"Brains Have No Sex"
Sergio, Lisa, “Brains Have No Sex,” WQXR Program, 1942, pp. 1-5, Booth Family Collection, Georgetown University
Because many people wonder how it feels to be a woman radio commentator, we asked Miss Sergio to write the following article. She needs no introduction to the WQXR audience which listens to her regularly at 7 o’clock every evening Monday through Friday, nor to her morning audience at 10 A.M. on Monday and Friday.
“Brains have no sex”, Madame Chiang-Kai-Shek told a press conference in Washington when asked her views on the Equal Rights Amendment. Everybody agreed with her, it seems. Everybody present, that is. But in radio broadcasting experts will tell you that listeners classify brains according to the speaker’s sex. The woman commentator who deals in current events does not come out on top. This is what the experts say: men don’t like to have a woman tell them what’s what; they want he-man stuff or nothing. Women, they continue, don’t like to take it from another woman, for they also demand the stern voice of male authority when they learn the war news and the political issues that perplex and confuse this man-made world.
I am one who agrees with the brilliant lady from China and who takes little stock in the findings of those disobliging experts. I will admit that one man in my audience, who signs his name in full and gives me his address each time, accuses me at regular intervals of being a female parrot who belongs in the kitchen. I can also boast one woman listener who remains anonymous in the mail, and who, with the same frequency bids me get of the air and let a worthy man fill in the time with brains and common sense. However, I am glad to say that these two specimens are not typical of my audience, for thousands of others write in their criticisms, good and bad, without reference to petticoats or pants. And that is the way it should be.
“The responsible individual is built in the home. The citizen is built in the home. Good government is made by good citizens. Therefore the roots of good government are in the home. When the home is weak or broken, when the family ties are loosened or torn, when the authority of parents is not manifest, and the love of children not recognized and nurtured, the nation as a whole reflects the disease in its government. I think that this is what the world is now suffering from. When the sickness reaches the danger point, dictatorship, like a fatal infection, is ready to set in. It can take a nation a long, long time to reach the fatal point. But the fatal point is inevitably reached if the disease is not checked in time. It has happened to many nations. The people who believe in preventative medicine should keep tabs on their country’s temperature, without waiting for symptoms of malady to become evident. And the temperature must be taken in the nation’s homes. That’s where the fever must be broken.
“What does the temperature chart of the American home show? No dangerous signs of sickness, but still sufficient signs of warning that all is not well. Too many broken homes, too many family ties loosened under the impact of externalities, too much surrender of parental authority to outside forces which don’t belong.
“Let’s analyze these signs: more broken homes in the last two generations than ever before. Why? I maintain that it is because young people are no longer taught the significance of love. They are allowed to confuse sex with love, ambition to forge ahead with love, their natural urge to be independent with love. These things are not love. Love is service and selflessness, sharing and giving in order to receive. The meaning of love is learned too late in many cases, and the home built on insecure foundations, cracks and then collapses. The meaning of love is best learnt in the home, from example. Not from books or blackboards. These, at best, are poor substitutes when unavoidable. Men and women who came from broken homes, rarely can build a home of their own that endures unto death, and often break the law as well as the structure of the home. Love is surrender, not complacency. This we do not teach the young today. Until we do, the home will be weak.
“Our family ties are loosening and with them goes the security of the family circle, than which no other earthly security is greater. Why are they loosening? Because not enough parents and children like to stay home. They yield to economic needs – often imaginary more than real – and go outside the home to work, and work ranges all the way from baby-sitting for the teen-agers to night-shifts for the parents. With the earnings we buy time saving gadgets, so that the saved time can be spent with such constant visitors as radio and TV and movies and other countless outside attractions. These are good and necessary, but in due measure. They must enrich the experience lived within the home, and not destroy all interest in the experience of home life. The child who is perennial baby-sat will produce a very insecure, and ineffectual president of the United States some thirty years from now, unless he learns to know the importance of parental companionship very soon. The child raised without a sense of home – with its tenderness and disciplines, its understanding and advice, its joys and its sorrows – will never understand fully the meaning of citizenship, with its joys and sorrows, its sorrows – will never understand fully the meaning of citizenship, with its joys and sorrows, its tenderness and hardships. The child without a sense of home is likely to become a ship without a rudder. It strikes me that far too many such are rising to government positions everywhere in the world in our time. They had no sense of home in world war I, remember, and suffered all of that war’s in their formative years. We who can still create a sense of home, of the warm traditional American home, will be sorely to blame if we fail in this task before it is too late.
“I said that we surrender parental authority to outside forces. This is all too true and has been so in the last thirty years. There came World War I and then the staggering progress of science which gave us gadgets weapons and inventions which humanity was not morally wise enough to handle without excess and without danger. Thus parents today seem rather glad to be able to pass on other the responsibility of being parents morally as they have been physically. They do not seem displeased to let their children learn religion in Sunday school or during released time, without bothering to make the teaching real in the home. They seem glad to let sex be taught through films and the blackboard, while pulp magazines and radio serials initiate the young to the pangs and delights of romance, vicariously at first and with often disastrous personal realism later. Hopalong Cassidy and High Ho Silver to name but two tell children what is good and what is evil, and the parents are glad to let the TV screen take over their educational task. The comics and the murder strips, the men from Mars and other factors do not always teach how to distinguish good from evil. But parental authority calls this progressive and commits the sin of surrender. And out of this comes adults who will be nationals, but not citizens. They will not have learnt responsibility, because those whom God delegated to teach them this fundamental virtue will have failed in their task.
“What is responsibility? It is recognition of authority, acceptance of moral standards without betrayal or compromise, acceptance of duties and fulfillment of rights, it is respect for the individualism, others as for the dignity of one’s mind and soul. Responsibility, the corner stone of good citizenships is absorbed in the home. The school and the community can supplement, expand and assist, but the home contains soil for the roots. The plant is what the roots make it. The roots feed on the soil around them. The tiny human form, newborn into the world, is tended and fed in the warmth of the home. It must then be raised to the full strength and health of complete manhood. The same is true of the spirit, which needs to find its food within the home to produce a citizen strengthened and tempered to meet the strains and stresses which await him as he crosses over from dependency to self-support and self-determination.
“Our American pattern of government is a good pattern. But it takes people to translate the pattern into the living thing that is government itself. Citizens start out by being people who grow in the home and develop in the home. It takes citizens to make both the governing and the governed and unless both are equally good government is bound to decline. Responsibility is the essence of both, and I repeat, responsibility is taught, learnt, absorbed and made manifest through dignity and love, only in the home. That is where the roots of good government are to be found.”
Lisa Sergio, “Brains Have No Sex,” February 1st, 1946, pp. 1-3
The radio experts have a theory that listeners classify the brains of people on the air according to sex. I need hardly add that the ladies do not come out on top, except in the field known as the “woman’s field” whatever that is. When it comes to a woman who claims to analyze or comment on the day’s domestic and international news, the experts also have a theory: the men, they say don’t like to have a woman tell them what’s what; the women, they say, want the man stuff, and don’t like to take it from another woman, since most of the news in our modern world of wars and strife and rivalries and exhausting quests for peace is made by the men. But the truth of it is that brains have no sex, and there is not a scientist who could disprove that statement.
Because it somehow a general belief that brains are a masculine prerogative, women have to fight and struggle and do better than their male competitors in order to prove their point. But when the point is proven, the audience, too, ceases to pass judgement on them with the sex angle in mind. My experience is that they like or dislike a woman news commentator for what she says, for what she thinks, rather than because it is a woman who is thinking and speaking.
Women commentators are a recent acquisition to radio. In the beginning sing, fiddle or recite as they would they were confined to the class known as “fillers”. Eventually they broke into the cereal and baking powder game, and their cooking schools conducted over the air called for the best mental agility of the housewife, plus convincing words and clear instructions. In this field the women made a hit and they are still at the top.
But they have broadened out, bringing their measure of intuition, of common sense, of appreciation of particulars and their analytical faculties, in brief, their “brains”, to other graver subjects. Here, too, they have found a place and should hold it firmly. In time of war, men and women were needed to bring the struggle to its victorious conclusion. They bore the brunt of the struggle together, each in their own equally significant way. In times when peace is being laboriously made, men and women can equally contribute to the elucidation of the issues at stake and of the sometimes baffling trend of events which are shaping tomorrow today.
It so happens that I began as a commentator in Europe, over ten years ago. It was the first assignment given to a woman, it seems, and it was tough. To me, however, it was exciting and unique. Many years of unbroken familiarity with current events and with the microphone on both sides of the ocean, have neither dulled the excitement nor bred contempt of the medium. In all these years rarely, if ever, have I had reason to feel that being a woman was a handicap. That is why I prefer not to believe the experts.
The quickened pace of the last few years, the broader freedom which America offers as compared to most countries of pre-war Europe, the stimulating contrast of opinions and clash of reactions in the heterogenous American audience, and the growing suspense which the state of war brings into our lives, are factors that have unquestionably increased the responsibilities I recognize in the work of a commentator. But I do not believe that, as a woman, I recognize them less clearly nor accept them less honestly, than my male colleagues. Women, as a whole, make a smaller fuss about accepting responsibilities, of whatever nature, than men. That is probably why they get less credit for fulfilling them, and more criticism if they fail!That is why they have to work harder to make a place for themselves and to hold it.
Frankly, the commentator’s business boils down to this, I think: in hectic times it is a hectic marching step one has to keep. One must have mental energy, and some physical stamina too; a mind free from prejudice and stocked with as many facts and realities as it will hold. Whether it is a man or a woman collecting material, analyzing it, writing it up, making deductions and presenting the picture to the unseen audience, the most important single factor is sincerity. When that is conveyed, as the microphone invariably will convey the drive behind the words, be it sincerity or the reverse, the audience forgets the sex and merely judges the brains.
Lisa Sergio, “Brains Have No Sex - Women Are Power,” pp. 1-17
Thank you very much Dean Edwards, you know that first part of that title sometimes has led me into trouble. Some people have called it sex has no brains. Of course that’s a subject that I’ll leave to Dr. Kinsey rather than tackle it myself. But I do believe this that if any of you are studying medicine you probably know that it’s true from a purely physiological angle that that thing that we otherwise call gray matter does not have any sex. I’m not going to discuss it of course from that angle, I’m just going to try to point out to you why in my own experience as D. Edwards has pointed out to you as an interpreter for Mussolini, as one who saw at close range and then became disgusted with one of the dictatorships of our time and also as a general student of current events why I think women are a power. And that they should be considered a power in the light of the fact that brains that is the seat of our thinking really do not have any sex.
You know of course perhaps only too realistically that we are again involved in a war – it’s not a major war thank goodness but it is part of the same war that was left unfinished when we so joyously thought that all dictatorship had come to an end with our victories in Europe and in Japan. My statement about the power of women is connected really closely with the question of these dictatorships which we are fighting. I will say that the war against totalitarianism has had three phases. Three have been the enemies that we’ve faced. One was Fascism, one was Nazism, today we are facing communism. When the war against the first of these dictatorships really began to take shape that is the war between the democratic pattern and dictatorship. Nobody in this country surely was aware that that war had started. It was not even a cold war, it wasn’t even mentioned, but it began as soon as Mussolini established his power and at that very moment there entered into the whole picture of warfare whether it was cold warfare or hot warfare a completely new element which we later recognized and that was the element of psychology.
During the war against the Nazis, against the Axis you heard the terms of psychological warfare talked about from morning to night. We talked about it in the sort of way in which you talk about something that is new and different, actually that element of psychological warfare was brought into the struggle with the very establishment of the first active dictatorship. You might say to me that communism was established in Russia before fascism came into power, to some extent that is true but when Communism was so established in Russia it sort of closed its doors upon itself and operated within its country. You hardly heard anybody talk about Russia as a world power when Mussolini was riding the crest of the wave of success all over Europe in the twenties. So I think that in our struggle against totalitarianism we should say that the first phase began with fascism or the first round of the battle and we lost that first round, we lost it because Fascism won it when they won the Abyssinian War. The victory of an aggressor wrecked the League of Nations. It played havoc with the principles of equality and freedom on which the whole democratic concept is predicated, because a dark skinned ruler and his people were let down in a shameful manner because there were too many powers, white powers not the United States of course but too many white powers which held under colonial rule some dark faced or yellow faced people and so it didn’t suit those white powers to let a white man be defeated by a black one. I happened to have been at the League of Nations when Haile Selassie then the ruler of Abyssinia was shamefully let down and I remember his speech in which he said: Gentlemen: remember in letting down a member nation small as we may be you are destroying the very principles on which the League of Nations is built. I think that we must have remembered that speech when we decided that small as Korea might be we couldn’t afford to let that aggression go unstopped because we would have then destroyed the very principles not only of the United Nations but because we were involved and the whole pattern on which our country has predicated its strength, its growth and its greatness we learned the lesson but we lest that round. When Nazism went on the rampage we knew more about the principles involved and so after a very great and costly struggle we won and Fascism collapsed with it because they were tied up. Now we are facing Communism this is the third round. You might say what does this have to do with the power of women. It has a great deal to do with the power of women the fact that we haven’t recognized the power of women in this new and modern form of warfare which includes psychology. I think it accounts for the fact that we lost the first round and very nearly lost the second one as you remember and it has taken us quite a long time to get on our feet in this third round which is by no means finished. I have no doublet that’s it’s going to be won but it’s going to cost a great deal not only in point of lives and materials and money but also in sacrifices of many other things. It’s going to cost us a great deal of mental and spiritual unrest, it’s going to cause us to make a number of mistakes because we are panicked. We’ll come out on top but not without a struggle. After the third round let’s hope there will be no further round between freedom loving people and totalitarianism. But if we want to make sure that we win this third round quickly and thereby cut the losses and the costs I think we do have to consider this new element which is the power of women.
Mussolini who like most Latins I would say officially considered women to be rather second class citizens of course in the days when he came to power they had no vote, there was no question of giving them the vote and their place was supposed to be in the kitchen and in the nursery, maybe in the back yard. That was officially the attitude in reality he was a great student of human psychology. He knew very well that because of the ravages wrought upon economy in general by the first World War, in order to compel the people to follow a new leader you would have to talk in terms of social gains and of economic equality. He knew that the first World War had left a number of people much richer than they were before the new rich and had left an infinitely greater number of people much poorer than they were before and with very little hope of any recovery ahead of them and so the whole of the appeal of Fascism was predicated on social and economic causes and in order to make that appeal successful you have to study the psychology of people, you have to study whether they really believe that everybody has a right to education that all people have a right to be well fed you have to know how to bring these matters to their attention and so Fascism sold to the people of Italy a bill of social and economic goods. And they did this by using a method which we later described as psychological warfare but which in those days was not known at all. So he was the initiator of it and he knew very well that if you’re going to get the support of a nation not through force – force in the establishment of all these dictatorships was used only initially to gain political power, to gain the reins of government afterwards – remember and this is a very important point on which we sometimes make an error of judgement these dictatorial governments as long as they were successful, as long as they seemed to go ahead on the crest of the wave as I said before did so because they had the majority of the people with them.. They held then through lies and deceit if you will through clever psychological tactics if you will but not through sheer terror and power when a regime reached the point in which the people realized that they were held under control only through terror the lid was off the kettle. You saw it happen in Italy. Mussolini could have mustered enough military power to hold the people under control in 1945 when he was thrown out but he wouldn’t have held them long-he couldn’t have – because remember that any army is also made up of people and there comes a time when the very army that you’re going to use to enforce your unwanted political views rebels. That’s what happened in Italy and that’s what happened in Germany as you know. The Nazis, Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and all the rest were abandoned by the peoples. They had no power because the power that they had was the army and the army abandoned them. It could happen in Communist countries as a matter of fact there wouldn’t be such a drastic need for these constant trials that we read about – mock trials in Yugoslavia, I mean in Czechoslovakia, in Romania, in Bulgaria where ten, twelve people are strung up on gallows as examples – if they weren’t already a danger of defection so it may happen there but how have these regimes held their people. They’ve held them through a study of the things that they wanted and the things that make up the social and economic pattern which people want most are wanted first by the women of a nation. It is always the woman in the family who first realizes that the man isn’t bringing home enough money to feed her children properly or to pay for the doctor or to get them new clothes. If you look back in history and you are closer to the study of history than I am – certainly you will realize that revolutionary movements have generally all started from a social concept- ours was a concept of freedom in this country and it was a very different kind of revolution. Actually it was more political perhaps than social but the French Revolution to quote one or even the Bolshevik Revolution-they were all started from an idea that is closer to a woman’s mind – we are being unfairly treated – we are the underdogs-somebody is rich and we are poor-the realization of that dawns upon the mother’s mind before it dawns upon the mind of the father. She starts the movement and he then translates it into organization and in the case of a revolution goes out to fight in the street but the woman is at the foundation of it and Mussolini knew it very well indeed. So what did he do? The very first reforms that he made in 1922-1923-1924 were intended to please the women of Italy because he knew that if the women of Italy could come to look upon him as a great savior, as the great liberator of the nation from the shackles of poverty and injustice they would cause the men to go and vote from him and he didn’t need to give them the vote for which they were not prepared and they were not asking for. What did he do? It may look like a minor fact but it’s a vital one. Women in Italy you know that because you’ve seen old picture of them-used to make the landscape particularly picturesque carrying pitchers of water on their heads. They didn’t do that just to make good pictures they did it just because there was no general running water systems in the farm lands. Oh yes the ancient Romans had established aqueducts which brought water to the cities and within the larger cities such as Rome in antiquity there was more or less water available for the citizens but down to 1922, 23, 24 there wasn’t any running water in the farm houses of Italy. If you wanted to eat, if you wanted to drink, if you occasionally quite by accident wanted to wash (that was quite a secondary proposition) the women of the family would carry these enormous pitchers on their head and walk five, six seven miles to the nearest well. Do you wonder that some of my dearly beloved countrymen in Italy in those days did not have a reputation for being perfume factories, Shall we say as they walked around: Naturally at that price you don’t really use water for washing. For some of these women for all of them I would say from the time that they began to understand anything when they were 10 or 12 years old they realized that part of their life, a certain number of hours every day of their life was devoted to this carrying of the water. You try to picture yourselves if you had to do that every day how far you’d get. All of a sudden the first big public works program Mussolini set up was to carry running water into farm homes and practically overnight the farm woman went into the kitchen and she saw a funny little object protruding from a wall and she turned the little handle and there was water in her home. Mussolini became God. There was again performed Aaron’s miracle. That made her think quite a deal of him. The husband began to realize that he’d acquired a new worker for his farm, she didn’t have to go walking for miles to get water she could do work on the farm so he appreciated it too. But then the next step was even greater. Oh yes, the men are good exploiters of women activities. There was a compulsory education law in Italy, oh it was established in 1876 but it was really curious-sometimes people have ways of making one law and then unmaking the effect of that law with another law. There was one law which said that all children after six or seven – I forget which – had to go to school- public schools or parochial schools or some kind of school they had to be educated at least until the age of fourteen and then another law said that they were not permitted to go to school without shoes. Well when you consider that in the south of Italy roughly speaking and I think quite accurately ninety percent of the potential school population did not have any shoes you had a choice of whether you went to jail because you didn’t go to school or you went to jail because you went to school without shoes and so using what was a very correct psychological approach most of the peasants’ families and even the families in the town that had no money with which to buy shoes for the children thought-well look if I send the child to school without shoes the child is there is caught flagrantly in the act of breaking the law but if the child doesn’t go to school you know in Italy we don’t have or didn’t have then and I don’t think they have now a statistical system comparable to ours so if the child did not go to school who would ever know the child had ever existed. So it could stay home barefooted and the chances were that no one would come home and say you’d broken the law by not going to school. Italian families have a way of being rather large…mothers would have 8 or 10 squawking brats.....mamma...mamma...tugging at their skirts...little bits of ones, twins and then otherwise the difference of age just about a year.It was enough to send a farm woman crazy but she didn’t bother she had a very summary system-you know...it
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laws that closed all the windows upon knowledge and upon the outside world and when you live in the dark you are not aware of what is going on outside it’s very hard to complain about what you don’t have. Remember that it is very easy to talk about preserving freedom of thought and speech. But after three or four years if we had laws that prevented any newspaper from coming into our homes except an officially printed one that controlled the radios after three or four years we wouldn’t know what the alternative was to the things we were hearing. And many people would say well maybe it is true so what the dickens and we’d stop complaining because what you don’t know doesn’t worry you as much as what you do know. We know freedom that’s why we must fight for it. And when you haven’t had it for a number of years or when you’ve never had it and it was the case of the rising generation of Italy who never had it because when there still was freedom in Italy they were too small, they couldn’t fight for it because they didn’t know what it was. And the laws that made freedom a non-existing thing were passed because the men elected certain people to Parliament who made those laws and the men voted for those people because the women satisfied with the things which Mussolini with his knowledge of psychology had given them made the men vote. When the women saw that their sons were going to be used for cannon fodder that was the time of the Abyssinian War, I was in Italy then still. I knew that ill feeling was rising just like a storm. The women were so incensed to see their sons go out to fight because the economic situation in Italy was good by and large under Fascism unfortunately because that’s what permitted it to last so long. Thanks also to a great deal of economic help that they got from this country because I don’t think we were then aware that that was the first round of the terrible game in which we are still involved-the game of war. The women didn’t want to see their sons go out and fight and I remember at the port of Genoa seeing a horde of women shouting angry hopeless women preventing a transport ship from sailing for Africa with their sons on board and Mussolini was smart enough because he knew psychological warfare to give orders that the transport should not sail and the men disembarked. And two days later he ordered a rally for women only, the men were not permitted to attend. In the public square where large speakers were set up or in the halls where his speech could be heard. Every woman in the country was told to voluntarily attend the meeting. You know in a dictatorship everything is always voluntary but it’s an awfully funny thing it’s always done by means of a card and if you fail to turn in your card when you go to one of these voluntary rallies for some unknown reason the police seem to know that you didn’t turn in your card, they come to your house and find out why voluntarily you didn’t go to the rally. And I assure you that next time when you get a card you’ll go voluntarily. because few people like the clink as an alternative. But he ordered this rally and hundreds of thousands of women listened to his speech and in that speech he pulled the most masterful public relations trick maybe of our time which Hitler has imitated and Stalin has taken a pattern from. He said to those women – this war that I am planning in Abyssinia was forced upon me by the Abyssinians. He gave them the usual lie on which he tried to justify that war. He tried to pretend it was not aggression of course same way the Korean War it was the South Koreans who attacked the North Koreans according to the Soviets. Well he pulled that same sort of trick but that didn’t matter much to the women. What he told them was look I’ve raised beautiful sons and daughters for you, we have an over population, doors to immigration are closed. I’m going to build an empire such as the British and the French have. But if you prevent your sons from going to fight for it you’ll never have it so you’re dooming them to poverty. Now I’m not going to fight this war without your held he said, if you women will encourage your sons to go and win this empire for themselves, if you women will above all stay home and be the guardians of national economy because unless you enforce very careful economic controls at home you cannot win a war because it does disturb your national economy and the women are those who can wield the implement of those controls if you women don’t pledge me your support on those two counts I call this war off. He said this with that inimitable power that he had. He was a very appealing speaker. He was a man really endowed with the gift of the demagogue if you will and those women shouted their lungs off and escorted their sons to the transport ships and on the wave of the most spectacular form of enthusiasm for I was there disapproving because I knew the insides of the story and consequently after a couple of years less than a year I was sentenced to prison for my disapproval and the undermining I’d done but never the less I saw the wave of enthusiasm and they won that war-sure they won it because the Western powers did not stand together and say this is breaking a principle but he knew that he would have to win it in a hurry and he couldn’t win it in a hurry without women prodding the men to go and win it and without the women staying at home and preserving the solidary of a wartime economy. If you look at Hitler you see exactly the same thing. Oh yes today you can travel through Germany and every woman will tell you she’ll have nothing to do with women’s organizations or politics; we’re having a hard time establishing democratic ones there because she was fooled. remember that Hitler thought so much of the power of the woman in the home that as soon as the woman’s children were old enough to go to kindergarten he compelled young mothers to attend training courses in which they were taught how to carry on in the home the same kind of foul teachings that the children received in the school because he knew that a mother at home can undo in one hour what a child has been taught at the school in six because having to make a choice the average normal child will listen to its mother and he wanted to be sure there was no contrast. And he forced every young woman to attend a training course in which she was indoctrinated with exactly the same things. And she believed them. You might say well women are so gullible why do you say they have power? Some women have proven themselves gullible in the face of Fascism, Nazism and Communism today. The women in the Communist set up are by far the strongest factor but they’re gullible because down the centuries they’ve never had equal opportunity to share in education and in life in general. But I’ll tell you that when women reach the point where they’re no longer gullible some of you men in the audience would hate to meet them. When a woman is determined she’ll get where she wants to go especially if she feels she’s been fooled. Did you see by any chance those dreadful films – and Mussolini’s body being kicked and strung up, feet foremost in the public square after he’d been killed. Most of the kicks, the spitting on his dead face, things that not good because once a man is dead I believe that he is no longer within the province of the human person to deal with. The man is dead whatever the method of his dying and bury him and don’t insult his body. They did and if you saw that film you will remember that the feet that kicked that face and caused the film to echo the sound of the cracking of the skull were woman’s feet, woman’s shoes. And most of the faces lowered in the horrible and insulting gesture of spitting on that dead body were women. That too is a bad trait. But it comes as a complete reverse of the picture. It is also a form of power. Now I’m saying that in one democratic pattern, it doesn’t go only for the U.S. I’m saying ours in the broadly plural sense that embraces all of the freedom loving countries that live by a basic democratic pattern. We have not recognized sufficiently the power that is in women in this struggle against totalitarianism. We have not used the thinking the approach of woman, the sensitivity of woman even though she may not have had as much training in the field of public affairs as men, down the years. We have not used those typical qualities of woman in the planning of our struggle against totalitarianism. We used it not at all when we decided that maybe we should stay the hand of fascism which we did very much towards the end we didn’t use it practically at all this power of women when we were fighting Nazism in the hot shooting war. We are not using it as much as we could and should today in what I hope is the last round in the struggle against Communism. I believe that just as nature indicates that without the coming together of men and women the human race cannot continue and now I’m making a parenthesis to say that I suppose somebody would suggest that the day will come when science will say that women can have children all by themselves and maybe men can too. – But that isn’t here yet and both are equally necessary even though in the act of continuing the human race they play an extremely different role. But different as those roles are they are equally indispensable to the creation of a new human life. Why then can’t a partnership of that kind be established in creating the setting in which that human life is going to develop and that is what we haven’t done. It has been done by the totalitarians. They have used or to put it more aptly misused – betrayed if you will, those valuable things that both men and women have to contribute to the shaping of society. But they’ve used them both. Every single important social program under Nazism, Fascism and today communism is either officially headed by a woman or a woman is the one who does all of the work and the man takes the credit, that also happens. But because the dictator and the men who follow him know that the strength of any totalitarian regime and the possibility of its survival lies exclusively in meeting certain social needs. Now whether you meet them lies or whether they are truthfully met and honestly met with a preservation of freedom matters nothing to them...They need free hospitals – fine ...the dictator gives them to the people even though they’re surrendering in order to have free care for their body – the freedom of their spirit but they’re not aware of it because it’s done carefully, it’s done intelligently and in most of the cases the figuring out of a pattern in which you can trick people into the lies has been figured out with the aid of women. I think that this is a fact that we in this country must consider very seriously, because it is perfectly obvious that the start of the war in Korea, the force of the North Korean aggression was propelled and driven by something that was not strictly military. Behind all the communist drive in all of the countries behind the Iron Curtain where Communism is still I regret to state quite strongly entrenched – the drive, the propulsion has been of a social and psychological nature. Wars today are no longer fought for the conquest of this mountain or that bridge head or that river except as a limited strategical objective. Today they are fought for the domination of the entire world by a certain ideologist. We would like to see the entire human race subscribing to those fundamental principles on which we predicated our way of life – so do the communists. The race is no longer limited to this country, that one, or to this mountain or that river. The struggle today is globe wide. Either the Communist conquer the whole world or they cannot survive. Either we establish eventually freedom in the whole world or we cannot survive. That’s how serious it is. And in this the psychological element instituted by the first successful inventor of a dictatorship system - Mussolini - is paramount. If you look in Britain, if you look in Sweden which are smaller national countries than we are and consequently they can make changes more quickly than we do you will see that women are holding positions of tremendous importance in government and they’re all positions that fit into those fields in which the communists in the countries which they’ve been successfully [sic] have also placed women and where they have made their deepest dent. Women in the field of education, women in the field of social welfare, women in the field of health, of planning. Why because the human element is the fundamental thing in the structure of the nation obviously. There are no races there are no nations without human beings. Therefore the preservation and the healthy growth of the human being is the first thing. The human being comes out of the family, which is the root of the national structure and the woman is in the family.- the pivot. The man singles out the woman when he chooses to be his companion. Some people will tell you that the woman does all the choosing, maybe she does but she doesn’t do it quite as openly. I think there are more proposals of marriage made by men than by women. It may change but for the moment it’s still that way. He singles out the woman and around her whether she turns out to be the ideal person he has in mind or not is not the point – the point is that he thinks of her, I would like her to be my companion. I can go through all the difficulty and struggle of creating a career for myself with her. She will be the mother of my children. She will be the woman who will keep the home fires burning and with her will I sit by that hearth when we are old and the children have made their own life. The man has much more of this type of thinking than the woman. She thinks of him rather more as the pillow on which she’ll rest. Maybe the person will buy the mink coat if you will. But he, he ascribes to her that fundamental position, we should do it in the national structure because the nation is nothing unless it is a conglomeration of family unit and the family is nothing unless it is a close knit unit of man, woman and child. And the woman in our democratic pattern has not been given as great a role to play in the national family and in the planning of the nation’s life that she has acquired through a great deal of struggle in the family itself and in the planning of family life. I think that this is a very serious problem for men and women to consider in our country sure - nearly all careers, all professions are opened to women. But it is a revision of our whole approach to the problem of living together that I think we must undergo and it should be undergone at a time when peoples are on the threshold of their full-fledged life as most people who are students are. You have not made your life yet. You are working towards the shaping of it. It is necessary to approach it with an understanding that in the type of war in which we are engaged hot war or cold war the partnership between the qualities with which God endowed man and woman is indispensable and it has been demonstrated to us by those who are the very enemies of freedom. You can learn a great deal by studying your enemies and it is not a sign of weakness by any means or a sign of unpatriotism to conceive that those who are your enemies have been successful or have in advance of you in some of their thinking: that is an intelligent approach as long as one is willing to make the effort to see what was good about what they did. And bluntly unremittingly erase what was bad about what they did. The partnership into which
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concerned in America that can help man towards giving to the world lasting leadership towards those things cv that are the essentials of freedom. Let me conclude by appealing to the women who are in this audience. But for the grace of God, or for providence or fate or whatever you want to call it anyone of you could have been a Polish woman raped and killed in a concentration camp because if there is one thing about which we have no control it is the parents from whom we come and the place in which we are born. And those of you who are born American women perhaps take it for granted that you deserve to be born Americans. Maybe you did, but you’ve got to show now that you deserve this privilege. I’m not going through the horrible torture of everything that is most sacred to a woman. Being forced to bear children of your prison keepers of your jailers as thousands of women were in the concentration camps of Europe. Or threatened today as they are in some of the Iron Curtain countries with being hanged as one of my close friends in Czechoslovakia was 3 months ago. A woman who’d lived through German concentration camps and therefore was a great patriot. And stood the concentration camp and was sentenced to it because she believed in our democratic freedoms and in the right of women to take their part in society. The communists arrested her five or six weeks ago because she believed in those same things and hanged her. You are fortunate that you don’t live under those shadows and you don’t live under them because you were born in this country and educated freely in this country but you could have been one of those tortured women forever doomed to go through your life with a concentration camp number on your wrist and I’ve seen thousands of them – you weren’t and you must pay back for that privilege. And you must pay back by working to achieve the intelligence the serenity and the common sense to rise to this full partnership with men because otherwise there will not be a free world resulting out of the victorious, wholly and fully victorious third round of the struggle between the free and the unfree. Thank you!