Femininity (14 page)

What does all this mean? Are the test score patterns merely reflective of societal
expectation and pressure, of parental reward and practice, or are they reflective,
as those who hold to the theory of the male/female brain believe, of basic neurological
differences that are genetically programmed and hormonally shaped? And which alternative
explains the stuttering males? Science as yet can make no determination. In the next
fifty years it may well be proven that the left half of the brain is innately more
responsive in females and the right half is ordained to develop more fully in males,
but hardly enough evidence is in today for me or anyone else to cast a wise ballot
for or against a sexually dimorphic brain. For the time being it is enough to say
that Woman the Communicator has had her capacity to speak, acquire and transmit knowledge
squelched, hindered, restricted and scoffed at in every age, in the name of the feminine
ideal.

The sad history of prohibitions on women’s learning is too well known to be recorded
here. Without access to knowledge half the world’s population could instantly be eliminated
from the competitive lists—one need look no further for the underlying reason. In
much of the world women still are barred from advanced knowledge and technical training.
Germane to this book are the theories offered as an excuse to keep women dumb, for
they bear on a cluster of feminine qualities as men have defined them, and that women
seek to fulfill.

Shakespeare wrote that a voice soft, gentle and low was “an excellent thing in woman,”
yet the public voices of women in his
day, except for the Queen, were nonexistent. Females were barred from the stage in
Elizabethan England. Lower-class dialects were merrily amusing to the British elite,
but when the harsh, untutored accents were spoken by women, they grated on upper-class
ears as particularly strident and shrill. The fishwife hawking her wares in the market
went into the dictionary as a coarse, vulgar-tongued woman; her husband the fishmonger
remained a mere seller of fish. If Eskimos have several words for snow because snow
looms so large in their daily lives, what may we conclude about the English, who devised
so many words to define a woman with a loud, unpleasant voice, a short temper and
impertinent speech? The fishwife is joined by the shrew, the harridan, the magpie,
the virago, the termagant and the scold.

Dickens has a teacher of manners instruct Little Dorrit to mouth the words “prunes
and prism” when entering a room because the effect on the lips is so pleasing. In
Shaw’s
Pygmalion,
Henry Higgins transforms a street vendor, Eliza Doolittle, into a fair lady by modulating
her cockney tones. Fifty years ago elocution lessons were the rage in Brooklyn for
immigrant Jewish families who wished to give their daughters the right advantage;
sons were prepared to study medicine and law.

The great French and German philosophers of the eighteenth century addressed themselves
with vigor to the questions of female education and feminine deportment. Rousseau
theorized in
Emile
that the purpose in educating a girl was to render her “agreeable to man,” because
women by nature were “framed to please, to live in subjection.” Rousseau’s educational
theories were designed to perfect a winsome creature who was spotlessly clean, inherently
modest, naturally polite, and a bit of a coquette. Her feet were quite small, and
in matters of food she preferred tiny sweet cakes to meat. To gild this delightful
lily, Rousseau instructed that she should be given lessons in singing but not in the
reading of music. She should be allowed no “books of genius” that would tax and upset
her mind. There was no point in teaching her abstract mathematics, nor in taking her
to Paris, for she would find the loud noise of that city distressing and would want
to go home. Attention, he instructed, should be paid to her elocution, to encourage
her “pretty manner of
prattling” and animated face. There should be practice in the pleasing art of the
curtsy, and perhaps in the harpsichord, to best display her pretty hand. Proper training
should be given in “cooking and the buttery,” in needlework and lacemaking, especially
in lace, “because there is none that gives a more agreeable attitude to her person,
or in which her fingers are employed with more dexterity and grace.”

A girl so educated would have “taste without study, abilities without art, judgment
without learning.” She could then be called by Rousseau’s highest accolade, “Oh lovely
ignorant fair!” and be a fit wife. “She will not be her husband’s tutor, but his disciple;
instead of desiring to subject him to her taste and inclination, she will enter into
his. Such a wife will be better and more suitable by far to him, than if her head
were filled with learned lumber.”

Ah, Rousseau. He struggled to fill his own head with learned lumber. He taught himself
music and developed an original system of notation. He studied mathematics, he traveled
to Paris many times. “Reader,” he asked, “which would you prefer … a woman with a
needle in her hand … or a female genius, scribbling verses and surrounded by pamphlets
of all sorts?” Rousseau was true to his ideals. No pamphleteer for him. He hooked
up with an illiterate servant girl who bore him five children that he put in a foundling
home.

“Oh lovely ignorant fair!” In A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft hurled herself against Rousseau—she could not contain her rage.
From a more secure position in the twentieth century, we may now explore with dispassionate
neutrality the thinking of Immanuel Kant, who also read
Emile,
and who never had an intimate relationship with any woman. Within the stiff sentences
of this German philosopher of the beautiful and the sublime lies a critique of pure
femininity that education would damage.

In Kantian logic, charm and a beautiful nature form a feminine essence that is inborn
but rather easily bruised. Women have “very delicate feelings in regard to the least
offense.” They “love pleasantry and can be entertained by trivialities if only these
are merry and laughing.” Good-hearted, sympathetic,
compassionate and friendly, women at all times “prefer the beautiful to the useful,”
are “intolerant of commands” and do things “only because it pleases them.” What pleases
them most is “adornment and glitter.”

The feminine characteristics that Kant describes are not very different from the set
of virtues that American plantation owners in sentimental moments ascribed to their
slaves, who were also denied education, but the reasoning behind the denial of knowledge
to women is somewhat different: in Kantian logic a woman’s gentle, sensitive nature
must not be marred by “painful toil.”

Overcoming great difficulty in the drive for success is noble and sublimely masculine,
according to Kant. “Deep meditation and long-sustained reflection … do not well befit
a person in whom unconstrained charms should show nothing else than a beautiful nature.
Laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed at
it, destroys the merits that are proper to her sex. A woman who has a head full of
Greek, or carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics, might as well have
a beard.” Abstract speculation and useful but dry knowledge upset her “finer” feelings.
“A woman therefore will learn no geometry … In history they will not fill their heads
with battles, nor in geography with fortresses, for it becomes them just as little
to reek of gunpowder as it does the males to reek of musk.”

Kant and Rousseau have a point. If one accepts the idea of inborn feminine qualities,
and believes they were placed in the “fair” sex to render them pleasing to the “noble,”
then one shouldn’t tamper with human nature. One should stay far away from geometry,
mechanics and the history of battles—as most women have. Deep meditation will earn
us frown lines above our fair brow. Laborious learning will get us squint lines around
the eyes and a pair of glasses, and we know what Dorothy Parker says about girls who
wear glasses. To sustain membership in the fair sex one should never carry on a fundamental
controversy over anything. Knowledge is power, and the lack of it is charmingly feminine.
Between the bluestocking and the dumb broad, there is no doubt who lies closer to
a natural feminine state as men have defined it.

A variety of curious theories were floated in the campaign to keep women from knowledge.
In the Victorian era it was not woman’s charm but her uterus that was in mortal danger
from geometry and Greek, as doctors sought to convince their patients that a woman’s
reproductive system could be upset by intellectual stimulation. But the femininity
argument, the danger to the traits that men find pleasing, has been woman’s own compelling
fear.

Belief that the feminine nature could be coarsened by learning has been coupled in
history with the idea that it is in woman’s nature to talk too much. Loquaciousness
in the female sex has been remarked upon, not surprisingly, by the most voluble of
men. Woman’s wagging tongue was discussed by Aristotle, Aristophanes, Juvenal, the
Babylonian Talmud, Swift, Ben Franklin, Shakespeare and Milton. Her silence was counted
a virtue by Sophocles, Plutarch, Saint Paul and Samuel Johnson. Babblers, tattlers,
gossips, chatterboxes, nags and scolds: the descriptions apply to one sex only and
suggest a severe defect of character. It is said that women gush. We run on about
insignificant matters, and when entrusted with something important, we can’t keep
a secret. The din is infernal. What’s a man to do? A popular pub in London, The Silent
Woman, named for the Ben Jonson farce, has as its tavern sign a headless female torso,
the final resort.

“One tongue is enough for a woman” was the excuse the blind poet Milton offered his
friends for why he would not teach his resentful daughters Latin and Greek, although
he had them read aloud to him from the classics without understanding. A biographer
rallied to Milton’s defense with the explanation: “It was a masculine jest, with centuries
of satirical laughter behind it; but later ages, more conscious of woman’s emancipation
than of her traditional garrulity, have sometimes heard it with a literal mind.”

Centuries of satirical laughter have not been an aid to women’s confidence in speaking,
but the attempts to silence the woman’s voice have gone further than satire. In Orthodox
Judaism a woman is exempted from synagogue prayer because of her motherhood duties;
if she chooses to go to a house of worship, she is required to hide behind a curtain
or screen. Although
women were active as prophets and preachers during the early years of Christianity,
Saint Paul put an end to their work when he told the Corinthians, “Let your women
keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak.” During
the Protestant Reformation, William Tyndale, the Bible translator, took on Saint Thomas
More to argue that women should be allowed to preach, baptize and administer the sacrament.
Tyndale did not prevail.

During the Middle Ages, Christian theology, as well as chivalric custom and secular
law, condoned wife beating for such offenses as lying to a husband or scolding him
before others.
The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry,
which set forward the duties and customs of upper-class society and was the most
popular manual of its kind in medieval Europe, favorably mentions a husband who broke
his wife’s nose for scolding him in front of others “with evil and great language.”

Writing on indictable offenses against the public order in eighteenth-century England,
Sir William Blackstone makes reference to the common scold, provides her with a Latin
name,
communis rixatrix,
and adds the witty aside, “For our law Latin confines itself to the feminine gender.”
A common scold was a woman who disrupted the peace of the neighborhood with her ribald
speech or abusive tongue. She was punished by confinement in a ducking stool and plunged
into a river, lake or pond. The scold did not have a male counterpart, and although
the ducking stool was utilized for other offenses, the ignominious punishment was
identified in the public mind with noisy females.

Ducking stools “for the correction of unquiet women” were celebrated hilariously in
popular English ditties. One poetic example: “There stands, my friend, in yonder pool/An
engine called the ducking stool/By legal power commanded down/The joy and terror of
the town/If noisy dames should once begin/To drive the house with horrid din/Away,
you cry, you’ll grace the stool/We’ll teach you how your tongue to rule/No brawling
wives, no furious wenches/No fire so hot but water quenches.”

An iron muzzle with a triangular bit that fitted the mouth, known in Scotland as “the
branks,” was another device to silence an idle tongue during the Middle Ages. Locked
into the branks,
an offender was chained to a post or led through town for all to witness her shame.
Male blasphemers and some paupers also were sentenced to wear the branks, but like
the ducking stool, the scold’s or gossip’s bridle (its other familiar names) went
down in history as a punishment reserved for raucous, troublesome women.

English colonists brought the definition of a scold to America where, according to
historian Alice Morse Earle, the ducking stool was in great favor in the cavalier
colonies of the South and in Quaker Pennsylvania, set up near the local courthouse
along with the pillory, the stocks and the whipping post. She quotes a Virginia statute:
“Whereas oftentimes many brabling women often slander and scandalize their neighbours,
for which their poore husbands are often brought into chargeable and vexatious suits
and cast in great damages, be it enacted that all women found guilty be sentenced
to ducking.” Eyewitnesses reported many duckings in Virginia. A letter written in
1634 describes the ducking of “one Betsey wife of John Tucker who by ye violence of
her tongue has made his house and ye neighborhood uncomfortable.” Betsey Tucker was
ducked five times before she was penitent, and she was the third such case that summer.
In colonial Philadelphia the ducking stool was considered a “just punishment,” but
a visitor to Boston in 1686 found that “Scolds they gag and set them at their own
Doors for certain hours together, for all comers and goers to gaze at; were this a
law in England and well executed, it would in a little Time prove an Effectual Remedy
to cure the Noise that is in many Women’s heads.” (It is worth noting that a woman
with a gag in her mouth is a staple of present-day hardcore pornography.)