How Women's Lib Looks to the Not-So-Mad Housewife

Career women and college girls have been far more active in the liberation movement than the housewives who long ago made their personal commitments "for better or for worse." But it is clear by now that many of them too, from time to time, are caught up by the cause. To capture the feelings of some of them, at least, TIME turned to Sue Kaufman, wife, mother, and author of Diary of a Mad Housewife, a novel (and later film) that early sounded the tocsin of domestic alarm.

SHE will admit, under slight pressure, that she has never really cared for the epithet "male chauvinist pig"; though she tried it on for size a few times, and though she felt a certain heady sensation of power while using it, she has come to see that it is not really her style. She has had two abortions, both premarital and illegal, and she sends contributions to organizations like the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition--but, enclosed with her check is a request that her name be withheld from the printed list of donors. She reads Sylvia Plath's poetry because she loves poetry and thinks that Sylvia Plath is an extraordinary poet; she finds it particularly exasperating that Sylvia Plath should be made into a heroine of Women's Lib, since it seems to her that there is nothing heroic about a poor, tormented, brilliant woman who was driven by the terrible inner pressures of her own psyche--not the pressures of the feminine role--to kill herself.

She bristles whenever she hears the term lady editor, lady painter, lady doctor, lady lawyer; they are, she will insist with quiet fury, editors or painters or doctors or lawyers who also happen to be women. Active, dedicated women--and lucky ones, she will often silently tack on.

She is anywhere from 25 to 45--a wife, a mother, a housewife. She is usually far from mad (crazy or angry), far from being wildly bitter --but also far from being satisfied with what or where she is. Though she isn't too clear on where she would rather be, she knows it isn't up there on the big, steamrolling bandwagon of Women's Lib, or in the front ranks of the marching phalanx, waving banners. Much as she admires them.

And she does admire them. Shirley, Florynce, Bella, Betty, Gloria, Germaine, Kate. And when one of them comes to town, she will arrange, often with great difficulty, to go and hear her speak. She will make the complicated arrangements for the sitter to come and cover the home front for her and "liberate" her for a few hours. (This is the context in which that word is mainly used in her life.)

She will go, usually with friends.

They will arrive at the hall, the auditorium, the community center, take their seats--and slowly it will begin to happen. The extraordinary thing. The thing they have really come for, the speeches aside. The thing the speeches generate, but which takes on a life of its own. For as she sits and listens, she begins to feel the flickers and currents of a mass communion, a rising sense of excitement that she imagines parallels what one feels at a revival meeting. She doesn't get up and cry "Right On!" (which she suspects is already passe) like the girl down front, she doesn't hop up and shout "Yes, sister, yes!" But she feels this powerful thing happening, this sweeping, surging, gathering-up-momentum feeling of intense camaraderie, solidarity movement. Action. Yes, sister, yes. All of which is pretty damned strange--she has never been much of a one for sisterly activities, and she largely disagrees with what it seems to her the voices from the platform are suggesting: she is not ready to turn it all around, to start again. Yet here, among her own--kind? Yes, kind --she feels the sweep of mass identification, feels the sense of Tightness, shared protectiveness: we are all birds of a feather. This is the way, the path. And yet.

Yet, after the meeting has dispersed, after the ball is over, and the sense of excitement and communion begins to dim, she climbs into her car, station wagon, Land Rover, bus, taxi--and goes home. And it hits her. She arrives home to pay the sitter or what-have-you, to take over the children, to keel the pot like greasy Joan, to put the kettle on like Polly, to take up the reins of her existence. Only --something is wrong.

She is overwhelmed by a terrible sense of wrongness, of jarring inconsistency. There was that surging, powerful feeling in the hall, and now, stranded on the linoleum under the battery of fluorescent kitchen lights, there is this terrible sense of isolation, of walls closing in, of being trapped. It doesn't compute. Something in her calculations is wrong. She stands there, with a sense of being too late, passed by, stuck--but she doesn't burst into tears. The days of weeping are over. In spite of the desolation she feels, she knows that she is not alone; she has company and they are legion. There is enormous comfort in knowing that. And knowing that is one of the big changes in her life.

There have been many other changes. Perhaps the most important is that she has learned to speak up without the fear (yes, it was a fear) of being called a ballbuster, an aggressive or castrating female (the counterpart tag of male chauvinist pig). She has also learned to assert herself, insist on certain rights--mostly around the house, true, but that's where, after all, she spends most of her time. She asks--does not demand--that her children, her husband pitch in, share some of the trivial drudgery: she swears that gone are the days when, the country weekend over, the rest of the family sat out in the car waiting for her to pack up the last carryall and check the last stove burner, giving her an occasional impatient blast on the horn.

The result of all this asserting herself has been a new awareness in the others: she is somebody to be reckoned with. It has made a change in her husband: he is more available to discussion, even argument, more willing to listen, even give way. He hasn't--and isn't about to--become an apron-tied caricature, a grocery-lugging, mop-wielding, cooking-and-diapering paragon, but he can now see the Victorian darkness overshadowing her days, can see that time is of the essence, for her, as well as for himself. The long hours in front of the brilliant panorama of the Rose Bowl still go on, but they can be interrupted. Perhaps it is because of exposure to her more militant sisters in the press or on TV, but he is more willing to listen and often concedes that she is right.

He is now even willing to concede that, as she has long asserted, there are men who don't like women, hostile men, and he listens soberly when she adds something new to her assertion: she will no longer tolerate them. In her house, or any other phase of her life. This is really an advance, and other smaller ones have followed in its wake. For instance, she has begun to think about the necessity of financial independence: if she has, or earns, no money of her own, she has begun to think about a job, part-time now, full-time later. If she has money of her own, she has begun to ask questions about separate bank accounts, separate tax returns. Though she is not about to chuck the whole setup, she now acknowledges that the day may come when she does want to chuck it for valid reasons and, except in the case of a deep grudge that would need satisfaction, she does not want the decision to rest on her eligibility for a monthly alimony check. She does not want to be dependent on a monthly alimony check.

But most likely she will not divorce. At least not casually, and certainly not for any principle or idea. Moreover, she likes, or loves, her children, and though they are often a terrible drain on her emotions and strength, she is simply not prepared to delegate most of their care to someone else. She also likes, or loves, her husband, and though she is no longer willing to put up with anything she considers an infringement on her rights or dignity, she is not about to blow up the whole works by refusing to do what was contracted at the onset of her marriage, namely Women's Work--which covers everything from enduring labor pains to counting laundry. Though that is the nasty hooker--that so much should ever have become, way back, Women's Work exclusively--the hard fact is that it did. And the other hard fact is that no one, including her sisters in sodality, has figured out a way of reversing history, of turning it all around in a way that would work. Moreover, much as she loathes much of Women's Work, she likes some of it too, reactionary as it seems. And she isn't someone who thinks she can have her cake and eat it too. On the contrary, she knows all too well that everything in this world has its price. If she's ready to break the commitment, then she has to pay that price. Actually," this constant self-evaluation, this weighing of prices to be paid for one thing or another, is, like the experience in the hall, one of the important changes in her life: a short while back it would never have occurred to her to ask if the price was right. At all.

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