Women's Lib: A Second Look

To Critic Irving Howe, the book is "a farrago of blunders, distortions, vulgarities and plain nonsense," and its author is guilty of "historical reductionism," "crude simplification," "middleclass parochialism," "sexual monism," "methodological sloppiness," "arrogant ultimatism" and "comic ignorance." Howe's attack seemed certain to stir up an unholy war between the sexes. For it was directed against both the bible and the high priestess of the Women's Liberation movement: Sexual Politics and its author, Kate Millett.

Howe was not alone. Last week, while Kate and her allies were girding themselves for a new equality strike on Dec. 12, other critics were also dissecting both book and movement. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger, Harper's Editor Midge Decter, Janet Malcolm in the New Republic, and Esquire Writer Helen Lawrenson raised some provocative questions. Can the feminists think clearly? Do they know anything about biology? What about their maturity, their morality, their sexuality? Ironically, Kate Millett herself contributed to the growing skepticism about the movement by acknowledging at a recent meeting that she is bisexual. The disclosure is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause, cast further doubt on her theories, and reinforce the views of those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians.

Female Impersonator. Howe was unaware of Kate's confession when he reviewed Sexual Politics for Harper's, but he nevertheless sensed a sexual ambiguity in its author. Kate, he writes, "shows very little warmth toward women and very little awareness of their experience. There are times one feels the book was written by a female impersonator."

What bothers Howe even more is Kate's "lack of intellectual sophistication," betrayed, he says, by her "dominating obsession" with the idea that all male-female differences except anatomical ones are culturally rather than biologically determined. Besides, he continues, she maligns Freud when she brands him a counterrevolutionary whose theories set back the cause of women's freedom. On the contrary, Howe believes, Freud's ideas paved the way for today's concern about sex roles. He tried to free women from "subordination to domineering fathers," and to help them like themselves as women. That, says Howe, is not necessarily the same as trying to make them stay in the kitchen.

Masters and Chattels. Though he admits that women have been exploited, Howe points out that men have, too, and in the same way: as members of disadvantaged classes rather than as members of one sex or the other. Moreover, "males may have been 'masters' and females 'chattels,' but this is perhaps the only such relationship in human history where the 'masters' sent themselves and their sons to die in wars while trying to spare their 'chattels.' "

Howe has nothing but scorn for the Millett assertion that only men have human work to do. Asks he: "Is the poor bastard writing soap jingles performing a 'human' task morally or psychologically superior to what his wife does at home, where she can at least reach toward an uncontaminated relationship with her own child?"

Why, Howe asks, "cannot intelligent and humane people look upon sexual differences as a source of pleasure?" From Sexual Politics, "you would never know that there are families where men and women work together in a reasonable approximation of humanness, fraternity and even equality."

That equality might be more easily attainable, says Lionel Tiger* in a recent New York Times article, if feminists recognized biology. No one can avoid the fact that menstruation appears to make a difference. In one study cited by Tiger, girls taking exams just before their periods earned grades 14% to 15% lower than was usual for them. Other studies show that 46% of female admissions to mental hospitals come in the seven to eight days before menstruation. So do 53% of women's suicide attempts and 49% of crimes committed by women.

When society accepts this difference, Tiger suggests, it can minimize the effects. How? By adjusting exams and work time (the flying time of women pilots, for example) "to the realities of female experience." When feminists ignore biology, claims Tiger, they may make it harder for women to compete for scholarships, jobs, graduate school entry and other prerequisites of wealth and status.

Refusal to Grow Up. To Midge Decter, writing in Commentary, the feminist's problem is her refusal to grow up: "To judge from what she says and does--finding only others at fault for her predicaments, speaking always of herself as a means of stating the general case, shedding tears as a means of negotiation--the freedom she seeks is a freedom demanded by children and enjoyed by no one: the freedom from all difficulty."

According to Journalist Decter (who is 43, married, and the mother of four children), the liberated woman, with most of men's options open to her, has found work less interesting and sex less fun than she had hoped. By her very discontent with what most men find rewarding, she has proved herself different from men. But to this she is blind; in Women's Lib she has created a "culture of dissatisfaction," and she has found someone to blame--men.

Women are not men's victims, Editor Decter says. Both sexes have the same freedom: "To make certain choices and take the consequences." A feminist need not be a "sexual object." Instead, she may remain chaste, "thereby restoring to herself that uniquely feminine power over men which many women so cavalierly make light of in the struggle for equality."

What concerns Janet Malcolm is feminine power over children. In the New Republic, she raises a moral issue: "From feminists' writings, one gathers that the claims of children are incompatible with the rights of women, and that it is the children, being the less important of the two, who must be sacrificed." Liberationists writing about children remind her of Playboy authors writing about women: "There is the same condescension and tendency to see the child as an object rather than as a person."

Writer Malcolm considers togetherness "vulgar and stupid," but she warns that feminism "may be an even more invidious cause of unhappiness and discontent." It may well be, if some of its extreme tenets are adopted. But chances are that society will heed only the movement's legitimate demands. All the rest--motivated by what Helen Lawrenson calls the "splenetic frenzy of hatred for men" voiced by "these sick, silly creatures"--is likely to remain unacceptable to all but the sickest and the silliest.

* Who first rebutted Sexual Politics in an interview published in TIME'S cover story on Kate Millett (Aug. 31).

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