Protests Misogyny

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In the past months, the letters in this column on Radcliffe have been so thoroughly insulting to women, that it is difficult for me to overcome my disgust long enough to sit down to answer them. In these letters, a number of Harvard men have revealed that they condescendingly consider women as playthings for men's leisure hours. Therefore, women's hair-do and dress must be dictated by their male masters, and women must naturally be excluded from the serious, intellectual classrooms and clubs that men choose to frequent.

Don't your letter writers ever go to class? If so, how can they have failed to recognize the intellectual contributions that the Radcliffe women make? Don't these presumably heterosexual correspondents go on dates? If so, how have they managed to find women who are willing to be treated with such contempt?

Women's abilities have been abundantly demonstrated by outstanding work in industry, education, art, science, government, and in every other field. If there are also women whose conversation before marriage is confined to trivia and whose activities after marriage are confined to washing dishes and diapers, don't try to explain it by the innate inferiority of women. Put the responsibility on continued discrimination against women in education, jobs, and the professions, as well as on the social values typified in the letters of Messrs. Lustig, Morey, Molloy, etc.

The ideology of "Kinder-Kuche-Kirche" is much more dangerous to the intellectual community of Harvard and Radcliffe than the "regimentation" of the beanie and the feather bob (or of the white shoe and the grey flannels). Mrs. Natalie Zemon Davis, Radcliffe 1G