Emily Hahn - Once Upon a Pedestal

EMILY HAHN

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Emily Hahn

I wish to thank Professor Gordon S. Haight and Professor Edmund S. Morgan, who lent me books and gave me advice, and David H. Springer, for advice on Anne Hutchinson.

CHAPTER 1

Whistling Girls

There was a time not so long ago when she was talked of as the most pampered female in the world, with the possible exception of some prize-winning Persian cat. She was drawn by Gibson, painted by Sargent, written about by Henry James, costumed by Worth, gently but lovingly mocked by Punch, and describedthough, admittedly, with a certain distasteby Kipling. A rose was named for her. Noblemen courted her. She was the American Girl.

It goes without saying that she didnt burst on the world full- fledged. There were many American women ahead of her, as there have been thousands since, but somehow that period, about 1890 to 1914, seems to stand out as the Girls epitome, her finest hour. Since then, slowly at first, and then with mounting speed, something has happened to her successors, and as the long-stemmed American Beauty fades from the scene we might wonder why. After all, American women have lost none of the Gibson Girls advantages and have gained some of their own in recent years. She is still the envy of the other women of the world or is she? What has happened to bring forth this latter-day womens protest?

It may be that one cant sum up the processes. Perhaps feminism just happens from time to time, lurking in womankind like the flu virus, for if we look at history we can see that there is nothing new about feminine protest. It even crops up in mythology and literature. Twenty-three hundred years ago the citizens of Athensmen, of course; women didnt have citizenship in Greece, and were not permitted to visit the theater anywayrocked with laughter at Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata. In that play, you will recall, the women grew so tired of a long-drawn-out war between Athens and Sparta that they staged a revolt against the men, denying them sexual intercourse until peace should be declared. Then there was the myth about the Amazons: female warriors who fought like men, governed a nation of women only, and took mates temporarily, sending away all male infants at birth to be raised by their fathers somewhere outside the country.

But Lysistrata and the Amazons were figments of the imagination. Real-life Greek women lived much like women everywhere in all ages, mothering children and taking care of men. In ancient civilizations very few women became rulers and fewer were warriors or hunters, because fighting and hunting were mens work. Down through the centuries humans have continued to behave in much the same waythough in extraordinary circumstances, such as those in which Joan of Arc found herself, a few people must have given fresh thought to the subject. It is hard to believe that some women now and then, even when the Catholic faith was observed throughout the West, did not question the justice of St. Pauls philosophy.

Surely little girls of ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt, before they were brainwashed, must have rebelled when they were checked in their attempts to play the games boys played, and stormed in futile protest when they had to give way to their brothers in family disputes. Almost inevitably, life tamed them, but now and then a girl made history, and I cannot believe that such girls were confined to the class of queens like Nefertiti and Hatshepsut. The queens records were engraved and so lasted; the little rebels have been forgotten, but they lived too. Here and there in fables and old-country anecdotes we catch the echo of a womans voice protesting, as in the tale of some housewife outwitting her husband. The Arabian Nights have many such stories. Certainly feminine protest existed in old Englandwhat about the following?

Whistling girls and crowing hens

Always come to bad ends.

I find it significant, both because there were evidently girls who whistled and because of the propaganda against them implicit in these words. We know about Aphra Behn, the seventeenth-century playwright who often protested against womans lot, and there was, too, Mary Astell, who wrote a long book on the subject from which I shall quote in due course.

But American women, people used to say, are a new breed. Though the United States has taken its language and many of its customs from England, American women are not like Englishwomen. They are indulged and spoiled. They behave like queens. They bully their husbands, leading them around like pet dogs. Articles in British papers point, over and over, to statistics that indicate a high incidence of heart disease and early death among American husbands. The cherished theory held by the English is that our unfortunate men work themselves into early graves to satisfy their wives demands for luxuries: bigger and better cars, huge houses or apartments, glittering dishwashers. Then, having killed off their husbands, the harpies sit back and live the life of Riley on the insurance. Look at them, say the Englishand the French, and the Germans, and the Italiansswarming over to Europe in chartered planes, thronging the shops, playing bridge in luxury hotels. As if this were not bad enough, we have the statistics relating to divorcethe American laws which grant ridiculously generous alimony most husbands must pay even when they are not the offending parties. No wonder American women own 80 percent of the nations wealth.