Where She Is and Where She's Going

There is a tide in the affairs of

women,

Which, taken at the flood, leads --God knows where.

--Byron, Don Juan

BY all rights, the American woman today should be the happiest in history. She is healthier than U.S. women have ever been, better educated, more affluent, better dressed, more comfortable, wooed by advertisers, pampered by gadgets. But there is a worm in the apple. She is restless in her familiar familial role, no longer quite content with the homemaker-wife-mother part in which her society has cast her. Round the land, in rap session and kaffeeklatsch, in the radical-chic salons of Manhattan and the ladies auxiliaries of Red Oak, Iowa, women are trying to define the New Feminism. The vast majority of American women stop far short of activist roles in the feminist movement, but they are affected by it. Many of them are in search of a new role that is more independent, less restricted to the traditional triangle of Kinder, Kueche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church).

The most lordly male chauvinist and all but the staunchest advocate of Women's Liberation agree that woman's place is different from man's. But for the increasingly uncomfortable American woman, it is easier to say what that place is not than what it is.

Most reject the Barbie-doll stereotypical model of woman as staple-naveled Playmate or smiling airline stewardess. Marilyn Goldstein of the Miami Herald caught the feeling well when she wrote about the National Airlines' celebrated "Fly me" advertising campaign: "If God meant men to 'Fly Cheryl,' he would have given her four engines and a baggage compartment."

The New Feminism includes equality with men in the job market and in clubs, though it is not restricted to that. Already, women have invaded countless dens once reserved exclusively for the lion: there are women at McSorley's Old Ale House in New York, women in soapbox derbies and stock car races, women cadets in the Pennsylvania state police. Women have come to protest what seems to them to be the male chauvinism of rock music. An all-female group in Chicago belts out:

Rock is Mick Jagger singing

'Under my thumb, it's all right'

No, Mick Jagger, it's not all right

And it's never gonna be

All right again.

The New Feminism has increasingly influenced young women to stay single, and it has transformed--and sometimes wrecked--marriages by ending once automatic assumptions about woman's place. In the first issue of Ms., New Feminist Gloria Steinem's magazine for the liberated woman, Jane O'Reilly writes of experiencing "a blinding click," a moment of truth that shows men's preemption of a superior role. An O'Reilly example: "In New York last fall, my neighbors--named Jones--had a couple named Smith over for dinner. Mr. Smith kept telling his wife to get up and help Mrs. Jones. Click! Click! Two women radicalized at once." The term Ms. itself, devised as a female honorific that, like Mr., does not reveal marital status, is winning wider acceptance: for example, the Republican National Committee and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission now use it.

American men and women are looking at each other in new ways --and not always liking what they see. Reactions are ambivalent. Men feel threatened; yet sometimes, by marginal amounts, they appear more favorable than women do toward strengthening women's status in society. A Louis Harris poll taken for Virginia Slims cigarettes ("You've come a long way, baby") indicates that men favor women's rights organizations 44% to 39%, whereas women narrowly oppose them (42% to 40%). But unquestionably, consciousness has been raised all around, particularly among the more liberal and better educated. Psychology Today got almost 20,000 replies to a questionnaire that sampled men, women not associated with a women's group and women who were. Of the men, 51% agreed that "U.S. society exploits women as much as blacks." Nongroup women agreed by 63%, group women by 78%.

Second-Class. The New Feminism has touched off a debate that darkens the air with flying rolling pins and crockery. Even Psychology's relatively liberated readers are not exempt. Male letter writer: "As far as Women's Lib is concerned, I think they are all a bunch of lesbians, and I am a male chauvinist and proud of it." Female: "It's better to let them think they're king of the castle, lean and depend on them, and continue to control and manipulate them as we always have."

Activist Kate Millett's scorching Sexual Politics (TIME, Aug. 31, 1970) drew a frenetic reply in Norman Mailer's celebrated Harper's article, "The Prisoner of Sex," which excoriated many of Millett's arguments but concluded in grudging capitulation: "Women must have their rights to a life which would allow them to look for a mate. And there would be no free search until they were liberated." Arthur Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, complained last month: "Now we have women marching in the streets! If only things would quiet down!" Washington Post Co. President Kay Graham left a recent party at the house of an old friend, Columnist Joseph Alsop, because her host insisted upon keeping to the custom of segregating the ladies after dinner. Other social habits are in doubt. A card circulating in one Manhattan singles bar reads: IF

YOU'RE GONNA SAY NO, SAY IT NOW BEFORE I SPEND ALL OF MY GODDAM MONEY ON YOU.

Many currents of social change have converged to make the New Feminism an idea whose time has come. Mechanization and automation have made brawn less important in the marketplace. Better education has broadened women's view beyond home and hearth, heightening their awareness of possibilities--and their sense of frustration when those possibilities are not realized. As Toynbee had noted earlier, middle-class woman acquired education and a chance at a career at the very time she lost her domestic servants and the unpaid household help of relatives living in the old, large family; she had to become either a "household drudge" or "carry the intolerably heavy load of two simultaneous full-time jobs."

A declining birth rate and the fact that women are living increasingly longer--and also longer than men --has meant that a smaller part of women's lives is devoted to bearing and rearing children. The Pill has relieved women of anxiety about unwanted pregnancies.

All of this helped ensure a profound impact for Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. In it, she argued that women lose their identities by submerging themselves in a world of house, spouse and children. The book came just at the height of the civil rights movement in the South; the pressures to give blacks a full place in society inevitably produced a new preoccupation with other second-class citizens. The Viet Nam War also led to far-reaching questions about traditional American assumptions and institutions, to a new awareness of injustice.

First in Wyoming. The 1960s were not the first time in American history that civil rights and feminism were linked. Early American woman was conventionally seen, and conventionally saw herself, as the frontiersman's helpmeet in building the new nation --wife and mother of pioneers. It was the Abolitionist movement before the Civil War that helped get American feminism under way. In working against slavery, women emerged as a political force. The 1848 Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., was the first of several to demand the vote, equal opportunity in jobs and education and an end to legal discrimination based on sex.

The 14th Amendment in 1868 enfranchised blacks, but not women. In 1913 some 5,000 women, many of them bloomer-clad, marched down Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue carrying placards addressed to Woodrow Wilson: MR. PRESIDENT! HOW

LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY? About 200 women were roughed up by unsympathetic bystanders, and 169 were arrested for obstructing traffic in front of the White House. Anger over the shabby treatment of the demonstrators, plus the momentum of state women's suffrage movements--Wyoming in 1890 was the first to enfranchise women--finally got women the vote throughout the U.S. with ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

"The golden psychological moment for women, the moment at which their hopes were highest, was in the 1920s and 1930s, when they won the vote and began to go to college in considerable numbers, with the expectation of entering the professions," says Clare Boothe Luce, politician, diplomat and author. "Women then believed that the battle had been won. They made a brave start, going out and getting jobs." World War II made Rosie the Riveter a figure of folklore, and many women never before in the work force found that they liked the independence gained by working. The postwar reaction was the "togetherness" syndrome of the Eisenhower era, a doomed attempt to confer on suburban motherhood something of the esteem that pioneer women once enjoyed. From the affluent housewife's suicidal despair in J.D. Salinger's "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," it was not far to The Feminine Mystique.

Oddly, women characters have never had a particularly important place in American literature; as a rule they have had smaller roles than in English, Russian or French fiction. In Love and Death in the American Novel, Critic Leslie Fiedler argues that U.S. writers are fascinated by the almost mythological figures of the Fair Maiden and the Dark Lady, but "such complex full-blooded passionate females as those who inhabit French fiction from La Princesse de Cleves through the novels of Flaubert and beyond are almost unknown in the works of our novelists." There are memorable figures, of course: Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, John O'Hara's Grace Caldwell Tate and Gloria Wandrous, Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Steinbeck's Ma Joad, Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara, Nabokov's Lolita, Roth's Sophie Portnoy.

Still, Fiedler finds American writers displaying at least covert hostility to women. Probably none has matched in misogynist invective Philip Wylie's diatribe in Generation of Vipers (1942): "I give you mom. I give you the destroying mother ... I give you the woman in pants, and the new religion: she-popery. I give you Pandora. I give you Proserpine, the Queen of Hell. The five-and-ten-cent-store Lilith, the mother of Cain, the black widow who is poisonous and eats her mate, and I designate at the bottom of your program the grand finale of all soap operas: the mother of America's Cinderella." It is a mark of the wondrous sea change of public attitudes that in a scant three decades Wylie's castrating bitch has become, in much popular mythology if not in fact, part of the wretched of the earth.

Twenty Years Older. Just where is American woman today? In a statistical overview, she is nearly 106 million strong, at the median age 30 and with a bit more than a twelfth-grade education. She is likely to be married (61.5%). She makes up more than a third of the national work force, but according to a Department of Labor survey, she generally has a lower-skilled, lower-paying job than a man does. In many jobs she does not get equal pay for equal work. (Her median earnings have actually declined relative to men.) In a recession she is, like blacks, the first to be fired. Because of the instability of marriage and a growing divorce rate, women head more and more households; 20 million people live in households depending solely on women for support.

As Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his controversial report on black family life, black women tend to be the center of households more often than white women. Black women, interestingly, are more likely to go to college than black men are. According to Christopher Jencks and David Riesman in The Academic Revolution, "Among other things this reflects the fact that at least until recently they have had a better chance than their brothers of getting a professional job once they earned a degree."

Early in 1964, Lyndon Johnson sent out a presidential directive pushing for more women in Government. Only in 1967 did the federal civil services start making full-scale reports on the numbers of women at the upper civil service levels of the U.S. Government. In the top grades, at salary levels beginning at $28,000 a year, 1.6% of the jobs were held by women in 1966 v. 1.5% four years later. Midway in his present term, President Nixon promised to appoint more women, and to that end he created a brand-new position on the White House staff for a full-time recruiter of women. She is Barbara Franklin, 32, a Harvard Business School graduate who was an assistant vice president of New York's First National City Bank. She claims to have more than doubled the number of women in top Government jobs within a year.

But women in Washington seldom scale the highest reaches of power like the National Security Council. There has never been a woman Supreme Court Justice, though both Pat Nixon and Martha Mitchell lobbied for one before Nixon wound up nominating William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell. Only two women have ever sat in the Cabinet: Frances Perkins under F.D.R. and Oveta Culp Hobby under Eisenhower. Ten years ago, there were two women in the U.S. Senate and 18 women Representatives; now there are only Senator Margaret Chase Smith and eleven women in the House. The first woman in Congress, Jeannette Rankin, elected from a Montana constituency in 1916 and still starchy at 91, ventured recently that if she had it to do all over again she would, with just one change: "I'd be nastier."

At the state and local levels, women have yet to make much impression on government. New York is the only state that has a special women's advisory unit reporting to the Governor, but its head, a black ex-newspaperwoman named Evelyn Cunningham, readily confesses: "We're a token agency." There are 63 separate agencies in the New York State government, she notes, and only 13 of them have women in jobs above the rank of secretary. Round the U.S. there are a few women mayors--among them Anna Latteri in Clifton, N.J., Patience Latting in Oklahoma City, Barbara Ackerman in Cambridge, Mass.

The last female state Governor was Lurleen Wallace in Alabama, a stand-in for her husband George, forbidden by the state constitution to succeed himself. (The first: Nellie Tayloe Ross was elected Governor of Wyoming in 1924.) The legislatures of the 50 states have a total membership of more than 7,000--including only 340 women. Few of these women have much influence, though there are stirring exceptions: New York Assembly Member Constance Cook, for example, represents a small upstate county, but led a successful fight for liberalizing the state's abortion law in 1970.

In a man's world, women still have only a ritualized place: they are received regularly and warmly only in woman-centered trades like fashion or in acting. As Clare Luce puts it, "Power, money and sex are the three great American values today, and women have almost no access to power except through their husbands. They can get money mostly through sex--either legitimate sex, in the form of marriage, or nonmarried sex." Sexual freedom is not enough; "what leads to money and power is education and the ability to make money apart from sex."

It is not an easy goal to achieve.

Many women fear it; they want to have their cigarettes lit and their car doors opened for them. Far more seriously, they are afraid that, as working mothers, they simply would not be able to give their children the necessary personal care and attention. Ann Richardson Roiphe, a novelist with five children, worries about the de-emphasis of the family. She has written: "These days I feel a cultural pressure not to be absorbed in my child. Am I a Mrs. Portnoy sitting on the head of her little Alex? I am made to feel my curiosity about the growth of my babies is somehow counterrevolutionary. The new tolerance should ultimately respect the lady who wants to make pies, as well as the one who majors in higher mathematics."

Utopian. In a sense, if the feminist revolution simply wanted to exchange one ruling class for another, if it aimed at outright female domination (a situation that has occurred in science fiction and other fantasies), the goal would be easier to visualize. The demand for equality, not domination, is immensely complicated. True equality between autonomous partners is hard to achieve even if both partners are of the same sex. The careful balancing of roles and obligations and privileges, without the traditional patterns to fall back on, sometimes seems like an almost Utopian vision.

While nearly everyone favors some of the basic goals of the New Feminism --equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunity, equal treatment by the law--satisfying even those minimum demands could require more wrenching change than many casual sympathizers with the women's cause have seriously considered. Should women be drafted? Ought protective legislation about women's hours and working conditions be repealed?

Still, American women cannot be forced back into the Doll's House. More and more, American women will be free to broaden their lives beyond domesticity by a fuller use of their abilities; there will be fewer diapers and more Dante. Anatomy is destiny, the Freudians say. It is an observation that can hardly be dismissed as mere male chauvinist propaganda, but it is simply no longer sufficient. The destiny of women and, indeed, of men, is broader, more difficult than that--and also more promising.

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