Came the Revolution

THE REVOLT OF AMERICAN WOMEN (224 pp.)--Oliver Jensen--Harcourf, Brace ($6).

In the same year that Marx & Engels published their Communist Manifesto (1848), a group of women met in Seneca Falls, N.Y., pondered their discontents, and issued a manifesto of their own. "The history of mankind," it said, "is a history of repeated injuries . . . toward woman." The downtrodden of Seneca Falls resolved to turn woman's wrongs into Woman's Rights. Moreover, the same sort of female revolt was getting under way all over Christendom.

Queen Victoria called it a "mad, wicked folly," and was not amused. But male observers, then and later, have been both amused and convinced. The latest, Oliver Jensen, lets the camera make his sharpest comment for him. His picture history, The Revolt of American Women, chronicles more than half a century of rapid change which carried the female of the U.S. species "from bloomers to Bikini--from feminism to Freud." In text and captions, Author Jensen shines up an old masculine brief to new brightness, i.e., that the fight for equality began as a war between the sexes and ended up as a civil war within modern woman's psyche.

Ironically, the granddaughter of the girl who stamped into a business office as her right, says Author Jensen, is often stranded behind a typewriter out of necessity. While winning elbowroom at the men's bar, she has lost her seat in the subway. Where the advance-guard girl once fought to get into college and out of corsets, she now fights to stay out of the divorce courts and off the analyst's couch But most of Author Jensen's photos go back to the days when the U.S. woman was just trying on her "new freedom" as she might try on a new hat.

In one shot from the 1880s, three bustled and beskirted ladies skip rope, flashing a daring inch of petticoat. In another decade, bicycling was the craze, as Author Jensen illustrates, though the Boston Women's Rescue League warned that 30% of all fallen women had at some time been bicycle riders. After a "long night in armor," a 1910 gym picture shows a bevy of union-suited beauties straining at pushups, pulleys and punching bags. In another 1910 photograph, Julia Ward Howe, at the age of 91, is being wheeled to a suffrage drive to recite her Battle Hymn of the Republic. Behind her stands Socialite Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, who once bucked up a despairing suffragette with some super-feminism: "Call on God, my dear, She will help you."* Quicker than the eyes of the women who lived through it, the camera catches the maid, the chaperone and the iceman going, the flapper, the fox trot and the facial cocktail coming.

Author Jensen ends his picture parade in the middle of a counterrevolution with Psychiatrist Marynia Farnham calling women "the lost sex," Philip Wylie calling "mom" a "jerk," and another critic jabbing at modern women who "regard their husbands not as mates, or men, or even mice, but as mats." But even if modern woman heeds her modern critics and beats a retreat for home, warns Author Jensen, she will never again make it her only beat.

*A quotation which Adlai Stevenson used for a laugh in a campaign speech.

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