D.H. Lawrence wrote this years ago, before 1930 even, and I’m not sure
if I posted it earlier, but I wonder how many women and men today have read it.
It tells the tale of how men treat women – and I believe it. If you don’t know
what he said, you have to read this – whether you’re male, female, trans or any
other gender. Women are due to a decent life.
Give Her a Pattern
by D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
The real trouble
about women is that they must always go on to adapt themselves to men’s
theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is thoroughly
herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is
hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to
follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to.
For, of course, just as there are many men in the world, there are many
masculine theories of what women should be. But men run to type, and it is the
type, not the individual, that produces the theory, or “ideal” of woman. Those
very grasping gentry, the Romans, produced a theory or ideal of the matron,
which fitted in very nicely with the Roman property lust. “Caesar’s wife should
be above suspicion.” So Caesar’s wife kindly proceeded to be above it, no
matter how far below it the Caesar fell. Later gentlemen like Nero produced the
“fast” theory of woman, and later ladies were fast enough for everybody. Dante
arrived with a chaste and untouched Beatrice, and chaste and untouched
Beatrices began to march self-importantly through the centuries. The
Renaissance discovered the learned woman, and learned women buzzed mildly into
verse and prose. Dickens invented the child-wife, so child-wives have swarmed
ever since. He also fished out his version of the chaste Beatrice, a chaste but
marriageable Agnes. George Eliot imitated this pattern, and it became
confirmed. The noble woman, the pure spouse, the devoted mother took the field,
and was
simply worked to death. Our own poor mothers were this sort. So we
younger men, having been a bit frightened of our noble mothers, tended to
revert to the child-wife. We weren’t very inventive. Only the child-wife must
be a boyish little thing - that was the new touch we added. Because young men
are definitely frightened of the real female. She’s too risky a quantity. She
is too untidy, like David’s Dora. No, let her be a boyish little thing, it’s
safer. So a boyish little thing she is.
There are, of course, other types. Capable men produce the capable woman ideal.
Doctors produce the capable nurse. Business men produce the capable secretary.
And so you get all sorts. You can produce the masculine sense of honour
(whatever that highly mysterious quantity may be) in women, if you want to.
There is, also, the eternal secret ideal of men - the prostitute. Lots of women
live up to this idea: just because men want them to.
And so, poor woman, destiny makes away with
her. It isn’t that she hasn’t got a mind - she has. She’s got everything that
man has. The only difference is that she asks for a pattern. Give me a pattern
to follow! That will always be woman’s cry. Unless of course she has already chosen
her pattern quite young, then she will declare she is herself absolutely, and
no man’s idea of women has any influence over her.
Now the real tragedy is not that women ask and must ask for a pattern of
womanhood. The tragedy is not, even, that men give them such abominable
patterns, child-wives, little-boy-baby-face girls, perfect secretaries, noble
spouses, self-sacrificing mothers, pure women who bring forth children in
virgin coldness, prostitutes who just make themselves low, to please the men; all
the atrocious patterns of womanhood that men have supplied to woman; patterns
all perverted from any real natural fullness of a human being. Man is willing
to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a
baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a
servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t
accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.
And, of course, women love living up to strange patterns, weird patterns - the
more uncanny the better. What could be more uncanny than the present pattern of
the Eton-boy girl with flower-like artificial complexion? It is just weird. And
for its very weirdness women like living up to it. What can be more gruesome
than the little boy-baby-face pattern? Yet the girls take it on with avidity.
But even that isn’t the real root of the tragedy. The absurdity, and often, as
in the Dante-Beatrice business, the inhuman nastiness of the pattern - for
Beatrice had to go on being chaste and untouched all her life, according to
Dante’s pattern, while Dante had a cosy wife and kids at home - even that isn’t
the worst of it. The worst of it is, as soon as a woman has really lived up to
the man’s pattern, the man dislikes her for it. There is intense secret dislike
for the
Eton-young-man girl, among the boys, now that she is actually produced.
Of course, she’s very nice to show in public, absolutely the thing. But the
very young men who have brought about her production detest her in private and
in their private hearts are appalled by her.
When it comes to marrying, the pattern goes all to pieces. The boy marries the
Eton-boy girl, and instantly he hates the type. Instantly his mind
begins to play hysterically with all the other types, noble Agneses, chaste
Beatrices, clinging Doras and lurid filles de joie. He is in a wild
welter of confusion. Whatever pattern the poor woman tries to live up to, he’ll
want another. And that’s the condition of modern marriage.
Modern woman isn’t
really a fool. But modern man is. That seems to me the only plain way of
putting it. The modern man is a fool, and the modern young man a prize fool. He
makes a greater mess of his women than men have ever made. Because he
absolutely doesn’t know what he wants her to be. We shall see the changes in
the woman-pattern follow one another fast and furious now, because the young
men hysterically don’t know what they want. Two years hence women may be in
crinolines - there was a pattern for you! - or a bead flap, like naked
negresses in mid-Africa - or they may be wearing brass armour, or the uniform
of the Horse Guards. They may be anything. Because the young men are off their
heads, and don’t know what they want.
The women aren’t fools, but they must live up to some pattern or other. They
know the men are the fools. They don’t really respect the pattern. Yet a
pattern they must have, or they can’t exist. Women are not fools. They have
their own logic, even if it’s not the masculine sort. Women have the logic of
emotion, men have the logic of reason. The two are complementary and mostly in
opposition. But the woman’s logic of emotion is no less real and inexorable
than the man’s logic of reason. It only works differently.
And the woman never really loses it. She may spend years living up to a
masculine pattern. But in the end, the strange and terrible logic of emotion
will work out the smashing of that pattern, if it has not been emotionally
satisfactory. This is the partial explanation of the astonishing changes in
women. For years they go on being chaste Beatrices or
child-wives. Then on a sudden - bash! The chaste Beatrice becomes something
quite different, the child-wife becomes a roaring lioness! The pattern didn’t
suffice, emotionally.
Whereas men are fools. They are based on a logic of reason or are supposed to
be. And then they go and behave, especially with regard to women, in a
more-than-feminine unreasonableness. They spend years training up the
little-boy-baby-face type, till they’ve got her perfect. Then the moment they
marry her, they want something else. Oh, beware, young women, of the young men
who adore you! The moment they’ve got you they’ll want something utterly
different.
The moment they marry the little-boy-baby face, instantly they begin
to pine for the noble Agnes, pure and majestic, or the infinite mother with
deep bosom of consolation, or the perfect business woman, or the lurid
prostitute on black silk sheets: or, most idiotic of all, a combination of all
the lot of them at once. And that is the logic of reason! When it comes to
women, modern men are idiots. They don’t know what they want, and so they never
want, permanently, what they get. They want cream cake that is at the same time
ham and eggs and at the same time porridge. They are fools. If only women
weren’t bound by fate to play up to them!
For the fact
of life is that women must play up to man’s pattern. And she only gives
her best to a man when he gives her a satisfactory pattern to play up to. But today,
with a stock of ready-made, worn-out idiotic patterns to live up to, what can
women give to men but the trashy side of their emotions? What could a woman
possibly give to a man who wanted her to be a boy-baby face? What could she
possibly give him but the dribblings of an idiot? - And, because women aren’t
fools, and aren’t fooled even for very long at a time, she gives him some nasty
cruel digs with her claws, and makes him cry for mother dear! - abruptly
changing his pattern.
Bah! men are fools. If they want anything from women, let them give women a
decent, satisfying idea of womanhood - not these trick patterns of washed-out
idiots.
D.H. Lawrence's "Give Her a Pattern" was first published
(under the title "Woman in Man's Image") in the U.S. in Vanity Fair (May
1929) and in the U.K. (as "Give Her a Pattern") in the Daily
Express (June 1929). It appears in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished,
and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, edited by Warren Roberts and Harry
T. Moore (Viking, 1968).
