Monthly, The North American Review, The Unpopular Review, and The Churchman, and are here reprinted with the kind permission of the editors of those magazines.

The Joys of Being a Woman

I

The Joys of Being a Woman

SOME years ago there appeared in the “Atlantic” an essay entitled “The Joys of Being a Negro.” With a purpose analogous to that of the author, I am moved to declare the real delights of the apparently down-trodden, and in the face of a bulky literature expressive of pathos and protest, to confess frankly the joys of being a woman. It is a feminist argument accepted as axiomatic that every woman would be a man if she could be, while no man would be a woman if he could help it. Every woman knows this is not fact but falsehood, yet knows also that it is one of those falsehoods on which depends the stability of the universe. The idea that every woman is desirous of becoming a man is as comforting to every male as its larger corollary is alarming, namely, that women as a mass have resolved to become men. The former notion expresses man’s view of femininity, and is flattering; the latter expresses his view of feminism, and is fearsome. Man’s panic, indeed, before the hosts he thinks he sees advancing, has lately become so acute that there is danger of his paralysis. Now his paralysis would defeat not only the purposes of feminism, but also the sole purpose of woman’s conduct toward man from Eve’s time to ours, a course of which feminism is only a modern and consistent example.

It is for man’s reassurance that I shall endeavor gradually to unfold this age-old purpose, showing that while the privileges which through slow evolution we have amassed are so enjoyable as to preclude our envying any man his dusty difficulties, still our attitude toward these our toys is that of a friend of mine, a woman, aged four. Left unprotected in her hands for entertainment, a male coeval was heard to burst into cries of rage. Her parents, rushing to his rescue, found their daughter surrounded by all the playthings, which she loftily withheld from her visitor’s hand. Rebuke produced the virtuous response, “I am only trying to teach Bobby to be unselfish.”

The austere moral intention of my little friend was her direct heritage from her mother Eve, whose much maligning would be regrettable if this very maligning were not the primary purpose of the artful allegory: Adam and all his sons had to believe that they amounted to more than Eve, as the primary condition of their amounting to anything. Eve, in her campaign for Adam’s education, was the first woman to perceive his need for complacency, and so, from Eden to eternity, she undertook to immolate her reputation for his sake. Eve, I repeat, was the first woman to perceive Adam’s fundamental need, but she was not the last.

The romance of Adam and Eve was written by so subtle a psychologist that I feel sure the novelist must have been a woman. Her deathless allegory of Eden contains the whole situation of the sexes: it shows the superiority of woman, while seeming, for his own good, to show the superiority of man. As it must have required a woman to write the parable, so perhaps it requires a woman to expound it.

I pass over the initial fact that the representation of Eve as the last in an ascending order of creation, plainly signifies that she is to be considered the most nearly, if not the absolutely, perfect, of created things. The first thing of real importance in the narrative is the purpose of Eve’s creation, to fill a need, Adam’s. “It was not good that the man should be alone.” The whole universe was not enough for Adam without Eve. It neither satisfied nor stimulated him. He was mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy. If he had been merely lonely, why would it not have been enough to create another Adam? Because the object was not simple addition, whereby another Adam would merely have meant two Adams, both mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy; the object was multiplication by stimulation, whereby, by combining Eve with Adam, Adam, as all subsequent history shows, was raised to the nth power.

Intimately analyzed, the details of the temptation redound entirely to Eve’s credit. Woman rather than man is selected as the one more open to argument, more capable of initiative, the one bolder to act, as well as braver to accept the consequences of action. The sixth verse of the third chapter cuts away forever all claim for masculine originality, and ascribes initiative in the three departments of human endeavor to woman. For no one knows how long, Adam had been bumping into that tree without once seeing that it was: (a) “good for food”; this symbolizes the awakening of the practical instincts, the availing one’s self of one’s physical surroundings, the germ, clearly, of all commercial activity, in which sphere man has always been judged the more active; (b) “the tree was pleasant to look upon”; here it is Eve, not Adam, who perceives the æsthetic aspect; if man has been adjudged the more eminent in art, plainly he did not even see that a thing was beautiful until woman told him so; (c) “a tree to be desired to make one wise”; Adam had no desire to be wise until Eve stimulated it, whereas her own desire for knowledge was so passionate that she was ready to die to attain it. We all know how Eve’s motives have been impugned, for when a man is ready to die for knowledge, he is called scientific, but when a woman is ready to die for knowledge, she is called inquisitive. The Eden narrative concludes with the penalty, “He shall rule over thee,” that is, the price Eve must pay for Adam’s seeming superiority is her own seeming inferiority. The risk and the responsibility and the recompense for man’s growing pains, woman has always taken in inscrutable silence, wise to see that she would defeat her own ends if she explained.

The methods and the motives of Eve toward Adam have been the methods and the motives of woman with man ever since. Eve’s purposes, summarized, are fourfold: first, she must educate Adam; second, she must conceal his education from him, as the only practical way of developing in man the self-esteem necessary to keep him in his sex; third, Eve must never bore Adam, to keep him going she must always keep him guessing; and fourth, Eve must not bore herself; this last view of the temptation is perhaps the truest, namely, that Eve herself was so bored by the inertness of Adam and the ennui of Eden that she had to give him the apple to see what he and she would do afterwards.

The imperishable philosophy of the third chapter of Genesis clearly establishes the primary joy of being a woman, the joy of conscious superiority. That it is the most profound joy known to human nature will be readily attested by any man who has felt his own sense of superiority shaking in its shoes as he has viewed the recent much-advertised achievements of women. How could any man help envying a woman a self-approval so absolute that it can afford to let man seem superior at her expense?

Woman’s conviction of advantage supports her