WOMEN'S LIB: BEYOND SEXUAL POLITICS

ONE would think that Kate Millett or Germaine Greer were feeding the gentlemen their lines. More than 300 earnest women--ranging from Black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to Writer Gloria Steinem to Betty Smith, former vice chairman of Wisconsin Republicans--met in Washington last week to form a National Women's Political Caucus. Its goal: to seek out and promote candidates of either sex, preferably women, who will work to eliminate "sexism, racism, violence and poverty." And what was the reaction in San Clemente? Discussing a newspaper photograph of four of the caucus leaders, Secretary of State William Rogers remarked that it looked "like a burlesque." The President replied: "What's wrong with that?"

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Faced with that kind of crude, belittling response, it is no wonder that women are often provoked to sharp recriminations, and sometimes to stretching a point beyond reason. For example, along with setting themselves the admirable goal of organizing politically, a few speakers at the Women's Caucus also made some farfetched assertions. "We must humanize America and save her," said Betty Smith, implying that it is up to women to do the job. Author Steinem railed at the "masculine mystique belief" in the inevitability of violence. If recriminations are in order, one could with some justice blame women for passively tolerating that violence, since for some time now they have constituted more than half of the electorate. To imply that they are more humane and peace-loving than men is to make not only a dubious claim but a sexist one.

The occasionally exaggerated rhetoric of the feminists would not matter, except that it could discredit an important movement that still has a long way to go. Are suburban wives really comparable to the inmates of Nazi concentration camps? So Betty Friedan argued eight years ago, groping for strong words in The Feminine Mystique to stir up the feminist movement after its 43-year relapse following ratification of the 19th amendment. Now, having achieved some success, the movement might be expected to show greater responsibility. Instead, in countless books and "consciousness raising" sessions, hyperbole seems to have become its hallmark. "The majority of women drag along from day to day in an apathetic twilight," states Germaine Greer unequivocally in The Female Eunuch. She warns that "women have very little idea of how much men hate them." The draconian arbiter of Sexual Politics, Kate Millett, has mentioned the "envy or amusement" she noticed in certain men when Richard Speck murdered eight nurses.

Extremism in any movement--despite its attention-getting value--scares off potential followers, and makes it all too easy for dissenters to attack or ridicule its aims. Women's Lib is no exception. There is the further danger that female chauvinism will mislead and confuse the women themselves, particularly younger ones who have little experience to give them ballast. Consider, for example, the consequences of distorting or exaggerating three of the movement's most enlightening propositions:

1) CERTAIN KINDS OF BEHAVIOR AND OCCUPATIONS HAVE BEEN EXPECTED OF WOMEN FROM BIRTH; IT IS THEREFORE DIFFICULT FOR THEM TO BECOME AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUALS.

Elizabeth Janeway, 57, a novelist and mother of two sons who stands somewhat apart from the movement, provides a low-keyed discussion of this valid notion in a new book called Man's World; Woman's Place (William Morrow; $8.95). Unlike Millett, who drew on fiction, or Greer, whose examples came mostly from pop culture, Janeway borrows from academic sociology to explain how society maintains itself by means of roles and myths. One of her basic themes, applicable to either sex, is that individuals find it easier to adopt a ready-made self than to create one.

But social shifts can make familiar roles and myths archaic. Most Americans still believe that a woman's chief function is to be housewife and mother. In fact, 43% of American women today are in the labor force and 75% of these work full time, most of them because they have to support themselves or their families (see BUSINESS). Others work because they want a vocation with utility and meaning that their homes do not always provide--especially for a lifetime.

This does not mean that women have fundamentally changed; it is home and family that have been altered beyond recognition. The "virtuous woman" of Proverbs never thought about a "career," but she bought fields, planted vineyards, made fine linen and sold it. A few centuries ago, rural estates were, in effect, agricultural and industrial cooperatives, and women took their place beside men as managers of farms and workshops. Now there are few comparable possibilities for productive work at home; moreover the proportion of a woman's life devoted to care of her children, thanks to her longevity and the sharp reduction in the size of her family, has dwindled. Nonetheless, it is still considered somewhat unfeminine, even "abnormal," for a woman to stress her career; and to be regarded as abnormal today, Janeway points out, is almost as damaging as it was to be thought heretical in the Age of Faith.

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Today's women should certainly see the traditional role as only one possibility in their lives, and then feel free to accept or reject it. But are they conditioned by culture to accept it? Or at least influenced as powerfully as Women's Lib claims? Does overemphasizing this point discourage women from striking out for themselves? If cultural conditioning accounts for everything, there would be no Women's Lib. To devastate some feminists with whom she disagrees, Germaine Greer suggested that their theories were "devised by minds diseased by the system." If conditioning were all, Greer's mind would be no less diseased.

Liberated women should put cultural conditioning in its place, along with Freud's notion of biology as destiny, which the movement's best ideologues have so brilliantly attacked. They might even, for a moment, pay heed to the archenemy. In The Prisoner of Sex, Norman Mailer suggests that "some necessity may exist in human life to rise above what is easiest and most routine for it. Humans-with-phalluses, hardly men at birth, must work to become men, not be --as Millett would have it--merely conditioned into men; and humans-with-vaginas, not necessarily devoted from the beginning to maternity, must deepen into a condition which was not female automatically, must take a creative leap into becoming women." The latter is not a popular ambition at the moment, but liberated women should not throw out the baby with the bath water. The important tip from Mailer is that to become anybody at all (certainly to become autonomous), one must make a creative leap beyond one's conditioning, not count on it or blame it.

2) ONLY BY LEARNING HOW SOCIETY HAS HOBBLED HER CAN A WOMAN HEAL HERSELF. The text of many consciousness-raising sessions seems to have been taken from Soren Kierkegaard: "What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet the misfortune, when one is a woman, is at bottom not to comprehend that it is one." In other words, a woman is lucky only if she understands how unlucky she is.

Certainly there was no chance of changing society's attitudes toward women until they dared to see themselves and their problems clearly. Yet how deeply and how long do they have to look? Many women, especially those over 30, feel a sense of disbelief on reading the new chronicles of sexist injustice. There are some passages that seem to be authentic, that jibe with their experience and feelings, but on the whole, no. To take the diatribes at face value can lead to incapacitating bitterness. The central question was posed rather poignantly by a columnist in Rat, the radical women's underground newspaper. "How to change pain into strength again?" she asked.

One of the most frequently invoked analogies in the movement is that "woman is a nigger." Apart from its triteness (we now have students as niggers, and workers as niggers--everything but blacks as niggers), there is some question as to how apt the comparison is. Women are not segregated from their male "oppressors"; moreover, women constitute 51% of the population, not 11%, as blacks do.

Nonetheless, Shulamith Firestone claims that it is worse to be a woman than to be a black. In The Dialectic of Sex, she contends that "feminists have to question not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature. For we are dealing with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself." What she means by "oppression," it turns out, is the necessity for females to bear offspring. Firestone is logical enough to see that only test-tube babies will save women from this predicament. But is it really necessary for women to go back beyond history or forward to test tubes to gain social and economic equality?

3) MEN TREAT WOMEN AS SEXUAL OBJECTS. This notion is now embraced by 57% of American women under 25, according to a recent poll by McCall's of 20,000 females. Many women who do not agree with the proposition still applaud the movement's rebellion against the Playboy philosophy. Even girls that girl-watchers watch are bored at being considered nothing more than Bunnies or potential bedmates and are delighted to reject the cosmetic look imposed by male tastes. Germaine Greer says that she is "sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs." She should certainly remove them, even less radical women would agree.

Having made some valid points about the indignity of being considered only sexual objects, a few of the feminists have unfortunately gone on to exaggerate the proposition. They now claim that women are almost universally victims of rape. Never since the Sabine women were put upon by the Romans has there been as much furor about this crime as in the past year or so. This outcry has less to do with violence in American cities than with the radicals' all-embracing definition of the offense. Last April, they organized an all-day "rape workshop" in Manhattan, where they discussed such topics as "rape in marriage" and "the psychology of rapist and victim." (Child care was provided.) For women who cannot bring themselves to feel raped, there is a spectrum of lesser outrages to dwell upon, like being whistled at or ogled. Manhattan's Village Voice recently printed an essay "On Goosing" by Liberationist Susan Brownmiller, who furiously denounced all such male attentions as heinous insults, reminiscing painfully about her most memorable gooses from age 13 on and calling them "a long and systematic continuum of humiliation."

What should women do about lovers who treat them only as sexual objects? Kate Millett suggests that women are virtually powerless before such men--Lady Chatterley before Mellors, for example. In celebrating the "transformation of masculine ascendancy into a mystical religion," D.H. Lawrence presents "sexual politics in its most overpowering form," she wrote. Katherine Anne Porter, no feminist at all but a perceptive novelist, analyzed the situation quite differently. "It is plain," she wrote in an essay eleven years ago, "that Lady Chatterley will shortly be looking for another man; I give Mellors two years at the rate he is going, if sex is really all he has to offer her, all she is able to accept. For if sex alone is what she must have, she will not abide with him."

More mischief lies in the Great Clitoral Controversy. Movement radicals, misinterpreting Masters' and Johnson's laboratory experiments, declare that the clitoris is the key to womanly orgasm. They denounce Freud and his notion of the superior role of the vagina. Certainly women are entitled to any sort of orgasm they like. But girls who are now being enjoined to "Think clitoris!" are being sold a mechanistic view of sex that is almost as dehumanizing as the phallic consciousness of Playboy.

It is time for the movement to abandon sexual politics for real politics. U.S. women have less political representation than their counterparts in many other Western democracies, and indeed less than they used to have. Maine's Margaret Chase Smith is the sole female Senator, and there are only eleven women compared with 422 men, in what New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug has derisively called the House of Semi-Representatives (she was also referring to its small number of young people and members of minority groups). In appointive positions, the record is even worse: women hold only 1.5% of the 3,796 top federal jobs. As a promising first step, the National Women's Political Caucus has already begun to organize groups in 26 states and Washington, D.C.

What, specifically, can politicized women do? Some will be fighting for job equality (including pay), child-care centers or tax relief for mothers who have to work, and further liberalization of abortion laws, and safer means of contraception than the Pill. They will also pressure universities, still largely male sanctuaries, to admit women on an equal basis with men both as teachers and as graduate students. Sensibly, last week's Women's Caucus subordinated such specific, feminist aims in favor of such larger, humanistic goals as better housing and a national health-care system that might cut down America's infant mortality rate, now a shocking 14th among developed nations.

Achieving any of these goals will not be easy. They will, in fact, be impossible to attain unless American women, both in and out of politics, demand a lot more of themselves and their daughters. In her classic treatise on womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir accused "the second sex" of exhausting its courage in dissipating mirages and stopping at the threshold of reality. She may be right. If they really want to liberate themselves and to create the kind of world they talk about, women must start thinking less about consciousness-raising and more about stepping across that threshold. qedRuth Brine

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