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A New Peace Between Man and Woman?
(“The last of three talks by Florida Scott-Maxwell”)
The Listener (September 29, 1955) : 503-504
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      Whenever women do anything new it is always said they are about to lose their femininity. Society is constantly alarmed about this, as though femininity were important, but fugitive. It may be so. Society almost seems to fear that if women were left to themselves they would cease to be women. This too may be true. It certainly looks as though women had a tendency to escape from the role assigned them, and now no one can say just what that role is. It has many new facets, and a woman always has to combine the new things with the old. At present she is professional and domestic at the same time, and she works like any ten men. The modern home does not seem to be sufficiently full of life to hold women in it, and the husband’s life is not regarded as requiring two to live it. The women need money and know they can earn it, but above all else women have energies for which they want an impersonal outlet. At present it is this thirst for the impersonal that appears to be their strongest urge.
      One could almost say that woman has fallen out of love with man, and fallen in love with the impersonal. A great number of women have stepped outside personal relationship. All this, of course, has been developing for a generation or two, with the two wars giving violent pushes forward. Now, woman’s education and her achievements declare unmistakably her impersonal allegiance.
      Someone may like to protest here and say: ‘Don’t tell me that because a woman learns to think she forgets how to feel’. So I answer at once that I am sure it is not inevitable, indeed must not be, but what I see about me looks very like it. And I ask in reply: ‘Is there not a dearth of true feeling among us? Does no one miss it in the present scene?’
      Coming back to my argument after that altercation with a possible someone, indeed with many possible someones, I again suggest that education, independence, and accomplishment have turned many a woman toward the impersonal, that the demands we make on her lead her further along the road, and that she delights in the way she is going, that she even finds the man within her own nature more exhilarating than other men, and that she would, in brief, rather be interested than loved. The upcoming of the masculine side of the woman is so general that psychologists accept it as a new phenomenon: destructive when it possesses the woman, deeply enriching when she integrates it, and always of great social importance.
      This fascinating fellow within woman’s psychology has always been an integral part of her make-up, but why is she living him so markedly now? Has she summoned him up to make some great change? Or because she is driven so hard by events that she cannot do otherwise? What is striking is that so many women are turned toward the impersonal long before marriage. They are stirred by learning, by some aspect of art, science, or affairs, before they are stirred by love. The have early formed an allegiance to something that they may not be able to take into marriage, which may indeed leave a great deal of them outside marriage. The wife’s affair with the impersonal before marriage has a very curious resemblance to the ritual marriage that in much earlier societies used to take place in the temples. They may have been performed so that the full impact of marriage might not be too great. And perhaps the first night being offered to the god allowed the bride and bridegroom to meet in their simple humanity. That first pledge to the impersonal made marriage easier, but if present-day women are wedded, without knowing it, to the impersonal, it may make marriage more difficult for them.
      So many women have learned to live successfully in a communal situation where everything is highly organised, and where the issues are large. When they marry they enter a small, isolated, and very personal situation, and they are at a loss. Their collective side has become very capable, and it is upsetting for a woman to find that she is not at all good in a personal situation. Her husband noticed it, too. He may seem to her rather small, and very personal, just one human being in fact, which of course is what he is. He now takes the place in her life where before marriage there was a large organisation. This is hard for both of them. The old rules of husband and wife no longer fit the situation. He does not now represent the outside world to her, since she knows it almost as well as he does. Nor can he be said to introduce his wife to the masculine world, for she has been living that in her own right. Here, of course, is the new element. Women do now live their masculinity in their own right, and, what is more, they like it. Which can only mean that the man no longer has the importance of doing it for them, so that he is proportionately reduced in the eyes of his wife. She has become collective and wants him to be as big as society, while he hopes to find the personal in her, and she has not got it.
      I want to stress again that while woman’s direction has become markedly outward, those men whose fate it is to live the birth of the new value out of the breakdown of the old tend to be turned inward. One has to suppose this has happened because man in general has gone too far in his development of the rational, and thus has created a world too barren to nourish him. This has forced many of the finest men to go in search of feeling and what can only be called their own femininity. They seek the life-giving values that rise from our deepest [504] sources. Many poets and writers speak from these places, saying things that puzzle and irritate, but which proclaim the missing thing. They are saying that the world needs ‘feminine oneness’ from which to be reborn — that humanity, now having seen its power to destroy, thirsts for love and mercy, and that the way to creative life lies through the individual soul.
      If many men have gone to their sources for very life’s sake, what happens when they meet? Sometimes, one knows there is mutual dismay, and mutual wounds received and given. The man needs, as he has always needed, the woman to symbolise his feeling, lived and honoured, making him rooted, and so free to exercise his strength in the outside world. Instead she lives the gallant, experienced man she has learned to be. Depth of receptivity is absent. The feminine oneness with life may be more in the man than in the woman. Instead she lives the gallant, experienced man she has learned to be. Depth of receptivity is absent. The feminine oneness with life may be more in the man than in the woman. The husband would have to be a hero indeed to rescue the wife from the tyranny of her inner man, and husbands have so little time to be heroic. So the men are baffled, weakened, because they offer the woman feeling that only half dares flower, and she looks askance at it, having no idea how to nurture it. Each turns towards the other the unwanted side, and there is confusion and pain.
      One could say that men and women are becoming more alike. This change in them might be one more aspect of the increasing collectivity that is perhaps our greatest peril. There is a widespread fear of being individual, a sense of relief in being collective If we are all alike we all feel safer. Perhaps it is felt to be too dangerous to be so potent a thing as a man or a woman. Such depths are best avoided.
      Many also shrink from being those powerful figures, mothers and fathers. Parents want to reduce these roles, and be ‘good friends’ to their children. Then the child need never summon the strength to bypass the parent, and so find himself. Poor parents, they have been so blamed! Mothers are wounded and confused by the great guilt that has been laid on them for grave harm blindly done. So everyone is doing his conscientious best not to live the deepest roles, and many of us succeed in this.

Role of Wife and Mother
      One might take a dark view of it all. A man may say that a woman must guard personal values, that only she can give the children the security that allows their feeling life to grow, that only thus are individuals nourished, that the quality of our humanity matters more than anything else, that any other achievement seems easlier of accomplishment than the training of a noble nature — if this is said, we can only give full, heartfelt assent. But a woman might say: ‘This thing has happened to us, and must be lived through. We are caught by a side of our nature that we need, and have too long lacked. We pay for it with bitter conflict, and we know our husbands pay, and our children, but they gain as well, and society gains, hands down. So give us time. We could not do the heavy tasks that are required of us without the man in our nature. Do not blame us, we carry a double burden, and we are trying to endure and to understand’. To that also, one would give most heartfelt assent.
      So what does it all mean? Is there a new balance forming between the masculine and the feminine? Both within man and woman, and between them?... A new integration, not yet begun, barely glimpsed? Is there a new balance forming between the masculine and the feminine? Both within man and woman, and between them? If this is so, may it not be a new promise, a new hope? A new integration, not yet begun, barely glimpsed? It will entail more new things, though many of them are already among us. It will certainly entail new tasks, but fruitful ones I believe. Among them is a new standard of relationship, where we must attempt to relate to our partner uniquely, in a way not possible for any other two people; accepting that men and women need each other to become themselves, and are only partly themselves if alone.

The Combat Begins
      Think what has happened hitherto. We imagine that we fall in love haphazardly. It is seldom so. Marriage would not be the mortal combat it sometimes is, if our choice were not less simple, and more meaningful. Falling in love seems, very often, to be a uniting with that part of ourselves of which we were least aware. Nature confronting us with what is truly ours, and in the blindness she puts upon us we accept our worst and our greatest possibilities. We take on the hidden sides without which we are not ourselves. Then, naturally, when we begin to see our own blind fault in our parter we dislike in intensely. We find it alien, inexplicable, and wholly unacceptable. So the combat begins. We take on the hidden sides without which we are not ourselves. Then, naturally, when we begin to see our own blind fault in our parter we dislike in intensely. We find it alien, inexplicable, and wholly unacceptable. So the combat begins. We urge, we hammer at our poor partners, we clamour that they must put the matter right. Oh, we see the fault now. The sickly evasion, or the arrogance, or the hardness. We see it and we hate it. We are driven to dealing with it, but in the other, not in ourselves. At last, we have an opinion about it, and willy nilly we have to endure it. But how often do we say: ‘I chose to marry someone as hard as this. Why Am I hard? Or am I so soft and cowardly that I have asked someone else to live my hardness for me? It must have meaning for me, since I am confronted with it daily, in the wond I love the most and hate most often. Is this the unique conflict at the very core of my being? Is this truly me?’
      If by courage, grace, and insight, or just the wear and tear of marriage, we gain the humility to see that this quality of our partner is also in us, that it is mutual, indeed unites us, is the very dark spot in us that most needs our redeeming acceptance, then we may reach a wholeness that was perhaps the fullness and goodness foreshadowed in the first enhancement of love. By living our latent sides, as so many of us are doing ow, or more often being lived by them, are we too blind and stupid thus to learn that they exist, are with us, tearing us to pieces, and yet, if we could only see it, are the wholeness that awaits us if we would make them ours? If they are neglected, they are the evil that belongs to no one, yet which exists, and shames us. There is such promise of living riches here, that very caution makes me pause, remembering how all through time men and women have wronged each other.
      But if we only say, and I believe we can go so far, that our present plight is a chance of self-knowledge that could prevent our planting on our partner our own worst fault, then who denies that this might bring new peace between us? And if before marriage a man has learned to honour his feeling, and a woman to guard her masculinity as her courage and her wisdom, then could there not be a new-found clarity between man and woman, and perhaps a new ease in giving the love each longs to receive?
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