LETTERS
Editor: I started to read the article "Are American Jews Turning to the Right?" [by Bernard Rosenberg and Irving Howe] in your Winter issue with considerable interest. I stopped reading it...
...Senator Edward Kennedy scored 91.5 percent, Senator McGovern 87 percent, and Senator Jackson 83 percent...
...q Metamorphosis of the Mother Jeanne Binstock (in "Metamorphosis of the Mother," DISSENT, Fall 1973) argues that "succeeding waves of technologies liberated first the middle classes, then the working classes, and now the young and the female sex from the Hobbesian natural world in which the strong dominated the weak...
...On the other hand, he must bear sole responsibility for "backward man...
...Why hasn't it increased more...
...In making the above observations, which seem to us merely factual, we didn't propose that Humphrey or anyone else be "excluded" from "a really broad, liberal coalition...
...Binstock wants to have it both ways...
...The number of working women increased by 3 million and climbed proportionately from one worker in four to one in three between 1939 and 1944...
...When women get power, they too will abuse it, probably as much as men...
...By January 1946, there were 4 million less women working than there had been at the peak employment of the war, and the hourly wage rate of those employed women was rolled back...
...Second, if we are to reestablish our old liberal coalition—in which Jews thrive—let's not be so divisive...
...Johnston to think of "forward-looking view of man" and its unfortunate Rotarian connotations...
...Why has it increased so much...
...If so, what would such a biew be...
...Why is it unevenly spread...
...Binstock says she is concerned with "good mothering," mothering that goes beyond seeing to a child's physical well-being...
...To predict historical development as a technical problem is to take an entirely different view of history, which involves both an attempt at intellectual and moral neutrality and the belief that all humans, regardless of race, creed, sex, or national origins, have equal limitations and potential capacities...
...She assures us that there will be an "occupational shift 358 LETTERS of great numbers of former mothers in new occupations of postindustrial society...
...Well, let's look at the record of the new Humphrey...
...I see no reason to want Humphrey in the forefront, if only because he carries on him, like a Scarlet Letter, the brand of Vietnam...
...5. Has the modern world eliminated all "extreme cases" (the Strauss quotation...
...I, personally, would not have included that issue as one of the test issues because of other complicating factors, which would mean that had a different test issue been substituted, the probabilities are that all senators would have increased their liberal quotient by 5 percent...
...Those of us concerned not only with liberation for women but with what persons are or ought to be must reject any view of the future that neglects the legitimate needs of children for patience, nurturance, endurance, and tenderness...
...1. What is a "backward-looking view of man...
...Some people couldn't stomach McGovern...
...I include in this the power to eat regularly, live too long, and to choose to bear children...
...Binstock glosses over this inequality by concentrating on technological change...
...Banfield's class prejudgment...
...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN JEANNE BINSTOCK replies: Subscribers to the "blame theory" of history refuse to recognize the theoretical possibility that lawful processes determine the course of human as well as physical events...
...I have attended meetings with Irving Howe where the consensus of the meeting was that there was a great need to reestablish a really broad, liberal coalition...
...I pick on technology in this exploration because it is clearly son-ething that produces change—food in our stomachs, money in our pockets, babies in our bellies, and ideas in our heads...
...Children are currently "bound to parents" by means of guilt...
...These people are likely to have supported the Vietnam war (remember...
...What is the meaning of liberation for Binstock...
...Binstock imagines an androgynous future in a postindustrial society awash in boundless goodies...
...2. Would this backward man be like a Caliban...
...others wouldn't be able to stomach Jackson...
...Binstock's "unique" female traits are nothing but contemporary stereotypes of the female writ large...
...they are likely to be contemptuous (not merely critical) of insurgent constituencies among labor, youth, women, and within the Democratic party...
...It is "backward-looking" because it assumes that man is a finished product...
...Toward the war's end women were forced out of jobs as a result of a series of politico-economic decisions, including withdrawal of government funding for day care, which would not have been foreseen if one had looked to technological factors alone...
...MARVIN ROSENBERG New York IRVING HOWE replies: Useful as ADA ratings may be, there are many things they don't tell us...
...His average is a stunning 97% for his 17 years in the Senate and he scored 100% during 10 of those years...
...If these contrasting views of man are what Mr...
...Jackson had a 55 percent voting record, McGovern 80 percent, Humphrey 85 percent, Stevenson 85 percent, Bayh 85 percent, Kennedy 90 percent and Mondale 95 percent...
...She insists that those characteristics presently considered feminine, including the use of "seductive tricks" to achieve goals, are merely an outgrowth of traditional female life situations...
...Claremont, California MURRAY HAUSKNECHT replies: Some statements about humans are "accurate" in the sense that they are demonstrably true: only women can bear children...
...On one issue they all voted wrong according to ADA—the confirmation of Ford...
...Is it enlightening to replace one prejudice with another...
...Anyway, I hope that by now Marvin Rosenberg, veteran of many good causes, will have gotten past the sentence that "lost" him and continue to read our article...
...But I would first require a clearer definition of "Right" and "Centrist...
...it cannot be derived from anything I wrote...
...Tender care" by women of their children has become "excessive scrutiny...
...I am interested in where we came from and where we are going, and who we might become, on technical grounds of biology and cultural evolution, without calling for action...
...It is easier to divide the world into good guys and bad guys...
...Then it is only a matter of good guys wresting power from the bad guys, and if you think you're one of the good guys, it stills the pain...
...Is it to be contrasted with a forward-looking view of man...
...The groups that now support Jackson and hope to make him the Democratic presidential candidate in 1976 have, by and large, been those that in the past supported Humphrey: the AFL-CIO leadership, some urban machines, party spokesmen and intellectuals who were shar'ply anti-McGovern and recently organized, if I recall the name correctly, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority...
...All else, including ideology, is a spin-off of technology...
...They don't tell us where political figures are placed within the struggles of groups, tendencies, and outlooks that have been taking place in the Democratic party for several years and still continue today...
...And, yes, there is a "forward-looking view of man": it questions the postulate of immutability and assumes humans have potentialities that can be and are realized under appropriate social and economic circumstances...
...The power of all human groups has increased markedly in the past few hundred years, particularly in the last hundred years...
...I stopped reading it before the end of the very first page when you referred to "those Jewish intellectuals who wish to keep the liberal community within the centrist camp of such politicians as Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson...
...Implicitly she advances the notion that children can, with minimal care by paid caretakers and the use of antibiotics, rear themselves...
...7. Has Mr...
...She nonethless insists, without a single reference to politics, that the "new occupations" of the future will be filled by "former mothers...
...But you will say that was the old Humphrey (and the old Jackson...
...It assumes, further, that the future can be different from the past, although whether it will be depends, in part, on policymakers not adopting the untenable notion that modern working and lower classes are "born devils" with "canker'd minds...
...Toward the views put forward by CDM or the views put forward by ADA...
...Seduction and synthesis," and a "desire to synthesize in an internal explosion of feeling," will define the contributions of women on the highest levels in her future technological society...
...Murray Hausknecht's article "Caliban's Abode," in your Fall 1973 issue, I have some questions which may seem only impertinent but are intended to be serious...
...She wants women to relinquish these artificially induced character traits so that their unique "biological energies will emerge...
...In addition, this tactic is counterproductive...
...That doesn't mean that people on the Left should re357 fuse to collaborate in the next presidential election with people who supported the Vietnam war...
...In December 1971, the ADA World published the lifetime legislative record of all the potential 1972 candidates for the Democratic nomination for president...
...Their voting records...
...First of all, I don't like the denigrating attitude toward Hubert Humphrey...
...Here the demonstrably true is intertwined with an a priori...
...The strong surely continue to dominate the weak in modern society—not so much the "naturally" weak any longer, but the powerless, and this domination is at least as all-pervasive as that which pertained in the Hobbesian war of all against all...
...Any coalition that excludes people who support Hubert Humphrey and people like him is not only unrealistic but is doing the liberal cause a great disservice...
...Political power, structures, and ideologies play no role in her scenario...
...You would consider Javits a liberal...
...You would never lump Javits, Humphrey, and Jackson as Centrists...
...3. Are there no modern Calibans...
...To include "want" one must hold to a belief in choice, which, in turn, admits the possibility that rational and responsible individuals may resist the "inevitable" by making choices that do not mesh with the present variants of technological development...
...6. Is it possible for us to appreciate the relationship between Prospero and Caliban without thinking of Prospero as a class enemy...
...The ADA stated, "Hubert Humphrey, a founder of ADA, has the highest ADA voting record of all potential presidential candidates...
...What is your basis for lumping Hubert Humphrey with Scoop Jackson...
...I know of no evidence that Hubert Humphrey has dissociated himself, or wishes to dissociate himself, from this group within the Democratic party...
...Editor: With regard to Mr...
...they tend to be hostile toward the raising of new social issues, while often supporting economic proposals made by the AFLCIO...
...Many of the more interesting statements of philosophers and social theorists are of this kind, and to think about them simply in terms of "accuracy" can be misleading...
...what was true of him in the past is true of him now and will be true of him in the future...
...It is human to both use and abuse power: it is also human to want love and meaning...
...they are inclined toward a Cold War-ish approach to international affairs...
...Both are exaggerations—one a positive idealization that makes of mothers inhuman saints, and the other, a negative idealization that turns mothers into obsessed meddlers and guilt-inducers...
...Such people, for good or bad, form a political tendency within the Democratic party...
...LETTERS 359...
...4. If there are no longer Calibans, why then do we have laws...
...I really would like to read an article on the subject, "Are American Jews Turning to the Right...
...It does mean we'd very much prefer that this collaboration be conducted in behalf of a candidate who didn't have the Vietnam brand on him and in behalf of a program that wasn't the handiwork of the boys around Scoop...
...And are there no instances in which natural justice pertains...
...But if the future is an ineluctable outgrowth of technological advance, why the caveat "whether they want to be or not...
...WILLIAM E. JOHNSTON, JR...
...My phrase refers to a view of man (a term here referring to the species) that emphasized the immutability of his nature with a special stress on what Leo Strauss called "the lower impulses...
...Backward-looking view of man" is not a particularly felicitous phrase, since it encouraged Mr...
...How would it differ from the view of man which is neither forward nor backward but is simply accurate...
...But he showed up in the first session of the 93rd Congress with an ADA voting record of 55 percent— the same as Jackson...
...These assertions are as objectionable as were all those corny paeons to blessed motherhood and celebrations of noble, self-sacrificing Mom...
...Such a coalition is necessary for the next election...
...El What of Caliban...
...Women will be liberated "whether they want to be or not...
...A day or two before I received the Winter issue of DISSENT, I also received the current issue of the ADA World in which the voting record of the first session of the 93rd Congress for 1973 was analyzed...
...The modern powerless, those putatively "liberated" persons of whom Binstock writes, face a capitalistic-technological structure of vast inequality and social stratification that denies to its underclasses (including the un- or under-employed, women, the elderly, blacks, and other minorities, as well as the physically and mentally handicapped) access to those social goods that set the contours of life for the more privileged...
...And there are differences, significant differences, which are symbolized by the rival candidacies of Scoop Jackson and, let's say, X. The possibilities for an electoral coalition remain, but so do the internal tensions among its potential elements...
...All these are interesting questions and worthy of, finally, one aesthetic (scientific) answer...
...For example: women were absorbed into the work force in large numbers during World War II...
...Yet she outrageously suggests that penicillin has replaced "patience, nurturance, endurance, tenderness" in the modern era, and that motherhood has been pared down to a "marginal" three-hour-a-day job, as easily done by someone else...
...This business of lumping Humphrey and Jackson is very strange...
...Here as elsewhere she confounds possibility with certainty...
...Hausknecht (simply) reversed Mr...
...We know, however, that female economic participation is influenced by political decisions...
...Given an ideology of women's liberation confronting a system of male dominance, who would be willing to predict the outcome solely on the basis of technology...
...To buttress her case for the phasing-out of motherhood, Binstock draws an image of the contemporary mother replete with cliches and overstatements...
...Other statements are more problematic: humans are aggressive because they are by nature so...
...But the question that is going to be fought out in the next few years is: in which direction will that coalition lean—toward, say, George Meany or Leonard Woodcock...
...As to "good guys and bad guys," I don't believe it...
...Such naivete is particularly inexcusable when the possibility of slowdown in economic growth, constriction of jobs, and even enforced curtailment in the manufacture and use of labor-saving, energy-using devices( which have freed women from some tasks associated with domesticity) is at least as likely as Binstock's technological bliss-out...
...You lost me then...
...Johnston means by "class prejudgments," then, (again) yes, I do think my perspective is enlightening...
...But, if supporting Hubert Humphrey is to be your litmus test for determining a turn to the Right, then there isn't much validity to your argument...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
