THE STRONGER SEX
Neuberger, Richard L.
The Stronger Sex By Richard L. Neuberger NEWSPAPER reporters marvel at Eleanor Roosevelt. As a great-grandmother she leads them a merry chase. In the morning she inspects slums', in the afternoon...
...Perhaps even man's physical supremacy is all a myth...
...Women, in truth, are the stronger sex...
...Be a woman...
...And if you want to live to be 100, there's a way to do it better than sleeping on hard boards or eating a Spartan diet...
...She is a gaunt pale woman of 49 named Dorothy Lee...
...Practically all her husband's biographers agree that she is made of a good deal sterner stuff politically than the man who was elected President four times...
...Margaret Chase Smith of Maine told off the Wisconsin plug-ugly in crisp, terse terms...
...this explains them...
...There is no legerdemain in this—merely the actuarial fact that the normal life-span of a female in America is 67 and that of her consort only 61...
...But Dorothy Lee, Republican, is the best mayor, a hundred times over, that Portland has had in my lifetime...
...Every female in the party reached the top...
...Joseph McCarthy, Sen...
...Margaret Chase Smith is so far ahead in stature and independence of those Republicans, Dewey, and Stassen, and Taft, that they can't even communicate with her by smoke signals...
...They had their wives along, and the wives were proficient on snowshoes or behind 14 snarling Huskies pulling in harness...
...Ill Men have dominated business, finance, sports, politics, and exploration by default...
...Rangers said they were more diligent and efficient than the men they had replaced...
...Menard M. Gertler, recently told the New York Heart Association: "Available evidence indicates there is an inherent weakness in the male, a sex-limited inferiority, so that by comparison with the female he is a weakling at all periods of life...
...Nor was she a "primitive" woman...
...But that was in the era when the place of females was presumed to be in the kitchen or nursery— certainly not on the trail to Oregon...
...At a mountain lake in the dead of winter, several couples camped on a ski trip...
...Wallowa Lake in Oregon's granite uplands, a frigid four-mile test of endurance and courage, has been swum by three times as many women as men...
...America's males find it almost impossible to adjust to the fact that those fine old platitudes, "the weaker sex" and "the little woman," are utterly without foundation...
...it was before the freeing of females from the fetish of masculine superiority...
...Washburn, svelte and 28, plodded methodically up the great mountain when others in her RICHARD l. NEUBERGER, The Progressive's correspondent in the Northwest, writes for many publications, includinn Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Nation...
...Of 1,225 Americans who were alive when Zachary Taylor was President, 751 are females and only 474 of the legendary "stronger sex...
...It was not until 1920 that Article XIX of the Constitution was ratified...
...To begin with, they live longer...
...On the return, one of the men bestowed the supreme accolade: "She did better'n us...
...He wrote "The Promised Land" and co-authored "Integrity," a biography of George W. Norris...
...Editorials are legion wondering how a woman of 66—and a great-grandmother at that—can possibly manage such an exhausting routine...
...To add to the white man's burden, nearly half of these century-old males are Negroes, in spite of the fact that only about 14% of the population of the country are colored...
...But why not...
...When all of California's liberal Democratic Congressmen hesitated to challenge the aging and cantankerous Sheridan Downey, a Congress-woman rushed in where they feared to tread...
...My wife and two other women dived into the icy water for a quick dip...
...Nor is woman's superiority only in the physical realm...
...They had no chance to show superiority, whether in government halls or on the side of a mountain...
...She made it...
...I have seen this happen more times than I care to tell...
...Yet there was a time, and not so long ago, when barely a dozen white women lived in the Northwest Territories...
...But Mrs...
...When all the male Republicans in the U. S. Senate cowered in the presence of Sen...
...Women's emancipation began with the 19th Amendment to the Federal Constitution...
...Had Jefferson suggested that wives accompany the expedition, his political party might not have ruled the government for the next 40 years...
...Women, in that period, were supposed to bear children and do little else...
...A noted coronary specialist...
...They could vote...
...In fact, she had a Ph.D from Columbia University...
...And what of Eleanor Roosevelt herself...
...She was on her runners and slaloming, when all the brawny males from Dartmouth and Lake Placid were on their backsides in the snow...
...Many Mounties whom I met in the Northwest Territories were not lonely, silent men waiting for Jeannette MacDonald or Linda Darnell...
...Enough relicts survive their rich spouses to keep a preponderance of stocks and bonds in distaff hands...
...Neu-berqer is active in politics in his home state of Oregon, where he is a state senator...
...F.D.R...
...For many decades women were kept in the home, trussed up in hoop-skirts, shawls, and corsets that fit like straitjackets...
...The equality of women is barely one generation old...
...Who wouldn't take Mrs...
...We robust males watched shivering from the shore, muffled in mackin-aws and wool caps...
...Many men had failed to gain that formidable rampart...
...My city has a woman mayor...
...I didn't...
...Women, in my opinion, could have trudged westward with Lewis and Clark...
...II World War II helped to knock in the head many notions about weak and flabby females...
...On the Alaska Highway I met a gray-haired woman who lived at Bear Creek and traded with the Indians...
...My wife and I ventured forth in a party ascending Mount Hood, Oregon's highest summit...
...The idea seems very titillating...
...Women worked at assembly lines and they welded steel plates...
...Indeed, all who failed that August day were men...
...The Wall Street Journal regularly reminds its subscribers that the bulk of the nation's securities are held by women...
...As a Democrat, I ordinarily would be suspicious of a Republican...
...About this I have a theory...
...Men have had competition for a mere 30 years...
...On top of all this, only one American ever won an Olympic Games gold medal for skiing—evidence of world supremacy...
...When forest guards were drafted for the Army, farmers' wives and school teachers ascended to the loneliest peaks in the West and scanned the horizon for fires...
...In the morning she inspects slums', in the afternoon she rebukes Malik, and at night she flies across the continent to campaign all the next day in behalf of her son Jimmy...
...Police forces which had added police women expressed great reluctance to go back to male patrolmen and detectives...
...She was a 29-year-old Vancouver, Wash., housewife with a trim figure and pigtails...
...The editorials are written by men...
...Today this freedom demonstrates itself in varied domains...
...She lived alone and liked it, and seemed far more able to cope with the stern Arctic wilderness than most men...
...Every so often a publicist speculates on the possibility of a female President...
...Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former actress, forced Downey to withdraw his candidacy...
...Still others had disappeared in the labyrinth of glaciers...
...party were forced to abandon the climb...
...I have seen women prospecting for gold at the bottom of the 6,000-foot Snake River Canyon, and wt>men who trolled alone for salmon In the treacherous waters off Wrangell and Petersburg in Alaska...
...in preference to Harry Truman, or even her late husband...
...When an expedition which included slender Barbara Washburn set out for McKinley's 20,300-foot pinnacle, the continent watched tensely...
Vol. 14 • November 1950 • No. 11
