DEAR SISTER KATE:

...Bad as her situation is, you are at work righting it-and through our institutions...

...Your sisters, laywomen, were excluded from this kind of community, in practice if not in intent...

...And we must...

...Is this not in new, attractive contemporary dress, the old American missionary approach-that there are sinners, that we know how to bring them to terms, and that we know how to right things, and that those who do not agree with us can be the object of our righteous excoriations...

...I think there are dangers here...

...This fact, and this rhetoric, has divided not only the worldwide women's movement, but efforts to deal, on the international level, with population, hunger and the ecology...

...The possibilities are there for better things...

...You had listened in vain, you said, through two days for some comment on truly oppressed women, the chicano, the third world woman, the poor, the black, and the way in which our institutions oppressed them...

...You described her as a woman who worked cleaning a government office building and had ten children...

...You are right, however, in saying that in the past that kind of education was not offered, not possible for, the woman in the kitchen...

...There are several ideas worth considering implicit in this approach...

...There were strengths in that which can be rediscovered in today's terms...

...Second, there is the rather virtuous thought that we should not concern ourselves with our relatively minor wrongs when there are these others more serious to be righted...

...She rides to work today without being subjected to the indignity of segregated seating...

...But they could be, and, for that reason, people of the churches for long years have been working on Project Equality...

...First, there seems to be the unspoken assertion that we cannot afford to think in terms of long-term planning in the face of immediate need...

...What are institutions anyway, in the context of your question...

...You could extend that community now to the lonely, the alienated, the struggling, those who need psychological support...

...I only wonder if concentration on "the oppressed" may not lead this way...

...I hope I am going to paraphrase what you said correctly...

...And I think it was true that the plan of the panels ranging as they did over the topics of the ministry of women, the ERA, inequality of opportunity, etc., touched on these women only peripherally...

...Let us be gentle with ourselves...

...And the things she enjoys now are the result of long, hard work over the last twenty years by people who cared...

...Finally, the institutions of our society, legislature and then courts-and legal means of changing opinion, have made a significant difference between the condition of the oppressed government cleaning woman and her sister in, let us say, northeast Brazil...

...Her children can and probably do attend unsegregated schools...

...But it could be now...

...Sketchy, inadequate-we must face it -but some public health care is available to them...

...Public education through the college level is available to them...

...Men and women are at work through our institutions to do something about her housing...

...It is certainly true that when you are faced, day by day, with people deprived so drastically it is hard to concern yourself with less dramatic forms of injustice...

...Perhaps in these oppressed-particularly in the strength of black women derived in part from necessity and in part from tribal culture-we can find examples and methods which will make us all more effective women...

...I think what you wanted us to do is to care...

...The night before in connection with your work helping people in the inner city you had talked with another, so beset by her problems that she had considered suicide...

...Perhaps there is instead new health in identifying and recognizing our own oppression and its sources...

...The complexity of the new tax laws and aid to dependent children legislation made it difficult for her to feed and care for her children...

...But about everybody...

...DEAR SISTER KATEAbigail McCarthy When you rose to ask your question and to state your case at the end of the day-long discussion which the nuns of your community had devoted to women there was no time left for the panel to reply and to comment...

...One of these oppressed women was in the kitchen preparing the meals, you said, and you had talked with her...

...No doubt others, as well as I, have had a nagging sense of unfinished business...

...Your religious institution was established, I suppose, in the simplest terms, as a way of women living together and establishing community...

...We have to acknowledge our own needs first, and thus establish mutuality...

...Yours faithfully, ABIGAIL MCCARTHY ABIGAIL MCCARTHY...

...Third, when we talk about the violence wrought by institutions are we talking about institutions or the way we use them...

...Your schools afforded one kind of liberation-education-which, incidentally, is liberating and the kind of liberation third world women are crying for...

...Your institutions are employers- employers which in the past were little concerned with living wage, tenure, retirement, equal opportunity...

...She has a minimum wage, and will have social security and medicare...

...Cannot we do both...

...I know you do not espouse this attitude...

...And, through new community forms, you try to do just that...