The Female Eunuch

While little boys are learning about groups and organizations, as well as the nature of the world outside their homes, little girls are at home, keeping quiet, playing with dolls and dreaming, or helping Mother. At school they use their energy to suppress themselves, to be good and keep quiet, and remember what they are hearing and doing. At home they perform meaningless physical rituals, with no mental activity attached to them. So the sensual and intellectual are even more widely separated in them than they are in their brothers. If the sensual retains its hold, they prefer to work with their hands, cooking, sewing, knitting, following a pattern designed by someone else. The designers, the master-cooks and the tailors are men. If women become ‘intellectuals’ they are disenfranchised of their bodies, repressed, intense, inefficient, still as servile as ever. Some geniuses have broken right through the chain reaction and have seen it for what it was, but most creative women bear the stamp of futility and confusion even in their best work. Virginia Woolf saw some of the way, but it cost her too much; George Eliot was one of the few who burst right through her straitjacket. The difference may have been one of the energy of the psyche, or of intelligence, or simply that Eliot was plain and Virginia was graceful and lovely. Whatever the case, the foundations of the conflict were laid in their infancy.

Girl

I would not be doing justice to girls if I were to imply that they accepted all their enculturation without a struggle. The heaviness of maternal pressure in little girls to be neat and sneaking is very often met with the same degree of resistance. The growing girl may refuse to keep her room neat, may insist on mucking about with boyish affairs, even to the extent of joining a male group and fighting to maintain her place in it by being twice as tough as any of the boys. She may lose all her hankies and hair-ribbons, rip her knickers climbing trees, and swear and swagger with the best of them. This is patronizingly referred to as going through a difficult phase, but we may find evidence of the duration of this kind of resistance over years and years, until puberty delivers the final crushing blow. The tomboy as this energetic rebel is pejoratively called may be of any age from five to fifteen; she may not be a tomboy all the time, either because she enjoys the coddling that neat, pretty little girls get, or because she has come to realize that it is advantageous to operate in the favoured way, or because she is simply denied opportunity or incentive to discover how vigorous she could be. Generally it is the little girls who are given presents of pretty things and spoilt and flattered who capitulate to the doll-makers earliest. The pattern of reward is kept up: at first it might be sweets and dolls’ clothes, then dresses and shoes, and even the occasional perm and eyelash dyeing, and then pretty clothes for being seen at weekends in, outings, movies and all that.

A girl whose spirits have not been dampened by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp …

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p.87

However, even the little girl who gives in to the pressures applied by her mother and the rest of the feminizers is subjected to conflicting influences. At school her pretensions to jewellery and cosmetics are severely frowned on. She is required to do some form of physical exercise for a fixed period every week, despite Mother’s notes pleading all kinds of delicacy and indisposition. She is given responsibilities, made to join in team efforts, all activities which, if her feminization is proceeding at good pace, she finds very unattractive. She would rather gossip and giggle with her confidantes in a corner of the playground than play soft-ball, even if soft-ball is a feminized form of a masculine sport. She does not like to get sweaty and dirty. Although her teachers praise her manners and her neatness, they lament her increasing dullness, and she may even feel the contempt of the more ‘masculine’, that is, active, girls in her class. She may be reviled as a cissy, a sook, a teacher’s pet, a namby-pamby, a sneak.

But if Mummy’s darling has trouble at school, the successful and active members of the school community run into trouble at home. Out of school, there is not the scope for team activity and adventure that school provides. Housework seems intolerable, and domestic conflicts can become a source of serious anxiety, so that many a teacher has discovered that a good pupil comes back from the summer holidays changed beyond recognition, principally by the abrasion of her training at home. As she grows older she finds her activities more severely curbed; innocent exertions are ruled out because she is ‘too big for that sort of thing now’. Sometimes she feels that she is being catapulted into a sort of shameful womanhood, and resists desperately, to the point of regressing into infantile and destructive behaviour. She may become unaccountably sullen or clumsy, long before the approach of puberty makes such changes explicable. Many of the changes thought to be intrinsically connected with puberty are actually connected with the last struggles of the little girl to retain her energy. The primary school has educated her as a person, making no distinction between boy and girl. We may expect the conflict to arise when she moves up to the junior school to find that, as a capitulation to womanly objections about the imposition of the masculine model of education on to girls, she has the unenviable options of studying dressmaking, domestic science and so forth. The bitter irony of having been inducted into a masculine-contoured form of education is counterpointed by the inclusion of these fatuous subjects in her regimen. Sitting in her absurd version of masculine uniform making sponge fingers with inky hands, she must really feel like the punching-bag of civilization.

Girls sometimes wish they were boys – You can see what man does – His work is wonderful – What is greater than man’s work? Man – Who made the man? – Made by mother’s training – Abraham Lincoln’s mother – Great responsibility to train future President – Cannot tell what any child may become – No greater work than child training – The wife may think the husband’s work greater than hers – Her work monotonous and tiresome – So is business – Women’s work is not less than a man’s – What Ruskin says about the wife – Man’s success dependent upon woman – His health depends on his wife’s cooking – The fate of a nation may depend upon a wholesome meal – If both man and woman were in business life would lose much brightness – Woman makes social life – Moral life – Keeps man thinking – Values of home education – Daniel Webster’s table manners – Woman embroiders man’s life – Embroidery is to beautify – The embroidery of cleanliness – Of a smile – Of gentle words.

Summary of Mary Wood-Allen, ‘What a Young Girl Ought to Know’, 1928 (cited verbatim)

The pre-pubescent girl, however sluggish and confused she may seem to the disenchanted observer, is a passionate creature. The conflicts that she is daily and hourly suffering absorb much of her energy, but she still has enough left to thrill to stories of adventure and achievement and to identify with heroes, male and female alike. Her sexuality is fundamental to these responses, just as it is to her actual genital practices. In the primary school, one may find this excited interest in an innocent and open form, sometimes quite sensual. I remember being warmly kissed once on a visit to a school in Manchester by a horde of little girls and boys, who flung their arms around my neck and snuggled into my fur, pressing questions and gifts indiscriminately. The classes of eleven- and twelve-year-olds that I taught in Australia could generate extraordinary intensity which had its expression in lots of odd ways, sometimes in crushes and rapt idealism, and sometimes in peculiar and deflected experiments within the playground community. Sometimes they could perform wonders of orchestrated cooperation in presenting their little plays and projects, or devising ways to recognize a birthday or thwart the school administration. More often they flagged or fell to quarrelling. Most often the authorities intervened because the classes had got too noisy, or because school routine was in danger of disruption. Gradually the scope for embracing, experiencing and expression was being limited as the pattern of submission, rejection and all the rest that is meant by adaptation was imposed.

It was remarkable that in view of the conflict and the relentless enculturation to which they were subjected, these girls retained so much of their childhood energy and love. Some of its expression was specifically sexual, as the psychologists are prepared to admit, although they insist that the pre-adolescent girl’s sexuality is masculine, clitoral and so forth.[1] So they grossly misinterpret the typical adolescent passion for horses as a reflection of the immature girl’s penis envy. The horse between a girl’s legs is supposed to be a gigantic penis. What hooey! What the young rider feels is not that the horse is a projection of her own physical ego, but that it is an other which is responding to her control. What she feels is a potent love calling forth a response. The control required by riding is so strong and subtle that it hardly melts into the kind of diffuse eroticism that theorists like Dr Pearson would have us believe in. For many girls who are beginning to get the picture about the female role, horse-riding is the only opportunity they will ever have to use their strong thighs to embrace, to excite and to control. George Eliot knew what she was doing when she described Dorothea Brooke’s passion for wild gallops over the moors in Middlemarch. It is part and parcel of her desire to perform some great heroism, to be free and noble.

Those little girls who wrote passionate love-letters to each other and to me in the schools where I taught had no conscious understanding of their own passionate and amorphous feelings. Because of the taboos on their expression of these intense feelings, they became miserably agitated, sometimes hysterical, sometimes desperate and ridiculous. The feeling was expressed in a distorted fashion, like suppressed laughter, and so it was easily scorned and reviled. The reaction of most teachers to ‘that sort of thing’ is terribly destructive. I have even witnessed the public reading of a child’s love poem, accompanied with sneers and deprecating gestures, as a punishment, while the little authoress stood impassive, feeling the iron enter her soul, waiting for the blessed time when she could escape to the lavatory and enjoy the obscenity of tears. However liberal a teacher may be she early discovers that the rigid embargo imposed upon physical contact between teacher and pupil must be observed, because the last flame of sexual energy is only destructive and can only be corrupted, given the wider context and the socializing function of the school. It is an aching nerve in the education situation and will remain so, must remain so, unless our whole sexual orientation is radically changed. To defy it piecemeal can only produce ever greater suffering.

The girl who directs her passion towards her peer is in a better situation than the girl who loves her teacher. It is usual to explain such deep and lasting attachments as the seduction of one girl by another who is especially aggressive, and sexually mature, or as transferred longing for the mother whose closeness is being withdrawn as sexual maturity and oedipal rivalry become pressing prognoses, or simply as the desire to confide sexual curiosity and share forbidden knowledge.[2] It is dangerous to admit that inseparable girls are often fascinated by each other, deeply altruistic and cooperative, and often genuinely spiritual, as well as utterly sexual if not literally genital. If we dignify these relationships by the name love, without patronizing diminutions, we imply a set of anti-social corollaries which cannot be allowed. Learning to dissemble these feelings, among the strongest and the most elevated that she will ever feel, is a squalid but inevitable business. However innocently one girl caresses the body of another, she cannot escape the necessity of furtiveness which she intuits right from the birth of her love. Gradually she learns to consider her own feelings in the light of the common appraisal of them and to ridicule and disown them. Such loss is enormous, and brings her much further on the way to the feminine pattern of shallow response combined with deep reserve. From the frank sharing of another’s being she turns to the teasing and titillation of dating, which all the world condones. I can remember a scene with my mother when she discovered a letter written by me to my lover at school, a girl who introduced me to Beethoven by playing his sonatas to me in a dingy annexe where we retreated at every spare moment, who held my hand while we sang harmonies of Palestrina and Pachelbel in the crack school choir, and pretended I was George Sand and she was Chopin, and vice-versa, a girl who was obliterated by puberty and would end up singing in the chorus of Damn’ Yankees. Mother was screaming that I was unnatural: to stem her flow, I repeated what I had read in the Sunday Supplements, that it was an adolescent homosexual phase, and I was through it anyway. I expiated that pusillanimous, lying betrayal of myself and my love for weeks. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

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