Jean Huleatt Wheeler

"Please don't say I have five children," the Ann Radcliffe lecturer asked when about to be introduced to her audience last week. Not that Jean Huleatt Wheeler is ashamed of her progeny: as she explained later in conversation, she just wants her work to "stand on its own," neither increased nor decreased in value or interest because it is the work of a woman.

Mrs. Wheeler is by no means a feminist, and she is not primarily concerned with promulgating a credo of equal rights for women. But she is disturbed to see "how far women really are from achieving a freedom comparable to men's." She is disturbed to see women "overemphasizing their family work to the point where they no longer think they can do work."

"I have a friend, a wife and mother, who is a splendid painter," Mrs. Wheeler said. "America would grow by seeing her art work, but she has no concept of herself as someone through whom others might learn. It's not necessary that she have this self-image, of course; but it would be nice."

Women do not necessarily have an obligation to do intellectual work, Mrs. Wheeler stressed again. She is worried not so much by the women who could but don't, as by those who want to but are afraid. Once a woman has taken time out from work to raise a family, she needs to do some studying to catch up. But many highly-educated women spend so much time studying that they never again get around to activity, whether in physics or politics.

"Perhaps because of centuries of conditioning by men, women don't have confidence in them-selves," Mrs. Wheeler said. The position of women will not advance, she added, until women are willing to take stands and make decisions for themselves, without first consulting scholarly or neighborly opinion. Because the pressures to conform are much greater on women than on men (witness suburban motherhood, for example) women need more courage than men in order to declare themselves in a given situation.

In America, the high standard of living helps women leave the Kinder and the Kuche; "Now we can serve a TV dinner occasionally and go out to work for a political candidate." But though American technology provides the necessary time and money, the U.S. is not the only leader in developing its womanly resources. The Pakistanis, Mrs. Wheeler noted, have more women in their legislature than we do.

Mrs. Wheeler deals with the broader question of world-wide education and the distribution of economic resources in a dissertation which will soon be published, Freedom and Education: A Study of the Interrelation in American Thought of Ideas of Freedom and Education. The social growth caused by freeing and exploiting woman-power in this country would be only a miniature version of the social benefits of education and economic development on a world scale, she feels. But world-wide education will have to be properly handled.

"I don't think it matters where you start your education--you can probably major in anything--but you have to be trained outside your own field, too," she said. "You have to escape the parochialism of seeing your own discipline as a basis from which others proceed. The physicist should not claim that the artist serves as his technician, for example." Mrs. Wheeler warned that one-sided education is taking its toll today in the newly-independent nations. The young people, trained in technology but not the liberal arts, are susceptible to the specious appeal of Communism. The liberally educated older generation can resist its simplistic thought.

In her analysis of the new, 20th-century liberalism, Mrs. Wheeler defined the role of the liberal as expanding the bounds of freedom; the role of the conservative as retaining the liberal's past achievements. Speaking in Agassiz last Wednesday, she said: "Freedom is a reaping of the good and the large; and a reaching out for the better and larger. It is a happiness; and a pursuit of happiness. To be one, it must be both. The gains of the past must be kept before men and active enjoyment of them must be encouraged so that regression will not easily be mistaken for growth, change or substitution for increase, the similar and different for the better and larger. Yet there would be no gains to keep and enjoy were men not also encouraged and enabled to explore and to experiment, to purposefully reach forth into the unknown to bring forth new possibilities for the lives of men living and of men yet unborn."