To prove that men always see us as women and not as equals, all we need do is to look at the women whom men will let succeed in public life or a profession. Clare Boothe Luce is a very intelligent and capable woman, but she owes a great deal more to her beauty and her female charm than she does to her brains.2 No homely, awkward female would ever have gotten as far as she has in this world. The brains are there, but if they had been in an ugly head, the men would have taken pleasure in beating them out and forgetting all about her the next moment. Where men see no possibility of mating in a woman, she holds no interest for them. They may not recognize this consciously, but they work along those lines just the same. The keys compel. It is safe to say that no man has ever admitted any woman as his mental equal since God said, “Let’s make Man.” Men just say that when the female in question interests him enough.

  Nor is it a valid contention that men have control of things and will not let us do. It is only too true that men are in control of the affairs of the nation and the world, and that they are not willing for us to take their places. But the conclusion is inescapable that we have not the same strength as men, or they could not have things their own way. It is begging the question to clamor that men will not let us win. The questions must be answered, first, if we have equal strength, how did those men get control of things in the first place? Second, how have they managed to beat off the challenge of the last century of female freedom? It is true that female students in college make just as high grades as male students do. But let us not forget that for the greater part those text-books have been written by men, and that once out of college, we seem not to be able to apply what we have learned with the same intensity and drive as the men do, and thus fall into second place in the same fields. Nor can we maintain with any degree of conviction that the burden of motherhood is what prevents our measuring arms with the best men in the professions, because it is a notorious fact that most career women do not become mothers, even if they marry.

  It is possible that that very thing works against us in the race with men. Nature denied is cruel. The high rate of neurasthenics among modern women may mean something. We have not that same detachment in our emotions, and pretending that we do might be costing us more than we care to admit. Let us ignore the extremely rare woman who has the male detachment, for she is so rare as to be negligible. That known male whom we desire, or the possible one whom we seek is with us even in the midst of the most serious occupation, consciously or sub-consciously. We want some other woman’s grown-up boy to pet and mother over, make whatever compensation through a career which we will or may, and suppressed desire is always at our elbow, hunching and nudging us when we should be concentrating on business if we are to be a serious challenge to men. We refuse to admit it in the glory of our new freedom, and the nation is strewn with female neurotics from end to end.

  Perhaps in a few more centuries of female freedom, this natural handicap will be overcome, but this will only be true if some way is found to alter biological fact. In the meanwhile, thousands of inter-sexual tragedies clutter up the landscape.

  Take the case of the beautiful and utterly feminine girl who decided that it would be an exciting thing to become a woman dentist. Before her freshman year in college was over, she had two opportunities to marry well. She refused both for the stated reason that she did not wish to abandon her career. Men wanted to make a pampered plaything of her, but she wanted it understood that she was going ahead, and prove the case for the women. She seemed not to notice the fact that she got along as well as she did in college because the men in her class were ever ready to help her with her laboratory assignments, and the professors were not indifferent to her beautiful young body and face. They were happy to give her of their strength. She misunderstood and considered herself a whale of a Dentist.

  The pay-off came when she opened her office in New York City. First, she found that many men admired her as a woman, but few trusted her as a Dentist. The women stayed away from her office in droves. Then her femininity kept her on the go all the time, and she had little time to devote to her practice, and even less energy for actual work. Still, she refused to marry unless she could find a man who was willing to acknowledge her intellectual equality and take her as a sort of brother-brain. After six years of this sort of thing, she came to realize that she was a failure in her profession, and a bit shop-worn socially. This came about because she had mistakenly considered that as a professional woman, she could adopt the same attitude towards sex-relations as a man. The desirable men who had once held it an honor, and certainly a blessed privilege, to win her as a wife, were either safely married, or now treated her as she had wanted to be treated, that is like a pal. Nothing like marriage in their minds, where she was concerned any more. Dr. Emily F. eventually captured a shipping-clerk in her mid-thirties, shut up her unprofitable office and settled down to be a very humble housewife. A year later, a very frustrated woman, she had a nervous break-down, from which she has never recovered. A divorce followed, and single again, she became a notorious sensation-seeker and publicity fiend. She has made two more marriages, both beneath her intellectually and after short periods, both ended in divorce. She still delights in parading her degree of D.D.S., but otherwise has been working as a Social Worker for years. Always talking about the now-distinguished men who she could have married.

  Then there was Winifred B. Another beautiful and feminine creature who came up from the South to study at Columbia U. She met a young and ambitious medical Doctor, and soon they were married. She was introduced to his circle of friends. Among them was a young woman, not nearly so seductive, who was a journalist with a pleasing personality that got her a great deal of admiration from the Doctor and other men. They admired her as a woman and as a good and skillful conversationalist, but the pretty wife of the Doctor did not understand this. She thought that it was the career that made the other so popular. She decided that she herself must have a career. Nothing that the Doctor, who was very much in love with her, could do or say had any weight with her. His income was still small, but out of that he must pay her tuition for two years at Columbia while she took up Sociology, and in addition, he had to pay a housekeeper to look after the home while she attended school. On graduation, she must get her a job and work, which she did. It brought her fifty dollars a week, but the satisfaction which she got out of being a career woman, and rattling off the technical terms of her profession with others in her field, made up for the rest.

  This went on for nine years over constant friction in the home. She complained that the Doctor was too old-fashioned, and wanted to crush her personality by confining her to his home. In the meanwhile, and in her absence, the Doctor went in for advanced studies himself. After six years of graduate work, he bloomed forth as a brilliant surgeon, and was offered a place on the staff of a famous hospital in the city of New York. Madam Winifred suddenly came to realize that she was the wife of a very important man. She also came to understand at about the same time that the Doctor was no longer interested in her. He was indifferent as to whether she was at home or at the office where she held down a minor desk. All he wanted of her was a Bill of Separation from her, and not to see her around the place.

  What troubled her was that she was a little heavy now through her hips, and the lower part of her face. If the Doctor succeeded in getting rid of her, as he boldly stated that he wished to do, where would she find another man of the eminence of the Doctor? How could she bear to move out of the big, comfortable house where they now lived, and which he owned, to less spacious quarters, which the terms of the Separation demanded? The Doctor won all down the line, and she was forced to accept a monthly stipend, and move into a small apartment. Now she was compelled to hold onto that job which she hated, but which had once been so important to her.

  And there was no satisfaction for her anywhere she looked. The journalist had long since married a friend and colleague of the Doctor, and practised her trade only when it did not interfere with her domestic arrangements. Her husband got steak and potatoes and apple pie on demand, his slippers brought to him wherever he might choose to flop down and wallow in the house, and his cigar ashes brought no protest from the erstwhile woman of affairs. She had disappointed Winifred in turning out to be her husband’s woman as well as his wife, and betrayed the feminist movement in other ways. Winifred came to feel herself led astray and betrayed, and took to sleeping-pills every night so as not to remember what she had once held in the palm of her hand. After a year of bitter reflection, Winifred became a rabid Communist, and took to speaking in Union Square.

  Multiply these two cases by thousands, and you have a picture of the numbers of women who have followed the light that failed. Stirred by the example of some more or less successful woman in the public eye, these women miss the point and tear out after the free life of the males. They see in Dorothy Thompson for instance some female figure detached in space from the ordinary human emotions, when in fact, Miss Thompson is dependant on a man for her happiness and recognizes the fact only too well.3

  There is another aspect of this mirage that is threatening to happiness for both men and women. That is the illusion that women, career women, can enjoy the same sexual freedom as men with the same impunity. It is not so, but let us assume that the world has advanced to the point where this is accepted. Is it not possible that these women contrive a great disappointment for themselves by such a habit? A blasé attitude brought to a new marriage bed is bound to occasion a certain disappointment in the woman. Where is that springtime ecstasy of the intimacies with the one-possible man for her? The adhesive quality that makes of the mate something of a king, if not something only a little short of a divinity and puts up a barrier against divorce is lacking, and the mistaken girl has been cheated out of the greatest emotion of her life. Then too such casual pre-marital affairs kill off the mystery that men used to feel, and make marriage less binding on them too. He feels little of the need to guard and protect. He does not have that instinctive feeling that he cannot turn back, even under the strain of temporary unhappiness that comes in all marriages at times. Oh, she will get along all right. She knows how to take care of herself, he concludes, and lets the marriage slide. What looked like freedom turns out to be a snare for the girl’s unhappy feet. More young women, after a brief period of marriage, join the caravan of unattached and unsettled women in the land.

  No one can deny that these conditions are. No female careerist can avoid looking at the picture from time to time. And the inevitable question arises inside her, how much is a career worth to a woman anyway? Are not the unknown women, bossing the man of her choice really happier than the career-woman, however famous outside her natural sphere?

  There are those three keys of mystery lost to sight somewhere in this modern shambles. Like the legend of the Holy Grail that hid itself from the sight of men after the world became too wicked, perhaps the three keys of the mysterious metal mined only in the veins of the highest hill in Heaven, on the jewelled ring that is made of finest gold, and that once hung on a silver nail at the end of God’s mantelpiece, have vanished from the sight and hold of women because they have become too mannish.4

  And like Sir Percival, and Sir Galahad, of King Arthur’s famous court, some modern maidens, wary of the hurly-burly of the times, shall yet clothe themselves in white samite, and after a period of meditation, shall go forth in search of this female and modern equivalent of the Holy Grail, the three keys of feminine mystery, which if found, shall make Woman again the ruler of the earth.5 The Devil will be re-won as the friend of Woman and from one thing to another, everybody, including God, might come to be happy again.

  The South Was Had

  The South was had. There is no doubt about it. The matter of segregation and the Eisenhower administration of the South was had.1 Dixie was sold the Brooklyn Bridge. The only question before the Court is who made the sale? Who did it? Did what? murmurs that out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth hypnotic phrase, “The South must not forget that Eisenhower was born in Texas,” the inference being that he would hold the line on segregation with all the pugnacity and determination of a Brahma bull. Southerners quoted it with a gloating glint in their eyes. How could they lose with the tools they had. Ike was born in Texas.

  There are three prime suspects: First, Ike himself, somebody in Ike’s machine and the wishful thinking South itself. Ike has an alibi. Eisenhower has the distinction of being the only man who ever won both the nomination and then the high office while being hidden up under a particular bed. This had a two-way stretch. It prevented the highly touted candidate from exhibiting his ignorance of political know-how, and at the same time, prevented the public from getting to Ike so that it could be truthfully, more-or-less, said that Ike knew nothing of the raw deals necessary to edge him past Robert A. Taft and into the nomination. So far as to whom, where and on what occasion Ike muttered the promissory sentence that so bewitched the South, there is no record.

  But even if Eisenhower had shouted the reminder where he was born from the house tops, his record in the matter is such that no one in their sober mind should have been persuaded by his words, for:

  Ike had no choice in where he was born: for his father, having failed in business in Kansas, merely migrated to Texas temporarily to earn a living for his family, and his stay was very short. Ike indeed was born there, but the family stay was so brief that he was still an in arms baby when the family returned to Kansas—the Kansas of “bloody” conflict over the question of Negro slavery, of the raids of John Brown and the like. There the boy became first a toddling Kansas-baby, then a sturdy boy and finally, a man. Never did he show any inclination to return to “The Lone Star State,” and did not do so until he was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army and a married man, when sent there on an army post.

  While in command of American forces in Europe during World War II, he desegregated his army of his own accord.

  When he did decide to buy a permanent home, he did not even glance at Texas, but bought a farm overlooking the historical battlefield at Gettysburg, Pa., where the confederate forces had suffered their most crushing defeat and settled down to breed, of all things, black cows—registered black angus cows.

  The second suspect is somehow political genius in the Dewey machine, independent of and unknown to Eisenhower who spread this come-over pledge over Dixie. It was very clever in that it said, in effect, pay no attention to what may be said to get the vote of the Northern liberals. A Texan will never betray the South, even if nominated by the Republican Party. You know how Texans stand on segregation. Well, Ike is no different. Naturally this sounded good in Southern ears, and feeling betrayed by their own party under Truman’s determined liberalism, they bought into it.

  The third suspect is the South itself. Feeling let down by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party led by Truman, the idea of a man born in Texas was blown up into a grand illusion. This was brought about by some of the vocabulary boys like John Temple Graves II who urged the South to break the oath taken during the Reconstruction to one of NEVER NEVER vote the Republican ticket.2 And why not? They had already been betrayed by their own party. It was desolate and needed a dream, and it is well known that there is nothing that people know that is one-half so precious as what they want to believe.

  So from the meager incident of the birth of Eisenhower in Texas, the South dreamed with such violence that it committed what is equal to killing the albatross. It fell upon the political camel and beat it up, in spite of the proverb from the Near East to “Never strike a camel for it will certainly get even sooner or later.”

  The beating of the camel took the form of thousands of Southern Democrats invading the Republicans’ primaries to secure the nomination for Texas-born Ike over Senator Robert A. Taft.3 Somebody with evil intent evidently held of the constitution-worshipping Ohio Senator as a booger-boo to the South because he had secured a vote of censure for Senator Bilbo of Mississippi for stating on the floor of the Senate his inclinations and intentions of depriving not only the Negroes of his own state, but of the entire nation of their civil rights and shipping them all off to Africa if possible.4

  Now, not only his colleagues in the Senate, but everybody of importance in public life was aware of Taft’s reverence for the Senate and understood that Taft was spanking Bilbo for saying what he did over the floor of the Senate. There was no intent to pursue Bilbo into his own bailiwick and play into the conduct of radical affairs in Mississippi.

  There was no provision in the Constitution for such actions, and consequently, Taft would not even have contemplated it. He made himself clear on this point when a group of Negroes inquired of him at Durham, N.C., whether in case he was elected President, would he force the integration of schools in the South. Taft replied frankly that he would not attempt any such thing because there was no provision for such action in the Constitution. The President, he pointed out, was an executive, there to carry out the laws made and provided by the founding fathers or amendments by the legislators, not to make laws of his own. Yet, somebody scared the South into an acre of fits by picturing Taft as a rabid abolitionist and stampeded them towards Texas-born Ike. As a result, they rushed illegally into the Republican primaries in Texas, Louisiana and Georgia to the extent that the will of the actual Republicans was trampled down, and the political maverick, Ike, was nominated. These three states decided the issue. If their illegal delegations had been ignored, Taft would have won.

  After the winning ballot and while the Dewey machine was putting over Eisenhower and whooping it up in the aisles, came the tones of the golden voice of Senator Dirksen, commenting bitterly that there was a whole filing cabinet of evidence of fraud performed by the Eisenhower supporters being somehow ignored by the Republicans.5