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"The Perils and Privileges of Answering Questions"

Author's Note

A talk for Women's Alliance.

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As you know, three topics were suggested to me for tonight’s talk:

1) “Unitarian Women From a Minister’s Point of View;”
2) "How to Succeed in Marriage Without Really Trying;” and
3) “What Makes a Unitarian Man Tick? And Does He?”

With three such formidable topics, perhaps it is understandable why I chose this title in responding to them – “The Perils and Privileges of Answering Questions.” At least the perils of such an enterprise must be obvious. The privileges will have to be assumed.

It may be that I will do what the biologist did when he was asked to make a talk on elephants. It happened that his field of competence and interest – his specialty – was worms, earthworms, in particular.

Consequently, he began his speech this way. “An elephant is an animal with a long trunk. In some ways the trunk has the appearances of a very large worm. Now the earthworm …” And he talked for half an hour on the biology, life, and habits of the earthworm.

Or, I might speak to the three topics very briefly to begin with. Thus:

1) “Unitarian Women From a Minister’s Point of View” – They certainly are women.
2) How to Succeed in Marriage Without Really Trying” – Don’t get married.
3) What Makes a Unitarian Man Tick?” – He doesn’t tick, he throbs.

Or, I could be very cutting and say, “All of us who are interested in answers to these three questions should be at home discovering them in our own experiences.”

But I would never get away with a statement like that, so we’ll go further.

In a way it seems to me that the basic question involved here in all three topics is “How do I appear to other people?”

And it might be interesting to ask oneself why this is so important (if it is).

Look at it this way. It’s something like my coming to you, the Alliance member, and asking:

1) “What do you think of a Unitarian Minister from a Woman’s Point of View?”
2) “How can one succeed in the Unitarian ministry without really trying?” and
3) “What makes a Unitarian minister tick? And does he?” Or rather, “What makes a Unitarian congregation tick, and does it?”

Now the fact of the matter is that most of us do care how we appear to other people. Most all of us are vulnerable to attack. We, each one of us, can be hurt. We do desire a certain amount of recognition and approval.

But maturity must have in it somewhere the recognition of “me” as “me.”

If the scales are weighted too heavily on the side of “What do other people think of me?” then there isn’t enough of the “me” on the other side of the scales to keep my life in balance, and I am in for considerable unhappiness.

To approach a question like “How to succeed in marriage without really trying” as if it were possible is like wearing rose-colored glasses.

Perhaps there is an analogy to be found in a statement, not about marriage, but about seminary training, delivered to the first year students at Chicago Divinity School in 1949 by the upper classmen. I think it’s worth taking time here to repeat it:

*Last spring you held in your imagination some cloistered setting where you would join like-minded persons to search out and solve the problems of the world through the application of the Christian gospel. You would sit enthralled and inspired while articulate teachers opened unto you the vast vistas of the faith. You would go out to join competent and devoted ministers in their churches. You would find companionship among your colleagues and there would be brilliant repartee and deep fellowship.

What have you found?

You’ve found that there aren’t very many like-minded persons, and some appear to be without minds. You’ve found more problems than you had ever dreamed could exist, and yet all the experts are vague or hopeless about their solutions. You’ve found that the profs are all right for the most part, but you’ve yawned several times and wondered what in the world this or that little tidbit of information or bias has to do with the Christian ministry. You’ve gone to your job on the field and have been confused and disappointed with the pompous jerk or the asinine kids with whom you have to work. You’ve found that your colleagues are rather mundane, that some have crazy ideas, others are callous or cynical, that the upper classmen toss around terms that sound dull and vague and ponderous, and that fellowship is often alluded to and seldom practiced. In short, you’ve found that this is just another human situation.

If the above is an approximation of your experience, we welcome you to our circle and give you one slightly wilted violet and the password, to wit, “Gird up your loins and muddle through,” or “You ain’t the first one, bub!” There are many of us who hide behind our faces and brisk paces and prattling tongues, hearts that are as lonely, and as bewildered, and as frustrated as yours.*

The message is a little sad, perhaps even cynical in spots, but it removes the rose-colored glasses so that one may get on with the business of living in the real world.

Having faced up to reality doesn’t necessarily make life easier. The problems are there still and must be dealt with, but there are moments – there are moments when no one need tell you whether or not there is any meaning in it at all – for you have been there.

How do Unitarian women appear to this Unitarian Minister?

They tend to have, perhaps, more liberal views on religion and politics than the population at large, and I do not belittle that observation.

But, by and large, they seem to be pretty much like other women in their general middle-class socio-economic bracket in the urban and suburban centers around the country – that is, as far as personality and emotions are concerned.

Let me give you some sweeping adjectives and descriptive phrases the outcome of which will be a picture of no one in this room – and thus perhaps – just perhaps – a picture of all. This is a dangerous enterprise so take it with considerable salt.

Unitarian women are intelligent – that’s a good safe word to start with – they are intelligent and sensitive and vain and confused and attractive and sloppy and creative and dull and energetic and frantic – and, we should say, happy and sad and often in limbo.

They are much too introspective and self-conscious, but out-going and helpful, tender and caring and vicious and gossipy.

They are capable and afraid, lonely and flighty, passive and domineering, unloving and loving, democratic and authoritarian.

They are reluctant to lead and want to run everything, seizers of equality and requesters of special privilege.

They’re the best women in the world and the worst and all of the shades in between. They don’t know what they want and they get what they ask for.

They’re delightful – thoroughly delightful and they want to help, and they do help, and they care – sometimes they care to the point of desperation.

They want to be loved and they want to be independent.

They are afraid of freedom and they want to be free.

They are sometimes petty and mean and often genuine, honest, sincere, and self-effacing.

All told, they are fine, hopeful, positive human females.

All of this is to say, of course, that I cannot tell you what a Unitarian woman is.

The presentation could have gone another way. I could have cited examples, historical and contemporary, of the contributions of Unitarian women to society, humanity, and the arts but I’m assuming that that is not of the highest concern here tonight.

And really I should have begun with Unitarian men. What makes them tick or throb or pulsate? Or are they dead? That would have softened up the atmosphere considerably perhaps.

Unitarians men are, of course, paragons of virtue, strength, maturity, voluntary, and service.

Oh, come off it!

All right. Many of the same things I said about women – perhaps most of them – could be said about Unitarian men – plus a few more.

The men are silent Sams, uncommunicative, and hate their work. They also like their work and love to talk, but they segregate themselves in groups of men at a gathering – and so do the women.

Except that they want to prove their masculinity and be popular with the ladies. But they’re timid and withdrawn and some have not yet cut the umbilical cord.

They’re on the make, some of them, and they’re loyal and faithful – some of them – and so are their wives all of these things.

They love their children and pay no attention to them.

They fell in love with sweethearts and now that the sweethearts have come of age they don’t know what to do with them.

They are bewildered and perceptive and they are bewildering and as obvious as an open book.

This could go on – and has already gone on too long for both the women and the men.

The point is, generalizations and stereotypes are dangerous. We’re talking about people, male and female, people each more like the other than will be admitted and each different in ways we would not wish to change.

And what’s the point in your going home thinking, “He raked us over the coals” – or “He put the men in their place.” This is something I can’t do.

People pretty much hear what they want to hear in a talk and shut out most of it – and good riddance, too – and then apply some of it to other people but rarely point their fingers at themselves.

And that’s all right, too, really. The American game is fast becoming the game of the therapist’s couch. Therapy is legitimate, but the game isn’t.

The motto has become, “Merrily we probe along” – and what the heck do we find along the way?

The pendulum has swung too far in Montgomery County in the direction of pseudo-introspection and “I’ll analyze you if you analyze me.” And everybody and his brother, or sister, or wife, or husband or friend is trying to live vicariously in someone else’s experience while that person is busy living vicariously in still another person’s experience.

And then there are these knowing little suburban psychoanalytic glances passed back and forth as if Suzanne Brown or Hiram Adams knew a damn thing about why the other one is the way he is, and his father must have been thus and such, and her mother must have given her poor toilet training, and whenever they disagree with me it’s only because they’re defensive and can’t see that I’m right.

And a few courageous souls (mostly Unitarian women and men, naturally) have sense enough to have learned enough about therapy to know that popular mutual analysis has nothing to do with genuine human relationships.

Too much of a good thing is making it not such a good thing. And why can’t people start meeting each other directly as people – or even avoiding each other as people, if it has to be that way, rather than pulling out the shovel of analysis they aren’t equipped to man and digging indiscriminately into the psychic bowels of their friends and neighbors?

Alas, it is time for a shift in mood before tension mounts in me or thee and I find myself playing the same “psychologism” game.

The rest of the time I’ll spend on just plain women, men and marriage – which is exactly where I began.

You might find the latest issue – the October issue – of Harper’s Magazine interesting. There is a special supplement in it on “The American Female.”

My suggestion would be that if you read it, don’t seize upon everything it says as true – particularly don’t think it is necessarily true of you.

Much, much too often, men and women in the search of a new faith take the latest book or article as a new gospel – at least for a while they do – until it blows over and they come back to living out their own lives and discovering continually who they are and dealing with the reality they are a part of.

And please don’t read it and say, “That’s great – you tell 'em!” and bracket a paragraph and shove it under your husband’s nose and say, “Read that!”

But, having said these things, you may find it interesting – it may provoke some significant questions – and if you and your husband can talk about these things and he reads it because he wishes to – it may be quite fruitful.

Some of my remarks from here on were triggered in thought particularly by the article by Bruno Bettelheim called “Growing Up Female.”

First of all, the foreword to the supplement indicates that a great many American women are finding that motherhood and child bearing doesn’t last but so long. After bearing children, the wife then has about forty more years to fill up, and then she begins to feel a sense of grievance too large to contain. She faces a great void in her life and wonders who she now is and what is TIME for, and how will she fill the void. Quoting from the foreword:

Faced with this void, a mounting number of women are trying to pick up the pieces of the interrupted education. Others are taking jobs in offices and factories. Some are casting about for new functions within their own homes and communities. And there are those who can find no better answer than drinking too much, buying things they don’t need, or moving unhappily from one bed to another.

The void is there really for every human being – men as well as women. But it probably yawns as a wider abyss for women than for men.

For one thing, the society is changing and it is getting harder to know where she is going. The educational system works against women particularly. As girls they are taught to compete – to be as smart as boys or smarter, and then there comes a time when they must reverse this quickly and play dumb, attract a man, marry and settle down.

And as they do, so often they abandon old interests, significant intellectual activity, and the rest and one day wake up with time and energy to burn. And burn it where? In church work, politics, charities, League of Women Voters, and so forth? This is meaningful for some, but frustrating for others,

One answer for some women might seem to be – go out and get a job, or work toward the attainment of some deeply meaningful achievements in literature or the other arts.

It was suggested in Harper's that women should move more in the directions Russian women have taken. In Russia, most women do work outside the home. There are more women doctors than men and a great many professional women of all kinds. Excellent professional nursery situations are set up to provide – better than many frustrated mothers provide – for the nurture of the young.

Or, in another article, it is suggested that the Swedes do it better than we do. Their society encourages career and motherhood at the same time and makes it possible to do both.

The question before American women, I think, however, is not “Can they handle men’s jobs?” Of course they can.

The question might better be put: Do they want to?

What kind of family structure do they want?

What kind of society do they want?

And what does each individual American woman as a person wish her life to be – within the limitations of the reality she is a part of and through the potentialities in and before her?

Does she know what she wants?

If the Swedish way appeals to her, does she also wish to accept the Swedish (and general European) standards which define husband and wife roles more specifically than we do in this country?

Europeans “feel that American husbands do much ‘women’s work.” Swedish (or Dutch, French, or Austrian) fathers will seldom be found diapering, feeding, or bathing their children; nor are they dish driers, grocery shoppers, or babysitters.”

It seems to me that we may well criticize American society and education and try to change them, but we’re not going to get far, and American women are not going to fill the void, by blaming everything on externals – even though the externals of education, money, privilege or lack of it, and so on are tremendously powerful determinants of a person’s character. Nor will American wives (or husbands) fill the void by turning to their spouses and expecting them to fill it for them. And we certainly won't fill it by looking to other people’s spouses. We had best start with ourselves.

Not until each one of us looks into the abyss and maybe falls through it for miles and miles and sometime grabs hold of a little bit of herself or himself, will there appear to be any satisfactory way out.

Not until a woman can look at herself, be herself, be a little comfortable with herself, and have some respect for herself, will she be able to say, and I use incorrect grammar to emphasize it:

This is me. I am always me doing this and that. I am a wife, yes, but I am me doing the things a wife does. I have limitations. I must iron shirts and raise children, but it is “me” ironing shirts and raising children and I will go on being me when I am doing other things. I am not just playing a role and wishing I had some other role.

And there are things for me to discover that I want to do.

I may come to decide that my sex role is a passive one or an active one. I may take a job or work creatively in the home.

Some things I may not do. Other things I may try. And, through it all, there is “me” as a worthwhile person doing, attempting, failing, and succeeding at the things I do.

I will be learning, little by little, that it isn’t necessary to do it the way Mrs. X does it. I don’t have to wear my heart on the outside, hoping everyone will approve of it and love me but finding that someone is continually cutting it to ribbons.

I’m discovering me – that there really is inside me a better me, and it’s all right to be me.

Now … some last thoughts on marriage. May I be very direct? You can take it or leave it as you choose.

Don’t expect too much of marriage. Don’t expect your husband to make you happy. There is nothing quite so surely to lead to disappointment and a soul full of grievance than expecting, and, particularly, demanding too much.

And the same goes for husbands, too. Now this has nothing to do with mutual courtesies, helpfulness, sharing, and the like. This has to do with deep down attitudes.

Studies of late, including references in the Harper’s articles, indicate that wives and husbands would do well not to get hooked on the motion that they must have simultaneous orgasms – or even that they must both have an orgasm, or that sexual intercourse and sex play must be done in certain ways only.

The load of guilt and frustration and defeat weighing down American beds is enormous. Too many people go to bed expecting, expecting, expecting.

A sex problem many modern and well-read married people have is that they are concentrating on sex techniques to the detriment of relationships.

They may learn how to bring each other to a climax this way but do so by using the other person as a thing – a mechanical instrument.

They may not as often experience a physical release if they quit worrying about the climax and the techniques and begin to relate in bed totally and without inhibitions, but they will certainly have a better total emotional experience.

Just beware of tenderness by design.

How much better it would be if each partner knows something of who he or she is and then each “me” will be a “me” in bed making love with another “me” – each enjoying being a “me” – each enjoying the other.

… Each person must decide and keep on deciding what he thinks of marriage. Even love, if it is to grow, change, and last, must, I think, be a decision. In any case, what you think is very important.

For as you pick up this idea and that, read this article and that book, and take an idea as your own, you will start becoming more like that idea. It is most important then to choose wisely.

And it may just be that now and again you will be wisest when you are most alone.

I cannot tell others what marriage is nor can they tell me. Each person and each couple discovers it, or they do not.

I feel that one thing that would help in the discovery is the willingness of women and men to declare themselves. For heaven’s sake – or for your sake and that of your marriage – tell your husband how you really feel.

Do not think that he will or that he should know how you feel if you do not tell him… How many husbands and wives play a kind of game with the old “pursue me” routine? She wants to be taken out to dinner and he has even suggested that they go but she begins to think that he’s only offering to take her out to calm her down or to get her out to calm her down or to get her ready for bed, which is okay, but maybe she doesn’t think, so she says she doesn’t really think she wants to go, and then he begins to wonder, “Does she or doesn’t she?” and he asks, “Look, honey, do you really want to go or not?”

And she says, “I said no, didn’t I?” While all the time she’s dying to go, but now she is peeved, and so is he, and she goes out into the kitchen to prepare dinner feeling hurt or disappointed or bitter, and he slumps in a chair with the newspaper, and, before the night is over, they are sleeping in different beds.

And it happens the other way around, too.

Why can’t we say what we feel and what we really want in these little things? If we could, we might have a better idea of what we want in all things and a far greater chance of working together as husbands and wives toward the important things in our lives.

Saint Exupéry said, “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction.”

Bettelheim adds, “… and looking inward in the same direction, too.” Deep in the faith of most Unitarians, I am convinced, is the belief that men and women – that man is essentially, basically, somewhere inside a person with the potential for good, the potential for living in a constructive, loving, caring way.

And there is something I have observed over and over again in Unitarian families. They care about the quality of their lives – even when they feel the quality is poor – they want better – they care, and they try. And how much more than that can we ask?

With this, I stop, having given a few, if any, answers – perhaps raising questions no one can answer but you.

I do have a short closing reading. Maybe you will be thinking of the job you have, the tasks you perform or the home you are making as you listen to it.

*Does you job bore you? Would you rather have someone else’s job to do? Do you envy those who seem to do inspired work? If so, listen to some of the greats:

Edna Ferber: “Writing a novel is like slogging through mud three feet deep, with every step weighing a ton.”

Dr. St. John Gogarty (MD): “I get tired poking into people’s ears, and looking down their throats and having them say, ‘Ah’.”

Debussy (the composer): “What a way to make a living!”

Joseph Conrad: “I sit down for eight hours every day, and sitting down is all. In the course of that writing day of eight hours, I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all my resolutions and self-control to keep from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth …”

Even the glamorous life of a movie queen is less so at the twentieth retake of the thrilling line, “Do sit down!”

This means that the best work in the world usually seems like hack work to those who are doing it.*

End of Reading.

There are moments – there is no answer – seek it lovingly.

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jake wrote

Alisia wrote

jamoore wrote

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