Still reaching:
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy STILL REACHING WOMEN & POLITICAL POWER ALL MOVEMENTS ebb and flow. Just now there is a feeling that the tide of the women's movement is receding. What is really...
...She finds at least...
...Most important of all, however, is the gain women are making in coming together...
...She finds a wide sweep of other issues on the women's agenda including sexist language ("words shape and limit our concepts"), the differ-ing values of men and women, child care, health, probing the history of women...
...Recognition of women's gifts, talents, and needs is still another...
...Religious women working side by side with lay women in institutions are coming to see that, in terms of justice, they too are lay...
...He points out the first husband in history to run to succeed his wife has just done so in a recent Maryland primary...
...ABIGAIL McCarthy...
...Voters did not seem to think less of this first man who sought to take his wife's place...
...Some women want to move the humane influence attributed to women in the private sphere into the public sphere so as to create a more human society...
...Shields thinks it significant that the numbers of women elected to state legislatures has increased so rapidly since 1971...
...There are twenty-one women in Congress, compared with eleven in 1971...
...But the goal is the acquisition of political power...
...He] won more votes than all but one of the thirty other candidates...
...Empowerment is one, so that women can take control of their own lives and function with some expectation of success in the public arena...
...The changing of economic structures which some women see as the cause of oppression is related to that...
...Previously extreme liberationists now welcome the help of family women in the struggle for equality and seek to define aims in terms of these women's needs...
...This meeting," they say, "will be a beginning...
...State legislatures are the farm system of congressional politics...
...The candidate's platform had simply been that he could best carry out the mandate she had been given...
...Other women are concerned with the improvement of relationships between men and women in the workplace, in marriage, and in the family...
...In the space of 162 pages she places the effort in the United States in its context in history and in the world-wide situation of women...
...eight different ones...
...This month, for example, The Institute for Women Today-an institute sponsored by church-related Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish women's organizations to search for the religious and historical roots of women's liberation-is sponsoring the Annette Walters Memorial Conference on the philosophy of women's liberation...
...Her book does not advocate-it explains and is intended, in part, to answer some of the questions raised by women ambivalent toward or puzzled by the movement...
...Mary P. Burke has taken the unusual step of including the women who would deny being part of the movement in her analysis: I have included them in this survey because the values they advocate are vital to our society and to the world at large and need to be taken into account as the women's movement develops...
...Would the desire for equality in education fit there...
...Other members of the team are Sister Maria Riley, O.P., and Jane Blewett...
...They note that the greatest changes in human society were brought about by philosophical theories, and that it usually takes fifty years for a philosophy to "seep down" so that it has practical effect...
...There were 362 women elected that year...
...In addition, example, is as much known for her stand on women's issues as is Betty Friedan...
...Economic equality is a third...
...To find a unifying philosophy for a movement which concerns a little more than half the human race will not be easy...
...A book such as Mary Burke's is in itself evidence of the arrival of the women's effort at the point of consolidation of gains...
...Under the goal which has caused so much controversy -"control of their own bodies" - she groups women's desires for freedom from rape, from battering by spouses, from use and abuse in pornography, from unwanted pregnancies...
...Political analyst Mark Shields thinks that women are beginning to acquire the expertise and unity which will give them that power- and that a significant change in national attitude makes it easier for them...
...What are these goals...
...What is really happening, it seems to me, is that even as their gains are threatened by rising unemployment and the cutback in government programs which have been helpful to them, women are consolidating these gains and taking time for a more thorough analysis of what the women's movement is, what its aims are, and how it contributes to the understanding of, and the betterment of, the human condition...
...That means learning political skills-to elect people...
...The movement is still unorganized and those involved are sometimes working for contradictory goals...
...Burke is part of the project team at the Center of Concern on Women in Church and Society...
...And is quick to note that style is as important as substance in distinguishing women's groups...
...There are concrete gains to be consolidated, too...
...The planners feel that the struggle of women for equality is based on a philosophy "which has not yet been articulated'' and that may be one of the reasons why "it crests and recedes in each century...
...The integration of women into public life and decision-making is another...
...But the state legislative numbers are the ones that impress the politicians...
...It may not take fifty years after all...
...20017) finds a multiplicity of aims under the umbrella of the overall endeavor to secure justice...
...This is not to say that both tactics are not legitimate and useful...
...Still others focus "on the principle of hierarchy and the struggle to end it...
...Mary P. Burke in the admirably succinct and well-organized book which she calls a "primer" (Reaching for Justice: The Women's Movement, $4.95 including postage and handling, just published by the Center of Concern, 3700 13th St., N.E., Washington D.C...
...She is even-handed in describing division in the movement: "The acrimonious and deep polarization over abortion, for which pro's and anti's are alike responsible, has created an almost imposible situation...
...For the most part she does it in clear language free of the unfortunate sociologese which blights so much popular theological and philosophical writing-the use of nouns as cumbersome verbs, for example-theologize, impact, critique...
...now there are 905-twelve percent, up from five...
...If anything has slowed the progress of the women's movement- and its ability to affect the inequities which make women and women's children the poorest of the poor-it has probably been the fact that its leaders have stayed too long with the tactics of demonstration and mass lobbying...
...In addition the public activities of some, women in the group make them very much a part of the women's movement develops...
Vol. 108 • June 1981 • No. 11
