WOMEN - TERMS OF LIBERATION

...Abraham Maslow's need hierarchy thesis is helpful, for it suggeststhat middleclass women, whose physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, and sheer security of person are relatively assured, are free to concentrate on a higher level of need...

...Nor is there much evidence that the relations between the sexes are particularly different in Communist nations from those in Western Europe or the United States...

...Men are good at such detached self-stimulation since they learn sexuality in part through masturbation, which itself paves the way for a greater detachment in the sexual act than women tend to have...

...On the other hand, higher education is facing a financial crisis owing to the cutbacks in government funding, corporations pruning their staffs of "frills," and government agencies being on an internal economy drive...

...I was a salaried research associate, he a full professor, and as the dean put it bluntly to me, "he is valuable university property...

...But in an economy as hard-nosed as ours, such a stress is naive, for there must be powerful factors on the demand side that prompted employers to open their doors to older women...

...This award gave me an academic umbrella to legitimize my status in the university and the independence to undertake my own research...

...What follows is an attempt to sketch both the encouraging and discouraging developments that may mark the women's movement in the next decade...

...Through these research undertakings, I developed a fascination with a problem seldom adequately stated within sociological theory itself: what are the connections, the strains and accommodations between involvement in the family on the one hand, and the occupational system on the other...

...Even while expectations are rising, a reversal of national policy may lie ahead, as a brake is put on military expenditure, and as conservative political elements come into ascendancy with the new-old cry that women belong in the home instead of taking jobs away from men or making "outrageous" demands for maternity benefits and childcare facilities...

...Public airing of ambivalence or a shift of values toward the place of work in the lives of men touches a vital nerve in American society...

...Among activist women there is clearly a new note of optimism...

...It didn't just happen that my husband is supportive...

...I chose him in part because he was...

...My own concern for the status of women, the analysis of sex roles, the study of and active participation in abortion law and divorce law reform, I date to the "slow burn" that began in that first major encounter with sex discrimination in academia...

...For in truth, sexual behavior in American society serves not merely sexual needs, but also power and status needs compensating for a lack of gratification in other areas of life...

...As the Communist nations have industrialized, the same hard pinch of double jobs is detectable in the lives of their employed married women, and the same loss of humane values in the work place...

...The best education I ever had I acquired on my own during the first year or so of that award: the luxury of getting lost in libraries again, free to acquire that delicious "itch to know," to tackle new fields, turn down any lecture, paper, or course offering that did not interest me...

...Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on sex by all employers of 25 or more employees, employment agencies and unions with 25 or more members, with the exception of educational institutions...

...now I wanted to teach them...

...This optimistic sense does not, however, seem to be shared by many men...

...Kingsley Davis, for example, considers sex a high-intensity, social constant that must be channeled lest it find expression in behavior that threatens the maintenance of collective life...

...I think, therefore, that right now the middle-class women's rights movement can find a collaborative arrangement with black women only on such breadandbutter issues as protecting and expanding economic and political rights...

...John Dollard's description of caste in a Southern town is as relevant today as three decades ago, when he pointed out that within the white caste the man is in the superior position, and within the black caste the woman is more often in the superior position...

...So I spent ten years as a research associate, following not my own interests so much as the availability of funds and openings: intergroup relations at Cornell, generational differences in the Soviet Union at Harvard, kinship in the middle class at the University of Chicago...

...She's together, if he bes...

...in family and kinship systems rather than the roles of women within family systems...

...Women's Rights Organizations EVERYONE KNOWS there has already been a good deal of factionalism within the larger women's movement...

...Employment WHAT, Now, are the immediate problems and possibilities...

...Other groups may concentrate on demonstrations protesting sex imagery in the media or beauty pageants...

...These young women, one reads, drew the conclusion their ancestors did from involvement in the abolitionist cause of the 19th century: that the arguments developed and the battles waged to free the black American could apply to American women, even though women in the abolitionist as in the civil rights movement all too often foundthemselves treated as second-class creatures good for cooking, typing, and comforting their male leaders...

...NOW's focus on employment issues, dealing with an "optional" role for women, cannot compete for media attention with antimarriage and antisexism campaigns by the women's liberation spokesmen...

...However, once even a minority of women begin to reject their role as sex object, postpone or reject marriage, stop smiling over a shiny waxed floor or, heaven forbid, question the desirability of having children or rearing them themselves as a full-time job, then they touch an equivalent nerve in American society...

...Listen, for example, to a black poet's phrasing of the issue: blackwoman is an in and out rightsideup action-image of her man .. . in other (blacker) words...

...by the same token, an element of risk in contraceptive pills is, in and of itself, no basis for calling a halt to their use...

...Labor Department guidelines were announced in June 1970 to assure equal job opportunities for women on work paid for under federal contract...

...We do not halt small-pox vaccinations because a dozen children die from them each year, or stop using antibiotics because 500 users die a year...

...In the 1970s there will be a reversal in the demographic pattern...

...I was taking a first step away from the predominant theory that the family and occupational systems require "mechanisms of segregation" with only one member of the family participating significantly in the occupational system—a theory I now view as an intellectual put-down providing a rationale for men as the prime movers in work and politics...

...In the post-Sputnik decade, there was a widespread campaign to persuade women to enter the labor force, with the government serving as spokesman for short-handed employers trying to meet personnel needs...

...It takes time and some distancing from the heat of battle, and hence becomes a special responsibility of women in academia...

...Ambivalence can be admitted most readily toward those roles that are optional, least where they are considered primary...

...Critiques of Freud's notions of female sexuality are now commonplace, but I have seen little as yet that suggests an alternative developmental theory, with the exception of recent work by John Gagnon and William Simon...

...that the myth of women's relative asexuality has been shown to be a biological absurdity...

...But most women do not wish to live embattled and manless lives, and my impression is there are far more men in the younger generation than there were in my own who are eager to acquire a new lifestyle, a gentler and more meaningful relationship with women...

...Diversity within a movement can be a strength, for there is no one problem or one solution...

...But this is a path difficult for a married women in academia, particularly if, like myself, she is married to a sociologist...

...I watched women friends leave the university when they became pregnant and being kept out when they tried to return after their children entered school...

...Let me end with a comment concerning the relationship between the women's rights movement and the movements of black Americans...

...And during the two years I had my first two children I learned from personal experience the truth of the existential thesis that "one becomes what one does," for I realized with horror that I was resenting my husband's freedom to continue his full-time academic work despite the addition of parental responsibilities, and even more that I was actually trying to prevent his playing an intimate role in the lives of the children, so that I might at least have ascendancy in parenthood to complement his ascendancy in our profession...

...This is not to say that the society cannot absorb or does not need highly trained people...

...Personal-Political Background AS AN UNDERGRADUATE and graduate student, I had no particular interest in the status of women, sex roles, or occupational choice...

...These were also years of vast expansion in precisely those segments of the occupational system in which women have traditionally been prominent...

...The source of this growing interest was not only research and scholarship...

...Applying these hypotheses to the issues that triggered public attention to the women's movement helps explain why reactions are more intense to the women's liberation groups than to women's rights organizations like NOW...

...At the same time there will be mounting pressure for a national population policy...

...Now she recognizes that she can, as a female, contribute to the field without becoming a spinster or a swinger...

...It would be like putting them in a revolving door and spinning it: not permitting them easy entry or significant work outside the home, yet not permitting them fulfillment in a bountiful maternity inside the home...

...and that women's sexuality has been suppressed through a socialization of gender roles that urges passivity and submission to men...

...I found the sociological dimension of literature so fascinating that I fell in love with the field, and began a life-long affair of the heart and mind that is second only to my own marriage and the three children of that marriage...

...The majority of American men appear to be convinced that if they wait out the storm, activism will die down and they can then continue to run government agencies, businesses, and universities...

...What time I had beyond this research and family responsibilities was invested in active attempts at social, legal, and political change to benefit women...

...A workingclass person or group cannot indulge in such luxuary until needs for survival and security are met...

...This was how the National Organization for Women was formed in the fall of 1966...

...In the months since then, I have had offers for academic appointments based on the premise that my husband and I are about to be divorced...

...Renee Neblett of the Boston Black Panthers defined the black woman as a strong person who can act independently and make decisions but, most important of all, a woman with an ability to relate to men, one who would do anything to help her man retain or regain his manhood and insure the survival of her people...

...At least initially his interest was low, until I had designed the study, fielded it, and partially analyzed the results...

...There was widespread concern in manpower, government, and university circles when many bright middle-class young men began to depart from an unthinking acceptance of occupational aspirations like those of their fathers, either by shifting away from business, engineering, and science toward teaching, social science, and the humanities, or by indicating that their desire was for a life-style with more time spent away from the job...

...Their clamor was, in my judgment, ill-advised...

...The emphasis has been on the impact of homemaking simplification via frozen foods and complex gadgetry on the one hand, and the search for self-fulfillment and a solution to the "problem without a name" on the other...

...From that frustrating experience, a number of women concluded that little significant change could be expected until a strong organization was built that would be completely independent of the political establishment...

...I began a long process of reestablishing connections with my earlier life: intellectual exposure to the ideas of Robert Lynd and C. Wright Mills, personal experiences in a variety of workingclass and white-collar clerical jobs, and involvement in radical politics (as an undergraduate in the 1930s and early 1940s...

...A good example can be seen in the congressional hearings on the birth control pill this past spring, at which women's liberation spokesmen engaged in widely publicized protest...

...The birth rate is now on the decline, the age at marriage creeping upward, and the time interval between marriage and childbearing widening...

...There is always room in graduate departments for an extraordinary woman...

...The varied response to that Daedalus essay was itself a revealing commentary on American academia...

...We shall need every bit of sex solidarity we can get...

...But one must also reckon with the fact that 324 ALICE S. ROSSI the Masters-Johnson research only illuminates the physiological dimension of human sexuality...

...What has this to do with the women's movement in the 1970s...

...Up to 1970 the supply of Ph.D.s was far below the demand in institutions of higher education, but the reverse will hold from 1970 onward: the supply will exceed the demand in universities...

...For women, the counterpart is any airing of ambivalence toward what the culture has defined as their primary roles, in marriage and maternity...

...The answer, I think, lies in differences of stress and outlook between these two tendencies within the women's movement...

...WOMEN — TERMS OF LIBERATION 327...

...The male backlash is bound to come, and there are signs of it already...

...At that point he realized he had a good thing going, and simply announced, despite verbal agreements about co-authorship, that my services were no longer needed...

...During earlier years, my university colleagues criticized me for "not sticking to my last" as research sociologist instead of writing analytic social criticism...

...A more recent example of this kind was the reaction of male sociologists to the roles my husband and I played at the sociology convention in the fall of 1969...

...From one point of view, the excess supply means an opportunity for reducing class size, providing students with better learning experiences, changing graduate curricula to prepare students for nonacademic jobs, etc...

...In the case of men, overperformance can be stoked by extra-marital adventures or self-stimulation via pornographic literature or dramatic productions...

...But it took a return to academia, involving a traumatic encounter with the discrimination academic women so often suffer, to jar me out of my innocence...

...Public dialogue on population is increasing significantly, and we begin to hear large families discussed as undesirable for individual couples and for society at large...

...On campuses, as in professional organizations, there has been mounting pressure to hire and promote more women, to provide child-care facilities for married women students and employees, and to offer courses on the history and the status of women...

...The laws serving . to strengthen women's economic rights were passed during the '60s...

...The major difference is merely one of intensity: no country can match the United States for media saturated with exploitative and male-dominant sex, typified so well by the infantile or cruel acts of physical rape that fill so many pages of Norman Mailer's books...

...But the problem is that women are being told to hold back on their fertility in the same era in which there may be a shift away from encouraging them to seek significant work in the economy, and when much volunteer work is being transformed into paid employment for the poor...

...From 1964 to the fall of 1969 I enjoyed an ususual status under a research award from the National Institute of Mental Health...

...The voicing of these demands will increase significantly at professional conventions...

...One such professor, whose feathers were decidedly ruffled when the sociology women's caucus displaced a luncheon meeting he was to speak at, complained prettily, with an expectation that it would flatter rather than anger me: "But Alice, what is all the fuss about...

...It is not a "condition" she is fortunate to have as a base for being something more than homemaker, mother, and husband-relaxer...

...I would suggest that more critical attention should be paid to two factors bearing upon sexual behavior in American society...

...One is the view that sex is an intense high-pressure drive that constrains the individual to seek sexual gratification either directly or indirectly...

...Universities were concerned when men students expressed resentment of advanced training as a preparation for the adult rat race...

...Only among women who are relatively permanent members of the work force could daily experience force an awareness of economic inequities based on sex and a determination to do something about them...

...Those of us who worked on this issue early in the 1960s are now gratified and disturbed by the ease with which total repeal of abortion laws looms as a reality: gratified because this represents the fruition of long, hard effort, disturbed by the quite mixed motivations behind the passage of such legislation...

...Because schools were flooded with the baby-boom children, women college graduates were assured a welcome as teachers despite age, marital and family status...

...Don Lee What white poet has yet said of a man, "he's together if she is...

...you, unfortunately, are expendable...

...There is much need for research and sober analysis on the social correlates of varying styles of sexual behavior...

...Nothing is so threatening to conventional values as a man who does not want to work or does not want to work at a chal320 ALICE S. ROSSI lenging job, and most people are disturbed if a man in a well-paying job indicates ambivalence or dislike toward it...

...Liberation group discussions of these points can be enormously helpful for the psychological release of the submerged sexual selves of many women...

...Demands for equality for women are threats to men's self-esteem and sense of sexual turf...

...One of the more interesting hypotheses emerging from these comparisons is that the men most resistant to and in some cases almost hysterical about women's pressure for equal treatment are men known to be sexually exploitative in their relations to women students...

...By early 1969, however, I felt increasingly out of rapport with most of my colleagues in empirical sociology and restless for direct contact with the college-age generation...

...At the same time, graduate schools will be producing large numbers of young people with advanced degrees, who will face a very different job market from the one that young Ph.D.s faced during the past 20 years...

...In fact, I would argue that it was the changed composition of the female labor force during the period beginning with 1940 but rapidly peaking in the 1950s that provided the momentum leading to the establishment of the Kennedy Commission on the Status of Women and the formation of new women's rights organizations in the mid1960s...

...Though unglamorous and hard work, and rarely making a flashy news story, this is of greater longrange significance than any amount of braburning or antimen speech-making...

...My first sociology instructor was Louis Schneider, and he began his course by reading a Whitman poem and raising the question: who was this man...

...In the WOMEN — TERMS OF LIBERATION 319 fall of 1969, I therefore shifted from research sociology at Johns Hopkins to undergraduate teaching at Goucher College...

...In more sociological terms, we might put this as follows: social roles vary in the extent to which it is culturally permissible to express ambivalence or negative feelings toward them...

...In short, she is not a participant in the women's liberation movement but a competent sociologist...

...Colleges and universities were expanding at a rapid rate, and married women were taken on as part-time instructors and full-time researchers...

...many wishfully view this as a dissipation of effort in a noisy fizzle...

...A number of radical-feminist analyses begin with a good critique of the Freudian fallacies concerning female sexuality...

...While this act does not prohibit sex discrimination, it could play a significant role in enlarging employment opportunities for women over 40 who wish to return to the labor market or change jobs...

...The . range of women's problems that NOW is concerned with has broadened greatly since 1966, but the core continues to be equal treatment in hiring and promotion...

...It is conventionally supposed that all men will want to work at a challenging job...

...Hence, it is when men question work and women question family commitment that we find public responses ranging from a shiver of dictate to a convulsion of hate...

...Women lawyers have on occasion separated from the more diffuse organizations, the better to focus on campaigns making greater use of their skills...

...If black women, largely poor but still more advantageously placed than black men, have the humanity and dignity to help raise the selfesteem of their men—to realize, as one of my black students put it, that the black female is no better than her man despite a history of educational and economic superiority— then this is a great tribute to black women in America that unfortunately is not matched by a comparable dedication on the part of white men toward their women...

...A significant factor underlying this willingness lies in the peculiarities of the demographic structure of the American populaWOMEN — TERMS OF LIBERATION 321 tion between 1940 and 1970...

...We are witnessing the advance wave of this policy with the unprecedented shift in opinion regarding abortion in the United States...

...Municipal and state Fair Employment Practices commissions and agencies administering state equal pay legislation can also be used to protect employment rights...

...As a result of the rippling effect of this low-fertility cohort, employers had to seek women workers from other sources than the young unmarried...

...What concerns me equally is to be spared another 50 years of anti-Freudian polemics from the women's movement...

...It may also be the case that marital satisfaction and happiness decline with duration of marriage in American society largely because adults are expected to perform at 40 or 50 as they did at 20 or 25...

...A conference on women last February at Cornell culminated in a dramatic session on the black woman in America, in which the largely middle-class white audience hissed black women and men on a panel who spoke of the need for black women to give attention to the black man and his position in the community, to be supportive of their men's struggle for greater self-esteem and dignity...

...Fifty years of accepting Freudian concepts of female sexuality will not be quickly undone by current research on the human sexual response...

...This view is apparent not only in psychoanalytic but in sociological literature as well...

...Consequently, the trigger was in the first place far more a matter of employer demand than of assertive women pressing to enter into the labor force...

...But this need not be true so long as those who form a new group do not concentrate on fruitless attacks upon the group they left or on styles of protest directed mainly at getting attention from the press...

...It will be won not by quickie-action skirmishes but by the persistent beat of the hearts and work of the minds of at least another generation...

...Certain women's liberation groups may be trying to recruit for a political revolutionary movement yet find some of their members graduating from consciousnessraising group sessions to affiliation with a NOW chapter...

...A fundamental assumption of American society is that men's primary social roles are in work and women's primary social roles in the family...

...I began to draw together these older layers of the self and to focus the ideas, the personal experience, and the political commitment I now have...

...Psychoanalytic theories have penetrated deep into the modern consciousness, and are reinforced a dozen times a day through commercials that attempt to sell everything from an Ohrbach dress to detergents...

...As you may know from reading Eli Ginsberg on life styles of educated women, a supportive husband is an absolute requirement for professional women...

...I discounted as peevish envy the claim of my male peers that I would not get a fellowship "because I was a woman," and then, when I was awarded one, the counterclaim that "someone on the faculty must be trying to make you.,, It would have been congenial for me to move from graduate training to an academic position as a teacher and secondarily a researcher...

...I predict comparable increases in the political and economic realms, as women organize and demonstrate to change laws and employer practices that discriminate on the grounds of sex...

...The movie The Graduate symbolized this generational contrast in dramatic form...

...The applicant is an unmarried woman who had taught in the writer's department and taken graduate courses with him...

...I do not share the view that the women's rights movement is a passing thing...

...We have WITCH, WEAL, Radical Feminists, FEW, NOW, WRAP, and there are .undoubtedly more to come...

...it was also my own personal experience as a faculty wife and mother of young children...

...I had studied these young people...

...Right now it is not clear how national policies in the coming decade will affect the lives of women...

...It will be especially true for the natural sciences, less so for the social sciences until late in the 1970s...

...Some women who have recently been acWOMEN — TERMS OF LIBERATION 325 tine in women's caucuses in academic associations have begun to compare notes on the responses their demands are eliciting from male colleagues...

...My husband received a sympathetic bereavement card from a West Coast sociologist for having such an upstart wife...

...Indeed, I think the movement has not yet reached its crest, though I also believe it faces hard times...

...My husband has been asked how he felt when I delivered that speech, with his male colleagues not knowing how to take his response that he felt pride...

...Young women were staying in school longer and marrying at an earlier age, thus shrinking the size of the traditional labor pool of young unmarried women...

...There is far more risk in frantically dissipating one's efforts by doing a great variety of things than in organizational splitting...

...Background of Current Women's Movement IT HAS BECOME FASHIONABLE to link the emergence of the women's liberation movement to the participation of younger women in the civil rights movement...

...Why so...

...Others said it was inappropriate and would "ruin your career" to get involved in the "woman thing," or to be publicly visible as an organizer for abortion law reform, or to write in a woman's magazine that "motherhood was not enough...

...The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 prohibits discrimination based on age between 40 and 65...

...I entered college as an English major, pragmatism dictating an occupational choice of high school English teacher, but romanticism prompting a hope I might become a famous writer...

...following that, a great need for a rather different conception of sex education than anything we have seen in school curricula or gymnastic sex manuals to date...

...Clerical, sales, and service occupations were expanding, and women with high school degrees were able to choose among the available jobs...

...Some feminists will say, fine and good: men have been our oppressors long enough, now they must give ground...

...WOMEN — TERMS OF LIBERATION 323 I would like to think that women would take the lead in calling attention to the human dimensions of national policies that have particular impact on the lives of women...

...A lot of nonsense has been written in the past decade to account for the flow of older married women into the labor force...

...But their voice will not be heard nor will their analyses be pertinent unless they keep in close contact with the women's rights movement and national policy formation...

...What I am urging is that women be more thorough and thoughtful in their analysis of a problem before rushing to the streets and into print with arguments that may appear sound superficially but are actually political posturing...

...Women in colleges and universities are not covered by the Civil Rights Act, but women lawyers in activist groups are now working through the channels provided by Executive Order 11375 rather than pressing for congressional change in the educational institutions exemption in the 1964 act...

...In recent years, many women in the women's rights movement have taken up with great moral righteousness the task of informing black women that they should avoid the trap of moving through the same series of mistakes that middle-class women were subjected to in the past...

...It was the women who served on the numerous committees of the Kennedy Commission, followed by the thousands who worked with the state commissions established during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, who experienced and then stimulated a mood of rising expectations among American women...

...Sexuality RESEARCH AND EDUCATION in human sexuality, and the implications of such research for the social roles of the sexes is another matter that merits increased attention in the 1970s...

...Before giving advice, one must understand...

...It is therefore of critical importance that women press hard during the next few years to secure equal protection of the law and to assure adequate representation in all segments of the economy...

...In no way is this to say that women should not have completely safe contraceptives, or that more emphasis should not be put on male contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion as acceptable procedures to control unwanted births...

...Nowhere did one hear anything about responsibility for reaching the larger public, nor did one have any sense thatthere was an obligation for a family sociologist to "do something" about contraception, abortion, or women's rights...

...A man or woman of 45 is not the same person as a 20-year-old, and to perform sexually as if they were is to require that the man overperform sexually and that the woman persist in a girlish style that is equally inappropriate to her stage of sexual and social maturity...

...It is only In the past few years that Woman Power has emerged, with younger women questioning conventional women's roles...

...I cite such examples to point out that we must have thick skins—at least as thick as those of our grandmothers in thesuffrage, union, and socialist movements of an earlier day...

...If, as a culture, we could move in the direction of mature interdependence between individuals, across social classes, religious, racial, and sexual lines, to say nothing of national boundaries, we might come to develop what Kenneth Boulding has described as "reconciling styles" in which we take primary pleasure in life from identifying with the process of change itself: watching and taking pleasure from our own individual growth and change, and the growth and change of our friends, spouses, and children...

...My own trial by fire involved a not untypical story of a bright woman Ph.D.—accepting a research associateship to do a study the male principal investigator was not competent to do on his own, and in which 318 ALICE S. ROSSI he had very little interest...

...Part of the Freudian legacy, however, is that we have become extremely adept at weeding out the sexual ingredient in many forms of nonsexual behavior and symbolism while rarely engaging in what may be an equally fruitful analysis: an examination of sexual behavior as an agency for expressing nonsexual motives...

...Despite the optimists in our midst, or the pessimists who anticipate revolution in the streets—after which, of course, a magical transformation would follow—I think we are in for a long and hard battle--cultural, legal, and political—before we reach any goal of sex equality for black or white in this nation...

...Young women wrote to say they decided to return to graduate school instead of having another baby...

...It tells us nothing about the nonsexual components of human sexual behavior...

...For the organizations directly involved in action concerning women's rights, such a thorough analysis is difficult...

...The counterpart for women is any suggestion that they feel ambivalent toward maternity, marriage, or homemaking, probably in that order...

...what does the poem tell about his time, his place on this globe...

...These were committed, knowledgeable, largely middle-aged women who had high hopes, as they filed their reports, that American society would finally do something to improve the status of women...

...Listening to men, one senses a gleeful pleasure at seeing such sectarianism...

...I dreamed of being one day the president of the American Sociological Society, and of writing a major opus that would be built on the strengths of my two mentors in theory and research...

...Let me start with the bread-and-butter issue of women's employment...

...It immediately precipitated the scholarship and writing that led me down the path of immodesty to my first essay on sex equality...

...As secretary of the association, my husband was on the platform while I delivered a speech and submitted resolutions for the women's caucus...

...Unfortunately, Ginsberg does not understand how a woman gets a supportive husband...

...Thus men repress negative feelings toward work and feel freer to express negative feelings toward leisure, sex and marriage, while women are free to express negative feelings toward work but tend to repress them toward family roles...

...What women must do in the next several years does not require new legislation, though passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution would cover a wide range of sex inequities in law and practice...

...I was one of those thousands of bright, eager New York students attending the city colleges, in my case, Brooklyn College...

...Except for its action in behalf of airline stewardesses, however, it has had relatively little public or media attention outside of New York, at least if compared to the extraordinary press coverage given to the women's liberation groups this past year...

...Even more important, the young women of the 1950s were born in the 1930s, when the birth rate was very low, while at the same time there was a vast increase in the number of young children born during the baby boom of those postwar years...

...Several male colleagues accused me of troubling their marriages...

...A male friend of mine recently sent me a xeroxed copy of a letter of recommendation to the chairman of his department...

...Some of my caucus colleagues believe that, beneath the surface, men such as this are not able to relate to a woman colleague at the same or higher status rank and feel comfortable only in superordinate positions from which they can dispense professorial and sexual favors...

...NOW includes lively, dedicated women who are pressing hard against the barriers that restrict women in American society...

...Without detracting from this point at all, I would only remark that the women's liberation movement is a bit more than two years old, and there were important, though less visible, changes among American women earlier in the 1960s...

...At the outset I shall draw on my personal experiences in academic and private life, upon participation in several reform movements in recent years, and upon a commitment to fundamental change in American society...

...in reference groups, through work with Robert Merton, and in studies of the professions...

...There is already a first sign that women are withdrawing from the labor force: in the last quarter of 1969 the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a drop in the unemployment rate, though the drop occurred not because people found jobs, but because unemployed young people and women were ceasing to look for jobs...

...Let us now assume it to be established that there is no differentiation between a clitoral and vaginal orgasm...

...WEAL, the Women's Equity Action League, has mounted an important campaign designed to apply pressure on colleges and universities to comply with this executive order or face cancellation and future loss of government contracts—something no institution of higher education would care to risk...

...Midway into that five-year award, I undertook a major research study of family and career roles of women college graduates...

...This is a reflection of what Henry Murray has described as the retarded adolescent stage of development of American society...

...In reading the transcript of this session, I felt anger and shame that the middle-class women in the audience had not appreciated the difference in the positions of the sexes among whites and blacks...

...Their hopes were dashed by the treatment they experienced at the spring 1966 conference of representatives from the state commissions brought together by the Department of Labor in Washington...

...It has been the questioning of family roles among women's liberation groups that has triggered the current widespread attention to the "woman issue...

...The social price of such a conflict could well be a rise in alienation, escape into drugs, alcoholism, or joyless sex and an even greater tendency to live vicariously through the few children they have...

...No woman in 1970, I hope, could be the total innocent I was in 1950 concerning sex discrimination...

...This is to look for explanations on the supply side of the economic equation...

...We must first look at a critical determinant of the changed profile of women's participation in the labor force...

...I think we should be prepared for intense masculine backlash to the demands women make that are rooted not merely in the specific area of work or home management or parental responsibility, but in displacements from a deeper level...

...As a graduate student at Columbia, I was interested in the macroscopic analysis of social institutions...

...The mere existence of such laws does not solve anything unless women press for their implementation, first by concerted efforts to educate their sex, and second by developing test cases that will bring real changes in women's employment status...

...Very often such anti-Freudian analyses are couched in Marxist terms...

...Beyond this, the white women's movement should try to deepen its understanding of the differences between their relations to men and those of black women...

...As a faculty wife, I had ample opportunity to observe that some sociological theorists did a good job of preventing two members of a family from holding significant positions in the occupational system...

...He wrote: When Miss X arrived she was somewhat lacking in self-confidence, uncertain whether there was a place for her in sociology...

...Nor do we sufficiently realize the continuing relevance of class differences in the ways a problem is perceived and experienced...

...They would simply have been told that if they could not take the academic pressure, they should go home...

...This fortunate circumstance is now changing...

...He is something she looks for, and when she finds him, she marries him...

...I had offended one such theorist by negotiating an appointment at Harvard without first clearing such a horrendous step with him, then my husband's department chairman...

...There is a serious danger that the essentially middle-class and white women's groups will be as guilty of misunderstanding the problems confronting black men and women today as an earlier counterpart in the middle-class suffrage movement 326 ALICE S. ROSSI of the 19th century misunderstood the political efforts of working-class people...

...Short of such passage, however, it is true that there has been a legal revolution during the 1960s in regard to protection of women's economic rights...

...It may serve unstated political ends, but it is historically false and analytically simplistic to claim that women's sexual role reflects the bourgeois notion of man's desire to possess and amass private property, or to charge that the second-class citizenship of women merely reflects capitalist society's need to coerce them into domestic slavery and conspicuous consumption...

...Amended Executive Order 11375 prohibits discrimination based on sex by federal government contractors and subcon322 ALICE S. ROSSI tractors...

...In turn, many NOW chapters have lost members to the liberation groups...

...Marxist analyses of women and capitalism have an element of truth only if you substitute industrialization for capitalism...

...I say this to emphasize that she is a mature person not swayed by the superficial values so evident on campuses today...

...So long as women worked mostly before marriage or after marriage only until a first pregnancy, or lived within city limits where there was a diversity of cultural activities to engage them, there were but feeble grounds for a significant movement among women, since their motivation for working was short-lived...

...A further complication is the pressure on American adults to remain pegged at an adolescent stage of development and behavior...

...The occupational role I chose to study in Kingsley Davis's seminar was that of the politician, 317 though not once did I think to look into the sex-linked nature of occupational choice...

...She is neither seductive nor emasculating and will be a useful colleague...

...At Harvard and again at Chicago, I saw numerous instances of women being kept off the academic turf their husbands claimed as their own...

...It was beyond his ability or willingness to understand that sex equality in academia would not be achieved until there was room for as many "average" women as for "average" men...

...But I doubt that anyone would have worried if only women had expressed such resentment...

...The Equal Pay Act of 1963 requires equal wages and salaries for men and women doing equal work...

...Two such conflicting policies— low fertility and minimal participation in the labor force—can have serious consequences in undercutting the confidence of young women...

...In the 1970s there will be more young unmarried and childless married women seeking jobs, for they will be the baby-boom females grown to maturity...