What I Know About Women

It isn't quite right to begin an exploration by urging the reader to feel free to disregard your findings. But prudence beckons, and it beckons with special force when the subject is women and the question posed is, What have we learned about them? Correction, What have I learned about them? Moreover, in discussing women, the inquiry is necessarily comparative: How does the woman differ from the man with respect to--you name it--intelligence, valor, loyalty, tenacity, stoicism? How reliable is her sense of humor, her sexual self-esteem, her capacity to condole, to inspire, to inspirit?

All of the above is strangely irrelevant, however useful as analytic narrative. It makes me think of what I call the "Gothic cathedral" story. It is the vehicle of a wonderful aperçu from a friend who insists that only a journalist can give reliable road directions. He cites a nonjournalist whose instructions on how his guest should travel in order to reach the country house to which he had been invited for lunch were, roughly, "As you leave your apartment (64th and Park Avenue), turn left, pick up Route 7, head north. (Route 7 happens to be in Connecticut, about 38 miles northeast of 64th Street and Park Avenue.) Go about six miles, and at a crossroads you will see a large Gothic cathedral on your left.

"Ignore it."

Should we ignore as irrelevant that which most of us would agree on about women, on the escapist grounds that, women being unique, you simply don't arrive anywhere by comparing them with men?

It is commonplace, for instance, that women are tougher than men. True? If so, why? Cultural arrangements obviously figure. It is the man who, generally, proposes sex or marriage. It is the man who, generally, initiates separation or divorce. That being so, the woman develops a reactive capacity, also the capacity to absorb. To absorb the indignity of being the wallflower never asked to dance, or the spinster to whom nobody (acceptable) proffers his hand, or the middle-aged mother who suddenly discovers that she is about to become the former Mrs. Appleby. She needs to learn mechanisms of defense. One such is obvious. I always cheer when I read about those gorgeous settlements that cost Mr. Randy one half the state of California to get rid of Mrs. Randy. On the other hand, not everybody who walks out on his wife owns half of California.

In the philosophically minded, that toughness born of experience can develop an edge that is fatalistically liberating in an odd kind of way. A woman of letters whom I knew well, in whom all the characteristics of womanhood were defiantly present (she always looked beautiful, always flirted, especially when denouncing male chauvinism, and never lost sight of the "big picture," even when buffeted by the williwaws of life), was the real thing, the sentient fatalist. She had a long and controversial career, and some of her fallen rivals made mini-careers out of belittling her. Her vulnerability found the best kind of protection. "It isn't that I am insensitive to criticism," she once told me. "It's that for some reason--and I don't know what it is--I simply just plain forget anything unpleasant said about me or printed about me; forget about it within a day or two, so that if I were to meet my critic at a dinner party, he might go home and say, 'My goodness, Melinda Bostwick is a forgiving creature! She was so nice to me tonight.' I am not a forgiving creature at all, but I simply forgot what it was that he did to me." My thesis is that Melinda's capacity to forget is the utilitarian evolution of her capacity to protect herself against the running initiative of the aggressive male gender. And in this respect, Melinda was, I think, a prototype. One issue of Cosmopolitan will give women 500 hints about how to hurdle the afflictions of life, mostly man-made, though some of them are providential.

I picked her up at the airport one day. She was just back from spending a week with a daughter-in-law suffering from a terminal disease. Melinda, I knew, would have been all tenderness during that week, contributing to the extent possible all the material and balsamic comforts she could contrive. But the night before, she recounted in the car as we drove to my house where she would spend the weekend, her sick relative had looked up in her distress. "She said, 'Why me?'" The reflexive response to such a question, posed by someone in pain, comes immediately to mind: "Yes, dear, it is terrible, and it is so terribly unfair that you should be singled out for this awful disease that hits only one woman in 3500."

But the lady in distress was asking of Melinda, in whom the afflictions of the human experience had composed themselves in a theological firmament orderly in its disorderliness, as disinterested in its applications of pain as of good fortune, the wrong question.

"I said to her, 'Alice,' I said, 'why not you?'"

I was struck, still am, by the philosophical bravura of that remark. Somehow I could not easily imagine it coming from the lips of a man, maybe because man's sense of chivalry is more orthodox. In such a situation he would incline to console the ailing woman by joining the ululation against the unfairness of Providence. Melinda simply refused to play. What she was saying was: "Look, one out of 3500 women get this fatal disease. Can you give me one good reason why the other 3499 should qualify to get it, in a sense that you do not qualify?" This particular foothold on philosophical reality is more the property of the woman than of the man.

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Having mentioned that my friend Melinda held no grudges, I must uncompromisingly make the point that this capacity for forgiveness was not in her an emanation of saintliness. She held no grudges only because some internal palimpsest wiped away all the traces of that day's detractor. Those women whose windshield wipers don't work quite that industriously in removing the sludge of the day are surely the gender-champ grudge-keepers. I wonder why, and conclude that it must have something to do with the singular hopelessness felt by women as they look on their men, so often poorly equipped to defend themselves in the brawl-storms of public and corporate life. I know women who do not forget or forgive a 20-year-old slight against their man, a slight the victim of which is perfectly prepared to dismiss, after a cooling-down period, as simply a vicissitude: one of those things that happen to everybody who contends in life, and that means just about everybody. Not restricted to men who fight for presidential nominations or who face themselves across battlefronts, but also to Carthusian monks in whom sweltering resentments develop over a brother's serenity or productivity or manifestly superior holiness.

It is a part of the human predicament that all men contend, but not a part of the human predicament that all men are contentious. Where in some men resourceful counteraggressiveness is insufficiently developed, my impression is that the woman is there to stoke her man's engines, or even to take on the enemy directly. Since, more often than not, she is not equipped to deny her man's adversary the presidential nomination or the chairmanship of the board or the Pulitzer Prize, she must rely on the one all-service weapon indisputably hers--her tongue.

The female willingness to take on the enemies of her man isn't an instinct that forms, like ovulation, only after a certain age. My baby sister, at the age of ten, won the Best Junior Rider award in 1939 at the Dutchess County Horse Show at which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose Hyde Park home lay a dozen miles away, regularly appeared in his role as country squire. The routine, when you win the blue ribbon, is to ride around the ring to receive the applause of onlookers. When she passed by the presidential box, FDR applauded lustily--and my sister turned her head abruptly to one side, so to speak, rejecting his applause. A minute later she bounced happily, blue ribbon in hand, to the family box alongside the president's. "Why," my father whispered to her, "didn't you acknowledge the president's applause?" My sister's hoarsely whispered answer was given in wide-eyed astonishment: "I thought you didn't like him!" The ten-year-old was protecting her man. In this case, her father.

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It may be an aspect of this same loyalty that makes women far better security risks than men. The convention is that women are bubble baths of gossip, and this is true up to a point. When I bother to listen in on some of the conversations between my wife and some of her friends, male and female, I have the feeling that I am listening to a CD-ROM of Liz Smith. But in 40-plus years, nothing I have told my wife in true confidence (and women know how to distinguish between frivolous confidence and the other variety) has ever come back to me from a third person. This is an aspect of fidelity. A confidence casually confided, whether under the impulse of intimacy or devil-may-care (I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours), could, if violated in our terrible times, dispatch the trusting male right to Gulag, and in the corporate world (I suspect) could result in a 180-degree turn from upward mobility. Men, whose hearts are more footloose than women's, are likelier to yield to temptation; for instance, in order to ingratiate themselves with the new objects of their desire, by recounting the weaknesses of the incumbent. If years ago I had made a systematic effort to collect such stuff, in the fashion of Suetonius, I know that I would have a fatter inventory of unpleasant data, relayed in the first instance under the shroud of confidentiality, told to me about women by men than about men by women. If one is of a turn of mind to explore the question systematically, it could be done by careful examinations of literature, of the law courts, even of the gossip columns. The challenge would be to discard that which is merely gossip and can't lay claim to the solemnity of a confidence broken. One comes across a Mia Farrow now and again, but hers was a case of desperation fueled by a determination that she and her children should survive.

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I have for years, in lazy moments, wondered whether there might be more interesting explanations than mere biological anomalies why women live six to eight years longer than men. I have as of this very moment indulged in the speculation that there is in women a surer sense of self-preservation. At the obvious level, the figures indicate that there are fewer women drunks than men (though the lines are gradually closing), fewer women who smoke than men and, I suppose, fewer (concluded on page 273)About Women(Continued from page 84) women who walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

But other factors come to mind. The stoicism alluded to earlier suggests a control of the emotions, and this in turn suggests the superordination of the mind over the body. This is a key to longevity. How do I know? Because, manifestly, I know everything.

But women do have, on the whole, a better perspective on things, so that what looms especially large for the man looms in more realistic dimensions for the woman. When Randall Jarrell wrote his wonderful novel Pictures from an Institution, about Benton College, he gave us a scene that is of course caricature, but caricature doesn't work unless it plays on something we are prepared to acknowledge as the true seed of that caricature.

We are talking about Flo, who is the wife of a sociologist and who is dominated by her ideological commitment to be tolerant. "If she had been told that Benton and [her husband] Jerrold and [her son] John and [her daughter] Fern and their furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed and sobbed, and said, at last--she could do no other, 'I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds.'" This is high derision at the cult of toleration--but even so leaves us sensing a truth that militates, if not exactly toward tolerance of the world at large, at least toward a certain fatalism about life's bumpiness. And when you understand that, you are on the way to nurturing the capacity to make peace with it. "Let's hear his side of the case" suggests that there is such a thing as another side of the case. Granted, that other side can be random evil, or divine caprice, if that term is not too disruptive of the idea of divine order. And life's hard knocks, understood in this way, tell us that no inequity, no anomaly, will rock the sufferer's basic cosmological anchors: "Let's hear his side" is a cry against uprootedness. What has just happened to Flo is the kind of thing we are instantly prepared to describe as intolerable, and in doing so, all we have really done is remind ourselves that, almost always, those who use the term intolerable to discuss certain human arrangements, ranging from the tax code to serial murders, are usually saying that what is intolerable they will continue to tolerate. They have no alternative, and I count this as a distinctively feminine insight. We are left with the insight Flo bequeaths us as the quintessential woman. It is only the woman who experiences the tragedy of a miscarriage and is prepared to put it down as a part of the overhead of life on earth.

We are left with the recurrent phenomenon of what we lightly refer to as the woman's intuition, an experience so workaday we tend to take it for granted.

"I don't trust him."

"Sounds nutty to me."

"I say it's spinach and the hell with it."

I can't prove it, but I like to think that women were quicker than men in taking the measure of Hitler and Stalin, though that insight was probably disciplined by their fatalism. (We're stuck with Hitler, we're stuck with Stalin, and there isn't all that much we can do about it--even as so many women put up with the outrageous behavior of so many men to whom they have the misfortune to be married.) It is a concurrent phenomenon that, through it all, they can, so many of them, remain so wholesome, so beautiful, so desirable, perhaps in no small part because they can refract so much of what men do to make life so odious so much of the time. Whether life would improve if ever they got effective hold of the basic institutions of life--government, family, the infrastructure of getting and spending--remains problematic.

"Ok, Ok, Ok," the dispossessed male says, handing over the reins of power, "so how're you going to do it?"

"Differently," is as much as we can safely count on getting from women.

"I like to think that women were quicker than men in taking the measure of Hitler and Stalin."