Florida Pier : writings and about       /       jmcvey.net

Emotional Malnutrition
Battle of Sexes ‘Fault of Males’
The Daily Colonist Victoria, B.C. (April 1, 1958)
archive.org : link
 

New York (WNS) — Man’s emotional malnutrition is a basic cause — and effect — of today’s battle between the sexes.
      So says U.S.-born Mrs. Florida Scott-Maxwell, one of Britain’s wisest sages — at the age of 74.
      This remarkable woman, who trained to become a psychoanalyst when she was past 50, is the author of the recently published “Women and Sometimes Men” (Knopf), a little book which caused a big stir among those concerned with basic human problems.
      Interviewed during visit here Mrs Scott-Maxwell explained that each sex combines both masculine and feminine qualities. “But we are taught to suppress our dual sex characteristics and to develop only those which social convention approves.” Thus, “boys learn to repress emotion, tenderness, compassion, all forms of softness, and girls refuse to be aggressive,” she explained.
      Author and BBC commentator, one-time actress and journalist, and wife and mother of four children, Mrs. Scott-Maxwell turned to psychoanalysis in middle age because of the threatened breakup of her marriage.
      seems to have been important, ca 1958; in fact, the marriage collapsed. She saved her marriage, went on to study in London and Zurich and became a leading light in the psychoanalytic world.
      “Women are often surprised to discover the masculine side of their own natures,” Mrs. Scott-Maxwell observed. “But men absolutely refuse to face their feminine qualities, and are shocked at the idea that they fall short in the emotional department.”
      The split between thought and feeling is a symptom of our times, says Mrs. Scott-Maxwell. Modern life makes men specialize in finance, industry, science. “But they are undernourished in the relationships with women.”
      Women and children are the family, and the man is left outside. He is considered free, a part of the outside world, and woman therefore feels irritation against him because she seems bound and limited by contrast.”
      In nearly two decades as an analyst (she is now retired), Mrs. Scott-Maxwell found growing evidence of rift between the sexes.
      Much of the male ordeal stems from the growing independence of working woman, she believes.
      “While indepdence gives women needed self-respect, it displaces men from their old position of authority, she continued. Robbed of pride, they are faced with making a new kind of relationship with their wives. Not all men can do this. It is a hard step, requiring much generosity and what amounts to a new concept of marriage and a new definition of women.
      “The change in women’s status is a disturbing force. Men feel they have a natural right to something that is being taken from them.”
      The problem will wane, she says, only when men and women both learn to take into account the masculine side of woman and the feminine side of man.
 

20260907