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The Feminine Paradox
(“The second of three talks by Florida Scott-Maxwell”)
The Listener vol. 54, no. 1386 (September 22, 1955) : 464-465, 479
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This is a time of emergence for women, and increased consciousness is being forced on us whether we like it or not; so that to deepen our understanding of ourselves appears to be one of our new tasks. Confronting oneself is an uncomfortable thing, avoided by all, and there is much in woman’s past that makes it especially difficult for her. It is some of these past influences that I want to look at, as they are still in us.
      It is generally felt that women are at their best in personal relations, but when not in a close personal relationship they tend to lose value in the eyes of society, and in their own eyes as well. So it is partly true that a woman is not felt to exist in her own right; that she is thought of as living for, and in, others. This is a strange fate. It can be deeply satisfying, or wounding to pride, and it can also be most confusing to the mind. Yet perhaps it is the very essence of being a woman to experience the paradox of both being and not-being. Yet perhaps it is the very essence of being a woman to experience the paradox of both being and not-being. Doubtless everyone will agree that in the past women have known their fullest humanity in personal relationship. They have known love, selflessness, and even self-sacrifice. These high virtues are sometimes ours, and can be called our strength. But our worst side is also an aspect of selflessness: our tendency to lose ourselves in others, to identify with them so that we become their mirrors; to be formless if no one gives us a mould to fill. Our good and our bad can be so close together that it is sometimes difficult to say when a woman is at her best or at her worst. One is occasionally uncertain whether to feel awe or despair.
      It may be just here that women are changing most, for they are becoming more definitely themselves. As many have won a relative freedom from some of the old necessities, all have become a little impatient of the deep claim that life makes on women. There is a general insistence that being a woman is now a simple matter: which ignores the fact that woman has one foot chained to nature; so her unique role is that of dancing in fetters.
      Living for others, or living in others, may well have accumulated much unlived and unadmitted egoism in us, so that now when many women live in their own right, they are driven by an almost ravening démand. It could hardly be otherwise. To be harsh, to be downright, to be indifferent even, is liberating. To be unfeeling is almost the new honesty. And it may take women some time to feel clean of the too personal.
      As woman’s participation in life so often entails an extreme of selfless giving, one might suppose she would always have been greatly honoured; and, as there was real danger of her losing herself, that she would have been warned. If we could look at it with fresh eyes we would expect that common caution would make a deep awareness of her innate duality the chief thing taught to women. But that is not at all how it has been. No garnered wisdom has said to women: ‘As you will give, make sure that you give from fullness. Otherwise you are flotsam, and cling from emptiness. As you will have to accept, and will sometimes receive what repels you, be sure you create clear values: so that your “Yes” and your “No” both protect life. As you are bound to know helplessness, learn to be steadfast. As you will have to conform, have a value in your own heart to which you can alway be true’.
      It was, of course, for women to on the words that they needed and if we have not done so it is our failure. I think we have failed to garner wisdom for ourselves. Instead, we have listened to society, and what society seemed to say to us was something like this: ‘You don’t belong to yourselves, but to others. It is the claim of others that will decide your lives. So forget yourselves, and try to be what others want you to be’.
      That is startling advice to receive, and it has had some dubious consequences. There is a deep level in us where we are still amazed and still saying ‘Really forget ourselves? Isn’t that an alibi for every thing? And really be what others want us to be? Is it safe?” It was reckless advice to give, and if we have adapted ourselves to others until we are instinctive chameleons, no one need complain. If for centuries society has confused us by wanting different things of us, and we have shown much sense, and some irony, by behaving as well as we sometimes do, my point is that now we have need of clarity as never before, since we are in ‘the process of creating for ourselves that exquisite thing, a true balance: a balance between what we are for the sake of others and what we are in ourselves. This that we live hour by hour, and day by day; we we give and we deny and we are never sure what amount is right, but we are trying [465] deperately to find out. We know that women will always live many forms of acceptance. We see this all about us, and know it in ourselves. Even the kind of child a woman forms in her body is almost outside her control. The chief influence in a woman’s life is apt to be the quality and ability of her husband. So nature and society agree that to accept is a great part of woman’s role. But this is a very big role. It matters who receives, and whether they honour, or misuse, the thing given them. If you accept, you also contain, and your influence is beyond measure. It has been careless of society not to take woman more seriously, for it needed the best of her quality, and it often engendered the worst.

Growing up in Vagueness
      Let us look at the effect of some of society’s expectations of woman. We will follow one of the paths by which she so easily loses herself, or finds herself. The maddening paradox being that she often combines the two. Let us begin in childhood where little girls are troubled by a sense of their own inferiority. Brothers often help them to feel this, and mothers are generally at a loss as to how to improve matters. Little girls, at six or seven, frequently declare that there is nothing girls can do. It is difficult to say to them that later on their humanity and reality are going to be of paramount importance, that they are going to need a great heart, incalculable stamina. One cannot go into all that — what they want is to be assured that women can train lions, or make good steeplejacks, so they can prepare for it now. Perhaps they will do these things, for one never knows what may be asked of a woman, or of what surprising things she may prove capable. She may inherit her father’s brains, and have to use them. She may marry a statesman, or become one herself; or she may have to maintain her family by charing. She may not marry at all, and then she may have to exist in her own right. So the attitude towards girls has long been ‘Better leave it open’, and in that openness, that vagueness, girls have grrown up.
      Mothers might say ‘Your quality creates happiness or unhappiness for men. You make or mar the children in your care’. But any honest mother would blush to say this, as it throws such a light on her. So she may fail to give her daughter the pride she needs, because the mother feels that she herself does not justify it. So little girls have too often lacked honour, and have been left in a sort of vacuum. They have drooped there, or they may have burst out yelling as crudely as their brothers. But either way there was confusion in them, an inability to find themselves, or a desperate resolve to do so at all costs. Or there may only have been a fatalistic vagueness, an acceptance of not-being. It is this passivity, this formlessness, that makes it so difficult to talk sense about women. For one cannot be sure when not-being is her virtue and when it is her vice. In trying to decide one wanders in obscurity, but does the obscurity belong to society, or to nature, or to women?
      Groping my way back to girls: they often decide that their disability lies in the body, as their bodies are clearly embarrassing to grown-ups. Yet when a young girl realises that her body is the very vessel of life, she wants to announce ‘I am very important’. This importance not being reflected in the air about her, she comes to doubt it. Then the impact of a new question is felt. Is her body comely or plain? This matters greatly if she is to be judged by her body. She may want to insist ‘I am in my body’, but it takes time to learn to say that simply. There seems to be a revolt among women against receiving yalue from others, and so they may turn from the body. They decide that they will not please, they will participate in life as little as possible.

How Baffling to be a Woman
      If you turn from the personal, there is nowhere to go but to the impersonal. So often women seek reassurance in study. Here, too, they can be frustrated. Modern psychology teaches that for a woman to identify herself with the intellect separates her from her true wholeess, so she thinks at her peril. Psychology often forgets to mention that if she genuinely honours the heart, the head can function without much danger. But she is naturally dismayed at this new pitfall for women. She remembers that in certain religions in the east, before women even thought of thinking, they had been said to lack souls. How baffling to be a woman.
      Seeing no way out she does what everyone wants her to do; she falls in love and marries. It is heartening to have a man like her body, even though he may not have noticed that she is in it. It is heartening to have a man like her body, even though he may not have noticed that she is in it. Indeed, she helps him not to notice it, as she is now ready to be whoever he imagines her to be. For, after all, she must be someone. Possibly he sees his feminine soul in her.’ It may not be much of a soul, maybe quite a light affair altogether; but it is his, and he fits it to her with no trouble at all. He is happy, he has found himself, and it enchants her to be the cause of happiness; though she does keep looking over her shoulder to see to whom he is talking. The truth is she has not the heart to tell him she exists. Nor is she sure that she does. She sees that as long as she wears a mask resembling him he is at one with himself. She will not intrude; she has been other people for some time now. Perhaps it is better so.
      Then she is with child, and the child claims her. There were things she had wanted to do, but they must go. She will be emptiness. She will carry her child as though she were a vase. Slowly she agrees to sink down in some deep river of women, submerged, almost lost. Then, after what seems a long time, she emerges exhausted, triumphant, and initiated, for a new person has been born from her body. She has been used by life and she is mute. Some of her has ceased to be, and instead there is this ancient, helpless, closed bud of a stranger. She has given part of her being to him, and he is her master. He is also her enemy, for he will drive her to all her sins of excess. He is the one she will die to further. She does not know it yet, but as long as she lives, her body and all her being will be under the compulsion of keeping him in life, that the life in him may fructify. For though she does it blindly and under protest, it is life she serves, and often serves by not-being.

Need for a Citadel
      Now she is caught by necessity, pulled here, pulled there; as time goes on she needs four pairs of hands, eight ears. Children, a man, a house, all need her and all misbehave if she is not theirs. The one thing she needs is a quiet centre in herself from which to view them, deny them; where she can rest and replenish herself. She lacks it, and can she reasonably be expected to have a citadel of her own, since she was never warned she would need it?
      Tired now, battered with living, and with new cause for confusion added to the amount collected earlier on, she hears a voice exactly like her own, but louder, much louder, that shouts at her adored and hated children. Can it be hers, and can it be her tongue that slashes at this man who inexplicably loves her? At about this point she begins to suspect that it might have been better, safer, and more comfortable all round if women were trained to know who they are and what they are: that this may even be the thing they need most. For to be a Boadicea at breakfast, and to tear through the day like one of the Valkyri is a logical result of our vague beginnings; but does anyone like it?
      Near to middle age now, we look at our almost grown-up family, and are not too pleased with the results of our years of hard work. Are we really responsible for what our children have become? Did we create, or fail to allay, the fears and weaknesses we see in them? And if we are responsible for their faults, did we create their virtues? No, we would not have known how. But we have done harm; this is the knife in our hearts. We can spoil, we can even ruin, the one we love. So selfless devotion is not enough. Forgetting ourselves has not worked too well. We needed wisdom, and we did not have it. If we had only known how important, how terribly important we are.
      Many women have come some such path as this, and may see, when it is almost too late, that it is when we are living for others that it matters most what we are. Being self-forgetful is not at all the same as being selfless. Believe us, for we know, having been both. Being self-forgetful is not at all the same as being selfless. Believe us, for we know, having been both. So society must not ask us to be blind any longer, not for love’s sake or for any of the lesser reasons, since it follows that we are then blind about ourselves. Now that we are gaining greater consciousness, we see that we have cause for pride and cause for shame, and this may be the time when we are ready to take on the conflict of our paradox.
      I want to imagine for a moment that I am near the centre of femininity and look about me, and report what I see. I have to admit that nothing looks very clear. Everything seems pretty undifferentiated. Must women be like this? Would the polarity between men and women be disturbed, if women were not somewhat formless? Perhaps we could not live nature if we were not close to nature. Opposing things do lie close together in women. So it may be our true role to live the balance of the opposites. For in us, side by side, lie comfort and confusion, [469] work and play. We are the ideal and the shadow, the sacred and the unseemly, sacrifice and indulgence. We bear the leaden weight of matter, and we are the mist of non-being. We are sense and nonsense, perhaps blindness and wisdom. Such opposites are heavy to carry. If it is like that inside, what is it like outside?
      Women have reached a place from where we may evolve our own reality or from where we can attempt to deny our depths. We are free to escape into our protest at being women, into arid thought, and a desperate hold on our own egos. Or we may learn to see ourselves, and be ourselves, even when living for others. We can become clear about the labyrinth of the personal, and we gained a place in the impersonal.
      We have long needed a feminine goddess to worship and fear. She would have to be the goddess of duality, of good selflessness and bad selflessness; she would be the goddess of the body, in its good and bad, and the goddess of love and hate. For we need to know our own destructiveness. With her enshrined in our hearts we might clarify our quality, we might even create the wisdom of living, as our protection, and our offering.
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