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

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HUSTO wife be CLOSED OCT. 15 MORATORIUM October 15

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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.

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