It must be at once obvious that there has been no such cultural growth in housework. Housework has long remained an individualized, non-cumulative industry, where daughter learns from mother the old ways of doing things. The small improvements and ingenuities which most housewives devise seldom find their way into the whole stream of culture. Thus it is that the recent great inventions which are slowly revolutionizing this last stronghold of petty individualism have come from the man-made world. Workers in electricity could more easily devise the vacuum cleaner than the solitary housewife; the electric washer, parquet floors, the tin can, quantity production of stockings, wool, clothing, bread, butter, and all the other instruments that have really made possible women’s emancipation have naturally come not from women’s minds (any more than from men’s) but from the growth of culture and the minds that utilize that growth for further expansion.
Consequently, as women participate in the work of the world and win the right to acquire the results of past achievement in science and technique and art, we may expect their contributions to the social advance to appear in ever greater numbers. Until we give them this full chance to contribute, we have no right to explain the paucity of their gifts to society by inherent lacks. And it seems reasonable to expect that such a chance will render the old quest for female geniuses properly old-fashioned. For they will be there, these women—the able and talented and geniuses—working side by side with men, not as “very great men” nor as necessarily “depraved” nor in any way unusual. They will be there as human beings and as women.
Man and Woman as Creators
By Alexander Goldenweiser
Alexander Goldenweiser,
psychologist and anthropologist, is a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York.
MAN AND WOMAN AS CREATORS
BY ALEXANDER GOLDENWEISER
“A hen is no bird, a woman—no human,” says a Russian proverb. In this drastic formulation stands written the history of centuries. Woman’s claim to “human”ness was at times accepted with reservations, at other times it was boldly challenged and even to-day when woman’s legal, social, economic and political disabilities have been largely removed, woman’s acceptance in society as man’s equal remains dependent on a definition of the “equal.”
As in the case of the mental capacity of races, the question of woman’s intellectual status was never judged on its merits. Rather, it was accepted as a practical social postulate, then rationalized into the likeness of an inductive conclusion. The problem seems so replete with temptations for special pleading that a thoroughly impartial attitude becomes well-nigh impossible. However, let us attempt it!