A FOND FAREWELL
Barth, Ramona
A Fond Farewell By RAMONA BARTH CONTRARY to Edith Wynner, who is "shocked" to find The Progressive publishing a "Farewell to Feminism" article, I feel we women, regardless of whether we are...
...We've had a century agitating for her needs as a "person...
...In defense of my "Farewell to Feminism," I conclude, with President White of Mills College, that "American feminism has achieved much...
...It was the strong, independent personalities of their mates, as well as the great and noble crusade they led, which appealed to them...
...Some of the barriers Carrie and her cohorts labelled as artificial we now know are natural...
...I'm grateful, too...
...How can you talk so glibly about that "happy marriage," Edith...
...As for their being "perverted" and "vicious," these are your words, Edith, not mine...
...I'm^ interested in producing better mothers, better women...
...the number of babies they had doesn't automatically exempt them), she emotes as strongly as the DAR women would if I insisted George Washington told a lie...
...The titles of my published tributes would make Edith beam: Lucy Stone: Crusader for Human RAMONA BARTH has written and lectured widely on feminism and pioneers in the feminist movement...
...She needs to realize her femininity as well as to own property in her own name, or serve on juries, or get equal pay for equal work, or any of the rest of the litany of the Women's Party-liners...
...A Fond Farewell By RAMONA BARTH CONTRARY to Edith Wynner, who is "shocked" to find The Progressive publishing a "Farewell to Feminism" article, I feel we women, regardless of whether we are homebodies or careerists, owe the magazine a vote of thanks...
...Incidentally, in Educating Out Daughters, Lynn White, Jr., contends, "To assume that cooking is any more elementary than the study of literature merely demonstrates a boorish Anglo-Saxon attitude towards food, unworthy of a civilized person...
...what women think they want...
...Please, Edith, stop taking pops at my daughter's crusty-crunchy homemade honey oatmeal bread...
...If singing the praises of integrated womanhood puts me in the same bed with the preacher or poet of the gay '90s, I've the company of Dorothy Thompson, who says, "If I had a daughter I would tell her that marriage is a career in itself...
...But I refuse to make Sunday School saints out of any of them, as Edith does...
...We need to re-read Woman in the 19th Century and Mary Wool-stonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and get some seasoned ideas for a new feminism...
...Granted Aunt Susan and the prim Lucretia Mott met, with rare dignity, the hymn books and rotten eggs aimed as their heads—others didn't...
...As for the suffrage girls "liberating the human race without shedding a drop of blood or destroying a foot of property," I say, "Sentimental rot...
...She is the author of "Fiery Angelt The Life of Florence Nightingale...
...Property was destroyed, blood was shed, and lives were lost when the irate British women, on foot, and the British tommies, on horseback, clashed...
...Edith Wynner is emotionally identified with the feminists, and when I contend that Susan B. Anthony was a victim of "masculine protest" along with Lizzie Stanton and Lucy Stone (of course I'd include them...
...Susan B. and her lifelong sidekick, Liz Stanton, were tied together by a mental Lesbian relationship as well as by a great cause—a bond so strong that Henry Stanton periodically packed up his bags and left home...
...But I concluded in 1948—and said so in The Nation —that we need to re-evaluate the lives of the feminists and the whole feminist movement in light of modern psychiatric knowledge...
...The market has been glutted with the Robert Ruarks and the Phil Wylies ranting about our girdles and our sag...
...what are women's psychic as well as legal needs...
...what they really want...
...It's a far cry from the day when women let their eight loaves of homemade bread cool on the hearth to the day when we take a half loaf out of the deep freeze...
...Why be so touchy about airing some of the interesting emotional nuances of the "founding mothers...
...Carrie Nation wasn't the only aggressive female in this country who wielded a hatchet during the suffrage storm...
...Meanwhile, while waiting for that Utopia, am I supposed to bash my brains out and find no enjoyment in my own kitchen...
...the answer was that only some 65% of the women polled would stick to their sex, as opposed to 91.5% of the men...
...And I agree with White that "under the surface of the seeming freedom which women enjoy in the U. S. is in the hearts of millions of them a strange sense of bondage...
...I'm interested in an answer to Fortune's question put to a sampling of men and women: "If you could be born over again would you rather be a man or a woman...
...For a decade I could see no wrong either in the feminist or the fight she staged...
...I'm interested, in short, in those millions of women who are not barren and who have husbands to support them who refuse to recognize or realize their fundamental creative role of motherhood—or who, if they do, run from sterilizing bottles to their typewriters, from diaper-washing to their easels, feeling guilty at each that they aren't at the other...
...Hysterical" and "ranting" though I am—according to friend Edith— my "case history" should nevertheless shed some light on that more general conclusion arrived at by psychiatrist Marynia F. Farnham (is she a quack...
...I've stood on the foundations of castles in England "burned to the ground" by the "gentle" suffrage girls...
...In an era in which the "staff of life" has been reduced to a crutch by the milling and baking industries, it's well worth bragging about, and eating...
...Were you there...
...Now, thanks to The Progressive, we're hitting some basic issues on "the woman problem...
...Rights...
...the women who will never marry...
...It is impossible not to see that the feminists themselves were motivated by belligerence and a deep-seated hatred of men as well as by the noble desire to free their suffering sisters...
...It was a crusade founded on the "dogma" of women's complete subjection to man—"one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind," according to Mary R. Beard...
...But I'm interested too, even though there are no Women's Bureau statistics to bear me out, in that "quarter of the women in the U. S."—so designated by Margaret Mead—"who are disturbed, articulately, definitely disturbed about their lot . . . as women...
...III In my new feminism, I'll plead fundamentally for a recognition of women's basic needs as women...
...IV The truth is that, along with Negroes and sharecroppers, we women are in bondage, a kind of bondage Edith Wynner doesn't understand...
...The butcher-baker-candlestick maker days are over...
...Of course we need them, not only for factory women but for the "underprivileged" white collar strata to which I belong...
...Aren't they great enough to be allowed a few weaknesses...
...We need to listen to current writers like Harrison Smith of The Saturday Review of Literature who pleads for a new feminism "based not on a jealousy of men and an attempt to be their rivals...
...I believe that it is time in the middle of the century which Bebel called "the woman's century" to take inventory: what women have...
...Lucretia Mott: The Soul of the Woman's Movement...
...It's time for "a new feminism," with the broad philosophical stand of a Margaret Fuller, whose influence, if it had been felt, might have given the feminist crusade a new direction...
...Her articles have appeared in American Family, Parents, The Nation, Reader's Digest, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Post...
...The feminist leaders, however I may "vilify" them, have made their niche in history...
...Barth received her Bachelor of Science degree from Tufts College, her Bachelor of Divinity from the University of Chicago, and pursued special studies at the University of Munich, the University of London, and Harvard...
...II No, the feminists were not "holier than thou"—nor was the feminist movement...
...Susan B. Anthony: She Won the Rights We Take for Granted...
...Susan B. Anthony's bust, along with Lucretia Mott's and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's, has been accorded a place of honor in the crypt of our Capitol—a memorial I'll show my daughter on one of our trips when our two infants get a little bigger...
...It's interesting to see Edith push Margaret off the stage just as the narrow-minded feminists did literally during the fight...
...As Mary R. Beard keenly observes, the feminist movement provided "the satisfaction of a fight for women possessing great physical energy and oratorical power...
...Obviously, my "Farewell to Feminism" (I refuse to call it retreat or retrogression) makes me a striking target for today's fanatical feminist...
...the women whose husbands will be killed in war and who will have to bake bread for money instead of for the light in their man's eye...
...Of course women can't go home again, and few of them will produce colonial-sized families like mine...
...Woman needs to be a biological as well as a mental being...
...The full impact of Freud has been felt since the "Votes for Wimin" gals stood up on their soapboxes...
...My new feminism will recognize the strong "oral" component to the true "mothering" aspect of women, as well as the well-warranted plea of Edith Wyn-ner, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman before her, for communal nurseries and dining rooms...
...Of course I'm interested in the millions of women who work because they have to and need human consideration irrespective of their sex...
...who, from her study of thousands of women, contends, "Feminism is the unsuccessful attempt to the necessary readjustment of women in the machine age...
...That's a credo for a new feminism, as is Agnes E. Meyer's contention, "Modern woman has to recapture the wisdom that just being a woman is her central task and her greatest honor...
...Is that "stopping" the woman's revolution—or giving it new direction...
...We have learned a lot since Carrie Chapman Catt (like Edith, I've sat reverently at her feet) defined feminism as "the world-wide movement of revolt against all artificial barriers which stand between woman and human freedom...
...I think it's time to analyze our "strange sense of bondage" and free the next generation, if not ourselves, from it...
...Henry Blackwell and John Stuart Mill, who weren't aggressive enough to take such issue with their strong, dominating wives, were, in psychiatric parlance, "effeminate" men...
Vol. 15 • June 1951 • No. 6
