RAGE OR RECONCILIATION?

...The catch is that the work-world in which so many women now find themselves may not be much better, and in some ways is worse...

...Men also suffer from these conflicts, Friedan reminds us, and increasing numbers are now trying to work out new ways of living that can combine satisfying personal and work lives...

...The fears that have found expression in "pro-family, pro-life" slogans are ones that feminists should understand and come to terms with, says Friedan, lest women destroy themselves in the hostile sex-role polarization the times have encouraged...

...Oakley has undertaken so much that she ends on a note of muddled confusion...

...The majority of women in clerical and service jobs enjoy precious few outlets for personal expression and creativity...

...Flextime" that allows for shorter and less rigid hours on the job and housing that promotes communal sharing are needed by men as well as women—and can benefit business and society generally...

...City apartment-living and office jobs may offer financial and spiritual freedom, but this life too can be lonely and unfulfilling...

...First, conservatives savaged her for leading women out into the streets and single-handedly breaking up the American family...

...Her first book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, jarred many women into the realization that housework and raising children weren't all there was, or could be, to life...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer, peace activist, and mother of two teen-age daughters...

...And why conceal specific support for lesbian or abortion rights behind a facade of togetherness with the Moral Majority...

...They have traded the "feminine mystique," says Friedan, for the "feminist mystique...

...Militant feminists are urged to quiet their rage, ally with men and even "pro-family" forces, and appreciate the pleasures of bearing and raising children—or some sort of family life...

...Oakley ends her voluminous work by turning to science fiction for a vision of the future: "The rise of the second sex demands a new language and new structures of thought to gestate a completely different society," she writes...

...What few gains women have made, Friedan's critics say, have been due to women's militancy—and the world is still run by men...

...but it is also true to say that women have conspired among themselves to deny men the rights of full citizenship in a female world____" A bit like blaming the victim for the patterns of survival she has perforce devised...

...some argue that women haven't come so far that they can let, down their guard...

...Everyone needs some sort of family, says Friedan, and even conservatives recognize that the definition of this unit—this small personal community that has some claim on every healthy person—is undergoing great change...

...Even those with busy professional careers often feel robbed of a personal life, or torn and frustrated by the effort to juggle family responsibilities with successful careers...

...Friedan advocates a de-emphasis of abortion and "sexual preferences" so that feminists can win the support of moderates prepared to think better of choosing to have children, and to tolerate sexual differences that are not flaunted and family-threatening...

...To describe it is an act of fiction...

...She would work with established systems as she would with conservatives and moderate "pro-life, pro-family" groups to win acceptance of— or at least respect for—feminist/humanist views...

...Friedan's faith that this less combative approach will achieve more for women than the old stance of defiant rage is not shared by all feminists...

...now militant feminists are coming down hard on her for compromising with reaction and trying to lead women back into subjugation...

...But Oakley, a British scholar and author of several books about women's condition, has obviously worked so hard researching her ambitious and informative study that one can only wish her well and urge libraries to stock Subject Women for reference...

...Friedan's assessment of the feminist order of battle—where women are now and where they ought to be—is much more readable, pragmatic, and humane...

...Supportive examples cited from female-written science fiction—of "hermaphroditic individuals who experience a cyclical sexual potency" and "a world in which women have yielded childbearing to humanly kept machines in order to humanize men"—are not reassuring...

...Oakley and Friedan are in accord on the necessity of women and men working out more equitable ways of getting on with each other and the world...

...For conservatives who may, one hopes, read The Second Stage, Friedan's message is that women are probably in the paid work force to stay, out of both physical and psychological necessity, and it is to everyone's benefit that all join the fight for equal pay and benefits and safe legal access to every kind of family planning...

...Why work within systems inherently patriarchal and violent...

...The Second Stage has already been excerpted and discussed widely...

...What is new in the past century, especially in the United States since the first wave of feminism receded after the vote was won, is the much-talked-about "nuclear" family of breadwinner, housewife, two children, dog, cat, and private house stocked with gadgets meant to "liberate" the housewife, or at least make her housework more "scientific...

...But, withal, she seems blithely optimistic about the prospects of changing these preeminent male institutions from the inside...

...Super-woman is now advised to relax, cool her ca-reerism, and enjoy and share family life more...

...The degree to which the world is male-dominated is charted and graphed profusely in Ann Oakley's Subject Women, subtitled "Where Women Stand Today Politically, Economically, Socially, Emotionally...

...Now that women make up almost half the paid work force, smoke more than men, and suffer stress symptoms that usually hit males, Friedan, in The Second Stage, questions the lemming-like rush into the male work-world and suggests that that is not "all" either...

...Extended families, shared child-rearing, "flextime," communal kitchens, and other man-woman-child arrangements have sprung up throughout history in various forms and cultures...

...The old "masculine" Alpha style that characterizes both capitalist and communist hierarchies is giving way to the more "feminine" Beta style of flexibility and consideration of individual feelings and differences, in commerce and even in the military, as Friedan illustrates in a chapter that draws on an interesting visit to West Point...

...Friedan looks to alliances with men, to Beta work techniques and expanded "family" sharing of shelter and attendant responsibilities...

...While this more human Beta style makes for better feelings and more efficiency, Friedan says, the military may be no place for anyone to be, and the capitalist corporation may be inherently exploitative and undemocratic—or so she seems to say...

...Many women, they point out, are barely into the "first stage...

...This early Twentieth Century dream turned into the hard mid-century reality of isolation and confinement which made increasing numbers of housewives envy their "working" sisters...

...The task she appears to have set for herself is to document ways, degrees, and places in which women have been subjugated, yet toward the end of her book she writes, "It may be true that certain socio-economic groups have conspired to oppress women, and that a key conspiracy has been a contraction of the feminist vision to the formula of equal rights in a masculine world...

...Friedan's concluding proposals for new kinds of families and communities are intriguing and promising, although they are not really "new...

...I hope it will be as thoughtfully read as it is vociferously debated...

...Poor Betty Friedan...

...Friedan suggests in her new book that feminism is at a "second stage," one of reconciliation and new beginnings...