all the facts of feminine industry, forgot to note that woman might perform these amazingly varied operations, outside the home, without changing in any measurable degree the rooted conception of her nature and activities. She may step out of skirts into knickers, cut her hair in a dozen short shapes and even beat a man in a prize fight, but old ideas as to her place and qualities endure. She changes nothing as set as the stereotyped image of her sex which has persisted since Eve.
The Inquiring Reporter of the New YorkSunrecently asked five persons whether they would prefer to be tried by a jury of men or women. “Of men,” cried they all—two women and three men. “Women would be too likely to overlook the technical points of the law.” “Women are too sentimental.” “They are too easily swayed by an eloquent address.” “Women are by nature sentimental.” Almost anybody could complete the list. Ancient opinions of women’s characteristics have been so widely advertised that the youngest child in the kindergarten can chirp the whole story. Billy, aged ten, hopes fervently that this country may never have a woman president.“Women haven’t the brains—it’s a man’s job.” A. S. M. Hutchinson, considerably older than Billy, has equally juvenile fears: that the new freedom for women may endanger her functions in the home. Whatever and wherever the debate, the status and attributes of women are settled by neat and handy generalizations, passed down from father to son, and mother to daughter. For so far, most women accept the patterns made for them and are as likely as not to consider themselves the weaker vessel, the more emotional sex, a lay figure of biological functioning.
Optimists are heralding a changed state in the relationship of men and women. They point to modern activities and interests as evidence of a different position in the world. They say that customs and traditions of past days are yielding to something freer and finer. The old order, as far as home life is concerned, has been turned topsy-turvy. Out of this chaos, interpreters of the coming morality declare that already better and happier ways have been established between man and maid.
It sounds plausible enough, but the trouble remains, that, so far, it isn’t true. The intimaterelationship of men and women is about as it was in the days of Cleopatra or Xanthippe. The most brawny stevedorette leaves her freight in the air when the whistle blows and rushes home to husband as if she were his most sheltered possession. Following the tradition of the centuries, the business woman, whose salary may double that of her mate, hands him her pay envelope and asks permission to buy a new hat. Busts and bustles are out, flat chests and orthopedic shoes are in, while the waist line moves steadily toward the thigh—but what of it? Actualities of present days leave the ancient phantasies unchanged.
Current patterns for women, as formulated by the man in the street, by the movies, in the women’s clubs and lecture halls can be boiled down to one general cut. Whatever she actually is or does, in the stereotype she is a creature specialized to function. The girl on the magazine cover is her symbol. She holds a mirror, a fan, a flower and—at Christmas—a baby. Without variety, activity, or individuality her sugary smile pictures satisfying femininity. Men are allowed diversity. Some are libertines, others are husbands; a few are lawyers, many are clerks.They wear no insignia of masculinity or badge of paternity and they are never expected to live up to being Man or Mankind. But every woman has the whole weight of formulated Womanhood upon her shoulders. Even in new times, she must carry forward the design of the ages.
One of the quaint hang-overs of the past is that men are the chief interpreters of even the modern woman. It may be that the conquest of varied fields and the strain of establishing the right to individuality has taken all her time and energy. Or it may be that the habit of vicarious expression has left her inarticulate. Whatever it is, in the voluminous literature of the changing order, from the earnest tracts on “How It Feels to Be a Woman,” by a leading male educator to the tawdry and flippant syndicated views of W. L. George, masculine understanders take the lead. And the strange part of their interpretations is that they run true to ancient form. Old adages are put in a more racy vernacular, the X-ray is turned on with less delicacy, but when the froth of their engaging frankness disappears, hoary old ideas remain thickly in the tumbler.
Take the intimate life story of a girl of theyounger generation—Janet March—written by that good friend of women, Floyd Dell. The blurb on the jacket of the book announces that she moves toward “not a happy ending but an intelligent one.” And the end? Janet finds her mate and the curtain falls to the soft music of maternity. “One has to risk something,” Janet cries. “All my life I’ve wanted todosomething with myself. Something exciting. And this is the one thing I can do. I can”—she hesitated. “I can create a breed of fierce and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers.”
As a conclusion this is acceptable to any one with a heart, but wherein is it intellectual and not happy? Queen Victoria, the Honorable Herbert Asquith, or the Reverend Lyman Abbott would be equally pleased by its one hundred per cent womanliness. And how does it differ from our cherished slogan, “Woman’s place is in the home”? Only because Floyd Dell cuts Janet in a large, free-hand design. The advance pattern calls for a wealth of biological and gynecological explanation, pictures the girl as a healthy young animal who “smoked but drew the line on grounds of health at inhaling,” and,following the fashion of peasants in foreign countries, consummated the marriage before it was celebrated. Yet Janet, who claimed her right to all experience and experiment, finally raises her banner on the platform of fireside and nursery.
Despite its unquestionable orthodoxy, Janet March was retired from circulation. But no one has successfully dammed the flowing tide of W. L. George. He draws with somewhat futuristic effect, at times, but his conclusions are those of the old masters. “No woman,” he enunciates authoritatively, “values her freedom until she is married and then she is proud to surrender it to the man she has won.” Or take this: “All women are courtesans at heart, living only to please the other sex.” Wherein does this differ from the sentiment of Alexander Pope who, one hundred and fifty or more years before the birth of W. L. George, declared:
Men, some to business, some to pleasures take,But every woman is at heart a rake.
H. L. Mencken, stirred by debates about the intelligence of woman and her newer activities, essayed “In Defense of Women,” to put his oldwine in a fancy bottle, but it was the same home brew. Generously conceding brains to women, he proves his point on the evidence that they are used to ensnare men, who weak-minded and feeble in flight are usually bowled over in the battle of wits. “Marriage,” he says, “is the best career a woman can reasonably aspire to—and in the case of very many women, the only one that actually offers a livelihood.”... “A childless woman remains more than a little ridiculous and ill at ease.”... “No sane woman has ever actually muffed a chance.”... “The majority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex hygiene and birth control species are simply those who have done their best to snare a man and failed.”
In H. L. Mencken’s favor is his absence of the usual gush about feminine beauty. He declares with refreshing honesty that in contrast to the female body a milk jug or even a cuspidor is a thing of intelligent and gratifying design. Of woman’s superior mental ability he says, “A cave man is all muscle and mush. Without a woman to think for him, he is truly a lamentable spectacle, a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterouscaricature of God.” What a pity that women use all these advantages of superior mentality and ability only in the age-old game of man-hunting. But do they?
D. H. Lawrence shares this philosophy of the chief business of women, and he is much more gloomy about it. In fact, he is decidedly neurotic in his fear of the ultimate absorption of man. Woman he describes perpetually as a great, magnetic womb, fecund, powerful, drawing, engulfing. Man he sees as a pitiful, struggling creature, ultimately devoured by fierce maternal force. “You absorb, absorb,” cries Paul to Miriam in “Sons and Lovers,” “as if you must fill yourself up with love because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.” The Lawrence model, madly, fiercely possessive, differs from older forms in the abundance of physiological and pathological trimming. His conclusion, as voiced again by Paul to Miriam is, “A woman only works with part of herself; the real and vital part is covered up.” And this hidden reality is her terrific, destructive, fervid determination to drown man in her embrace.
So it goes. To Floyd Dell woman is a Mother,to H. L. Mencken a Wife, to W. L. George a Courtesan, and to D. H. Lawrence a Matrix—always specialized to sex. There may be men who are able to think of woman apart from the pattern of function, but they are inarticulate. Most of them spend their lives associating with a symbol. The set pieces they call Mary, Martha, Elaine, or Marguerite may follow the standardized design of grandmother, mother, or aunt. Or in more advanced circles, the pattern may call for bobbed hair, knickers, and cigarette case. Under any form of radicalism or conservatism the stereotype remains.
The old morality was built upon this body of folk-lore about women. Whether pictured as a chaste and beautiful angel, remote and untainted by life’s realities, or more cynically regarded as a devil and the source of sin, the notion was always according to pattern. Naturally, the relationship of men and women has been built upon the design, and a great many of our social ideals and customs follow it. The angel concept led, of course, to the so-called double standard which provides for a class of Victorian dolls who personify goodness, while their sisters, the prostitutes,serve as sacrificial offerings to the wicked ways of men. The new morality, as yet rather nebulous and somewhat mythical, has fewer class distinctions. The angel picture, for instance, has had some rude blows. As portrayed by the vanguard of radicals and interpreters, however, the changing conventions have their roots in the old generalizations and phantasies.
Perhaps this is only to be expected, for the man or woman does not exist whose mind has not become so filled with accepted ideas of human beings and relationships before maturity, or even adolescence, that what is seen thereafter is chiefly a fog of creeds and patterns. If several hundred babies, children of good inherited backgrounds, could be brought up on an isolated island, without a taint of superimposed custom and never hearing generalizations about themselves—never having standardized characteristics laid heavily upon their shoulders, perhaps a different type of relationship founded upon actualities, would be evolved. Without a mythology of attributes, based chiefly upon biological functions, real human beings might discover each other and create new and honest ways of comradeshipand association. As it is to-day, we do not know what the pristine reactions of individuals, free from the modifications of stereotype, would be like.
It was the development of means by which beliefs could be separated from actual facts which brought modern science into being and freed the world from the quaint superstitions of the ages. Not until the nature of substance could be proved and classified in contrast with the mass of ignorant notions which clogged ancient thought was the amazing mechanical, economic, and scientific advance of the last century possible. The world of antiquity had standardized life and tied thought down to speculative creeds. Empirical science discarded all supposition and centered itself upon building up another picture—life as an examination of its actual nature proved it to be.
In the creating of a new order which will bring with it a different type of social and personal contact, something similar must take place. For most of our ideas, even those classified as liberal and advanced, are built upon the reactions of an alleged, not an actual human being.Men have suffered from pattern-making, but never have they been burdened with the mass of generalizations that are heaped upon women from birth. Nobody knows what women are really like because our minds are so filled with the stereotype of Woman. And this picture, even in the interpretations of those who claim to understand the modern woman, is chiefly of function, not character. It is impossible to create a satisfying relationship between a red-blooded individual and a symbol. A changed morality cannot successfully emerge when half of those who participate are regarded not as people but functions. As long as women are pictured chiefly as wife, mother, courtesan—or what not—defining merely a relationship to men—nothing new or strange or interesting is likely to happen. The old order is safe.