Whither Women's Lib?
GOODMAN, WALTER
Whither Women's Lib? Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN It has become evident in recent weeks, if it was not so before, that the deepest issues of the Women's Movement are being fought out among women...
...There is a tone of scorn in the Women's Movement not only for the family arrangements of a majority of the nation's women, but also for their community activities, apparently because they don't get paid for them...
...The rewards are not nearly of the same nature as those in the publishing houses and television stations where so many of the Women's Lib spokespersons seem to congregate...
...The leaders of now have always been a special group...
...In practical matters, to be sure, men are still considered the adversaries...
...It certainly never occurred to the young troopers, whose own experiences may have been somewhat out of the ordinary, to ask themselves just how much they really knew about what life was like out there, among the benighted...
...It is my impression that a much larger proportion of them are unmarried or divorced than in the country at large...
...One might argue that numerous social causes do this...
...And after a couple of decades of giving her all to her children, the woman is only too likely to find herself with nothing much to do, and not capable of doing very much...
...actually, she would have to be quite insensitive and perhaps a little stupid to take it any other way...
...They continue to hold the most prestigious positions in universities, the most interesting jobs in the mass media, the most powerful posts in corporations, financial institutions and law firms—and few of them can be counted on to give up their prerogatives in the interests of sexual equality...
...it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise...
...The liberationists are telling their sisters that no matter how worthwhile the work they do in day care centers or schools or hospitals or church groups or even political parties, their efforts in truth count for little since the society does not deem them worthy of recompense...
...Yet the dogmatic assertion, the militant manifesto, the hot polemic are scarcely the best means for carrying on a dialogue...
...they needed to be made aware of their wretched state, of how beaten down and unhappy they were, of all the indignities practiced upon them since some man wrote that Eve had emerged from a male rib...
...Nonetheless, it seems to me a healthy instinct that makes people resist organized efforts from without to dig into their most private values, that makes them wary of ideologues who would tell them how to ration their love, and even how to make it...
...The work is demanding, confining, often mindless, and endless...
...Very early in the Movement's history, the message sent out across the land was not merely that working women were entitled to a fair shake in the job market and on the job, but that women in general, whether they knew it or not, were oppressed...
...In fact, the recent electoral defeats have caused some of the Movement's leaders to rethink their strategy...
...The recent setbacks raise the question of how serious the Women's Movement is capable of becoming...
...As much might be observed of a husband and father, but let that go...
...The manifestos of those smartly gotten-up girls, with their big round spectacles, too frequently proclaim that her husband and children are not worth her devotion, that she ought to be commuting to an office each day if she wants to amount to anything, that every swinger, every lesbian is already closer to true liberation than she...
...there are not many blacks or members of other racial minorities...
...There are more Jews among them than Catholics, or perhaps Protestants...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN It has become evident in recent weeks, if it was not so before, that the deepest issues of the Women's Movement are being fought out among women themselves...
...Whether or not one thinks that greater participation by women in politics would uplift the quality of government, the fact is that men do pretty much run things in city halls, state houses and other smoky buildings around the country...
...Of course, one can justifiably despise many aspects of life in Middle America...
...The competition for jobs and offices will continue, and the lures of money, power and prestige being what they are, that competition is bound to be prolonged and bitter...
...Up with the Paycheck...
...There is no reason to doubt that the Movement's leaders have great sympathy for their sisters out there who have not yet joined them on the road to liberation...
...Within a household, basic power tends to be in the hands of the breadwinner, who is normally the man...
...A housewife, reading the stuff that pours out of the Movement, does not need to be a vile reactionary to take it as an assault...
...They enable day care centers to function...
...they enhance our schools...
...They are not designed for serious discussion...
...At the same time, there is not much doubt that they despise these women's way of living, along with that of the rest of Middle America...
...There may be more compelling reasons than political expediency, though, for a shift of direction...
...Yet as far as the idea of women's job equality and political participation is concerned, the feminists have won...
...They needed their consciousness raised...
...The organization's top cadres have been young, college-educated, urban-based, work-oriented...
...The "perhaps" is necessary because the phrasing of the amendment?Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex"—is so general that nobody can be entirely certain what it does have to do with...
...Now, there is no disputing the charge that for a wife and mother, home, husband and children are shackles of a sort...
...This is an odd line for radicals to take...
...Yes, one can construct a powerful case that public and private matters are ineluctably interconnected, that child-rearing, male domination, job opportunities, household budgets, the vaginal orgasm, political influence, and so forth are all intimately, albeit sometimes obscurely related...
...The Women's Movement finds itself mired in that swampy place where private lives and public issues meet...
...no movement is led by the "average" person...
...There is nothing odd about that...
...How conventional to tell them they would be better off writing bad books (a veritable industry among Women's Movement leaders) or running advertising agencies or being vice presidents in charge of anything for any company that will pay them a salary...
...Moreover, if we accept the proposition that women alone can truly represent women, then consistency requires us to go on to maintain that only housewives can represent housewives, and so forth, in which case the functionaries of now speak for a very small band indeed...
...Betty Friedan and her allies are calling for renewed emphasis on "mainstream" issues...
...Exploitation...
...A list of the causes they serve would easily overflow these pages...
...They are strikingly similar to the McGovernites of 1972, for they are both unrepresentative of the larger group they purport to speak for, and in many ways at odds with it...
...But if a person is out to form any sort of political movement, or is trying to get through a constitutional amendment, contempt is not a profitable attitude...
...What wonder that many female voters responded positively to anti-ERA pamphlets which asked, "Did you know that a vote for ERA is a vote against the family...
...The notion of a movement explicitly reaching into individuals' lives and attempting to transform them in accord with some larger scheme is inherently troubling...
...None of this has much to do with ERA perhaps, but ERA has paid the price of the campaign waged for it by its friends...
...The stalling of the campaign for a Federal constitutional amendment on equal rights of the sexes, the severe defeat of state equal rights amendments (ERAs) in New York and New Jersey, and the unusual publicity given to open divisions within the National Organization for Women (now) show us where the action is...
...The questions that today remain most unsettled are those dividing women from women...
...These are fruitful areas of exploration for men as well as women...
...In particular, the feminist firebrands directed their fire at the family as the chief imprisoning institution...
...Still, it seems never to have occurred to the ideologists who drew up this picture of the family that it might not be a total picture, and that the women whose lives they believed they were describing and whose cause they believed they were championing might find offense in it...
...they make hospitals more humane places...
...You can't abolish child labor or institute public education or give aid to unwed mothers without affecting family life...
...Well, who is being radical here, and who is being conventional...
...It seems never to have occurred to the most vocal feminists that other women might take umbrage at being informed their lives were a sham and a waste...
...Countless women across the country are engaged in activities vastly more rewarding personally and more useful socially than those their husbands must give their lives to...
...they need to be pondered and discussed...
Vol. 58 • December 1975 • No. 25
