University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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Women ' s Lib Cross-Examined Women ' s liberation doesn ' t have the immediate impor- tance of black liberation or ending the war in Vietnam — the revolution. That statement shows you have no concept of the oppression of women. It ' s true that women are not being killed off as a group in the great numbers that black people and Vietnamese are, or in such obvious ways. But 10,000 women die each year from abortions be- cause the men who run this country have decided that a woman may not control her own body. Women are dehumanized and put into service roles like black peo- ple. More of us can make it economically, if we are willing to prostitute ourselves as wives of upper- or middle-class men. But basically we are economically ex- ploited, psychologically oppressed and socially kept in our place by men i by a capitalist system that has institutionalized male supremacy — in a more subtle way than the caveman but just as destructively. Your ideas may be all right for you personally, but why must you impose a particular life style on other women? Some women really want to serve a man in the tradi- tional way, they just naturally want to be housewives. That sounds like the happy slave argument for the South — a great rationalization for continuing op- pression. There are at least two things wrong with your point. First, no woman in a modern Western society has grown up in the absence of lifelong pressure to seek sub- missiveness, to want to be a housewife, to define herself in the terms of the dominant male society. So no one can say for sure that such attitudes and goals are innate in women, that they have come naturally. Women never had a chance to find out what they really want; no one knows what a woman would choose if she were free psychologically and technically. In the second place, it doesn ' t seem really probable that anyone would want to be no more than a housewife if all other avenues were open. Housework is uncreative, no matter what the mass media say about it in their re- lentless drive to sell a new cake mix or floor wax. Any- 28

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gay liberation A Human Being Is a Human Being Whatever causes homosexuality is the same thing which causes hetrosexuality. And it ' s as simple as that, explained a member of the Berkele y Gay Liberation Front. He said the purpose of the eight-month-old or- ganization was to teach today ' s society that human beings will not be free until they are able to express their sexual feelings and desires to whomever they want, regardless of sex and based solely on another ' s consent. This message is constantly preached by the Gay Lib- eration street theater and by picket demonstrations in the business communities of the Bay Area. The Uni- versity, he continued, is no more free than any other societal institution. Gay students are still afraid of being discovered, he lamented. So to demonstrate the University ' s repressive attitude and actions towards gays, the Liberation Front in January consecrated a bathroom in Harmon Gymnasium as a sanctuary for homosexuals. 27

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one who has ever done that kind of work for an extended period knows it is endless, repetitious drudgery with worst of all — no relevance to the larger human commu- nity. It provides a pathetic sense of being needed, of identity, to many women. But anyone who thinks she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn ' t being natu- ral; she ' s literally lost her mind. But what about the women who say that giving birth was the most extraordinary experience of their lives would you deny them that? It ' s true that some women say that. Others find childbirth exciting but no more so than various other experiences. Some women begin to enjoy children only when the kids attain a more developed humanness. It seems possible that those who find childbirth their most outstanding experience haven ' t yet had access to other experiences. Again, what we want is a society in which women who want to try it can do so and those who don ' t can not try it without being made to feel guilty, inade- quate, unfulfilled. Well, I still think most women want things the way they are. They may demand equal pay or less drudgery, but they still want to have the same kinds of personal relationships with men that people have had for cen- turies. It ' s in nature. A lot of women who say they just want to play the traditional roles are simply fearful—or unable to imag- ine other ways of being. Old roles can seem to offer a certain security. Freedom can seem frightening — if one has learned how to achieve a certain degree of power inside the prison. We don ' t seek to impose anything on women but merely to open up all the possible alterna- tives; we do seek choice, as one of the functions which make people human beings. We want to be free people, crippled neither by law or custom or our own chained minds. If there is no room for that in nature, then na- ture must be changed. From The Militant, an article by Carol Hanisch and Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez entitled The Most Frequently Asked Questions: Why Women ' s Liberation? , December 26, 1969.