'American Women Are Rude', 'Visiting
Englishmen Are No Roses'
Herewith an English novelist and recent visitor to the United
States, Malcolm Bradbury, offers his opinion of
American women. It is followed by a riposte from an American woman who has
lived in England, Gloria Steinem, freelance and editor of "The Beach
Book."
American Women Are Rude by Malcolm Bradbury
One of the deepest traumas experienced by every Englishman who
comes to America-and, these days, that's almost every Englishman-is that of encountering,
for the first time, in quantity and in her own native habitat, the American
woman. Blind terror, a desire to learn judo, and a willingness to marry any
girl who'll sit at home of nights and sew are some of the symptoms usually
associated with this confrontation.
"American women are generally rude," said one
visiting Englishman, still shaking from a recent encounter in a New York
drugstore in which he had been hoicked off his stool
by one of the breed. Another found American women fickle ("You don't
really know how well you're doing," he said).
Others are likely to brood over an age-old mystery that
Europeans have never really been able to solve. They will observe that, though
they are, properly enough, fascinated by the American girl, they are
disturbed to discover that she grows up into the American woman. On the
one hand, you have the young American girl, trim, smart, apparently just
unwrapped from Cellophane packing, looking as fresh as a Daisy Miller. And on
the other, you have the middle-aged American woman, with her shrieking voice
and parchment skin, growing money-trees, doing plant-prayer, gossiping about
her neighbors and scouring through genealogies for a regal connection.
All these comments are, of course, classical symptoms of the cultural
divide that still separates the two English-speaking peoples, and I propose to
take this occasion, on the authority of several years' research, to try to
clear up some of the confusions associated with the Anglo-American male-female
relationship:
(1) It should be remembered that American women are, from
the European view, men. A European visitor is likely, in the early days of
his visit, to forget this. Yet, of course, years of emancipation have given
American womenfolk personalities, opinions, leisure, money, careers and all the
other characteristics of male power. At the same time, male authority has been
diminished, male spending power has been reduced, and all fathers have been
symbolically slaughtered. Thus the female has a rare charismatic power.
I remember once taking a frightened, hasty walk through the
New York offices of Vogue, a central shrine of American womanhood. All over the
building, career girls sat at their desks, typing and correcting proofs, smart,
svelte, each one wearing a hat. I realized afterward that the hats were
like those skulls medieval philosophers kept in their studies; they were momento mori to
remind them what they really were.
(2) It should also be remembered that American girls are
the product of enormous capital investment. Every country has something
that it particularly likes to spend money on. Thus, in Germany it is veal; in
England it is dogs; in the United States it is the young American girl. Such
girls are a form of conspicuous consumption, like Christmas trees outside
office buildings.
Because they are the products of such attention, young
American girls can be very selective indeed about their standards, their clothese and their boy friends. In the Middle West, this
selectivity is ritualized into something called rating dating; this means that
a girl dates with men who bring her more and more prestige until finally, as
with a thermometer, the mercury settles and she knows who she really is. This
is a form of arranged marriage, in fact, in which the girl herself does the
arranging; it would be considered old-fashioned in Europe, where marriage is
supposedly for love. This period of choosing is the most important period in
any girl's life, and marriage is a necessary comedown.
Thus all those middle-aged ladies who, fresh from scavenging
through Europe, sit in the bars on ocean liners, tipping waiters and apparently
grinding their diamonds between their teeth, are really looking sadly into
their drinks and wishing they were girls again. And thus it is that whenever
you speak to some women's club-the Daughters of Benedict Arnold, or whatever it
may be-on "Africa-Wither?" Madam Chairman will rise, put on her
diamond-encrusted glasses and say, "Hi, gals." To any European woman
in the audience, coming from a location where it is more prestigious to be old
than to be young, this would be rude. It is, of course, simply politeness.
(3) It should further be remembered that American women
have little sense of difficulty. "Very demanding" is what
American women are often said to be. But as an English friend of mine, with an
American wife, put it to me behind some vine plants at a party, "The thing
about American women is they don't understand what's meant by 'difficult.' For
instance, my wife keeps having these ideas. She'll get up in the morning and
say, 'I've had this great idea; I'm going to have my legs plated with gold.' That kind of thing. I tell her I can't afford it; it's too
difficult, and she says, 'But money is a means and not an end.' I keep saying
to her, 'Do you realize our relationship is an ulcer-syndrome?"
The high expectations of the American women devolve
particularly upon her menfolk, of whom the greatest
courtesy is expected. A man shows his interest in a girl by performing
innumerable ritual politeness-opening car doors for her, carrying such small
packages as she has about her, presenting her regularly with gifts, and the
like.
(4) It should be remembered, finally, that one nation's
rudeness is another nation's manners. And so the
foreigner is never quite sure whether Americans, generally, are being rude or
not. I remember once a New York cabbie said to me, while I was waiting
for him to open the taxi door and let me descend, "Whatsa
matter, Mac, no legs?" It is quite possible, and even likely, that he was
being, in his own way, perfectly amiable. As my English friend pointed out,
"The thing about Americans is that they're so nice. But sometimes it
sounds so like other peoples' being nasty that you
have to be very careful indeed."
Thus it is that the American woman who, at a party, analyzes
your psychological make-up, questions all your standards, doubts your virility
and accuses you of moral corruption-leaving you finally in a discarded heap by
the wall-is not in any way trying to be rude. Quite the contrary: She is being
very polite and social, because she is creating a relationship. As an American femme
fatale once said to me, "I always think hostility is so much more friendly than total indifference."
The curious mixture of toughness and hospitality that has the
Englishman rocking on his feet is characteristic. My English friend summed it
up by saying, "They want you to know they're hospitable, but on the other
hand, they don't want you to think you can take them for a ride."
Hence Americans have to be very rude before they are
actually being rude. So often they are simply being nice. The
interesting problem is that of discovering how to know when they are really,
actually being rude, personally rude, to you. The trouble for an Englishman is
that finding out means watching, questioning, prying-and that is, after all,
very rude indeed.
Visiting Englishmen Are No Roses by Gloria Steinem
I have read Mr. Bradbury's article with admiration and dismay.
My first impulse was to put on something frilly, retire to the kitchen and stop
all mental processes, in order to avoid those accusations of rudeness and
regain, in his eyes, my femininity. But, on second thought, I cannot believe
that a man, even an Englishman, really enjoys being admired by women with no taste.
According to his witty novel "Eating People Is Wrong," Mr. Bradbury
doesn't believe it either: One of his most sympathetic characters turns out to
be a young girl with spirit, intelligence and a graduate degree.
So I have some hope Mr. Bradbury will understand that I am not
trying to pay him back for 1776, or discourage English tourism, or upset the
NATO alliance or, worst of all, be unfeminine when I say that visiting
Englishmen are no roses either.
(1) Take their dress, for instance. It isn't always
easy to feel feminine and nonrude beside a man who
wears slope-shouldered jackets nipped at the waist, speaks with an Oxonian lisp and says he's "tiddly"
when he means he's drunk.
Of course, we realize that the fault is in the eye of the
beholder, that some residue of our frontier tradition makes us feel the
difference between men and women should be accentuated. Moreover, postwar
Englishman are as tall and sturdy as their vitamin-fed
American counterparts, and that's a blessing. (It is difficult to feel
feminine with a man who weighs less than you do and has smaller feet.) But
visiting Englishmen-especially those from, or pretending to be from, the upper
classes-might bear in mind that the effete English prototype causes just as
incredulous a reaction here as does the loud, cigar-smoking American in London.
(2) A stout refusal to go native may have been invaluable
to the British Empire, but times change. A British general once said that,
had Americans been the colonial power in India, they would have intermarried
and disappeared within 50 years. It's probably true that our melting-pot
culture has made us look upon adaptability as a virtue. That explains why,
faced with a visitor who clings to his own customs with the same stubbornness
that made him wear a dinner jacket in the jungle, we judge him rude. In fact,
Englishmen seem to be constantly complaining (in a very genteel way) that no
one here knows how to queue properly, or that drinks have ice in them, or that
hotel managers just won't lower room temperatures to a decent 60 degrees (how
did they ever survive the tropics?), or that American girls look as if they
interchangeable plastic parts (no wonder we're so rude about their teeth).
Englishmen also tend to import their highly developed class
sense intact without considering that, though we are full of status
consciousness ourselves, we like to be less obvious (or more hypocritical)
about it. We therefore resent the Englishman's assumption that a working-class
background (his or ours) is a disadvantage in "society," that
"no golf green is decent until it's been rolled for 200 years," and
that it's uproariously funny to call charwomen cleaning ladies.
(3) Americans don't necessarily equate passivity with
politeness. While I don't go along with Mr. Bradbury's American informant
who found hostility charming, I do think that the Englishman's horror of asking
questions can make him seem uninterested to the point of rudeness. In 1955,
when Americans stationed in England were still competing with Englishmen for
the affections of local girls, a London tabloid ran an exposé called "Yank
for a Day." A masquerading reporter discovered that it was partly the
Yank's ready cash that made him attractive, and partly his un-English habit of
treating girls "like real people" and acting "interested in us,
not like our boys."
It's just possible that, had Mr. Bradbury's bachelor friend
asked his American girl a question now and then, she might not have married
someone else.
(4) We know we're difficult, but we love you. All
right, so we have some tribal dating customs (every country has peasants; ours
have money); and a talent for asking awkward questions ("Aren't you glad
you're not a first-class power?") and even, as we try to figure out how to
be women and people at the same time, an alarming habit of overplaying our
independence.
The thing is, we mean well, and if we react badly to criticism
it is only because our basic Anglophilia makes us
take English criticism more to heart than any other. But if our affection for
the British has withstood the burning of the White House, the sale of buses to
Cuba, Richard Burton, and the Beatles, it's likely to withstand anything,
including a fit of pique at being called rude.
Published in March 29, 1964
By Malcolm Bradbury and Gloria Steinem
On The New York Times On The Web
Copyright
1998 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/specials/bradbury-english.html
Other interesting
articles written by Bradbury: [Next] [1] [2] [3]
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