Gateway to Ideas; 7; Changing Attitudes Towards Women

it's b two ideas gateway to ideas a new series of conversations in which ideas are discussed in relation to meeting today's program to changing attitudes toward women is moderated by the g peterson noted author and critic our guests today are ms margaret cousins formally managing editor of good housekeeping magazine and then of mccall's magazine and now senior editor at doubleday and company and mr morton hunt off of the natural history of love and their infinite variety and of a forthcoming collection of articles on psychological themes called the thinking animal changing

attitudes toward women is rather a fat umbrella covers many things politics economic sociology not bespeak of sex and emotions i wonder ms cousins ray you see the greatest change in the attitude toward women if indeed you think there has been a great change well i think that the most tremendous change never happened in a group of people is through the world seven when the twentieth century and i think it's based largely on the fight that they have achieved a certain variety of economic freedom from which all the freedoms seem to stand and i think that the stresses and strains of how come in this transition or response for the troubles one i have today well what do you agree that the other freedoms all stand out of economic liberation well i think that's an awfully important part of it but this is a very broad perspective on changing attitudes toward women and i'm more interested in the changing attitude of the last fifteen years or so which seems to

me the really crucial interesting thing today i would say that that's a kind of a synthesis it seems to me that when the economic change in women's position began it seemed that any woman who entered the outer world beyond the home of critically in industry or business of any sort was so masculine aggressive dangerous and famine hostile and abed partner for a man in all ways or are we that was mr drew this was this is a kind of an overwhelming impression that people had in that sleeve i was as i was wasn't only propaganda the word there were quite a few women who were somewhat that way what i think is happening now was a kind of synthesis in which it's not necessary for a woman to be either aggressive or so masculine anymore to take her place in the outer world at the same time there has been this uniting of margin home life with a woman's interest in things beyond the home that is what i think is most important change this despite the fact that there still are a box popping up signs of the written by angry women well the feminine mystique manager is the one you have in mind i must say i

think she made a case for the effect of advertisers on women i i wondered don't you think his cousins that maybe they are deliberately setting about to corrupt women in order to keep the economy going i think that may be true athletic amiri chorus a large percentage of women to do to have gainful employment for certain number of years and i think the winner of the product of man's imagination is as verified i think that when i mean i stayed serve or record with a labor market and they required a consumer market so that is necessary for them to well i meant was elevated they're necessary as customers to buy fifty thousand varieties that individual market requires them as well as a labor market other thing i object to those who know the feminine mystique is the feeling that there were there was really sort of a plot afoot it's a kind of thinking which assume that behind oswald and ruby there was a plot to when there really was and i

think most of the advertisers managers do it takes to alice walton i mean i don't think madison avenue collectively is out to force women back into the home they may be out to make them buy more things for the home or they're not really out to work to force them back into some kind of victorian image you know i don't think they care about the image either but they're certainly out to make them pitches things they don't need because if they didn't we would we would go down unless we go on having a war in vietnam war think that's true and i think the image in our view of advertisement and women serve as michelangelos found typical american family with a handsome father the beautiful house wife and two small children there's religion once a picture on the cover of an issue the saturday evening post that i've never forgotten it was a summer vacation and the father and the two children was pulling on the sand and inside

looking through the window was the woman with a pile of dishes as high as her hair behind the holiday every one of the women when they are in twenty two would these thoughts on an overseas you go reid stacks of paper plates and hack back over is bad for women and women if they choose to be in homes that this is a splendid only woman to think themselves as individuals another play are free to choose they can think of themselves as individuals and make these decisions are they and the energy and the stamina that as a regular stomach do both that's fine if they choose to be housewives of my guest bryan burrough stop apologizing for god doesn't seem to think he didnt take stamina in that book of yours her infinite variety you can you sail along with and let's sit him age of shining women's faces being good wise good mistresses good mothers good heavens oh well now

you know it's a hassle and all we could do it if they just get very keen indeed that peace out of it well i think perhaps you saw in that something you might like to see but i did say that it's fairly difficult to do all these things a long time to do a little simultaneously without strain and stress in fact i really do believe that's quite an important thing in the league this multiplicity of roles modern woman has and it has a multiplicity which you can play a long time sometimes you must lay aside one or two roles for a while while others are more important in her life in pre empt her time but this doesn't say that you shouldn't define herself as that one thing from then on this i think is a mistake of many women make of it when they leave the job and become mothers i think now this is the real me and i will be this forever and ever and what i was trying to say is that a woman should have a role repertoire us hope a whole series of selfs upon which she can grow corn and what time of life she is in

casting a great deal more than the testing of management i know i don't really think it is because we also have many were already of roles a man who is a you know a good and somewhat subservient employee to rather tough boss plays quite a different role when he was home to last year's class was why aren't strong father of a son he plays another altogether in a local pta meeting or in his own club and sort of song always seem to be saying no really ultimately is that we still are the second sex don't you think it's cousins that we are i think seen and will as well was very annoying but also a very annoying but i refused to administer some boys be alone and i was very glad to be a woman an ad by do think she's not a notion that yes when she wrote about the shame and humiliation of childbearing i thought i'd go up through the ceiling as i got out of prison normal woman in the whole world who ever felt that way unless she were having a child she should be held in israel have that joy you

you can know we're reasonably successful in satisfactory life as a woman a woman's life is i think the best live and would rather be a woman than a man who already survived you had to give that to three years now long book because i was there that you're really write it because you're one of the most successful career women around and i think well i mean i mean i really i had a woman and i know that i missed most importantly life or woman as marriage and now i would like that but as i didn't have them are grateful to be alive now and i have a chance to to live a life on the terms that i can cope with it you don't honestly think that marriage is the most important thing in a woman's life to you i think a lot of the marijuana the changing attitudes that perhaps it isn't the only thing the major thing i think that as you as well that most women have too had to look up to another person they most women would prefer look up to men and many women in business look up to them and they

work for and i think sometimes selfishness is always the best situation for happiness and that's what this is the last issue of the habits it's grabbing that that that is a very difficult thing to bear in mind in modern times for women and men because freud as sydney he insisted on the importance of the self to the point where you forget selflessness as an event years ago the eu say this sends peterson and replied which are just saying i think that the changing attitude toward women and by women toward themselves still is not ruling out the importance of marriage as really the number one thing in the lives of most women this but the difference is this that once there was a dichotomy was either marriage or it was a career or the other activities in a woman's life and the two were really opposed they were they were invisible she couldn't do them both and today what has changed is that she thinks you can do them both she does do them both she feels she ought to do them

both and still in the minds of the great majority of women including working women but husband and home come just as head of all her other interests and when there is a conflict it's the other interest it's the career or the outside activity which has to heal because for her the main chance the main importance is this connection with a man and the creation of an enclave of her own a world that is her world oh this from some arbitrary a philosophical view it may not be quite fair says the way it is and i'm really trying to do we're describe the change that icu not to say whether it's the ultimate and the best way for for people when she said it that is controlled for instance had been one of the most important things in affecting the changing attitude toward women and in liberating them from satan sexual taboos and then giving them the feeling that it's possible to have a love relationship with a man and still go on with a career and not have any consequences or any social consequences either because a contribution of thing most well

jordan while so i'm impressed by the fact that in history it doesn't seem to be the birth control is what an m he seated periods of sexual liberation or freedom or other people for various reasons got more liberated and free and they're upon what about discovering how they could control what was supposed to be what should be happening is something that i really i really think it was the un the liberation or it is slackening of moral ties or greater freedom of women to carry out their own urges which always stimulated of discovery of contraceptive methods sing it irritates me about many a book sorry about women is is is known in central asian at that play on if they get married and everything stops and this just isn't true of woman is you know a good education most of us now is a massive education can apply the education to ennis situation justifies percent of men but many women diarrhea soon realized i wish as the heart we say that sometimes you can take take the

storm education your head and an applied the whole community children of the bomb itself jihad applied to the bakken key ministers and it really is and i find that ran back into your education he somehow they're always got jobs and then you do of you at work terrific situation a job you have many many chores that are everyday chores that are not exciting that are not created are not glamorous that are just necessary that's what keeping houses like us cousins i have two percent slightly from that i agree with you that that every job except that meeting of top five percent of jobs in the whole world every job has a great deal of boring and daughter patricia's but i got a great deal of correspondence from women are an awful lot of letters from women in alumni magazines and so on all about the subject how you use spinoza when raising children in that country our vacuum cleaner so you know what's the role of the facilities in a vacuum

cleaner it seems to me that the big difference is that at home when a woman is living the suburban household and dealing with small children her education is really sort of rusting away within her because there are no human beings of her own level to deal with young children is one thing was marvelous but she wants the stimulation of exchange with adult minds and even on a dull job you get some of this which is why many women take part time jobs even as something fairly routine like book keeping find it is a great stimulus because they're out there somewhere where the people are no one of those rare bid saying of your sex who really seems to date women quietly and seriously as they would like to be taken but i have been writing that among all the changing attitudes the attitude of contempt has not changed i have a feeling that the extraordinary and ubiquitous emphasis on sexual characteristics of women in the magazines and in the advertising for those that can ten

four women as vessels for pleasure and nothing else and i have a feeling that there's a there's a great deal of contempt nearly in the reference for instance let's say to women's clubs to women's cultural activities it's our colleague joe it's a stale is the mother in law a job but it goes on to making man actor as a male essays business it very difficult you don't don't be too defensive because i never see as i am license since i'm the only male representative one time when you can kind of destabilizing to have it warm friendly attitude toward women i must also say that if anybody starts to downplay or minimized women sexual characteristics i'm going to rise and they were you know things even it chaos that old cliche is that this doesn't in the least elite contemptible to appreciation well but it's not the kind of appreciation that a lot of women would like to have death i would like to hear somebody say than women being creative on the highest level as men can they get something

of the end i enjoy with creative not the sex ramona matter plays me as you think like a man makes me was going on fridays yes i know i think i do well on the other hand it's perfectly true that if you ever start to try and list the accomplishments of women versus accomplishments of menacing field you find for a few more specimens of women yelling in charge yes but but even when you take a video is eleanor mccabe a psychologist at stanford university who made a study of women ph these unmanned peach trees and she found that even a single women ph these did not turn out as many papers and books as the married male phd now so there was no factor here of there being tied down in the home and are that they had all of the time and freedom to do as much work as men they bore terribly inhibited and blocked by the kind of a fear that women get culturally induced that to be too bright and too successful used to be so masculine was

a lobbying on families of the greatest earlier when you're you remember the idol of my manners wrote in that image is sunday magazine section of the times not too long ago about how men detest educated women and she got an immense response to that article and do you think that men really like women to be educated as educated as they are i'd like to get a positive answer a positive yes and no because ha ha i think in the first place that there are thirty or forty years ago very very few men liked women to be truly educated and truly creative and there is still a good deal of that resentment and fear and hostility when it is changing you talk about changing attitudes how is it that a day practically all school teachers women scholars were impeached he's women scientists are women in government are all married says quite a difference from thirty four years ago apparently a large number of men are beginning to find them not only acceptable but preferable so i think that we are we are

changing we are learning how to synthesize our images of you and good heavens we don't have to give up the image of you as as such really delightful just like the other part of you i had a very encouraging but i'm trying to be encouraged but i think there are a good many novels dealing with women likely more than than we have before dealing with all women week we had three last year we had the girls of slender means by muriel spark we had the little girls by elizabeth bowen and we had of course we still have the group mary mccarthy key all of them dealing entirely with women and men did read these books but did they read them because they were laughing up their sleeves to think wonder whether the majority readers of the group for instance were men or women i suspect it was very largely women about i want i would think so raza says that's when suspects and nail figures must treat independents oddly told oh boy the least

two different publishers that the bulk of book readers are women who was a second article against them or is this true i think it probably is true desert near them from the major our percentage of book buyers are women now i think men read books or women buy and yet when you go out to women's clubs to speak inclined to tell you know ms beeson we got no time to read in great neck or actually that there's much you have a lot more time reading than men if they are not gainfully employed as we say coming back to the group for a moment and reason i would guess and this is just a shot in the dark but i would just a great many women really more than men is one of the things i heard from a number of women while i was writing my own book was that they were very curious to see what i wrote because women don't really tell other women they told some things but on the surface but they rarely reveal how it really is when they're out it said alito what is certain told what she thinks she saw

the ira i'm not sure that it's a whole picture i often get a feeling that if she's right there isn't anybody on earth i really would like to be a friend of and i don't know maybe that's just my reaction her but i think she sees things through rather dark glasses i don't think one until each other when streisand they don't tell men either what strikes me is as sell that really a barren saying is water what a problem we i mean we american women i don't think women in the rest of the world i'd consider themselves or are considered as much of a problem we have a reputation for being a matriarchy in this country and the rest of the world thinks of american woman has the most privileged spoiled self satisfied animal creation actually where we all seem to be into a minutely distressed in the ramallah discussions of this kind that we're having now and then and then there are many other time that we we we would present to ourselves an

enormous problem this doesn't seem to me indicate that the changes the indian attitude are either right changes which are letting ourselves in the category such that job lock people into categories many women are don't honestly think they'll be built was when a lot of themselves as individuals they have not got that far along the road a free domain says something of themselves as working girls your work and boy books that's true they think of themselves always in terms of song category housewife they say shelly you know so it helps us to think in terms of categories and i don't believe in generalizations right you did make a generalization the very beginning of the lessons that i have with others it is very right in in response to this question was peterson's you said that you thought economic change that produced most of the changing attitudes towards women and

although it seems american women the problem women i think that this doesn't and injustice i think wherever other countries are changing the direction of high productivity and organization like they're on the same problems are coming up have you read what's happening for instance a british woman or a german one and even two japanese they are coming up with the same problems american women have been facing for twenty or thirty years and i think it gradually is we're getting some kind of services american women will cease being such problem characters and everybody else to hire women or prompter villages were ahead of the times a little bit because we it became so much more industrialized so much more rapidly and had kind of a heritage of the frontier which gave women more freedom in the head your but how do you explain the hostility to women and so much modern literature both on stage and in into novels for instance tennessee williams and all be at all an unfamiliar all these these playwrights and and many of the novelist saul away from the

bottom from o'hara all the way up to two really distinguished novelist habits to reveal a marked hostility toward women and all the books about mothers and i blamed this on frogs are like hughes freud as a whipping post lola books about mothers and in fact all the discussion about mothers is placing the blame on mothers are the waste category in the hall of the united states they are princesses sentimental idiotic destructive women who ruin their children ah we have her fault for everything that our children do is now i'm responsible for himself laurel for you were playing for too much i like to point out there is a book which i think is being published later this month by anthropologist h r ks and the title is the dangerous sex this is a review i got it a review copy just the other day so this is how i know about the book that has even been viewed as far as i know this is a a review from primitive times to the present of man's hostility to women and his fear of her and it has both

anthropological and psychological roots and four didn't cause it in modern times didn't cause it goes all the way back you can go back to have see if you want and find him telling you what terrible creatures women are and this is an old old story so i think that this is not really the fault of psychoanalysis per se there's even a change in in in the attitude that in fiction to an adultery or if you think of anna karenina which is probably the greatest and most vivid novel that i'm sure it is for my point your dad ever read it is an extraordinarily sympathetic and yet highly morrow picture of the destruction of of a woman threw adultery now adultery is not taken that way at all there is no moral tone about it whatsoever but there also isn't the tenderness and the consideration for the woman involved in it as a sort of a contemptuous well you wanted to get rid of the double standard and and and so we

pay a price i think it's an instrument like a madame bovary would get much attention now there's a whole change in moral climate which you know i don't wear women are responsible for this or not i you know i think a good example of what you're saying spears and i just i just would sort of the summer yet gentle about three years behind on novels but to that i think that technology dylan i was written on our own it has it has a number of affairs in and perfectly true that the women in it are over quite free creatures equals a man and i will seem to get their comeuppance was the happy exception of one woman who comes out all right at the end of it but only after great trevor noah should say what dr johnson seventy years ago the other is whether a prisoner so badly in their journey the fiction and erin and goldman are the riders out answer as untrue is why planners are writing at the moment and one of the proprietors at the moment i think i think men's books get more attention when

a wooden she says some of the best women novelists to day ah women of that not at the very top knot of the faulkner level not in a mori actor level not a thomas mom level but just below that you've got katherine anne porter and you're you know you've got mary mccarthy outside of the group's sydney she's done a substantial body of which you got here i can't think of them now but you should be able to play companies they all hold but there is a mole body of work by women witches is really just below the top draw i think in the end that feel perhaps there's been more of a change than in any of course you see flying over but a psychoanalyst i know carrots or why you can think of the names were all hostile toward other women horrible oh mighty the very easily set on edge anyway

you do you do you miss cousins feel and say so quickly that we are on the way to becoming just members of mankind yes i do you do well it seems as if the consensus of opinion of this discussion is that marriage and having children is a very major thing but that women are fully capable of assuming all the roles and that the more education they get the battery isn't that pretty soon they will be established family as human beings and that won't be any more discussion of them as the second sex or a nation or sheep or any other dreary nomenclature for the mine i want to thank you very much for being with us ms cousins and mr hunt speaks to you you've been listening to gateway to ideas a new series of conversations in which ideas are discussed in relation to reading today's program changing attitudes toward women as presented margaret cousins former managing editor of good

housekeeping magazine mccall's magazine and present senior editor at doubleday and company and morton hunt author of infinite variety the natural history of love and a forthcoming book on psychological and psychiatric subjects the moderator was virginia peterson noted author and critic to extend the dimensions of today's program for you a list of the books mentioned in the discussion as well as others relevant to the subject as being prepared you can obtain a copy from your local library or by writing tool gateway to ideas post office box six four one time square station in new york and he's in close a standard self addressed on the right about six four one time square station in new york gateway to ideas has produced the national educational radio underground from the national home library foundation and the programs are prepared by the national book committee and the american library association in cooperation with the national

association of educational broadcasters technical production by riverside radio wor dr the new xbox this is the national educational radio network it's been fb