Second-fiddle females

FOR A MAN TO WRITE about women may seem incongruous as most of us are familiar with that 600-page tome, What Men Know About Women. All the pages are blank! One has to feel very intrepid to touch the topic. Nevertheless, the so-called "Women's Movement" deserves an apology from those who ranted against it in the past and those who still do so. Let us investigate the raison d'etre and background of this social revolution, equally as great as the Industrial Revolution since both have turned the world topsy-turvy.

Even to those less than fair-minded, there is no question that females have drawn the short end of the stick in history. One obvious reason is that history has been written by men. The universal bias in the Judeo-Christian tradition begins, as always, with the story of Adam and Eve. The fact that many biblical scholars regard the recounting as apocryphal is of no moment. As far as women are concerned, the story has done its damage.

The literalists mad fundamentalists believe that woman's secondary status was due to the will of God. Adam, after all, was created first and when the Lord saw that "it was not good for man to be alone," He created woman--the second sex. He did so by fashioning her from a rib of Adam. Eve also became the scape-goat in tempting Adam to cat of the forbidden fruit the tree of knowledge. Adam took the bait and both were punished by being cast out of Paradise and into a "veil of tears," forced to work by the sweat of their brows. Other biblical stories carry on the tradition as the perfidious Philistine Delilah, who betrays Samson's secret of his strength, thus enabling her people to subdue him. Salome, the exotic dancer, is promised whatever she wants by Herod as her reward. At the behest of her mother, she asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter.

The Greeks took it from there with the story of Pandora's Box. In Greek mythology, she was the first woman and Zeus thrust her upon humankind as a punishment for Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bestowing it to humans. She was given a box and told never to open it. Curiosity got the better of her: she took off the cover, thereby unleashing all the evils on the world.

The seagoing Greeks often had their boats grounded and destroyed on various rocky shoals, but rather than fault themselves, they, quite naturally, blamed women. Thus came about the story of the Sirens, alluring beauties who beckoned men to the shallows and their doom. Later, the Germans picked up on this exonerating myth by telling about die Lorelei, whose seductive singing enticed men sailing the Rhine River to their death. World War I produced a new seductress, Mata Hari, whom men could not resist. As a double agent for France and Germany, she was accused of trading military secrets and eventually executed by the French, who have their own special saying to rationalize almost all problems--cherchez la femme--look for the woman (as the explanation).

History (some feminists now call it her story) long regarded women as chattel, a kind of personal property of men, sometimes to be bartered and sold. St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century theologian favored by the Popes, speculated that unless there were a detect, every baby would be a boy. It is ironic that we now realize that just opposite is the case. Even today, there are societies that kill female infants, as they never will have the worth of a male. Certainly, parents-to-be almost invariably prefer boys.

The second-class status of females is born out of the traditional names they bore--diminutives of boys', such as Carolyn (of Charles); Geraldine (of Gerald); Joan (of John); and Bernardine (of Bernard). Until recent times--and still present in some cultures--women had to produce a dowry before they were regarded as suitable for marriage. They also took on the last name of their husband. Symbolically, this showed that the woman was a changed person and now "belonged" to her betrothed. Generally, females had few rights on their own. At one time, in fact, they could not even own a credit card.

Women long have been honored in theory, but debased in practice. The Catholic Church provides a perfect example. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is called the Queen of Heaven, yet the Pope will not allow women to be priests. Of course, they are seen as useful to the Church as house keepers for pastors, in maintaining flowers on the altar, teaching youngsters, etc. Nuns exhibit this secondclass status to the priesthood. In the seminaries, candidates were taught never to ride in the front seat of a car with a woman driver, even if she was one's mother or sister. Scandal must be avoided at all costs.

Carl Jung, a Swiss contemporary to psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, was kinder tn women than Freud, who faulted many females with "penis envy." Jung sought balance and held that each man had a feminine side and each woman had a masculine one. The more the one side dominated at the surface level, the stronger the other was beneath it. Jung also theorized that, besides each person having an individual conscious and unconscious, he or she shares in a universal Unconscious that belongs to humanity itself. Here one can find the archetypal idea of woman. (There is no such notion of man, however.)

She is puzzling and contains contradictory elements. She is wise, but not formidably so. She is eternally young and like a phoenix rises out of her own ashes utterly renewed. The novel, She by H. Rider Haggard, exemplified this female archetype in the setting of ancient Egypt. Sherlock Holmes scholars recognize her in the opera star, Irene Adler, heroine of A Scandal in Bohemia. Holmes, however, also had this to say about the fair sex, "The motives of women are so inscrutable.... How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes or their most extraordinary conduct may depend on a hairpin or a curling tong."

No wonder women still are trying to break through the glass ceiling, not only in business, but in world culture.

Gerald F. Kreyche, American Thought Editor of USA Today, is professor emeritus of philosophy, DePaul University, Chicago.

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