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By Root 816 0

Jim Crow fact that white people call black men “boys,” regardless of their age (“I wonder when I’ll get to be called a man, / D’I have to wait’ll I be ninety-three?” goes the refrain). In a society in which black men cannot enter the market as equals with white men, and in which being an actor in the market is associated with masculinity, a black man is always a “boy” (unless he’s a thief: theft will make him a “bad man,” but a man nonetheless). Think back for a moment to Carol Stack’s story of the kinship network in the Flats, the black ghetto near Chicago. Magnolia Waters and her husband, Calvin, disburse an inheritance among their kin. But as anyone who reads the story cannot help noticing, Magnolia is the main actor. Why? Because she is able to respond to need and strengthen the ties of kinship through gifts without any challenge to her gender. So long as gift exchange is a “female” commerce, her activity actually affirms her gender; through it she becomes a Big Woman in her community.

Calvin has no such luxury. In tribal situations, in an extended family, even in the community of science, a man may become a Big Man through the bestowal of his gifts. But where exchange trade is the only male commerce, generosity makes no one manly. I recently heard a story about an American Indian living on a reservation in North Dakota who, in the late 1960s, received $10,000 from the government, a lot of money in a place where many people lived on $2,000 a year. What did the man do with his windfall? He threw a party for the whole tribe, a party that lasted for days. Now, the interesting thing is that on the reservation there are two distinct versions of this event: the “Indian version,” in which the party-giver appears as a hero, a true Indian; and the “white version,” which takes the “wasted” money as proof of the inherently infantile nature of the Indians, thus justifying the continued management of Indian wealth by the white-dominated Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The story is the same as the one about the Flats—the fate of an influx of capital into a gift community. So long as gifts carry female worth in the white culture, for a black man to emerge from the ghetto or for an Indian to leave the reservation involves a crisis of gender: to make the transition he must adopt what is at home an unmanly individualism.)

To close this discussion of gender and commerce, I want to return one last time to Emily Post. In the section of her Etiquette devoted to “showers,” a woman’s gift-giving institution if there ever was one, Miss Post lists three different persons for whom these “friendly gatherings” are given: a bride-to-be, an expectant mother, and the new clergyman. What is this solitary gentleman doing among nubile and pregnant ladies?

Miss Post suggests that the women of the town bring food to fill the cleric’s empty larder. It seems a sensible enough suggestion, but still, the ladies are not urged to give food to the new vice president for marketing at the local manufacturing plant. The clergyman is grouped with the pregnant and the betrothed as the object of a gift ceremony because he performs a “female” role in the community. I earlier distinguished between “labor” and “work,” saying that there are gift labors that cannot, by their nature, be undertaken in the willed, time-conscious, quantitative style of the market. A clergyman does such labors. Not only is he charged with the cure of souls, that interior task which cannot be accomplished in any market, but nowadays he must also be a social worker, visiting nurse, marriage counselor, and psychotherapist. And by our current notions of gender all these duties place him closer to Magnolia Waters than to any salesman.

To make the wider point here, what we take to be the female professions—child care, social work, nursing, the creation and care of culture, the ministry, teaching (these last, when done by men, being done by effete men, as Vice President Spiro Agnew told us)—all contain a greater admixture of gift labor than male professions—banking, law, management, sales, and so on.