The Woman Thing, Part 2

Generation of Vipers

Isis and Child Horus, Ancient Egypt

Quite frankly, I’ve been paralyzed of late, as so many things have been happening. No sooner have I begun to write about one of them — citizens shot in Minneapolis? Blind man freed by ICE wanders around in the cold and freezes to death? Ukraine breakthrough on front line? USA and Israel bomb Iran? — than something else happens, and I get distracted.

So I’ll tackle The Woman Thing, Part 2. Women are a constant, though how women are supposed to look, act, and think, and how society views them, has morphed frequently over time and space. Let me start with a couple of axioms that will probably not be disputed. (I say “probably” because hey, it’s the Internet, where everything is disputed sooner or later.).

Venus and Cupid

Axiom 1: Without women there would be no babies and thus no people, as we have not yet developed the bottle incubators described in Huxley’s Brave New World. Thus they are not secondary or an afterthought. They are the heart of the matter, meaning humanity. And no, AI can’t do it.

Axiom 2: Once upon a time, women were viewed as the miraculous and even divine source of human life. They were honoured for this, and indeed viewed as heroic, since death in childbirth was quite frequent — in giving birth, women were risking their lives.

In view of these axioms , societies have responded in various ways. We can classify these ways as Supportive— we value your life-giving superpower and will protect, nourish, and appreciate you for it — or Repressive — we must control your life-giving superpower for our own ends. We, not you, will determine which women shall have babies and which not (enforced sterilization enters here, and arranged marriages, and eugenics, and stonings to death for infidelities); we will also decide which babies will be cherished and which will be strangled at birth, abandoned as foundlings, left to die in jungles, forcibly adopted, stolen, traded as sex toys, starved because their families are poor, or drugged to death by — for instance — the gin-and-opium-administering “angel makers” of 19th century England. There is no society in which babies have been universally cherished.

The Virgin of the Lilies. Bougereau.

Supportive and Repressive can of course co-exist, and often have. Girls and women must be safeguarded for their own good (Supportive), and thus their freedom must be curtailed (Repressive). This was the earlier European pattern for the genteel. Those who slipped the boundaries and got “ruined” before marriage became that 19th Century scary figure, the fallen and therefore scarlet woman, or, if repentant, that favourite 19th century trope, the Penitent:

Then along came the 20th Century, and a lot of that changed. World War One, secretarial jobs, votes for women, lipstick, and goings-on in parked cars… no more Penitents, but a lot of “fast women” and Femmes Fatales and Gun Molls. (See Noir Films.)

Then came World War Two, jitterbugging and swing, and wartime jobs for women — thus Rosie the Rivetter and WACS, and financial independence, a heady brew.

There were also wartime romances, coupled with and various forms of birth control, which didn’t always work (giving rise to Homes for Unwed Mothers, backstreet abortions, Irish nuns selling babies, Magdalene Laundries, and more). But Virtuous Motherhood was still an aspiration.

After World War Two, a great many men who’d had an overdose of adrenaline came back from the war, and women were told to move over to make room for the boys, give up their paying jobs and their brains (“Career Women” were sterile and cold), have four children, and live in 1950s open-plan bungalows. Oh, and it was cute to be submissive:

Despite the little-womanry going on, these domestic arrangements didn’t suit a lot of the men: they’d got used to more sexual freedom. Playboy Magazine was started in 1953, no coincidence. (Dump the boring frazzled wife and screaming babies and diapers, come on down to the Playboy Mansion where all is fun and frolic and the girls are really bunnies. Why bunnies? Let’s not be crude, but there was a popular saying involving copulation and rabbits.)

Add to this that the 1943 book by Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, was running through twenty editions, with an update in 1955. You will have never heard of it, no doubt, but I read it as a teenager.

What did this book say? It contained many attacks on various facets of American society, such as its politics and its religions, but the one that stuck in my addled adolescent head was the attack on “Momism.” Moms were too powerful, they coddled their children, they taught their sons to worship them, and this produced weak, effete young men. (Did he mean “gay”? Let’s guess.)

Wait a minute. You somehow ought to be the mom in the bungalow, making the perfect home and having babies, but it was a far cry from Isis and Horus. you were no longer to be praised and revered for your generative superpowers. You’d be “just a housewife,” or, even worse, a MOM — a viper, responsible for at least half the ills in society. Punished for fulfilling your “biological destiny,” as people became fond of saying. (See Freud, who was pretty popular at this time.)

So you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. An untenable position over the long run.

1963

And that, Dear Reader, gave rise — after the deployment of The Pill — to Second Wave Feminism. In my humble, elderly opinion.

(What to put below the line, for the Dear Paying Subscribers whose contributions help support the Pelee Island Bird Observatory (www.pibo.ca)? I feel kind of mingy hiding things from the rest of you, so I’ll just set down a couple of the other Woman Thing topics I’m considering. Fair enough?)