Women's Place

From Women Priests: Yes or No?
By Emily C. Hewitt & Suzanne R. Hiatt, pp. 17-22,

Published by the Seabury Press, New York, 1973.

That men and women have basic physical differences is a fact which cannot be denied. It is when we begin to discuss the consequences of those differences in the way our lives are lived that we come to that troublesome area known as the “woman problem.” We have somehow arrived at the notion that the best way to order society is to divide the tasks of living into two spheres, masculine and feminine. The most convenient way to do this is to circumscribe what is proper for one sex and to make everything else the realm of the other sex. In the case of our society, we have circumscribed what is proper for women and left the rest for men.

The problem we now face is that the old patterns are changing and we can no longer be as clear as we once were about which sex should do what. In fact, sex is proving diminishingly effective as a way to organize society. However, the old ideas persist and we define the resulting confusion as the “woman problem.” Can women take on new roles and tasks in society and still retain their “femininity”? This question is a source of great anxiety as a quick perusal of the books and magazines beamed toward the women’s market will show.

Dorothy Sayers, in an essay entitled “Human-Not Quite Human,” has dramatized the plight of the woman trying to change her role in the previously all-male world of work. She suggests how it might be if men were under the same kind of pressure both to be productive and to retain their “masculinity.”

Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness: if everything he wore, said, or did had to be justified by reference to female approval; if he were compelled to regard himself, day in and day out, not as a member of society, but merely . . . as a virile member of society . . . . If he were vexed by continual advice how to add a rough male touch to his typing, how to be learned without losing his masculine appeal, how to combine chemical research with seduction, how to play bridge without incurring the suspicion of impotence . . . .

In any book on sociology he would find, after the main portion dealing with human needs and rights, a supplementary chapter devoted to “The Position of the Male in the Perfect State.” His newspaper would assist him with a “Men’s Corner,” telling him how, by the expenditure of a good deal of money and a couple of hours a day, he could attract the girls and retain his wife’s affection . . . . People would write books called, “History of the Male,” or “Males of the Bible,” or “The Psychology of the Male,” and he would be regaled daily with headlines, such as “Gentleman-Doctor’s Discovery,” “Male-Secretary Wins Calcutta Sweep,” “Men Artists at the Academy.”(1)

In short, men would become embroiled in the “man problem” and the related question of the proper place for men in society.

Sayers’ wit dramatizes the added burden that women face when the society changes and their time-honored sphere changes with it. We are in the midst of such change today and the question of woman’s place has never been more discussed or contested. But while the debate rages about what women should be doing in the world, what they are in fact doing continues to change dramatically. Women are entering every sphere of human endeavor. They do so, however, not with the blessing of society, but with the apprehension that they are losing their unique gift of femininity. Many caution that women, though by no means inferior to men, are profoundly different from them and that their entering the world of work on an equal basis with men is courting disaster.

The insistence that women are not inferior but simply different from men in profound and irreducible ways has a disquietingly familiar ring. It reminds us of the “separate but equal” doctrine in education which this country devoutly cherished for so many years. The evidence was clear that separate never meant equal in the quality of the education of black and white children. Finally, in 1954, the Supreme Court admitted that fact, thereby reversing a whole string of its own previous decisions.

Many observers have pointed out the remarkable parallels between the arguments used to keep blacks in their place and those used to keep woman in hers. Gunnar Myrdal, in an Appendix to his landmark study of the Negro in America, has this to say:

As in the case of the Negro, women themselves have often been brought to believe in their inferiority of endowment. As the Negro was awarded his “place” in society, so there was a “woman’s place.” In both cases the rationalization was strongly believed that men, in confining them to this place, did not act against the true interest of the subordinate groups. The myth of the “contented women,” who did not want to have suffrage or other civil rights and equal opportunities, had the same social function as the myth of the “contented Negro:” In both cases there was probably-in a static sense-often some truth behind the myth (2)

Yet, like blacks, women have been leaving “their place” in droves. In the thirty years between 1940 and 1970 the number of women working outside the home in the United States more than doubled. In 1968, 37 percent of the American work force was female, with the large share of those workers married women. Since the percentage of women in the work force has been increasing steadily in that thirty-year period, it is very probable that at this writing it is close to 40 percent. (3)

Nobody's Home at Woman's Place

Whatever moral judgment we would make about woman leaving the home, facts clearly demonstrate that whether she should or not, she has already left. In 1969, 30 percent of mothers of preschool children were working outside the home. (4) Many of them don’t have to work for economic reasons. The vast majority of women are employed at lowskilled, low-paid jobs. In fact, during this thirty-year period of expanded employment for women, the percentage of women to men in all professional and technical positions dropped from 45 percent in 1940 to 38 percent in 1966. (5)

Caroline Bird points out that women-many of them working mothers-make an incalculable contribution to the economy. If married women who don’t have to work were to drop out of the labor force, Bird suggests, bedlam would ensue in the offices and factories where women handle the paper work. Furthermore, Bird estimates that $100 billion or more, representing the money women both earn and spend, would be lost to the economy. She concludes, “Without quite realizing it, we have come to depend on a work force of married women who do not think of themselves as workers and are not treated seriously on the job.” (6)

Women, like blacks, are no longer staying in their place. Yet women still have a strong emotional need to conform to feminine models. Most women feel they are working as a sacrifice for the welfare of their families rather than for career goals of their own.

As women have left the home, whatever may have been their reason for doing so, the very fact of their being in “man’s world” has laid to rest many of the old arguments that they were not suited for certain kinds of work, or that they could not cope with certain kinds of environments. It is unnecessary to devote pages here to arguments about whether or not women can handle the duties of any job. As they have engaged in every imaginable kind of work, the world has discovered that the question is not what women can do, but what is considered proper for them to do.

Also, as women have left the home to work, many of them have found themselves in positions of leadership and authority in their employment. Increasingly, women are finding themselves heads of households as well. In 1968,, more than 10 percent of American homes were femaleheaded.(7) Whatever the reasons for this-death, divorce, desertion-women are learning to cope with independence and its attendant duties and joys. While the American dream family as seen in the media still remains father, nonworking mother, and two young children, the actual situation in a growing number of American homes is very different. Women today are not only gainfully employed most of their lives, but increasingly they are also the sole support for dependents and the heads of households.

The Will of God and Working Women

Everything that is does not have the blessing of God, and many churchpeople react with horror to the above facts and figures. Does God want to see women, especially young mothers, working outside their homes? Does God approve of women having lives and careers of their own, independent of their husbands, fathers, and brothers? Does God approve of women having authority over other women and even men in offices, factories, hospitals, and churches?

If we answer these questions negatively, then clearly the church has been silent about a situation abhorrent to God for a very long time. Many nineteenth-century churchmen tried to stem the folly of woman’s “emancipation,” as the suffrage movement was called. The Rev. Jonathan F. Stearns, a Newburyport, Massachusetts,clergyman stated in an 1837 anti-suffrage pamphlet the position of those churchmen who felt that woman’s place was ordained by God to be in the home:

That there are ladies who are capable of public debate, who could make their voice heard from end to end of the church and the senate house, that there are those who might bear a favorable comparison with others as eloquent orators, and who might speak to better edification than most of those on whom the office has hitherto devolved, I am not disposed to deny. The question is not in regard to ability, but to decency, to order, to christian propriety . . . .(8)

Stearns and his colleagues waged a long battle to keep women at home, in the fervent conviction that it was the will of God that they stay there. However, it must be conceded that in large measure they lost that battle, as the figures on women who are not at home indicate. As we shall see in the next chapter, Stearns’s spiritual descendants have been forced to fight, not to keep women out of the world of work per se, but to preserve an ever shrinking male preserve. The argument about Christian propriety remains, but the battleground has shrunk to the sacred priesthood itself.

Notes

1. Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? (Downers Grove, Ill.: William B. Eerdmans, 1971), pp. 39-41.

2. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), Appendix 5, p. 1077.

3. Cynthia F. Epstein, Woman’s Place: Options and Limits in Professional Careers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 15.

4. Caroline Bird with Sara Welles Briller, Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down, rev. ed. (New York: David McKay, 1970), p. 44.

5. Epstein, p. 10.

6. Bird, p. 45.

7. Elizabeth Norris, Feminine Figures, 1971 (New York: Communications Unit, National YWCA, n.d.).

8. Jonathan F. Steams “Discourse on Female Influence (1837),” Up

From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism, ed. Aileen S. Kraditor (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), p. 49.

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