We continue with the second week of our new series featuring excerpts from Let Me Be a Woman, Elisabeth’s wedding gift for her daughter Valerie, in honor of Valerie and Walter Shepard’s 50th wedding anniversary.
These notes will be, in one way or another, about the meaning of womanhood. Women during the past decade have contrived to place themselves very much in the center of attention. They are talked about, puzzled about, argued about, and legislated about, and it is women who have done most of the talking, arguing, and perhaps the legislating, while it is men, I suppose, who have done more of the puzzling. A torrent of books about women has been pouring from the presses urging women to cast off traditional roles, to refuse the socialization that has for so many centuries, they say, controlled and confined them, and to move into what some of them call “human” (as distinct from biological or reproductive) pursuits, which, whether they are interesting or uninteresting are said to be male territory.
Is being a woman fundamentally different from being a man?
Is there anything inherent in the nature of human beings or of human society that requires certain roles or tasks to be associated with one sex or the other? Ought authority to be associated only or even mainly with men rather than women?
Does it matter who runs things? Does bearing a child necessarily mean that the bearer should care for it? What is marriage? How does it work? Is a woman’s lot really as bad as Germaine Greer says it is, “a lifetime of camouflage and idiotic ritual, full of forebodings and failure”?
Most of those who try to find answers for these questions start at the wrong place. They start with themselves. They ask, “Who am I?” “How do I really feel?” and they assume that if enough people express their personal opinions on this subject we will all somehow arrive at the truth of the matter. Carlyle observed this tendency and wryly observed, “Vulpine knowingness sits ever at its hopeless task— from a world of knaves to deduce an honesty from their combined action.”
There is, no doubt, a superficial sort of consolation and reassurance to be gained from sitting around telling how you feel about things. You generally find several others who feel the same way, or (what is even more reassuring and consoling) they feel worse than you do. But it is no way to come at the truth.
In order to learn what it means to be a woman we must start with the One who made her.
**Excerpt originally published in Let Me Be a Woman, pp. 3-4