When All the World

... Was Young... Barbara Holland

We sang the praises of our fighting men. However flawed they may have been in civilian clothes, once in uniform they were covered by a national blanket of love and admiration, and I was jealous. I wanted to be a soldier, loved and important, accepted among comrades, and learn to shoot guns and save the world. On the other hand, though it was unpatriotic to think so, soldiers might possibly be shot at instead of doing all the shooting themselves. They might get killed. Apparently they did get killed. It was part of being a man. Nobody killed women, not on purpose; who would bother? 

There were advantages to being female. Girls were required only to be mannerly, clean, and obedient, and our rules weren’t as binding; if we did run and shout and dirty our clothes, as in certain girls’ books, we would be scolded and punished and then forgiven. 

Boys’ rules were harder, and involved always being brave, never crying, and never refusing a fight or a dare, however dangerous. Mothers sometimes begged them to act like gentlemen, but Fathers told them to act like men, which was quite different, and ifa boy broke the code of boyhood with tears or cowardice, he slid far down in the world and might never recover face with his peers or his father. A father whose son fell from grace might struggle forever with the cold misgivings in his heart. 

I didn’t have all this spelled out at the time, but I did see that it was safer to be female, simply because we didn’t much matter. You could tell just listening: the very word “man” had a weight and solidity to it, an echo like the resonant clang of an anvil struck with a hammer, a bronze finality. The word “woman” was a wisp of a sound, like an apron on a clothesline. You could blow the whole word away with a breath, like a dandelion puffball. An elusive target, which was safer. 

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Sometimes I was deputized to take him down to Chevy Chase Circle, a longish walk, for a haircut. The barber shop was on the same street as the library, a proper, men-only barber shop, and I waited embarrassed and dwarfed in one of the huge black leather chairs, Fathers’ chairs. It was unseemly for a woman of any age to sit on leather, and almost indecent for a girl. Nobody there ever smiled, least of all Nick, who perched on a board laid across the arms of the barber chair, engulfed in a black cape, while Andrew J. Bible, a very solemn man, solemnly cut his hair, and ran the clippers up the back of his head and around his ears, and anointed him with manly and powerful perfumes. 

All little boys and many big ones wore Army-style crew-cuts, and a fresh one prickled deliciously under the hand like a baby hedgehog. When we got home, Nick went ritually around the family presenting his head to be touched and smelled. Men and boys got haircuts; Mother cut the female hair, including her own. She liked cutting hair, and long after we were grown she stalked us, clicking the scissors, anxious to take off just a little, Just to get it out of our faces. 

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We made butter. It was Winnie’s and Izzy’s idea. Butter was severely rationed or perhaps just not to be had, and the patriotic were told of the joys of margarine instead. The butter people wouldn’t let the margarine people sell it colored yellow, so it came white, with a capsule of coloring included, and it was some child’s duty to mash the stuff long and hard with a wooden spoon to spread the coloring through it. This never worked. It was always streaky, and never tasted like butter anyway, or felt like it in the mouth. Judith once found and ate a quarter-pound stick of real butter, probably the entire family’s ration for a week. She wasn’t scolded because, Mother said, she couldn’t have known it was precious, but it seemed to me that nobody who didn’t know it was valuable would bother to chew down a whole stick of butter like a banana.