Liberation Ladies
Robertson, Priscilla
Liberation Ladies Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in America, by William L. O'Neill. Quadrangle Books. 369 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson Women have been demanding...
...In short, does equality necessarily mean total individualism, or can it be achieved within a social structure where all units don't perform exactly interchangeably...
...To mine coal...
...BARTON J. BERNSTEIN, associate professor of history at Stanford, edited "Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History...
...Or does it mean protections that will tend to equalize women's special health and financial burdens...
...Such, today, is the lack of advancement for women who do equal work with men and arc not promoted so fast or so far, and also perhaps the fact that there are a smaller proportion of women college professors and doctors than there were fifty years ago...
...Perhaps equality signifies an equal right to have sex without pregnancy...
...Some women have thought pregnancy an insult, while others find in it the fulfillment of their deepest desires—and equality would mean something very different for these two types...
...Legislation about hours of work and types of dangerous employment...
...This was the period when women were idealized at home but protected from the outside world into which their men had rather precipitately moved as a result of the industrial revolution...
...The last thing this reviewer wants to be is a traitor to her sex...
...Reviewed by Priscilla Robertson Women have been demanding equality with men for a hundred years, but no one in all that time has ever come up with a satisfactory definition of what equality between the sexes might mean...
...MICHAEL P. ROGIN is associate professor of political science at the University of California in Berkeley...
...True partnership became rarer...
...Maternity allowances...
...Still, even though no one knows for certain what equality should or can mean, some conditions obviously imply injustice and unfairness...
...Quadrangle will publish his new book, "Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration," this spring...
...Out of a similar period of retreat into the home following World War II, comes the Woman's Liberation Front today...
...For one thing, women in the middle ranks of our society often have more freedom to choose their way of life, to plan their time to suit themselves, and to undertake various kinds of commitments than their breadwinning men...
...PAUL H. DOUGLAS, economist and former U.S...
...Out of this came the first feminine revolt...
...To become President...
...It is quite clear, for instance, that in the Eighteenth Century women took active roles in social and intellectual life which were rather suddenly cramped by the domesticity which fell on Europe and America in the first third of the Nineteenth Century...
...But surely when anyone gets pregnant, it is going to be the woman, and that fact in itself somehow upsets the equation...
...Such, in the Nineteenth Century, was the lack of suffrage...
...In Everyone Was Brave William L. O'Neill has written a history of "the rise and fall of feminism in America" which is the first study to recognize that there was a "fall"—that feminism in any broad sense did not triumph when the vote was won...
...Of course women's rights are often betrayed from within, by periodic retreats from militancy into domesticity...
...PRISCILLA ROBERTSON, a former editor of The Humanist, teaches history and humanities at Kentucky Southern College...
...THE REVIEWERS OTIS L. GRAHAM, JR., associate professor of history at the University of California in Santa Barbara, wrote "Encore for Reform: the Old Progressives and the New Deal...
...Besides being provocative in its thesis, O'Neill's book is both scholarly and interesting, with full accounts (all rather lively) of the early feminist organizations and short biographies (livelier still) of the chief ladies of the movement...
...Does it mean an equal chance to do everything...
...Or are these infringements of their right to freedom of choice...
...Although "everyone was brave" in that early period, no one was profound enough to come to grips with either the family system, or the economic system, and O'Neill makes clear that if women want to become truly free, both systems must be shaken to the roots...
...Such an attitude is, of course, anathema to the new militant feminists of today...
...As I say, this seems obvious, but the upholders of the established male position have never responded reasonably to the obvious, and this has turned feminists to disillusionment and eventually to frenzy...
...Only socialism, with its wide public assistance for the various crises in women's lives, can answer women's economic needs, and this is why, he tells us, women today are much farther along in the socialist countries of northern Europe like Sweden, and even England...
...Senator from Illinois, wrote "America in the Market Place" and "Ethics in Government...
...But in fact I have always found the advantages of being female at least as great as its disadvantages...
...Now that women's liberation is moving into the center of the news again, anyone interested in it would do well to review the background, the perspective, and the lessons of this portion of America's past...
Vol. 34 • March 1970 • No. 3
