Since their political equality was secured by the suffragettes, American women have toyed with the idea, the possibility in nature, of entering college teaching, and all other fields of educated work formerly reserved for men. But as Mrs. Jessie Bernard points out in her recently published Academic Women,1 their first happy flush of professionalism in the 20's dwindled in the 30's, and almost disappeared in the 40's in what might have been regarded as a new vagary, a revived enthusiasm for femininity and its most convincing proof, the bearing of many children. But now, presumably, college women have grown calm about parturition too, settling down to a much less feverish purpose, really to emulate men at last in being both sexual and highly educated. This new endeavor, though it suggests a perfect union of opposites, may be more attainable in college teaching than it appears at first. Of this fresh group of women the honorary president might well be Mary McCarthy—always beautiful (and her profile is strong), always married, and always making the most industrious use of a quick, informed intelligence.

But then she teaches only sporadically, and her connections are closer with art than with pedagogy. The troubles of academic women arise from their formal training and their formal use of training as teachers. There the difference, or the problem, lies. Other activities of body and mind have been allowed to women in the past. Their rightful share of gross physical exertion has always been inalienable. An absolute equality here, in fact, has been obscured only by the one condition, that they should not be seen enjoying it. Most heavy outdoor work in the city has always been confined, therefore, to men. And for at least two centuries Western women have been free to think—as long as, again, they carried on the activity in discreet privacy. They became novelists because novels could be written in sitting-rooms and because until the 19th century, novels, written or read, were something male relatives indulged as a female pastime. Women wrote letters and lyrical poems. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” asserts a small arithmetical skill as well. And women's minds became pleasantly associated, of course, with a superior intuitive power, a befitting faculty since it was untrained, instinctive, mysterious. In the past a man might be guided by this quality in a wife as warriors before him were advised by a sheep's entrails.

But in their invasion of academic education in the 20th century, women have relinquished the intuitive faculty, so effortlessly come by (“slattern thought,” Adrienne Rich calls it), to train themselves consciously and methodically as logicians and anatomists. The sexual and social effects of their new preference have been felt gradually, but now the initial response, uncertain and curious, would seem to have coalesced for some in an intense dislike. Dislike, at any rate, is the judgment, not of Mrs. Bernard's study, but of our novels of the 60's, which find it repulsive that women should bare their minds in public. This reaction is, of course, not wholly modern: the hint of rationality in the female has frequently been found distasteful in the past (see Chaucer's Pertelote). And yet there seems to be no recalling the old peaceful allotment of faculties between the sexes. To suggest, like a character in Wallace Markfield's To An Early Grave (“You couldn't think up his stories and he couldn't make your coffee”), that each sex can be happy in its own forte, has come to sound fatuous. Formal training has destroyed that old clarity of separate aims and separate gratifications.

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But the loss, as it seems to some, is repeatedly lamented. Just when women have reached a fairly stable position in the universities (holding to at least a steady 10 per cent of the Ph.D.'s each year), one becomes aware of a tremulous, and yet concerted, outcry in fiction for the old duality of learned man and lovely woman. And this new turbulence of dislike for formally educated women is still to some extent based on the old assumption that study dessicates women, renders them ugly, bespectacled, angular. So, in A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch has Martin Lynch-Gibbon refer to Honor Klein, the Female Don, as “looking like a haystack,” and one of the first isolated details about her is “a stout crepe-soled shoe.” (Not that Honor hasn't still some avant-garde surprises up her rough tweed sleeve.) And Quentin, in Arthur Miller's After the Fall, subscribes to a degree of this old assumption in deploring the fact that Louise, the bacteriologist, holds an ugly, angular conviction that to be a “separate person” is “maturity.” Between her microscope and her analyst, she has lost all her husband's warm, mystical sense of human complicity.

As learning used to be thought spiky, ignorance was charming, and Quentin echoes this early association as well in his bathetic utterance to Maggie: “Honey, you know how to see it all with your own eyes; that's more important than all the books.” But both teams of ideas began to break up in the late 19th century and are really only souvenirs now. George Eliot was learned and ugly (so far, so good) but she managed to bowl over one of the first of the conservative American writers, Hawthorne, by her sexual shenanigans. She set a pattern, evidently, in the minds of several novelists to follow her, since the new assumption is that learning turns a woman, not angular, but dissolute. If Bellow's Madeleine reads Soloviëv instead of folding her husband Herzog's undershirts, it follows that she will betray him with Valentine Gersbach. The classics scholar, Dorothy Murchison, in John Aldridge's The Party at Cranston, is “the author of three definitive works on the literary culture of Greece and Rome,” and “her qualifications for bed were no less impressive.” Her union with Waithe, the wraith-like narrator, happened to be “consummated to the accompaniment of the shelling of Cherbourg—an activity which she had likened, between moans, to the siege of Troy.”

The effects of study upon the body itself, apart from its. diversions, have also been freshly interpreted. The academic torso grows now more grotesque than pallid. Herzog can tell when Madeleine is excited by ideas because then her voice sounds “positively like a clarinet.” And when she reads her Russian encyclopedia, her nose twitches. What she says to Shapiro in the garden is apparently invalidated by Herzog's noticing that Shapiro notices her behind. And Shapiro, who offends by answering her, is punished by the same argument ad corpus: whatever he says seems invalidated by his having an ulcer. Breasts, above all, are considered to be at odds with the pursuit of knowledge. Delivering a formal lecture, Dorothy Murchison wore “a black and very low-cut evening gown beneath which she obviously had nothing on whatever” and “her large breasts bulged threateningly out upon the desk at which she sat.” Profanation of a desk. And Bernard Malamud, in his somber way, carries this point on to pathology. Pauline Gilley, heroine of Malamud's A New Life, is given to simple, untutored profundities: “I married a man with no seeds at all.” In her final, pregnant happiness with the seedy Levin, she is developing new breasts and she smells like “fresh-baked bread.” But Levin's colleague, the instructor Avis Fliss, smells of orange blossom perfume and tobacco; and her life, dedicated to remedial grammar, will never be new. Her breasts are extraordinarily depressing, even among academic women characters: hanging “like water-filled balloons,” scarred by one bout of surgery and due for another. Levin is obliged to examine a second “benign fibroma.”

Sorely afflicted with all these physical distortions, educated women are found to be generally malformed in character as well. They are bad-tempered; they fume and rage and tear sheets. Avis Fliss is a snoop. Madeleine Herzog is a bad housekeeper—she leaves veal bones under the sofa. But her successor in Herzog's affections, Ramona (perhaps because she never did finish that M.A. in art history), remains sweetly, very simply sexy, and a great little cook to boot. And Madeleine is a fraud: what she really likes to read, Herzog confides, is murder mysteries. (But she has at least that in common with Sartre.) Louise, the first lady in Miller's After the Fall, is a fraud too: it was Quentin, of course, who got her an A by writing her paper on Roosevelt. Both women are jealous of their husbands' talents and try to steal attention away from them. Quentin, with saintly restraint, tells Louise:

I wasn't angry: I simply felt that every time I began to talk you cut in to explain what I was about to say.

Herzog is frankly annoyed:

Madeleine, by the way, lured me out of the learned world, got in herself, slammed the door, and is still in there, gossiping about me.

Holga, the third lady in After the Fall, is educated too (Quentin can tell when she is upset because then she talks “desperately” about architecture), and the thorough approval accorded her is therefore puzzling at first. But the play furnishes reasons why she is right in being educated while Louise is wrong. (1) Holga is an archaeologist, not a bacteriologist (Louise has said, “Quentin, I saw you getting angry when I was talking about that new anti-virus vaccine.”) (2) Between Louise and Holga comes Maggie, a massive dose of know-nothing even for a man with a taste for it. (3) Finally, Holga, like Quentin, can survive higher education because she, like Quentin, is loaded with emotional insight: “I think one must finally take one's life in one's arms, Quentin.”

If the less joyful ladies of these tales are not capable of this solipsistic embrace, it is perhaps because they are already encumbered with the lives of others, or with the hatred of themselves emanating from those other lives. Herzog achieves the most eloquent venom. Arthur Miller is reduced once again to the predictable; at the end of an argument with Louise, Quentin thunders, “Bitch!” The reader is guiltily relieved (because the scene is unmistakably perorative in tone) when Dorothy Murchison gets her come-uppance, her bruised breast (one of those which threatened the lecture audience) and her bloody nose.

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Young women scholars, quailing before this modern fiction, might well retreat into Jane Austen's propriety of “acomplishments accustomary to the sex.” But fortunately ambition in women as in men is often ruthless, and often indifferent to literary judgments. Moreover, with excellent timing, Mrs. Bernard appears now on the book scene, to reassure and encourage. Reading her cheerless but dispassionate statistics, the thesis of the current novel (that intellectual women are bound to be hateful) begins to seem a temporary and eccentric inflammation of male self-pity in fiction, rather than an index of general feeling in the actual society. The truth of the matter must be, as always, less histrionic. What interests Mrs. Bernard is not so much the disturbance caused to lovers and husbands by women's education, as the disturbance caused to the women themselves. Their real problem in teaching is not that they cease to be women, but that they cannot cease to be women. The academic woman, as she enters her profession, is visualized by sociologists as wheeling before her, in a mental grocery cart, all the stock impedimenta, the staples, of her feminine role. Far from losing them, she cannot get rid of her passivity, her diffidence, her compliance, her leniency, her “conserving, stabilizing, appeasing” nature.

If she speaks as inoffensively seldom as possible, her colleagues find her “withdrawn.” If she teaches part-time in order to tend husband and children as well, her colleagues feel she is not seriously “involved” in the profession. If she teaches full-time and devotes herself to the nurture of students, she reveals a new shortcoming: a tendency toward “momism” in what the academic men believe should be as stark and rigid a training as that of the Coldstream Guards. If she consults members of her “field” freely, they assume that she is making advances. If she keeps a decorous distance, they consider her outside the real pulsing life of the subject. Even if she speaks eloquently, she finds it difficult to hold undivided attention. A man teacher reports to Mrs. Bernard:

There she [his colleague] stands. A beautiful woman. Above her neck she is talking about the most abstruse subject. From the neck down her body is saying something altogether different.

And undeniably, even if she dresses in a space-suit, the academic woman is always at some physical disadvantage. It is not, of course, as great as some men imagine it to be. Another male witness, confined to a sanatorium, his life evidently an intravenous illusion, announces in Mrs. Bernard's report that he now understands what it is like to be a woman. But all well women must demur: being female is not quite or not always a postoperative sensation. Moreover, the profession has never been noted in either sex for its great strength. But still, these women are aware of minor physical deterrents. Menstrual schedules do not yield priority to class schedules. The nine months of pregnancy are, as likely as not, the nine months of the school year. In fact, the problems which women create by attempting to lead both sexual and intellectual lives, attract so much sociological concern that one is left with an impression of wilful self-divisiveness in contrast with the disciplined wholeness and continuity of male careers. The coincidence that men too are repeatedly diverted from study by the marital act is obscured by the women's monopoly of child care. Most academic husbands, with the exception of Herzog, are therefore ready to report they are glad to be married; quite a few academic wives record less contentment.

Their physical difference causes the familiar difference between the careers of academic husbands and wives. College teaching careers depend more than others upon regularity. The academic law is that the first seven steady years of famine guarantee thirty-three more of tenure. The instructor who meets every class, corrects most of the papers, publishes an article a year in the trade journal, and escapes being seduced by a student, cannot fail. At worst, he will transfer at a higher rank to a lower institution.

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But women do fail, because their careers are notorious for interruption. The irregular history of most rouses suspicion of all from the start. Even as young, unmarried, and gifted applicants, women look treacherous to a fellowship committee. The male body holds no academic swindles in store. Its square bulk in the chair immediately suggests to the committee the uneventful filling of some job somewhere for the next half century. Unless the women applicants promise celibacy (a pious solution offered by David Riesman in his introduction to Mrs. Bernard's book—offered, at least, as an alternative to marrying . “dreadfully inadequate men”) or, married, promise to be barren, there is always that risk of their quitting before the fellowships have, in a way, been paid back. And if they are hired as instructors, women are capable of madcap romances—with other members of the faculty or, worse, with members of the faculty in their own departments. In the event of so thoughtless a marriage within the profession, the wife, in the past, invariably resigned. Now nicety yields gradually to necessity, to the shortage of teachers, and some of these brides are allowed to stay on. But still, married women teachers are prone to resigning. They reproduce and resign, they make beds and resign, they trail along after their husbands wherever their husbands' jobs erupt on the globe, and resign again.

The hapless women whom Mrs. Bernard describes make clear, nevertheless, that the profession is not quite forgotten, that it nags and pulls at them, and that—totally dismissed from the minds of their old colleagues—they reappear one day to sign a new (and, of course, punitively meager) contract. By having to leave their work so often, these women become distinct, too, in their compulsion to resume it. In four, ten, sixteen years the trauma of marriage is healed. And like Jane Eyre, that most academic heroine of all, the wives are no sooner nursed back to sensibility than they open their mouths and teach again. College deans have no way of guessing this lurking, dormant intention. Lovers and husbands confuse it with sexual invitation or sexual rebuff—a regrettable, though rather touching, single-mindedness. The personal accounts of the dilemma furnished to Mrs. Bernard are dreary, repetitive, threnodic for many paragraphs, but they all conclude with the decision to study and teach again. Once put to graduate school, women evidently harbor thereafter, until death do part, an implacable instrumentality of mind.

* Pennsylvania State University Press, 331 pp., $6.50.

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