"THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kirkland Winifred)

(_a_) "good for food"; this symbolizes the awakening
of the practical instincts, the availing one's self of
one's physical surroundings, the germ, clearly, of all
commercial activity, in which sphere man has always
been judged the more active; (_b_) "the tree was<4>
pleasant to look upon"; here it is Eve, not Adam, who
perceives the aesthetic aspect; if man has been
adjudged the more eminent in art, plainly he did not
even see that a thing was beautiful until woman told
him so; (_c_) "a tree to be desired to make one wise";
Adam had no desire to be wise until Eve stimulated it,
whereas her own desire for knowledge was so passionate
that she was ready to die to attain it. We all know
how Eve's motives have been impugned, for when a man is
ready to die for knowledge, he is called scientific,
but when a woman is ready to die for knowledge, she is
called inquisitive. The Eden narrative concludes with
the penalty, "He shall rule over thee, that is, the
price Eve must pay for Adam's seeming superiority is
her own seeming inferiority. The risk and the
responsibility and the recompense for man's growing
pains, woman has always taken in inscrutable silence,
wise to see that she would defeat her own ends if she
explained.

"And what was my reward when they had won--
Freedom that I had bought with torturing bonds?
--They stormed through centuries brandishing their
deeds,
Boasting their gross and transient mastery
To girls, who listened with indulgent ears
And laughing hearts--Lord, they were ever blind--
Women have they known, but never Woman."<5>

The methods and the motives of Eve toward Adam have
been the methods and the motives of woman with man ever
since. Eve's purposes, summarized, are fourfold:
first, she must educate Adam; second, she must conceal
his education from him, as the only practical way of
developing in man the self-esteem necessary to keep him
in his sex; third, Eve must never bore Adam, to keep
him going she must always keep him guessing; and
fourth, Eve must not bore herself; this last view of
the temptation is perhaps the truest, namely, that Eve
herself was so bored by the inertness of Adam and the
ennui of Eden that she had to give him the apple to see
what he and she would do afterwards.

The imperishable philosophy of the third chapter of
Genesis clearly establishes the primary joy of being a