The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [65]
Many writers have addressed themselves to divisions of labor based upon gender; I want to speak here of a similar “division of commerce,” one in which a “man” trades in one manner and a “woman” in another. I have opened with a description of the Protestant wedding not to raise again the issue of the woman given in marriage, but to show that—at least in the world that Emily Post describes for us—gift exchange is a “female” commerce and gifts a “female” property. There is no actual prohibition on the groom’s involving himself with the wedding gifts, of course; he may write thank-you notes if he wants to. But that activity will not make him masculine. Only the bride is able to affirm her gender, her social sexuality, by concerning herself with gift exchange.*
In recent years as women have justly demanded an opportunity to become actors on a par with their brothers in the marketplace, a new genre of newspaper article has appeared on the women’s pages to articulate the silent assumptions of “male” commerce, assumptions that women will need to know about if they are to survive in a world where the spirit of the gift may be missing. As gifts are agents of relationship, so brides become relations, literally, by the form of commerce assigned to them; but in the market, in a male commerce, relationship is a secondary concern. Thus a woman executive offers a typical word of advice to the women who read the “style” pages of the New York Times: “Women on the way up should avoid associating with ‘unsuccessful turkeys,’ even if they happen to be friends. Leaving your friends behind isn’t disloyalty. You are going to be judged by the company you keep. Seek out the people who can help you. Men have known this for years, and we are playing in their arena.”
And playing by their rules, too, we gather. To succeed in the marketplace one must, it seems, be willing to sacrifice attachment to advancement, affection to calculation. This ability to act without regard to relationship has traditionally been a mark of the male gender. The man who wants to make money does not spend a lot of emotional time abandoning his—how did Miss Post put it?—unwitting attitudes in favor of those of his in-laws. He is self-possessed, not self-effacing. He is willing to shun the “turkeys” who were his pals in college, willing to evict deadbeats from his apartment buildings (and wary, therefore, of renting to friends and relations), willing to put people out of work if one of his ventures isn’t paying its way, willing to close the operation down completely if some other property needs a shot of capital, and so forth and so on.
In fine, when anyone, male or female, sets out to make money in the marketplace, he reckons his actions by the calculus of comparative value and allows that value, rather than the home life of his clients and friends, to guide him. I say “male or female,” but of course this ability is still considered to be a mark of the masculine, a decade of advice columns notwithstanding. The men’s pages of the newspapers need no articles earnestly asserting that dumping your friends is not disloyalty. “Men have known this for years.” In a modern, industrial nation, the ability to act without relationship is still a mark of the masculine gender; boys can still become men, and men become more manly, by entering the marketplace and dealing in commodities. A woman can do the same thing if she wants to, of course, but it will not make her feminine.
These divisions of commerce by gender are most easily seen in those “boundary” situations in which a man or a woman is caught between two spheres—where, as in this last example, women would enter the market (and feel they must be “men” to do so), or where, in the examples that follow, men are denied access to the market and feel as a result that they are not manly. The great blues singer Big Bill Broonzy once wrote a song about the