It was just a symposium at San Francisco's
University of California Medical Center, but 1,200 students turned out
for it, cramming the 500-capacity auditorium and spilling over into
another building to follow the proceedings on closed-circuit
television. Thousands of plain citizens watched it on educational
station KQED and swamped the station with mail. The fascinating subject: women. The ladies were examined from all angles—some acute. Gynecologist
Edmund Overstreet speculated on the possibility that the menopause
might be an ailment rather than a natural process . Philosopher Peter Koestenbaum prescribed a
stiff course of existentialism for such female problems as sexual
incompatibility.* Investment Banker Albert E. Schwabacher Jr. viewed with amusement and
chagrin the feminine attitude toward high finance: “Women approach
stocks and bonds in a personal way. To buy stock in a company is like a
vote of approval, having nothing, or very little, to do with earning
capacity. Similarly, to sell a stock is an act of contempt.” This is
why widows are often reluctant to sell stock that their husbands
purchased. “It is not that they develop a sudden respect for his
judgment—a respect never manifest in his lifetime. It is that they
liked him in spite of his poor judgment, and are reluctant to break the
personal ties.” Sex & Changing IQs. Of the 15 papers read at the conference, three
especially came to grips with the problems and paradoxes of women in
the modern world. Author Morton M. Hunt pointed out that the Industrial
Revolution eliminated many of woman's traditional duties, and that the
new roles with which she has been experimenting have been sadly
disconcerting to men, who have always been ready to raise the cry that
women are “losing their femininity.” Actually, he argued, femininity is
a matter of fashion: “In some cultures women have done hard labor,
while in others they have been thought of as fragile and weak.
Sometimes they have been priestesses, but elsewhere they have been
thought unclean and unfit for priestly duties . . . The moral is that
what will offend, anger, or alarm a man in woman in one society, will
in another seem to be right, natural, and inevitable—and therefore
feminine and attractive.” Stanford Psychologist Eleanor E. Maccoby, surveying “Woman's
Intellect,” recalled that, statistically, girls are slightly brighter
than boys to start with, but in their teens they begin to fall behind
boys in analytic facility, which includes mathematics. Mrs. Maccoby
correlates this fact with the discovery from various psychological
tests that children who are protected and discouraged
from aggression, independence and initiative tend to be poor at math,
while those who are early turned loose on their own to work out their
problems without help tend to be better at it. And girls are more
likely than boys to have an overprotective kind of upbringing.
