Women's Liberation: Finding Our Heads

FOR THOSE OF US who passed through high school in the firm belief of the future: we could have the best of our own "liberation," Radcliffe offered a particularly reassuring image of the man's and the woman's world. Mary Bunting continually stressed her image of the ideal Radcliffe girl: wife, mother, career.

Our minds formulated vague and happy pictures of warm homes with interesting tweed-jacketed or blue-jeaned husbands who "respected our minds," kiddies diligently manipulating creative playthings, and also, vaguer still, some fulfilling, creative "work."

But what's wrong with that? Since obviously one would have to be maladjusted to even suggest that such a goal would be undesirable, let me begin at least by describing how it is impossible, even for those Radcliffe women who are assumed to be of the economic elite and therefore able to employ more exploited women than themselves to do the unpleasant household chores.

One of the main problems is of course our own heads, as they have been formed by our entire social education before we ever reached Radcliffe-the role of women in our own families and high schools, those roles which we were taught we must act out in order to be a "good woman"- whatever else we were. ..

Whatever else we might be, we were told, we must remember that the true fulfillment of a woman is through a man, that what our husbands chose to do would be ultimately more important, that we would want to marry a man "more intelligent" than we were, and that even if we were more intelligent we should never let him know it for fear of being considered a "castrating female."

WE TRIED our best to be sexy and interesting, feminine and creative. Why then were the Harvard guys always the more creative musicians and writers, the more dynamic political leaders, while we had the obviously inferior merit of "getting better grades?" We, accepting even the humor of male-dominated Harvard society, laughed at the Radcliffe grindiness guarded a secret contempt for our sisters who were insecure enough to work hard, and strove to be part of male society.

Those of us, who without realizing it, were becoming female Uncle Toms, succeeded to varying degrees in becoming partly accepted as equals by some of the men we knew. We never asked why women were more grindly and less interesting-why we ourselves were less interesting than any number of men we knew.

I never realized the degree to which I held these attitudes until I left Radcliffe, and even more important, until a movement began among women which made me realize how closely my lot was bound up with theirs, with the most "privileged" and the most oppressed, and just what the Radcliffe image of the emancipated female had done to my mind.

THE IMPORTANT thing to realize from the outset, is that it is impossible to be inferior and equal at the same time: it is impossible to consider your role as a "good woman" to be that of tenderly supporting whatever male you happen to be with in whatever he wants to do, and at the same time make plans for your own creative existence.

Ultimately the feeling of temporariness included by the knowledge that you will undoubtedly live where your man wants to live, that your work will of course be interrupted by children, etc., means that women often have great difficulty applying themselves to a long term task or occupation, and tend to restlessly take up occupations and leave them, developing what some psychologists have recently dubbed "the will to fail."

That is women observed in a wide variety of occupations performed significantly less well where men were present than in situations where there were all women. Why? The fear of being a "castrating female"?

At Radcliffe the situation is more complicated, because women do have the desire to succeed academically-but it must be remembered that academic success per se is a significantly inferior quality in a community where creativity and brilliance are the ideal, where men pride themselves on their capacity to spend a semester directing plays, then walk in to an exam and do as well as a woman who has spent the semester grinding.

Working hard at tasks defined by others is the quality of a submissive creature, and we have always been taught to be more submissive than men. This in no way means that women do not become revolutionaries-indeed, our revolt is all the more profound and authentic when it does occur, because our entire lives have been spent, in a variety of subtle ways, in a service of subservient capacity.

THE TENDENCY of women to go into social work, teaching, nursing and other service-type work can be seen in some ways as a positive value in a society which puts little stress on social welfare. But it results from a situation of fundamental inequality.

Men run the society, are politicians, corporate executives, leaders, and creative artists; women are secretaries, waitresses, teachers and housewives-public or private servants.

Many of us would not want the solution to this problem to be for women to become as manipulative as politicians or businessmen must be in the present system. We would like to see a society in which men could serve in the best sense of that word, could see their role as developing a better society for all, and in which women could do as well as serve-that is, plan create, direct.

As for why women traditionally have not been creative, some of the social reasons are obvious, and have been brilliantly analyzed in Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own. According to Woolf, a woman needs, as a bare minimum, financial independence, an income of her own, and a room to work in, things she has never had traditionally.

Some of us now may have a bedroom of our own (although living space at Radcliffe is distinctly less plentiful than at Harvard), but we do not have room-real psychological room in which to function.

How many of us have determined to travel on our own , seeking the kind of free mental space in which to observe, imagine, write, only to find that a woman is never as free as a man to bum across country or through Europe. Ever try to sit down in a park with a book or a sketch pad for more than five minutes without some character feeling it his obligation to make an attempt at picking you up? Of course you can get rid of him but your peace of mind is shattered for that day.

THE POINT is, to-create you need to be able to lose yourself in things and ideas around you, to forget your physical presence for a time. For a woman this is virtually impossible.

As has been pointed out by the women's liberation movement, the plain woman is continually burdened by scorn and abuse, while the even moderately attractive one is the butt of infinite routine seduction attempts. The initial pleasure of this kind of attention soon wears off when you realize that in many cases it has nothing to do with you personally; it is not your fascinating presence that has drawn the men, but rather the simple fact that you are a woman.

Our tendency to romanticize encounters derives in great part from the fact that we are essentially passive in the love relationship waiting is always fraught with fantasy. Even at Radcliffe one must generally wait to be asked to be married.

The passive waiting for a man to enter her life and magically transform it is something that the intellectual woman has been taught to desire as well as to fear. Is it any wonder that we get "hung up," resentful, are constantly being accused by men of expecting more than they are willing to give?

Of course they are right in one way-we are expecting them to fill the vacuum that exists in our lives by what we assume to be the fullness of theirs. And yet how few men are actually capable of accepting a woman who has her won life, who asks that he give her the support and help in her work that he has always demanded of her.

I have met many college educated women who tell me apologetically that they have given up work on their MA or PhD or are not working because "My husband doesn't like me to."

I can already hear some "independent" Cliffie protesting "But why does she take it? It's her fault." I probably would have said the same thing while I was still in college and hadn't yet seen just how difficult it is to do something about it yourself, how difficult it is to make it on your own as a woman in this society facing the psychological and physical pressures of bad affairs, social intimidation ("What's wrong with you, are you promiscuous, don't you like children, are you frigid, didn't anyone want to marry you, ect."), and, even more important, lousy work possibilities.

Try entering medicine, law, or academics and see how women, even Radcliffe women, are treated. Or try simply getting a job after you graduate-any kind of a job that isn't totally mind destroying.

English majors I knew who graduated from Harvard went almost immediately into editorships at publishing house, or reportorial jobs on papers like the N.Y. Times. Their female counterparts became readers in those same publishing houses, or, if they were lucky, got to write for some Women's Page.

AS FOR the woman who happens to get pregnant, in the absence of decent abortion laws, or adequate child care facilities, she is faced with two possibilities: raising the child herself and working at the same time, or turning to dependency on a man.

Of course the problems of a Radcliffe girl confronting these things are far less than those of a working class woman or welfare mother-and yet even for the middle class woman they are traumatic and difficult.

There is a myth that it is possible to hold down a full-time job and have children.

Even if you are willing to work twice as hard as any man, it is untrue unless you can 1) hire a more economically oppressed woman to do your shit-work for you 2) work out some kind of communal arrangement (difficult in most communities where people still adhere religiously to their notions of family privacy) or 3) make your husband or man share equally in tasks like cooking, cleaning and child caring (I defy the wives of most "emancipated" men to tell me this is easy).

The existence of an autonomous women's liberation movement has helped many women, including myself, in one important way. It has given us the moral support to say once and for all that we are not inadequate human beings, selfish mothers, or castrating females for making the justifiable demands on men and on society that we be treated as full human beings, not as sex objects, nurses, or servants.

It has done this through revealing to us that problems we considered to be our own hang-ups are shared by other women-to some degree by all women-and that they are part of a particular social structure rather than the inevitable outcome of biological differences.

THIS IS NOT to say that honorable relations with men are impossible, even under the present structure; simply that they are very difficult, and above all, they can never be a substitute for a life of one's own.

Women, like men, should have the option to live alone if they wish, without men, with one man, with many men, or with other women, and still feel like fulfilled people. They should know that having a child is a fine experience, but not the only fine experience a woman can have, nor necessarily the best.

All of these things can only come about for women, along with economic liberation, if we have a social and a political revolution in this country involving a change in the nature of work both for men and for women.

AT RADCLIFFE the exploitation of women is less obvious but just as deep as in other areas of American Society. At the outset, the "ideal" of Harvard elitism, borrowed heavily from the English universities, is basically one of male intellectual clubbiness-thus some common rooms are still closed to female tutors, and there are ridiculously few women on the faculty.

Fortunately, fewer and fewer Harvard men are drawn to this particular notion. Radcliffe women are not obviously passive in this community-in deed, we are often incredibly active, even while "waiting" for the right man to come along.

But we are active in precisely those safe areas which have been already laid out by men and male attitudes. Like blacks, we must behave like the dominant group in order to be accepted by them, and at the same time cater to their assumptions of our inherent weakness and inferiority (this extends to the sub-societies of radical political movements, and the editorial board of the Harvard CRIMSON).

Radcliffe women may no longer join ladies clubs to fill their time (though some may be active in their local PTA) but our attitude towards men and our own lives may not be significantly different than those of women who do.

Finally, in the mind of one who actually believed it, the happy-matron-career woman notion promoted by Radcliffe is a dreadful illusion, and one which if taken seriously can keep us not only from developing our own possibilities, but from relating to other women. The contempt and mistrust women have for each other, even when they are "friends," is the counterpart of the excessive awe we feel towards men, and part of what makes us sense that we would be utterly desolate without a man in our lives.