The New Woman, 1972

THE "New Woman" has been proclaimed with a certain regularity for a century and more. Ibsen brought Nora Helmer out of her doll's house in 1879. and succeeding generations have invented her anew: in Shaw's drawing-room heroines, Laurentian sensualists, Brett Ashleys, flappers, women who smoked and drank and swore and brushed their teeth with last night's Scotch, got divorced or did not bother to get married at all, wore pants, and perhaps in the mellow suburban '50s, lived to grow old as Auntie Mame.

As often as not, the New Woman was a masculine fantasy--Greta Garbo as a Soviet virago, titillatingly mannish yet secretly craving French perfume and Melvyn Douglas. Such, at least, was popular mythology--women, even in their supposed emancipation, have often been, as it were, prisoners of the male imagination. Always there was the secret, insistent vibration of sex: rebellion ends when Rhett Butler kicks down the door.

Sex emphatically remains, but something complex and important has occurred in the relationship between American men and women. Another New Woman has emerged, but she is, perhaps for the first time on a massive scale, very much the creation of her own, and not a masculine imagination--an act of intellectual parthenogenesis. The New Feminism cannot be measured entirely by the membership lists of the National Organization for Women and other liberation groups. It is a much broader state of mind that has raised serious questions about the way people live--about their families, home, child rearing, jobs, governments and the nature of the sexes themselves.

Or so it seems now. Some of those who have weathered the torrential fads of the last decade wonder if the New Woman's movement may not be merely another sociological entertainment that will subside presently, like student riots, leaving Mother, if not Gloria Steinem, home to stir the pudding on the stove while Norman Mailer rushes off to cover the next moon shot.

Certainly the movement itself has invited the ironist's eye. Foreigners have traditionally regarded American women with a sort of wary bemusement; they seemed a race of cool, assertive, pampered and sometimes savagely domineering women. In 1898, the Scots traveler James F. Muirhead observed, with what was surely a chauvinist's exaggeration: "Man meekly submits to be the hewer of wood, the drawer of water, and the beast of burden for the superior sex." Yet now the New Feminists assert--an irony that does not invalidate the argument--that it is they who are dominated.

It seems certain, at least, that sex is too important to be left entirely to ideologues. Some men have spoken of it as the last frontier of free expression. Yet in a way, the opposite is true. The appeal of sex, at least to some, is not freedom but order, represented by the clear definition of roles. Marriage is a remnant of a fixed social order that, in the past, was thought to be a reflection of a fixed natural order. In sex, of course, men and women feel that they must prove themselves, but they do not so often feel under the bewildering obligation to define themselves. It is one area in which definition is usually unambiguously understood--one simply is a man or a woman. Perhaps for this reason, many people, male and female, are troubled by the notions of sexual equality and interchangeable social roles.

In its belief that old traditions can be changed and that men and women can learn anything--even how to be men and women--the feminist movement is characteristically American. As Critic Elizabeth Hardwick has noted, the movement rests "upon a sense of striving, of working, and it has the profoundly native ethical themes of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and equality. Preparation, study, free choice, courage, resolution: these are its images and emblems." The women's movement, she points out, is antipathetic to "the youth culture, which appeared more as a refusal, a pause in the labor of the vineyard, sometimes a sort of quietism."

Miss Hardwick notes that when Hawthorne wrote his great parable about men and women in America, The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne decides to make a lonely stand against Puritanism and hypocrisy, Mrs. Hawthorne read it and said that she liked it, but "it gave her a headache." In a sense, that is where we are still.

The women's issue could involve an epic change in the way we see ourselves, not only sexually but historically, sociologically, psychologically and in the deeper, almost inaccessible closets of daily habit. Its appearance has startled men and women into self-perception. It has outraged some, freed others, left some sarcastically indifferent. Men and women have shared equally in all three reactions.

It is for such reasons that

TIME is devoting most of this issue to an exploration of the status of women in America today. Our cover story is an overview of the American woman. Because the subject touches so many facets of life in different ways, each department of the magazine explores the question of women in its specialty. Most of the sections include situation reports, the facts and figures of the feminine condition--not that the numbers tell anywhere near the whole story.

In the midst of such an enterprise, it seems prudent to admit that the subject remains mysterious. If men to some extent have lost their mystique as gods and kings and hunters, women somehow have not yet lost--not quite--the aura of earth mother or Kali. To say that over 99% of women are not lawyers--and why not?--reckons without the residual mystique of women defined not so much by what they do as what they are. Perhaps all of that will change and should change. Meanwhile, we have attempted to describe what women are doing and thinking, what they are and might become.

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