A New Femininity

It was just a symposium at San Francisco's University of California Medical Center, but 1,200 students turned out for it, cramming the 500-capacity auditorium and spilling over into another building to follow the proceedings on closed-circuit television. Thousands of plain citizens watched it on educational station KQED and swamped the station with mail.

The fascinating subject: women.

The ladies were examined from all angles--some acute. Gynecologist Edmund Overstreet speculated on the possibility that the menopause might be an ailment rather than a natural process (no non-human primate seems to experience it). Philosopher Peter Koestenbaum prescribed a stiff course of existentialism for such female problems as sexual incompatibility.*

Investment Banker Albert E. Schwabacher Jr. viewed with amusement and chagrin the feminine attitude toward high finance: "Women approach stocks and bonds in a personal way. To buy stock in a company is like a vote of approval, having nothing, or very little, to do with earning capacity. Similarly, to sell a stock is an act of contempt." This is why widows are often reluctant to sell stock that their husbands purchased. "It is not that they develop a sudden respect for his judgment--a respect never manifest in his lifetime. It is that they liked him in spite of his poor judgment, and are reluctant to break the personal ties."

Sex & Changing IQs. Of the 15 papers read at the conference, three especially came to grips with the problems and paradoxes of women in the modern world. Author Morton M. Hunt pointed out that the Industrial Revolution eliminated many of woman's traditional duties, and that the new roles with which she has been experimenting have been sadly disconcerting to men, who have always been ready to raise the cry that women are "losing their femininity." Actually, he argued, femininity is a matter of fashion: "In some cultures women have done hard labor, while in others they have been thought of as fragile and weak. Sometimes they have been priestesses, but elsewhere they have been thought unclean and unfit for priestly duties . . . The moral is that what will offend, anger, or alarm a man in woman in one society, will in another seem to be right, natural, and inevitable--and therefore feminine and attractive."

Stanford Psychologist Eleanor E. Maccoby, surveying "Woman's Intellect," recalled that, statistically, girls are slightly brighter than boys to start with, but in their teens they begin to fall behind boys in analytic facility, which includes mathematics. Mrs. Maccoby correlates this fact with the discovery from various psychological tests that children (boys included) who are protected and discouraged from aggression, independence and initiative tend to be poor at math, while those who are early turned loose on their own to work out their problems without help tend to be better at it. And girls are more likely than boys to have an overprotective kind of upbringing.

Similarly, children whose IQs tend to rise throughout their childhood are independent, self-assertive, dominant ones, while the IQs of passive, shy and dependent children decline. "The characteristics associated with rising IQs,'' said Mrs. Maccoby, "are not very feminine characteristics." Her conclusion: for the sake of her intellectual development, a woman should be a tomboy as a girl.

Malnutrition & Guilt. Writer Marya Mannes thought that the going judgment on what is or is not feminine creates intellectual malnutrition in most women and a sense of guilt in the few who use their minds. "Thanks largely to the brilliant manipulation of mass media, women are obsessed with an ideal of femininity as the guarantee of happiness. Be thin, be smart, be gay, be sexy, be softspoken. Get new slip covers, learn new recipes, have bright children, further your man's career, help the community, drive the car, smile." Nobody, she pointed out. "urged Madame Curie to dye her hair."

A redefinition of femininity is called for, said Miss Mannes (in private life Mrs. Christopher Clarkson). She suggested that "we have reached a stage in our evolution where procreation is not a duty or even a responsibility." and that modern society might well remember "the hetaerae of Periclean Athens: women who concentrated on the arts of the mind and body for the delectation of brilliant men--and themselves." Only the mass media, she seemed to imply, would find that unfeminine.

* On which Poet Ogden Nash wrote: "I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable."

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