Women's Liberation Finding a Life of One's Own

For those of us who passed through high school in the firm belief of the future: we could have the best of our own, "liberation," Radcliffe offered a particularly reassuring image of the man's and the woman's world. Mary Bunting continually stressed her image of the ideal Radcliffe girl: wife, mother, career.

Our minds formulated vague and happy pictures of warm homes with interesting tweed-jacketed or blue-jeaned husbands who "respected our minds," kiddies diligently manipulating creative playthings, and also, vaguer still, some fulfilling, creative, "work."

But what's wrong with that? Since obviously one would have to be maladjusted to even suggest that such a goal would be undesirable, let me begin at least by describing how it is impossible, even for those Radcliffe women who are assumed to be of the economic elite and therefore able to employ more exploited women than themselves to do the unpleasant house-hold chores.

One of the main problems is of course our own heads, as they have been formed by our entire social education before we ever reached Radcliffe-the role of women in our own families and high schools, those roles which we were taught we must act out in order to be a "good woman" -whatever else we were.

Whatever else we might be, we were told, we must remember that the true fulfillment of a woman is through a man, that what our husbands chose to do would be ultimately more important, that we would want to marry a man "more intelligent" than we were, and that even if we were more intelligent, we should never let him know it for fear of being considered a "castrating female."

We tried our best to be sexy and interesting, feminine and creative. Why then were the Harvard guys always the more creative musicians and writers, the more dynamic political leaders, while we had the obviously inferior merit of "getting better grades?" We, accepting even the humor of male-dominated Harvard society, laughed at the Radcliffe grindiness, guarded a secret contempt for our sisters who were insecure enough to work hard, and strove to be part of male society.

Those of us who, without realizing it, were becoming female Uncle Toms succeeded to varying degrees in becoming partly accepted as equals by some of the men we knew. We never asked why women were more grindy and less interesting-why we ourselves were less interesting than any number of men we knew.

I never realized the degree to which I held these attitudes until I left Radcliffe, and even more important, until a movement began among women which made me realize how closely my lot was bound up with theirs, with the most "privileged" and the most oppressed, and just what the Radcliffe image of the emancipated female had done to my mind.

The important thing to realize from the outset is that it is impossible to be inferior and equal at the same time: it is impossible to consider your role as a "good woman" to be that of tenderly supporting whatever male you happen to be with in whatever he wants to do, and at the same time make plans for your own creative existence.

Ultimately the feeling of temporariness, included by the knowledge that you will undoubtedly live where your man wants to live, that your work will of course be interrupted by children, etc., means that women often have great difficulty applying themselves to a long-term task or occupation, and tend to restlessly take up occupations and leave them, developing what some psychologists have recently dubbed "the will to fail."

That is, women observed in a wide variety of occupations performed significantly less well where men were present than in situations where there were all women. Why? The fear of being a "castrating female"?

At Radcliffe the situation is more complicated, because women do have the desire to succeed academically-but it must be remembered that academic success per se is a significantly inferior quality in a community where creativity and brilliance are the ideal, where men pride themselves on their capacity to spend a semester directing plays, then walks into an exam and do as well as a woman who has spent the semester grinding.

Working hard at tasks defined by others is the quality of a submissive creature, and we have always been taught to be more submissive than men. This is no way means that women do not become revolutionaries-indeed, our revolt is all the more profound and authentic when it does occur, because our entire lives have been spent, in a variety of subtle ways, in a service of subservient capacity.

THE TENDENCY of women to go into social work, teaching, nursing and other service-type work can be seen in some ways as a positive value in a society which puts little stress on social welfare. But it results from a situation of fundamental inequality.

Men run the society, are politicians, corporate executives, leaders, and creative artists; women are secretaries, waitresses, teachers and housewives-public or private servants.

Many of us would not want the solution to this problem to be for women to become as manipulative as politicians or businessmen must be in the present system. We would like to see a society in which men could serve in the best sense of that word, could see their role as developing a better society for all, and in which women could do as well as serve-that is, plan, create, direct.

As for why women traditionally have not been creative, some of the social reasons are obvious, and have been brilliantly analyzed in Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own. According to Woolf, a woman needs, as a bare minimum, financial independence, an income of her own, and a room to work in, things she has never had traditionally.

Some of us now may have a bedroom of our own (although living space at Radcliffe is distinctly less plentiful than at Harvard), but we do not have room-real psychological room in which to function.

How many of us have determined to travel on our own, seeking the kind of free mental space in which to observe, imagine, write, only to find that a woman is never as free as a man to bum across country or through Europe? Ever try to sit down in a park with a book or a sketch pad for more than five minutes without some character feeling it his obligation to make an attempt at picking you up? Of course you can get rid of him but your peace of mind is shattered for that day.

THE POINT is, to create you need to be able to lose yourself in things and ideas around you, to forget your physical presence for a time. For a woman this is virtually impossible.

As has been pointed out by the women's liberation movement, the plain woman is continually burdened by scorn and abuse, while the even moderately attractive one is the butt of infinite routine seduction attempts. The initial pleasure of this kind of attention soon wears off when you realize that in many cases it has nothing to do with you personally; it is not your fascinating presence that has drawn the men, but rather the simple fact that you are a woman.

Our tendency to romanticize encounters derives in great part from the fact that we are essentially passive in the love relationship-waiting is always fraught with fantasy. Even at Radcliffe one must generally wait to be asked to be married.

The passive waiting for a man to enter her life and magically transform it is something that the intellectual woman has been taught to desire as well as to fear. Is it any wonder that we get "hung up," resentful, are constantly being accused by men of expecting more than they are willing to give?

Of course they are right in one way-we are expecting them to fill the vacuum that exists in our lives by what we assume to be the fullness of theirs. And yet how few men arewomen "might force us to eliminate a number of such distinctive groups entirely." Not only were they saying that women from minorities need no female companionship so 1200 women is enough while 3000 men is too few, but they were dusting off the familiar tactic of dividing one oppressed group's fight from another's.

The second reason was that the departments now restricted by socialization to men would suffer from decreased male enrollment. Even for those who believe that a department can "suffer," the report was simply admitting that equal enrollment must be accompanied by abolition of all sex discrimination in the University, in employment, on the Faculty and Administration, and in the graduate and professional schools.

The committee also said that Radcliffe should be preserved as a women's voice, that if it did not exist, it would have to be created anew. It is true that women need to meet, talk, and act collectively, but Radcliffe, like a company union, does not serve that purpose. Radcliffe perhaps serves to help a few women escape a few of the worse effects of sexism. But in its size, its housing, its administration, it is an integral part of Harvard sexism, and certainly not a force demanding or teaching equality for all women.

Besides the practical reasons against equal enrollment, Dean Peterson and his committee alternated between two theoretical or philosophical reasons, the pluralism idea that "women are different" and the straightforward declaration that women are inferior.

Pluralism is a common way of obscuring power relations. A warden doesn't have power over his prisoner: they just have different roles within the prison system. The reasoning is that women fill different roles in society so they must be different. And if they are different they can have their own colleges and shouldn't be at Harvard. Women's Liberation explains how social roles have prescribed women's behavior, not vice versa. Dean Peterson does not even pretend that Harvard and Radcliffe are separate but equal, just separate and different. He wants to maintain the 4-to-1 ratio not because they are getting an equal education elsewhere but because they can be better kept in their place elsewhere.

As euphemism, as politeness, the argument that women are "different" is sure to become the most popular argument for men to use against Women's Liberation, but Dean Peterson does not stop there. He teaches outright female inferiority:

'Would increased enrollment of women be a fairer policy'... if the question was taken to its logical conclusion, then all identifiable groups should receive representation proportionate just to their numbers at large and not to the ability and potential of the individual applicants within a group, race, or area.

This pure sexism is the same as Agnew racism. In its theory it sees a choice between admitting members of population groups according to numbers or according to ability, as though ability is naturally distributed unevenly between men and women, for example. And in its practice, it means channeling women away from preparation for Harvard from the day they are born until the end of high school, and "discovering" that they don't meet "admissions standards," or that they can better find what they "want" elsewhere.

DEAN PETERSON and other "teachers" have begun our education about Women's Liberation. We can see that Women's Liberation does not mean more sex or less paying for girls on dates, that is, not merely less inconvenience for men, but a whole revolution in our attitudes and practices. Men need to take Women's Liberation seriously. If there are jokes and sarcasm they should be directed at men who live male supremacy and not at women who live women's liberation. We have to develop alternatives to the nuclear family which imprisons women. And, for the benefit of all of us, we must make ourselves those "forces of change," changing ourselves, changing society, changing Harvard beginning with equal enrollment immediately and moving toward general sex, race, and class justice in every aspect of this University.

We have been promised by President Pusey that alumni will be our greatest obstacle in obtaining equal enrollment. It does not seem that their world has been so happy that they could not benefit from Women's Liberation. Surely their wives and maids and secretaries will. But it seems clear that most of them do not and will not reject their roles and their security. We have images to help us understand the strength of the socialization that makes rich, privileged people continue to put everyone else and themselves through such inhuman punishment, through such hatred and violence, through racism and sexism and pollution. The most useful image is of "interests." Not interests of the human beings involved, but interests of the roles we serve and have become.

But it must be said that, whatever the alumni's interests, whatever the interests of the Faculty and Administration, they must understand that, in the face of sexism, racism, pollution, and imperialist wars, the very survival of our generation as human beings capable of love, dignity, and sanity is at stake. It may be that most of them will not remake their own lives, but we must remake ours and cannot afford to let them block our way.