Women's Lib

Sir: Women's Lib [Aug. 31]--phooey! They are only leading us to Orwell's 1984, where men and women are such equals that life is sterile and children are reared by the state in nurseries away from their parents. Brrr. That's not for me.

A lot of our nation's problems, financial and social, are due, in part, to women leaving home to take jobs and compete with men instead of devoting their time and energy to the really important jobs of wife and mother. If all those "Libs" were married to the "right man" and were blessed with children, then they would find the most rewarding, completely full life possible. I feel sorry for them all.

(MRS.) BONNIE J. HUGHES

San Gabriel, Calif.

Sir: All (woman) power to dear Abby Adams! After only 194 years, her wise advice on the necessity for feminine equality is getting the attention it deserves.

But your editors (overwhelmingly masculine?) missed the timeliest quote of all. "Whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations," she wrote her Congressman husband, "you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. You must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard; very liable to be broken."

Right on, Abigail.

JANE F. DETMOLD

New London, Conn.

Sir: What is puzzling is the fallacy that women are the gentler sex. On the contrary, women have always been associated with violence. Hurricanes bear feminine names, and a warship is referred to as "she." The long-range gun that shelled Paris in World War I was called "Big Bertha." Even in nature, it is the lioness that makes the kill.

BENJAMIN ROSEN

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Sir: I am the wife of a business executive, mother of five children aged nine to 21, and manager, with only part-time cleaning help, of a large twelve-room house. I do all my own cooking, entertain fairly frequently and have the usual assortment of suburban-mother-type chores (assistant den mother, vice president of the League of Women Voters, active on the citizens' committee on the schools, etc.). In addition, I manage to hold a half-time position as instructor in sociology at Long Island University in Brooklyn, 41 miles away.

So who the hell is Male Chauvinist Hugh Geyer calling lazy?

(MRS.) MARY JEAN TULLY

Armonk, N.Y.

Sir: Sisters--don't give up one form of slavery in favor of yet another; resist the draft!

FRED NIEVEEN BREUKELMAN

Dover, Del.

Sir: It's time that TIME liberated us too. How about a Woman of the Year?

(MRS.) VALERIE K. FLYNN

Syosset, N.Y.

> The Duchess of Windsor held that title in 1936; Madame Chiang Kai-shek shared the honor with her husband in 1937; Queen Elizabeth II was chosen in 1952.

Host Without Guilt

Sir: Despite the protestations of youth [Aug. 17], as a member of the Establishment I refuse to have personal or group guilt feelings. We, too, abhor war and would prefer love and peace, but do Red China and the U.S.S.R. allow us to pursue such noble desires? We, too, are against hunger, poor housing, discrimination and poor medical care, but aren't we the ones who pay the taxes, contribute to charities and hire and help the minorities? We also approve of sex and love, even though the fire burns less furiously, and we supply the youth with the Pill, facilities for safe abortions and medical care for their rapidly increasing rate of venereal disease. Why is the parasite so angry at the host?

ARTHUR M. GREENE, M.D.

Omaha

Sir: I am a longtime admirer of your excellent reportage in other fields, but your coverage of youth leaves virtually everything to be desired.

While you devote most of your space to the Woodstock crowd, you frequently mention the existence of young Nixonites and Wallaceites, and on special occasions you even hint that there are a few scattered wishy-washy moderates.

For all your seeming sophistication, you seem unaware of the attitudes of a majority of our generation. There are among us: pacifists who don't give a damn about ecology, right-wing hippies, speed-freak bigots, Agnew fans who want marijuana legalized, and crew-cut political radicals.

It is quite possible to dislike Ronald Reagan and Jerry Rubin equally, to smoke grass and not feel we have to bomb banks, and to enjoy Hair but still go to church once in a while. We are neither boy scouts nor demonstrators, goody-goodies nor political prisoners. We are liberals and conservatives and reactionaries and radicals. Because we don't fit into the molds you have fashioned, we have somehow escaped notice in the mad rush to publicize youth today.

MARK MCCONVILLE

Camarillo, Calif.

Sir: Author Wilfrid Sheed, in the recently published Max Jamison, commented most appropriately when he said: "I am not against youth as such. They are wonderfully teachable. But that they should be teaching us; that we should invest them with oracular powers, read into their shrugs and moans some great gnostic wisdom--this is an American superstition so crass that one scarcely knows where to begin with it."

ALIDA C. KRATNOFF

North Bergen, N.J.

All About Angela

Sir: Re your reference to Angela Davis' "brilliance" [Aug. 24]: I have only to cite the evaluation of her teaching conducted by the Philosophy Department of U.C.L.A., which found her qualifications "adequate but not exceptional."

Concerning her fight for academic freedom, I find it strange that she is unwilling to allow anyone else to exercise this right (some would probably call it a privilege). She has repeatedly stated that academic freedom is meaningless unless it promotes political and social freedom; very good. But when asked if she herself would extend this freedom to include those of the political right, or those who hold views opposed to hers, she has stated that "there is no place for the fascists or demagogues who aim at control and further enslavement." On another occasion, when she was asked to discuss or debate a point with a graduate student who was opposed to her violent tactics, she refused and said, "Why debate an issue that has only one correct side?"

These seem rather strange--or at least out of place--statements from one so involved in gaining academic freedom.

GUY-VINCENT DE PAUL

Los Angeles

Speakin' o' Art

Sir: TIME'S article on tobacco spitting [Aug. 17] appears to treat the subject as a novelty outside of Raleigh, Miss. That it is an established art is evidenced by a quotation from our beloved Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley: "Speakin' o' art --I know a feller over t' Terry Haute 'at kin spit clean over a box car."

Should your article be criticized, there is also a quotation from John Steinbeck: "In art the subject upon which you concentrate is unimportant, it is only the quality of your concentration that counts."

GEORGE E. TALMAGE

Indianapolis

A Second Look

Sir: Congratulations on your excellent coverage of the Treaty of Moscow [Aug. 17]. As plans for a European security conference are being formulated, Germany is leading still another attempt to unify Europe--peacefully this time, of course, and politically and economically as well--through the expansion of the Common Market. It is clear that Europe is pulling away from American influence and intends to stand apart from both superpowers.

Perhaps this is all to the good, but we would do well to look again at the history of German-Russian peace treaties and the world-shattering events that followed them.

A.A. ARMSTRONG

Denver

Sacred Symbol

Sir: Harold Hothan "jeered and booed" when the Czech waiter flashed a Nixon-Agnew button [Aug. 24]. To that waiter, a slave in a slave state, that button was a sacred symbol of free elections, free speech, free trade, free minds and private property. It was a symbol, to him, of life worth living. When Harold jeered that button, he jeered not Nixon and Agnew but the nation and the concept of America. The waiter literally risked his life to show Harold that button, and all he did was jeer at it and at him. Harold Hothan sickens me.

WENCESLAUS ANDRUSZKIEWICZ JR.

Buffalo

Mod Martyrdom

Sir: Father Daniel Berrigan [Aug. 24] does not impress me. Someone who knowingly and deliberately breaks the law and then tries to evade the consequences of his actions is not a man of principle--he is a vandal. The moral force of his opposition to laws that he considers unjust comes when he accepts the responsibility and the consequences of his actions. As Thoreau stated in Civil Disobedience: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

Unfortunately principle and moral force are not the determining factors in modern-day martyrdom; media coverage is.

DAVID R. STONE

Lima, Peru

Man the Beast

Sir: Your informative account of the current cholera epidemic--not yet, mercifully, a "pandemic" [Aug. 31]--would have been still more informative if you had not been so nasty-nice-Nellie in talking about "waste-contaminated water supplies." I know you can't use the usual four-letter word--though what's wrong with "dung"? But the fact is that cholera bacilli multiply only in human (not animal) intestines. To carry cholera, water supplies must be contaminated by human fecal matter, or, if you prefer another bowdlerism, human excrement. If man would stop drinking and washing in the water into which he defecates, there would be no more cholera. The disease may be 80% to 90% curable, but it is 100% preventable--if people were not such filthy beasts.

GEORGE CROZIER

Manhattan

A Couple of Cards

Sir: Naturally we were very pleased that TIME chose to illustrate an item on California's population problems [July 27] with one of the "PotShots" postcards created, copyrighted and published by this company, even if you didn't give us any credit for it. Lest it be thought, however, that in saying, "It's really quite a simple choice: life, death or Los Angeles," we have despaired of California altogether, let me point out that there is another card in the same series that says, "There may be no heaven anywhere, but somewhere there is a San Francisco."

ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT

President

Brilliant Enterprises

San Francisco

War May Be Injurious

Sir: Your readers are correct. It is deplorable that U.S. Senators have purchased TV time to advocate peace [Aug. 24]. I strongly suggest that these Senators and the "Advertising People Against the War" take action to have the Federal Communications Commission order all broadcasters to give free and equal time for messages about peace to match all those that they have carried for the Government for a half-century as "public services"--messages in behalf of military recruiting, war efforts, reserve units, etc.

After all, if the FCC has forced the electronic media to carry messages against cigarettes because of the suspected link between smoking and disease and death, why not compel them to admit that war, too, may be injurious to human health?

PATRICK E. LEE

Great Falls, Mont.

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