Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

Take the subject of women, for example. American women always absorb my interest, I watch them everywhere I go, I ponder upon them, I observe the way they talk and think and behave. Years ago I wrote a little book called Of Men and Women. So changeful is the American scene that while the book remains true in principle — that is, as it pertains to the relationship between men and women in the United States — yet women have changed very much since I wrote it. The present generation of young women, the daughters of the mothers about whom I wrote, are not “gunpowder women” as I called their mothers then. They are almost Victorian in their desire to marry, to be supported by their husbands, to have children, to do nothing outside the home. In spite of the fact that these young women are compelled to do a great deal outside the home, they seldom enjoy it, and they want now above all else, it seems, to be given an excuse, a moral reason, why they should give up outside interests. They want big families to provide the reason, they proclaim boldly that they take jobs only because they must. In this generation a girl is not ashamed to say that she wants to marry, and she appraises every man she meets, married or not, as a possible husband for herself.

Perhaps men do not accept marriage as necessary to a man’s estate as once they did. Military life, it is said, does a damage to normal life for a man. It not only increases the number of homosexuals, but it persuades men to consider life without marriage as good enough. In military life men find their companionship with men, and sex becomes a physical rather than an emotional experience. Once in so often a man needs a woman physically, and when that time comes he can go out and find her easily enough and often without paying money for it. Why, then, the emotionally dwarfed man inquires, should he burden himself with the responsibilities of wife and children? The number of men who find civilian life unsatisfactory and return to the shelter of the armed forces has never been made public but it is worth study, and women ought to be the students. If they crave home and family as they now seem to do, they had better find out how to fulfill their longings.

The pursuit of men by women is not healthy. It is a portent of totalitarianism. In prewar Germany homosexuality was rife as it usually is in militaristic societies, and women, knowing or not knowing, felt that they were not desirable in the old ways and they became abject and fawning before men. I do not like to see American girls in this generation give up their own individualities in order to attract men, for if men can be attracted by such behavior, then it is alarming. And it is alarming that girls stake so much on marriage so that if they do not marry they consider themselves failures, even though marriage should be the proper goal of men and women alike, an inevitable and desirable state, if society is in balance.

There will come a time, I daresay, when a sensible means will be developed for men and women to marry and as a matter of course, so that any one who wishes to marry will have a dignified and sane opportunity to meet persons suitable for marriage, and when, if individuals need help for the final arrangements of betrothal and wedding, it can be provided. In China this was done by the parents of both boy and girl. Who, the Chinese used to say to me, can know son or daughter better than his own parents, and who therefore is more suited to find a proper mate? Americans, unless family life becomes much broader and more stabilized than it is at present, will scarcely accept the parental control of marital fate, but it may be that our increasing trust in scientists will lead us to put our faith in those who may specialize in matching mates. Adoption agencies make great ado about matching adoptable children to the color, creed, environment, temperaments, the race, and the likes and dislikes of adoptive parents, thereby incidentally forcing many good people to remain childless because their individual peculiarities are not reproduced in children available for adoption, any more than they would probably be if they gave birth to a child. I have known parents with red hair and freckled complexions who gave birth to a black-haired, black-eyed child, and no one took the child away from them. Indeed I once knew a Canadian storekeeper in China who was brunette, and so was his wife, and in honorable matrimony they had six children, two black-haired and black-eyed, two red-haired and green-eyed and two yellow-haired and blue-eyed, with complexions to match the three varieties. Yet they were allowed to keep all these children, the ones that matched them and the ones that did not. But social workers are trained to be careful of their colors and their creeds, and I daresay that as time goes on we shall develop social work still further and then we shall find ourselves in the hands of matchmakers in marriage as well as in adoption. Men and women being born in about the same assortment, however, some shuffling will doubtless result in everybody finding the right person, scientifically at least, to marry.

Meanwhile I feel sorry for the women today who want to marry and cannot. Their mothers were the gunpowder women of yesterday, bursting out of their kitchens, and here are their daughters trying to get in again. I sat one evening in our living room and listened to a fine young woman, a little too tall and a little too old for the average marriage market — the girls grow up so quickly nowadays that a child of twelve or thirteen is already beginning to be competition to the woman of eighteen and twenty, and she in turn to the chances of the woman of thirty and this one was thirty-five. She talked and I listened, and she told me of the plan upon which she and two of her friends were working. They had made a list of the marriageable men they knew, and had divided the men between them in terms, first of preference, and then of possibility. A certain number they gave up as impossible. One was too attached to his mother, another was a confirmed bachelor, the result of being more handsome than needful for a man, another was stingy, another had tantrums, and so on. A year later I received a wedding announcement from her. She had married number four, the last of her list of preferences. I could have wept for her. But I hope, oh, I do hope, that she has lovely children!

Green Hills Farm

Yes, I remember the American years in scenes, unconnected. For example, when the war stopped, we were at New Bedford, in a hotel with all our children for the night, and expecting to get to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the morning. And that very night the news came that the war was over and everybody in the town went crazy and took a holiday, and even the steamer’s crew was drunk next day. But we had to leave the hotel because our rooms were engaged by other people and so we were quite without a shelter over our heads, while men and women went mad and got drunk and fell into fights, all because of joy. At last we were able to persuade a fisherman in Woods Hole to take us across the Sound in his motorboat and so we arrived, starved and tired and dazed with all we had seen and heard.

And I remember the day I spent with the children on a set in Hollywood. It was my only visit there, and I went because my novel Dragon Seed was being made into a picture with Katharine Hepburn in the leading role and I was secretly distressed because she wore a man’s Chinese jacket instead of a woman’s, and when I inquired of someone in command why this was allowed, I was told that she liked the lines of the man’s jacket better than the woman’s. Just as she would not cut off her bangs, although anyone who knew China would know that a farmer’s wife would not wear bangs. They are plucked out the night before her wedding, as a sign that she is no longer to be a virgin. And the bridge they had on the set was all wrong. It was the sort of bridge they used in South China but not in Nanking. And, worst of all, the terraces should never have been on the mountains. The rounded hills outside Los Angeles are very much like the hills outside Nanking, but for Dragon Seed they were terraced with bulldozers, whereas there is no terracing on the Nanking hills, and what confounded me most was that some of the terraces ran perpendicularly like great ditches up and down, impossible to imagine except in Hollywood, for terracing prevents erosion and the ditch provides it. When I inquired why the ditches, I was told that they made a contrast to the terraces running horizontally, and this only confounded me further.