Typescript: "Women As Angels, 1966."
Buck, Pearl S. Typescript: “Women As Angels, 1966.” [NP], [ND, but 1966].
8-1/2 x 11”; 21 sheets; typed manuscript with ink corrections in the writer’s hand throughout; marked “file copy”; textual changes to every page—additions, deletions, interpolations etc. In a custom-made cloth lettercase.
An update of Pearl Buck’s earlier 1941 essay, “Women as Angels.” While she draws heavily on the 1941 piece, Buck has recast the essay to focus on feminist issues contemporary to 1966 and the United States post-Feminine Mystique. She suggests women transform themselves from earthly creatures into angels, or at least men’s conception of angels, to ensure the survival of the home and family, and even when that role becomes tiresome and oppressive women are reluctant to shake themselves free of it: “most females are undecided as to which they should be, women or angels, and are waiting, as they have for centuries, to discover what men really want them to be...In this limbo of indecision women please no one, neither themselves nor men...” Men are caught in this never-land between dream and reality: “It was he who defined femininity as angelic and was able to confine woman in that definition because he held the power of money in his hands. The result of all this dreaming is that today man does not know what to do with woman outside of bed and kitchen. She has no place of her own in which to live and work.” Buck urges every woman to lose the halo and become a real woman, who:
likes to work, who thinks problems are meant to be solved, who is too impatient to bother about keeping wrinkles from her face, who lets her hair grow grey and refuses to follow fashions. She is hearty and life-loving, she is passionate and genuine and she likes politics as much as she does because she enjoys a dirty and exciting game. She loathes angels and wants no privileges.
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