War of the Sexes

When one contrasts the truly feminine — and healthy — woman with the neurotic (totally or parcially frigid, filled with anxiety, stress, etc.) woman of today, certain questions come to mind at once. Why, for example, are there so many neurotic women today? Have millions of women always been this way, or is it a problem of our times only? Why — if being feminine can be so pleasant — do some women hold onto their neurosis though they know they can get help for it?

To answer these questions in part or in whole, you will first have to know a little history. For, though every case of neurosis represents a psychological problem in the individual, we have found that, sociologically speaking, neurosis is rooted in certain destructive events that have occurred to woman in the past two hundred years. If you grasp them you will begin to get a picture of the over-all problem that has beset woman, of how she lost her direction, her sense of self, and what she must do to find them again.

The history I am going to tell you about is the history of a war... a bitter and destructive war. It is often called “The War between Men and Women.” For far too many women — and men too — it is still going on.

It began toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the apparently innocent event that started it all was the invention of the steam engine, that ushered in the modern age. It seems hard to believe now that this — almost outdated — means of creating power could have been so important... but it was. It launched the so called “Industrial Revolution”, which was to change the whole fabric of society, our ways of doing things and making things, our living quarters and our living standards, our morals, religion, art... name it and you will find that the Industrial Revolution has turned it upside down and inside out.

Most of all, and most tragically, it changed the home. It would be more accurate, if somewhat bleaker, to say that it destroyed the home; at least as home was nown up to that time.

But let me tell you what home was like before the Industrial Revolution, for when you see that you will begain to discern the outlines of the great tragedy that happened to woman when the old-fashioned family home ceased to exist...
In that era our society was almost entirely rural and agricultural. In other words, most homes were farms. There were cities and some industry, of course, but where industries existed they were almost entirely home industries run by individual families.

Home, then, was, almost without exception, the center of all life, economic, social, and educational. Everything was produced at home. There were simply no stores in which to buy anything.

Woman’s place in this early family home was indisputably at the very center, a faithful, equal partner with her husband in all the manifold duties, responsibilities, joys, hopes, and fears of the entire household. Her work was heavy and constant; she cooked the food her husband had grown, wove the cloth, fashioned and made the clothes for the entire family. She cleaned and she swept, washed, and ironed from morning till night.

Children, as soon as they were old enough, lightened her labors, but she was responsible for their education (public schools had never been heard of), which was not just a matter of teaching them the three R’s but of inculcating in them all that she knew of the multitude of arts, crafts, and techniques it took to run such a home.

Her reward for all this was the fact that she was needed, loved, held in the highest esteem by her husband and her whole family. if she failed in her duties or if she died, it would be not merely a sad, inconvenient event for the family... it would be a disaster! For the activities of the distaff side, although different from those of the male, were of equal importance.

From what we can gather, even the concept of frigidity in marriage was unknown to that woman. Love, home, work, were a unified and profoundly satisfying experience on all levels. As a woman she was profoundly needed, and as a woman reared to respond to this need she had no single occasion to question her worth or her abilities.

And then one by one, slowly but surely, her responsibilities and her duties were removed from her; her close and equal working relationship with her husband was destroyed; her importance to her children was diminished sadly.

The new machines began to take over, to displace all those things that had been done by hand. Transportation, via the new Iron Horse, developed, and trade between sections that were once remote from one another was made possible. A man could make more money than he had ever dreamed of it he could supply a need of some group or community.

And so industry in the sense that we know it today started with a rush. Factories sprang up, and they needed men to run them. Now husbands who but recently had worked at home, hand in hand and side by side with their wives, labored outside the home, developed lives that were independent — to some extent — of the home’s activities and concerns..

It happened slowly, very slowly, over generations, in fact and the full results of the Industrial Revolution were not felt fully until this century. At first, so gradual was the process that only a few women, scattered here and there, felt the impact of the change. But as time passed and the process extended, more and more families were drawn into the vortex of industrialization, and at length it had changed the lives of every individual in the land.

Very slowly, too, but everywhere, women woke as if from a centuries-old dream of peace and happiness to find themselves dispossessed. Gone was their central place in the family home, gone their economic importance, gone their close working partnership with their mate, their functions of teacher and moral guide to the children... The children themselves were gone, to school, as the husband had gone to the mill or factory.

Yes. She was dispossessed of all those things that for centuries had defined her womanhood for her, that had supported her ego, given her the certain knowledge that being a woman, however hard, was a wonderous and most desirable thing. She felt her womanhood itself devalued, the things it represented unwanted.
And then... she reacted. She reacted violently and with rage at this depreciation of her feminine attributes, of her skills, of her functions. Unhappily this reaction was precisely the wrong one... the one from which no solution of a happy kind for her could be attained.

Looking about, she thought she spied a villain in the piece. Who was it? None other than her partner throung the centuries: Man. According to her, it was he who had deserted her, who was responsible for her loss of self-respect as a woman, a mother, an equal socially and mentally and morally. Surely men despised women. Very well! She would show them! She would simply stop being a woman. She would compete with them on their own level. To hell with being a woman! She would be... a man!

You don’t believe it? It seems too farfetched? Women — as a sex — would never have made such a decision? Well, let’s look a little more closely at some of the facts...

What did the Feminist Movement really want to achieve? Let me quote to you what two profound students of feminism, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, had to say about it in their book “Modern Women, The Lost Sex”:

“Far from being a Movement for the greater self-realization of women, as it professed to be, Feminism was the very negation of femaleness. Although hostile to men and hostile to children, it was at bottom most hostile to women. It bade women commit suicide as women and attempt to live as men... Psychologically, Feminism had a single objective: the achievement to maleness by the female, or the nearest possible approach to it. In so far as it was attained, it spelled only vast individual suffering for men as well as women, and much public disorder.”

What was the program of the Feminists? Actually Mary Wollstonecraft had enunciated it in its entirety in her book “A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women” and the Feminist Movement never deviated from her original demands. She had stated that men and women were, in all fundamental characteristics, identical, and that therefore women should receive the same education as men, be governed by the same moral standards, do the same work, and have identical political rights and duties. Women were to be treated exactly as men in every detail of living, and the same demands were to be made on them.

The appeal of this program was enormous. Nineteenth-century woman felt: “Ah, if we could only achieve this, then we would be happy once again.” The fact — and it’s a dreadfully simple one to see — is that now, indeed, the entire program has been realized and modern woman, having reaped the “benefits” of it in full, is more confused, perhaps even unhappier, than ever.

In so far as the feminist Movement pitted itself against the male, and at the same time advised woman to masculinize herself or divest herself of her feminine nature, it was dreadfully neurotic, and we have been reaping the whirlwind this movement started ever since.

The rage of the Feminist was directed against herself... We know, for example, that to fulfill herself biologically — that is, to give birth to children — a woman must heve security, the protection of the male, a permanent abode. Marriage has been society’s answer to this feminine need from time inmemorial. But the feminists pitted themselves against the institution of marriage. Woman — they held — had the right, even as men did, to be promiscuous sexualty, to live with whom she peased, for as long or as short a time as she pleased. If she wished to get married she should be able to do so, but she should also have the privilege of terminating this marriage when she wished to, when she tired of it.

We know, too, that maternal love for children, particularly love of her own children, is one of the major traits of womankind, as typical of her a her female anatomy. We know that only the very sickest women, mentally, will desert or neglect their children. Maternality is so deeply rooted in the biology of the female sex that its fierce protectiveness can be observed in many animals.

Maternality is a trap, said the Feminists, in effect, a bill of goods sold to women by men in order to keep them enslaved. Children should not be allowed in any way to interfere with the new “freedom” of women. So, advised the Feminists, put your child in the hands of some trained child handler or handlers. Public nurseries were advocated, pre-kindergarten groups were advocated; anything that “freed” the mother was advocated.

Freed the mother from her children...? For what...? To work in offices and factories as the men did, of course. To substitute boss for husband, to share the “privilege” of being hired or fired; to be, in short, men.

If space allowed I could continue with a long and circumstantial list of masculine goals which the feminists advocated. And I could give an equally long list of goals which ignored or denied the existence of feminine characteristics in womankind. Very few of the early feminists actually lived in the manner they prescribed... but it was as clear as crystal that they ardently desired to.

But here is the important thing to remember: The Feminist credo thoroughly discredited truly feminine needs and characteristics and substituted male goals for female goals. There weren’t so many feminists in actual numbers, but those there were, were incredibly vocal, and in the end their ideals and beliefs became the ideals and beliefs of millions of women.

This, then, is the heritage of woman today: On the one hand, from Victorian woman, a profound belief that she is and should be non-sexual, frigid, by natural law. On the other hand, from the feminists, that man is woman’s natural enemy, that she should drop her feminity altogether, oppose man, supersede him, become him.

Please stop for a moment now to think what effect either of these two attitudes must have had on the home and marital life of a woman who held one of them. Her hostility to her husband and all the misery such hatred implies, we take for granted; but it was the effect on the children that was decisive.

The attitudes inculcated into many modern women since their childhood would make one’s hair stand on end... At least they should. This is what some learned at their mother’s knee: Shame about their bodies and sex; shame about menstruation, and disgust with it; fear of pregnancy and childbirth; scolding and punishment for early and natural sexual feeling and experimentation; destruction and depreciation of the father as an ideal image for the child to love or to emulate. In general, modern women learned early — and too well — to depreciate, despise and even loathe their womanhood in all of its important manifestations.

Most psychiatrists passionately agree with (previously quoted) Dr. Marynia Farnham when she writes:

“The most precise expression of unhappiness is neurosis. The bases for most of this unhappiness ... are laid in the childhood home. The principal instrument of their creation are women.”

. The feminists were, after all, for more and more sexual freedom; Victorian woman was anti-sexual. I feel that is only superficially true. They were both, in their unconscious lives, against feminine sexuality, considering it a “weakness”. It is not possible for woman to be masculine sexually; to advocate that for her is exactly equal to demanding that she be non-sexual.

The depreciation of the goals of femininity, biological and psychological, became part and parcel of the education of millions of American girls. Homemaking, childbearing and rearing, cooking, the virtudes of patience, lovingness, givingness in marriage have been systematically devalued. The life of male achievement has been substituted for the natural life of female achievement.

The feminist-Victorian antagonism toward men has survived too... It has been handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line for so many years now that, to millions of women, hostility toward the opposite sex seems (almost) a “natural law”. Though many a modern woman may pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart (and often without the slightest awareness of the fact) to supplant him, to exchange roles with him. She learned this attitude at her mother’s knee or imbibed it with her formula. Little that she learns elsewhere to counteract this will soon be nullified by the great effectivity of the constant (and almost universal) repetition of these destructive statements around her.

Clearly, then, if this is the historical direction women have taken, the individual woman who wishes to become a real Woman must change this direction. This she can to only by taking thought... long thought. For among the women around her she will not find much support for her wish to be entirely feminine.

For over two hundred years now women have blamed their problems on the outside world. They have used the very real difficulties created by revolutionary social changes to avoid the task of looking withing for the real problem and the real solution. They have indulged in an orgy of finger pointing at men and self-pity.
If the results had been different, if this attitude had brought them happiness and fulfillment, if feminism and Victorianism had made them good mothers and joyful wives, or even pleased them with their new place in industry... the game might have been worth the candle. But it hasn’t been. The game has brought frigidity, anxiety, pain and restlessness and a soaring divorce rate, as well as neurosis, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency... All that results when the woman in any society deserts ther true womanly function.

Seeing one’s own responsibility in a situation is often difficult. However, in this problem, not to take the blame is even more difficult. It means — and has meant for millions — that one commits sexual suicide by embracing emotional isolationism as if it were the proper condition for womankind.

The change depends on the effort each woman makes to acknowledge both her errors as her true role... as a Woman.

Women can get rid of this neurosis by accepting, once again, the role of men as their leaders and protector in a loving d/s [dominant/submissive] relationship.