MAKE ROOM FOR DADDY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Although I do not concur in Dean von Stade's particular formulation of the issue of male-female ratio in Harvard College, I detect something rather disingenuous about the uproar the lib-minded female students have made in response to his views. I refuse to believe, as the outcry from the libs would have us believe, that they were unaware that such views were common to men of von Stade's generation, and even to men much younger. Their own fathers after all, hold such views, as did their granddaddies too.

The real source of the uproar is, of course, that the libs had already invested the traditional attitudes on female roles with new meaning and connotations. Having thus politicized the old attitudes, von Stade's remarks struck the libs as, to put it mildly, out of order.

Fair enough. But might I add that these critics ought not be cheap: they ought not feign surprise at a college dean who expects most women to be, either full-time or part-time, housekeepers and child rearers. They also ought to be consistent: the venom at von Stade might well be tossed too at their own daddies.

Yet tossing venom about is equally cheap in face of what is, after all, a difficult issue to resolve. There is little evidence to suggest that apart from those women educated at elite institutions, most women will in the next generation escape housekeeping and child rearing roles.

Alas: perhaps all the uproar over von Stade's views is a mere mask for the guilt felt by females in elite colleges who for the first time can see-for themselves of course-the light of emancipation from housekeeping and child rearing roles at the other end of the (male chauvinist) tunnel!