Women as Angels

Fashions? I pay great heed to fashions. Men and women express themselves, their inner secret identities, through the clothes they create, the clothes they buy and wear, the cosmetics, perfumes and jewelry they use. Even their hair styles reveal their private fancies. It has been interesting, therefore, to observe the feminization of men's clothes in our modern age. Interesting, too, to read the sales figures of cosmetics for men, for such lure may mean a return to a romantic past when men wore lace and velvet and curled wigs, or it may mean a real feminization of modern man, with homosexual substitutes for women. If the latter is the more likely, then let us be concerned, for feminization weakens the fiber of a nation. There is a terrible and evil power in the feminine, and men ought to fear it and try to keep it within bounds, because it is their own weakness made flesh in women. History is full of the tragedy of one man after another who has prevailed against armies but has not been able to prevail against one feminine creature, because to prevail against her meant to prevail against his own deep and unconquerable weakness. Who knows but that Hitler's secret lay in his own inner impregnability to the feminine? And yet, resisting women, he developed his own femininity, which is always weakness, whether it be found in woman or in man himself.

From what ether came the female, this creature so oddly like man and yet so utterly different? She is such stuff as his dreams are made on. Mohammed, dreaming of houris, created Moslem heaven, and in India Lord Krishna dreamed of willing milkmaids in a summer meadow. For that matter, Adam in the Garden dreamed of Eve, not knowing that when a woman is created even from his rib, she takes on her own being, forever separate from his and yet forever entangled with him in his human frame. Yet, incorrigible dreamer that he is, man dreams that somewhere, somehow, women are or can be angels.

And woman? Never did she make talk of angels! She knew from the beginning that talk of angels! She knew from the beginning that such bird or beast did not existsnakes, yes, but not angels. But she knew man, too, from the first moment that she met his eyes, and she understood that he must have his dreams or she could never persuade him to plod his way into the wilderness and drudge his daily life away for her and for the children who appeared in due time and with dread precision when the two made love. Let him have his angels, she thought, so long as he brings meat to the cave and wood for the fire.

Since he dreamed of angels, however, it was inevitable that man dreamed, too, of where they might be found. As unlike as angels were to this woman he had captured, so unlike was the celestial heaven he imagined as their dwelling place to this dark and smoky cave. He conjured thoughts of a bright and happy place, whose streets were paved with gold, whose rivers ran with wine, whose air was filled with music, and he peopled it with angels, winged and beautiful. He grew restless with such dreams.

"Let's find heaven together," he said to the woman one day.

She heard but she did not listen. The last baby was cutting teeth and the other children were hungry and the meat was burning. She could not put her mind on heaven.

"I'd hate it," she said firmly. "Besides, the cave would be nice enough if you would only roll a rock at the entrance to keep out the rain."

"I'll find heaven for myself, then," he said stubbornly.

She, of course, knew exactly what he was thinking, for she looked into the mirror of his eyes and saw herself. He looked at her and saw how stringy her hair was and how filthy her sheepskin, but he said nothing. Anything to get away from here was what he thought.

"You're dreaming of angels again," she accused him. "Well, I have no time to sit around twanging a harp, even if I want to, which I don't. Who'd look after the children? Stop thinking about angels and mermaids and the like! No such creature exists."

The man did not answer. He knew there were angels or he would not have dreamed there were. Or, if there were not, there should be, and therefore could be. As for mermaids, he had only heard of them, but he loitered often by the sea, dreaming of them. They were the angels of the sea.

The woman never dreamed. She did not know how or she had not the brains for it. For her the magical sea was only a place of wicked waves reaching to snatch her children away, or even on sunny days when the water was calm, only a place where she went to find oysters and crabs, in case the man did not feel like working that day. She was too practical for him and too dull. He often marveled that when he first saw her, he had thought her the image of poetry. Soon, too soon, he discovered that she had no poetry in her. She was ruthless, quarrel-some, unsentimental and as stubborn as the winter wind. Moreover, she was always busy about small unnecessary tasks. She would never be able to understand why he continued to dream about angels, especially after she had told him they did not exist.

For her part, the woman was convinced that in his heart the man knew there were no angels, and that he kept up the dream talk in order to make her feel inferior. Perhaps he had seen shadows wavering in the forest or perhaps he had heard other men talk or perhaps he had only built dreams of angels to comfort himself after she had scolded him for carrying in mud when she had just cleaned the cave. At any rate, he was obsessed by the notion of angels and at last, when he could not find a real angel nor discover the road to heaven by himself, he thought up a plan so absurd that she hooted with laughter when he proposed it to her.

"Why don't you make yourself into an angel?" he suggested one day.

It was raining and he did not go into the forest, the sort of day she dreaded, because it gave him time to sit and think, or worse still, to dream. It was now that she laughed. To her surprise, she saw he was entirely serious.

"I mean it," he said gravely. "I believe you could do it if you liked the idea."

"Do what?" she asked.

"Be my angel," he said.

"How?" she asked.

He hesitated now that he had to give details.

"Be beautiful," he said.

"What do you mean--beautiful?" she asked.

"Brush your hair until it shines," he said. "Fix your face somehow--make your skin soft and white. And do something to your eyes. They are always red with smoke. Angels have great lovely eyes, like the eyes of deer. And their voices are soft, because angels are gentle. They never scold. They just wait for a man to come home."

"With no meat?" she asked suspiciously.

"I'd always bring home meat if you were an angel," he said. "I'd know you had no one else but me. As it is, if I'm a few minutes late you snatch a club and rush out into the forest yourself and come home with God knows what. That porcupine you brought in last night was worse than the sole of a bear's paw."

He made a face and she hastened to defend herself. "It was getting dark and the children were crying for food and I thought you'd probably got in with a gang of hunters."

He interrupted her. "Ah, that's your weakness--you are always thinking! I've told you over and over again--leave thinking to me. My brain is bigger than yours."

She was so angry that she could not think of what to say in reply to this. She turned to the fireplace and rattled the stones about and frightened the children into crying. When they cried she slapped them and all in all created such an uproar that in disgust the man went out to the forest.

When he was gone, the woman quieted at once. She hugged the children and told them she loved them, she fed them and put them to bed and covered them with bearskins. She tidied the cave and washed herself and combed her hair with a strong twig from a thorn tree. Then she lay down and waited for the man to come back. She knew he would come back, because he had gone away without eating. It was late, however, before she heard him crashing through the brush. Meantime she, too, had time to think. She thought over all he had said and she decided that she would change and be an angel, for the sake of peace. It would be difficult, for she did not know what an angel really was and the best she could do would be to find out at least what he thought it was, since he had never seen one. Meanwhile, she might as well begin by being as different as possible from her present self. So, when he stood at the entrance to the cave, in the light of the dying fire, waiting to hear her snarl at him for being late and ready to throw his club at her, she only smiled at him sleepily from her bearskin and put up her arms.

"Darling!" she breathed. "I've missed you!"

He was too dazed to reply at once. He stumbled in, threw down his club and took her to his breast.

"Why, you angel!" he muttered, mumbling at her lips.

She did not become an angel immediately, however. In truth, she never has become wholly an angel, although for centuries she has continued the struggle. It is not a struggle with the man so much as with herself. For the truth is that she still does not really want to be an angel and so she can never quite be one. In her impatience, she has goaded the man into all sorts of inventions designed to free her from the cave and cooking, so that she would have time to be an angel. The cave itself is entirely different from the one that was her first. It is now usually a ranch house or a split-level, but sometimes it is a palace. Whatever it is, she is still and too often impatient with it. She longs to get out into the forest into business and even government. She is, as she always has been, practical and competitive and not at all romantic at heart, and being an angel is a bore, for angels are always romantic and always ready to make love. At least that is what the man tells her. She (concluded on page 262)Women as Angels(continued from page 168) pretends to believe him, but secretly she envies him, as he swings himself and his briefcase off to work in the morning. The dark forest of their early days has become a maze of high buildings, but all the more exciting for that. Sometimes she hints that she, too, would like to go off in the morning, swinging a briefcase. Then he tells her that if an angel were to go into that jungle called Business, she would lose all her angelic qualities. Besides, if she went away, to whom would he come home? It comforts him, he says, to think of his own little angel safely at home waiting for him.

Result? Boldly expressed, women now find themselves in a situation absurd in its dichotomy. They cling to the angelic myth, out of date though it is, for it gives them the pleasant security of moral superiority. At the same time, they long to descend to man and meet him on his own level in the easy camaraderie of nonvirtue. Alas that our mothers insisted upon equal rights and at the same time did not realize that this meant giving up the privileges attendant upon being angels!

Still and all, perhaps most females are undecided as to which they should be, women or angels, and are waiting, as they have for centuries, to discover what men really want them to be. The delay is because men themselves do not know what they want women to be. In this limbo of indecision women please no one, neither themselves nor men. Who is to blame? Who but men? Yes, men! For it was man who began the dreaming about angels and once in the habit of dreaming went on to dream of other impossibilities. The confusions and absurdities of our modern world all come from the dreams of men. A man dreamed that he could save mankind from its own sins by dying on a cross, not knowing that none can save a soul except itself, and so the world lives on in sin. A man dreamed that the strong should help the weak, but instead the strong are only oppressed by the weak, who in their helplessness are the real oppressors. A man dreamed that by pen and ink he could set free the enslaved, but a hundred years have passed and equality is still only pen and ink. A man dreamed of a family of nations, in which each nation would have an equal voice with all others, but today that family rejects some among its own members and will not seat this one or that at the family table.

Dreaming is the folly that sets the world in turmoil, for men dream huge dreams they cannot bring to reality. Sentimental dreaming man, emotional, unstable, lacking the courage and persistence to make his dreams come true! Compare yourself, O man, to this rugged woman at your side, who if she does not dream, at least will not believe a dream complete unless it is fulfilled.

Let us now pity man! He has suffered more from his own dreams than woman has, for when he insists upon her being an angel, he loses her as a woman. In his determination to lift her above him as an angel, he separates her from himself. She is isolated, but so is he. And he has corrupted her by his notions of her moral superiority as an angel so that she has become self-righteous, believing that she is indeed better than he, and worthy of all the privileges of being an angel. Inevitably, he becomes disgusted with her, and yet she is his creation. It was he who defined femininity as angelic and was able to confine woman in that definition because he held the power of money in his hands. The result of all this dreaming is that today man does not know what to do with woman outside of bed and kitchen. She has no place of her own in which to live and work. In the predicament, he defends himself by declaring that nowadays she may be whatever she wants to be, forgetting that after centuries of trying to be what he wants, she does not know how to be anything else.

And yet woman must again take man at his word. She must take thought for herself and discover what she wants to be and therefore what she was meant to be. First of all, she must discard the whole trashy dream of being an angel. She must face the truth that women are no better than men, not more delicate, not more "spiritual," etc., etc. She must face the truth and be glad of it. She must realize her own ability to think clearly, to act promptly, and with logic. She must remind herself that nature is impartial in allotting brains. The chances of inheritance are equal and the girl may inherit the superior mind. She is right to believe that dreams must be rejected unless they can be brought to performance. The world is suffering from too many dreams and too little performance. Let women mend the discrepancy, for men, it seems, cannot, at least as yet. It is a possibility that women can so mend, since the problems of our world are basically household problems--on a vast scale, it is true, but still having to do with feeding the hungry, healing the sick, educating the ignorant, not to mention general house cleaning. Women are used to the logistics of such administrations and need only to multiply figures and enlarge their horizons. Practical nondreamers, unsentimental by nature, weary of romance and pretense, they may be able if not to save the world, at least to make it run more efficiently and comfortably for us all.

Woman's problem will, of course, be man. When an individual woman gives up being a sweet and helpless angel, she knows from experience that man goes into a sort of collapse. When instead of the creatures he has cherished as a dear old mother, a sweet silly little wife, a precious dependent daughter, all of whom he has struggled to feed and to protect, there appear brisk, efficient human beings, no longer to be tempted by furs, diamonds and mechanized houses, he will be utterly at a loss, at least for a time. What has he left to work for? Who needs him now? What in heaven's name has become of his angel? She is gone and in her place is this creature, this woman who likes to work, who thinks problems are meant to be solved, who is too impatient to bother about keeping wrinkles from her face, who lets her hair grow gray and refuses to follow fashions. She is hearty and life-loving, she is passionate and genuine and she likes politics as much as he does, because she enjoys a dirty and exciting game. She loathes angels and wants no privileges.

Yes, it will take time for men to get used to women. And women will, I fear, have an even harder time for a while ahead. For, accustomed to angels, men will not recognize women for what they really are and will not know how to enjoy them until the memories of angels have faded away. Men will be terrified, neurotic, angry, ferocious, depending upon their temperaments. "If women want equality, here it is," they will shout and will proceed to treat women as they never dreamed of treating angels or even other men. Women must be ready for this, and ready, too, to acknowledge their own follies, for without world experience they can scarcely expect immediately to know how to share the solving of problems on a world scale. They will tend to be dictatorial--bossy is the word --and nothing infuriates a bossy man more than a bossy woman. She must, therefore, be prepared for man's fury and learn to manage without being bossy.

There will be those women, of course, who cannot take it, and they will relapse into being angels again. being angels for so long has weakened women's mental and moral fiber, too. But real women will be patient with themselves and with men. They will acknowledge their own mistakes, they will try again and again until someday men and women, working together in cooperation and with mutual respect, will find joy in possessions other than fur coats and fine cars and glittering diamonds--the common sense of a world at peace, for example, and mutual appreciation and understanding between nations and races, and economic stabilization and equality of opportunity. It may be that together man and woman can dream greater dreams than man could dream alone. It is possible.

Did I once say that women never dream? I was wrong. We do!