CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPOND-ENCE Heywood Broun Woodstock, N.Y. To the Editors: It is, of course, difficult to catch the "essence" of Heywood Broun, ["Journalism and Integrity," Nov. 7]. Like many complex people...
...Or imagine the suggestion that to ignore acts of resistance to the Nazis by some German citizens and maybe even the compassion that many Germans had for the plight of Jews in Germany would invalidate arguments that anti-semitism was an egregiously important force in the society of Hitler's Germany...
...He might be prone to react glibly, condescendingly and defensively-or so one might suppose by an analogy to his reaction to Susan Brownmiller's analysis of misogyny and genocide [Nov...
...HEYWOOD HALE BROUN Boston's Busing Nahant, Mass To the Editor: I was surprised to see Maurice Ford ["Busing in Boston," Oct...
...Or to quote him directly, "After all, haven't fashionable sociologists since the late 60's . . . stressed the importance and healthiness of community solidarity...
...If his criticism of Brownmiller's book is in the end to come down to such defensiveness it is almost too pathetic to be believable...
...To believe he is therein presented is but "a cruel insult...
...To say otherwise is to be labeled "doctrinaire," caught in "the coils of political ideology," "dogmatic...
...Here in Massachusetts we have watched these two over the long, hard years playing shrewdly on the racial fears of their fellow-citizens, to their own political advantage and the disadvantage of both white and black...
...As one who graduated from the Harvard Law School over 40 years ago, I feel deeply for Judge Garrity and the other Judges who are "on the spot...
...He was a man driven by a host of fears to a series of courageous acts...
...21] requires some comment...
...He was shy and fearful in personal relationships and openly in love with mankind...
...I tried O'Neil's office in City Hall...
...Is rape-or even general violence against women -an officially proclaimed and executed policy of the government, as first the exclusion and later the destruction of the Jews was in Nazi Germany...
...Fair question...
...A good German might perceive it to be so...
...My first reaction is merely to find this sort of thing personally insulting and morally sleazy...
...Coles was speaking to self-righteous, affluent intellectuals at Harvard and everybody knows these types need strong medicine...
...Assistant Professor of Philosophy Marquette University New Brunswick, N.J...
...Mitchell...
...PETER STEINFELS...
...He was unavailable, but his aide checked the files and could find nothing...
...Of course, two closet rapists don't make a massacre, but that testimony would have been more to the point than their simple reassertions of Ms...
...Everyone with an axe to grind evidently has proprietary rights to six million Jewish deaths, to be used as a rhetorical club whenever a handy occasion arises...
...Let me suggest why with two other examples...
...He speaks from some elevated ground, free of "myopic male consciousness," outside of the "waters of patriarchal consciousness," unburdened by "defensiveness," in full understanding of "the basic nature of our environs, the structure in society," and so on...
...The movement against rape is the elemental, most radical anti-war movement yet conceived...
...Ford's really essential argument is "what warrant does a non-elected federal judge have, in a democracy, for imposing massive social change in a democracy" and so on...
...He says that nowhere in her book does Ms...
...And it doesn't help too much to justify it by quoting Robert Coles...
...That thought really bothers me...
...How, then, can we tell...
...But I look in vain, in this article, for any impulse, or even suggestion, that perhaps the role those who claim to be Christian should fill is that of reconciliation, of trying, and hoping to help others to try, to live with what our Supreme Court has determined should be one small way of embodying the principle of liberty and justice for all...
...After all, the same analogy has been employed by the opponents of abortion, by those worried about euthanasia, by the critics of student radicals, by resisters to the war in Vietnam, by blacks hostile to ghetto birth control programs, and by numerous others in our society...
...The fascist state was invisible then, in that good Germans missed and dismissed its presence, its iniquity and its incalcu-able integration into their own lives and dear institutions...
...The whole issue of desegregation, whether by busing or otherwise, is fraught with more emotion, gut reaction or whatever one chooses to call it, than most any on the current scene...
...He spent about 15 minutes on it and came up with an order passed by the Council on March 4, 1974, that the following question be put on the ballot at a special election on April 2, 1974: "Shall Boston public school children be assigned to a particular Boston public school on the basis of race, sex, or creed without the consent of his or her parent or legal guardian...
...Mr...
...it is to belittle and ignore our human and cultural capacities for doing and being good, in exchange for the glitter of a dramatic exaggeration, Mr...
...I do not have the sense that my correspondents can say the same about my column...
...in which they are blamed for being victims...
...The situation is hopeless...
...john c. cort P.S.: After writing the above I thought I would check out Councillor O'Neil's statement that "here in Boston, the people voted 15 to 1 against forced busing...
...Second: The fact that the Federal Judge is "non-elected" is an essential part of our tradition...
...He cannot see himself in her book...
...It did not, and does not, seem to me that this thesis follows from the previouly admitted realities...
...Good men like Peter Steinfels who fail to see that there is a war going on are one reason that it will continue...
...He knows...
...Neither did Ed Redd, director of Boston NAACP, whom I called...
...To the Editors: Peter Steinfels' discussion of Susan Brownmiller's book Against Our Will [Nov...
...10] quoting Dapper O'Neil with approval and giving Louise Day Hicks a kindly pat on the back...
...is not only uncalled for...
...J. c. c. Columbus, Ohio To the Editors: It is too bad, or so it seems to me, that the article "Busing in Boston" [Oct...
...This is a constitutional government, with among other things, a bill of rights which was (and is, I hope) designed to protect individuals and minorities from the tyrannical whims and emotions of the majority, whether they be in Charlestown, South-ie or Detroit...
...She referred me to Joseph Brogna, staff director for the City Council...
...Brown-miller by and large understands the rules of evidence quite well-and uses the absence of evidence to cut through many of the myths surrounding rape...
...A good man perceives that such culturally orchestrated acts of women hatred are an effect, not a cause-not an important force-of societal organization...
...Fish, likewise, are said not to take much notice of their environment, of the water that everywhere surrounds them and sustains them...
...It is also a society in which women have a de facto curfew...
...in which their freedom of movement is limited...
...Brownmiller provide "the slightest evidence" to support the central thesis of her book that rape is a "conscious process of intimidation" whereby men keep women in subjugation...
...Brogna, no such vote ever took place...
...Ford, which goes, "It (Boston) is a place where mobs have once again (evoking nightmares of Little Rock, Clinton, Tennessee, and New Orleans) confronted and endangered black children, whose parents have desperately wanted for them, in a word, out: an escape from overcrowded, inadequate schools and, more broadly, from the mean, brutish, utterly unpromising life of the ghetto, where (it must be stated again and again, especially today) from a third to a half of the black youths are unable to find any work, no matter how hard they try...
...Therefore, Mr...
...Brownmiller effectively documents, structurally related to the way we live and the values we hold (some of them...
...It is unfortunate that Steinfels' myopic perceptions and contentious wailings about Brownmiller's work are allowed to take a form where they chance being mistaken for serious criticism...
...Mr...
...I remembered no such vote...
...they reflect the way our society is organized (badly) and the values we hold (or don't hold...
...What does Steinfels want for evidence...
...The statistics on child abuse and the statistics on violent crime against the elderly are as appalling as those on rape...
...His seeming inability to understand the basic nature of our environs, the structures in society that shape our lives, the politics that governs and the violence that terrorizes as being rooted in patriarchal rule-in as Brownmiller says "the perpetuation of male domination over women by force"-is hard to comprehend, except maybe that as men we find it too threatening, too fearsome a prospect, to suddenly be cast out of the waters of patriarchal consciousness and have to face a reality that seems hostile and to which we cannot immediately adapt...
...Proof, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and the patterns are there for anyone who honestly looks for them...
...One method might be close attention to facts, including modes and degrees of oppression...
...to have one's argument declared strained and beset by hyperbole...
...would Ms...
...Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of his column is his attempt to state that Against Our Will does not document its thesis...
...Ford has done well in emulating the compassionate, tortured fair-mindedness of Robert Coles...
...That patriarchy had so decimated Sisterhood, had so kept herstoric struggles of women against patriarchal rule hidden or buried by ridicule (as were the "Purity crusaders" who fought rape in the 19th Century northwest-see Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 by David Pivar, Greenwood Press 1974), does not leave women either without a heritage of resistance to patriarchy or without a valid basis from which to argue that in addition to war between men (the mere peripheral, coup-like struggles) the central reality in world-historical terms has been the war waged against and oppression visited upon women by men...
...Mitchell could have testified whether as men they were themselves consciously complicit in this process of intimidation through rape...
...What need has he for evidence, for checking his analogies, for making distinctions...
...Is race hatred in Hitler's Germany or in contemporary South Africa to merely have the significance that auto accidents today have in our nation, to merely bear some relation to societal organization "without being an important force in that organization-more of an effect than a cause...
...edward h. laylin Brownmiller: Pro & Can Milwaukee, Wisc...
...Like rape, these crimes are not random events...
...It is not surprising that a good man like Peter Steinfels didn't see rape, didn't see the near half million women a year that the terrorists of the patriarchy attacked, until he read Brownmiller's Against Our Will...
...in which they must disguise their gender from strange men...
...But to pass from those facts to the conclusion that child abuse is a "conscious process of intimidation by which all parents keep all children in a state of fear," or that violent crimes against the elderly are a "conscious process by which all young people keep all older people etc...
...In the first place, we are not really a democracy, thank goodness...
...But it is disappointing that a myopic male consciousness still afflicts his perceptions, his understanding, of what he has read...
...What does Steinfels want for evidence...
...My column simply refused to make the leap from those realities to the thesis that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear...
...That it has much to say about the reality of rape and the misogynist values of patriarchal culture to be sure, but that it fails to muster the "slightest evidence to support" the thesis that women are "the targets of a universal war of intimidation launched by men," rather-so Steinfels says-it shows that women are "the victimized noncombatants in a number of vicious wars-of nations, of classes, of races-between men...
...I doubt whether such questions interest Mr...
...in which they are socialized from birth to accept vulnerability as a way of life...
...To all of which one is irresistibly moved to respond: now that we've got our compassion for white people operating smoothly, let's go back and do a little work on our compassion for black people...
...So my second reaction is to consider the analogy more carefully...
...And so Steinfels views the vicious, societally sanctioned misogynist terrorism women experience in a patriarchal state...
...Mitchell declares, I could not say without a clearer idea of what those terms mean...
...To proceed in the same spirit, I believe that assertions about a conscious process involving all men and all women should be backed by some pretty overwhelming studies of public opinion and personal attitudes...
...Similarly, Steinfels does not see the patriarchal state...
...T. MICHAEL MCNULTY, S.J...
...At the very least, Father McNulty and Mr...
...it is to begin dealing with these problems on false grounds...
...Brogna said that the Masschu-setts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that this question could not appear on, the ballot...
...Brownmiller's book have been published here...
...My column also did not deny-on the contrary, it emphasized-the extent and awful-ness of the problem of rape-and that this problem is, as Ms...
...But Mr...
...Patriarchal consciousness has insulated Steinfels from reality and to let reality enter in would too easily confuse his androcentric ideologic response to the evidence adduced by Brownmiller...
...would laws against rape and unequal treatment of women generally even exist, no matter how wretchedly enforced...
...for Sisterhood, gary mitchell Reply As readers of my column know, I did not deny that ours is a society in which women are treated unequally and unjustly...
...Such criticism of an important work on anti-semitism or race hatred would likely not be treated seriously and given much respect in the world of critical opinion...
...A good German might have harbored such suspicions too, analogous to those Steinfels has about Brownmiller's analysis of misogyny and rape in a patriarchal state, but in the case of the good German about anti-semitism and genocide: to elevate such phenomena to be an organizing principle for society, to see such phenomenon as a prism through which to view institutions and personal relations would likely have been "demonstrably false" to good Germans, the mere rant-ings of fanatic Zionists...
...He was afraid to ride in automobiles and willing to risk his life for a belief...
...he asks...
...Steinfels wants to know where Brown-miller's empathy is for men, for good men, for men like him...
...Mitchell compares me to the good German ignoring anti-Semitism and the Holocaust during the Nazi era...
...Ford appears to be saying to Judge Garrity, you might do better to withdraw your judicial hand of protection from Boston's blacks and leave them to the mercy of some "political" solution which would more accurately reflect the prejudices of white people...
...For all his faults, some of which have been hard to forgive, his final triumph was, from the rack of his dual nature, to speak with the single voice of passionate conviction...
...Where he comes out, as I read him, is in telling Judge Garrity and the Supreme Court, "Give it up, men...
...If there is any self-righteous, affluent intellectuality among us, let us think on his words by all means...
...That the thesis may be somewhat overstated is possible, but its plausibility is clearly established by Brownmiller...
...And let us also think on (Continued on page 58)CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 35) another part of his address, not quoted by Mr...
...His statement is either one of the most fatuous perceptions or one of the most disingenuous arguments yet produced by an androcentric mind...
...On the contrary, there is in the book, in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail a description of legal and social structures into which the ideology of rape fits all too well...
...According to Mr...
...I wouldn't quote Dapper O'Neil to prove that the sun also rises, for fear of prejudicing my case...
...Like many complex people he is not so reducible...
...Imagine the good German attempting to dismiss, if not ridicule, the critical work a Jewish scholar has done about the phenomena of anti-semitism and genocide throughout the Third Reich by arguing that the work fails to take into account the general decency of the German people...
...Brownmiller's book is not the whole story, but it is rather more of it that Steinfels is willing to admit...
...But where does he come out...
...Patriarchal ideology would rather not have us recognize the guerrilla war that its shock troops wage, the curfews and delimitations of mobility that its occupation forces enforce, the mass agit-prop activities that are conducted, the rule of law that in 1972 was able to lock up men in only about 400 out of nearly a half million rape attacks...
...Frankly I think that Ms...
...If the judge were dependent upon the whims, prejudices and emotions of the current majority for his selection and his tenure, "equal justice for all" would become simply a matter of the currently prevailing view, and the bill of rights would be a pious piece of paper, no more...
...Good Germans didn't see or understand what was happening when Jews in Germany were carted to the ovens...
...The number of his paradoxes was endless 'and inexplicable and do not add up to anything but the two words "Heywood Broun...
...And just as the anti-Vietnam war movement grew to embrace the larger struggle against imperialism in general, so too Brownmiller informs us there is a world-historical struggle against patriarchy to be embraced by those who seek peace and justice...
...I tried to read Against Our Will carefully and openly, and both in agreeing with some of the author's positions and disagreeing with others, to take her work seriously...
...Segregated schools may be unconstitutional, oppressive and unfair to blacks, and we may not have any really practical alternatives to busing in order to desegregate them, but white people just won't stand for it and, besides, they have a point...
...10], by a Harvard Law School graduate, stresses the emotional and denigrates the Constitutional...
...We live in a society that has been traditionally male-dominated...
...I would go considerably beyond Father McNulty's rather mild characterization of that society as "traditionally male-dominated," though whether it is a "patriarchy* or "patriarchal state," as Mr...
...Ford's article makes his task more difficult, and diminishes the standing that any of us may need the next time we seek to advocate an unpopular position...
...Father McNulty turns the tables on me, however...
...But mightn't that only be the defensive response of a good German...
...When near half a million American men die or are wounded in Vietnam over ten years that is war, but when half a million women yearly meet death or terrorist assault solely because they are women, that is not war...
...REV...
...Brownmiller's thesis...
...Clearly, to make the analogy does not automatically mean it is justified...
...If rape held the same place in our society as anti-Semitism did in Nazi Germany, would women hold so different a place in public life than Jews in the Third Reich...
...To the Editors: I wonder what Peter Steinfels would have thought of a tome on anti-semitism and genocide had he been a good German citizen living during Hitler's reign...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 2
