Man's Smart, But Woman's Smarter...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 943, 6 September 1957, Page 7

Man's Smart, But Woman's Smarter...

ERHAPS recantations belong, like reminiscences, to middle age, when one has had time to reflect. In any case, the time has now come for me to sing peccavi for an earlier. fault. In Donne’s words, I have a sin of fear that when I have spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore. . .- and perish, moreover, without once saying out loud my pleasure in that accident of birth or conjunction of genes which made me female. Now, like many another wild girl, I hated being one. Why had I not been born a boy? Boys have so much more fun, can do so much more, live so much more vividly. They can go sailing before the mast on a grainship from Australia (when I was young, they still could): they can apprentice themselves to great explorers and comb the steamy banks of the Amazon for strange flora, or encourage huskies across the frozen wastes, or live with nomad tribes on the steppes of Russia or in the Gobi Desert, or come, alone, upon rose-red cities half as old as Time. Boys-men-have everything which makes life worth while: girls have only dreams of greatness which never come true. Every hoyden among my readers will know these thoughts, and the contempt which went with them, for the very thought of marriage. Marry! Heavens!what a shocking waste of living time that would be!

Well, married now, sober now, middle aged now, I eat my words as generously and fully as possible. What fun, to be a woman! What fun, to maintain a woman’s world, and to watch man fumble his inept way through it, knowing that he will soon find its drudgery too dull, its discipline too ferocious. Here, of course, I refer to the domestic world, When a man commits the little woman to the home, tells her, ever so kindly, that it is there she belongs, he is quite right. But, while asserting himself as a man, he is acknowledging also man’s defeat in a sphere he can never control, whose complexities and urgencies are beyond him. (I refuse, by the way, to call the wide world "man-made," as some feminists bitterly do; woman makes it, man atranges it.) Take an ordinary Monday morning in an ordinary. New Zealand home, Mum having got up early to do the ironing, then making breakfast for her family. She is managing, and competently, half a dozen different activities — changing the baby, giving Dad his early cuppa as soon as he is sufficiently awake to raise it to his poor lips without ruining the sheets, starting up the washing machine, overseeing Mary’s homework, sending Johnny up the drive to fetch the milk, and removing, while he is absent, tokens of the unfortunate crise de. nerfs which has overtaken the cat, since her son, a greasy child, is given to turning green and throwing up in a moment.

All this merely a preamble to the more urgent flurry of cooking the breakfast bacon while seeing that everyone in the family gets a turn at the bathroom, answering three or four questions at once-"What! another grocery bill?""Where’s Limpopo, Mum?"-"Can I have one-and-fivepence for a_ school notebook, Mum, now, AT ONCE!’making sure that the baby doesn’t entirely swallow the spoon while feeding himself in his high chair, and_ toasting the bread. Seeing Dad emerge from the bathroom whistling to himself, in a happy cloud of baby powder, she may be tempted to ask him to do-this last but, "Blast those fellows who took away the Breakfast Session-I’ll have to put on a record," says he, doing just that, and intimating by the bend of his back, as only a husband can, his utter inability to do anything else at the same moment. So, biting back a retort about the German and Viennese ladies she has seen doing complicated knitting while listening to the world’s best music with that absorbed concentration wholly unknown to the British, Mum has to do the toast herself, having first made a lightning swoop on the wash-house to see that the wringer isn’t thoughtfully chewing on her one hemstitched sheet. By the time they have all sat down to, eaten, and risen from breakfast-that is, by the time Dad has gone to work, the children have gone to school, and she and the baby are left contemplating the ruins, she has successfully brought

several necessary strategic operations to a happy conclusion, and has never\had less than three on her hands at once. My point, in case you haven’t got it, is that the average woman has generally far more on her mind, and by the age of thirty or so has trained herself. far more thoroughly in coping with varied practical activities, than the avers age man, She may be scatty when it comes to abstract thought, she may never reach the higher peaks of poetry, sculpture, or physics, she may be slow to appreciate. the niceties of Hegelian philosophy or Proustian prose when her husband is kind enough to explain both to her; but when it comes to doing half a dozen utterly necessary things cheers fully and well at %nce and the same time, man is simply nowhere cosapared with her. And remember that practically all ths actions of the average housewife are beneficient, life giving. She is forever creating {something, rather than evolving more efficient methods of destruc-tion-of how many men can that be said? She brings to her toast-making, her washing, her child-feeding, as much passionate and ruthless competence as that of any business tycoon bent on ruining a rival-she brings to her job of creating life and making a home for it to flourish in, as much energy, initiative and sheer know-how as any arms manufacturer bent on successfully and anonymously launching another war-she does it all, mainly, from love rather than ambition, So, I’m glad-very glad-to be a

woman.

Sarah

Campion