Gloria Steinem
One of the best-known American feminists, Gloria Steinem,
advocated the
relaxing of traditional sex roles for women and men and the abolition of sexist
laws and practices, thereby leading to more gender fluidity and equality.
Steinem was considered among the most radical women’s activist of the era. Do
you find her ideas radical? Why or why not?
Any change is fearful, especially one affecting both politics
and sex roles, so let me begin these Utopian speculations with a fact. To break
the ice.
Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male
chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its
shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and
guilt. Men assume that women want to imitate them, which is just what white
people assumed about blacks. An assumption so strong that it may convince the
second-class group of the need to imitate,
That is not our goal. But we do want to change the economic
system to one more based on merit. In Women's Lib Utopia, there will be free
access to good jobs—and decent pay for the bad ones women have been performing
all along, including housework. Increased skilled labor might lead to a
four-hour workday, and higher wages would encourage further mechanization of
repetitive jobs now kept alive by cheap labor.
With women as half the country's elected representatives, and
a woman President once in a while, the country's machismo problems
would be greatly reduced. The old-fashioned idea that manhood depends on
violence and victory is, after all, an important part of our troubles in the
streets, and in Vietnam. I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate
violence. We are not more moral than men: we are only uncorrupted by power so
far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward
aggression. Even now, Margaret Mead believes that women fight less often but
more fiercely than men, because women are not taught the rules of the war game
and fight only when cornered. But for the next 50 years or so, women in politics
will be very valuable by tempering the idea of manhood into something less
aggressive and better suited to this crowded, post-atomic planet. Consumer
protection and children's rights, for instance, might get more legislative
attention.
Men will have to give up ruling-class privileges, but in
return they will no longer be the only ones to support the family, get drafted,
bear the strain of power and responsibility. Freud to the contrary, anatomy is
not destiny, at least not for more than nine months at a time. In Israel, women
are drafted, and some have gone to war. In England, more men type and run
switchboards. In India and Israel, a woman rules. In Sweden, both parents take
care of the children. In this country, come Utopia, men and women won't reverse
roles; they will be free to choose according to individual talents and
preferences.
If role reform sounds sexually unsettling, think how it will
change the sexual hypocrisy we have now. No more sex arranged on the barter
system, with women pretending interest, and men never sure whether they are
loved for themselves or for the security few women can get any other way.
(Married or not, for sexual reasons or social ones, most women still find it
second nature to Uncle-Tom.) No more unequal partnerships that eventually doom
love and sex.; men
who are encouraged to spend a lifetime living with inferiors; with
housekeepers, or dependent creatures who are still children. No more
domineering wives, emasculating women, and "Jewish mothers," all of whom are
simply human beings with all their normal ambition and drive confined to the
home.
In order to produce that kind of confidence and individuality,
child-rearing will train according to talent. Little girls will no longer be
surrounded by airtight, self-fulfilling prophecies of natural passivity, lack of
ambition and objectivity, inability to exercise power, and dexterity (so long as
special aptitude for jobs requiring patience and dexterity is confined to poorly
paid jobs; brain surgery is for males).
Schools and universities will help to break down traditional
sex roles, even when parents will not. Half the teachers will be men, a rarity
now at preschool and elementary levels; girls will not necessarily serve
cookies or boys hoist up the flag. Athletic teams will be picked only by
strength and skill. Sexually segregated courses like auto mechanics and home
economics will be taken by boys and girls together. New
courses in sexual politics will explore female subjugation as the model for
political oppression, and women's history will be an academic staple, along with
black history, at least until the white-male-oriented textbooks are integrated
and rewritten.
As for the American child's classic problem—too much mother,
too little father—that would be cured by an equalization of parental
responsibility. Free nurseries, school lunches, family cafeterias built into
every housing complex, service companies that will do household cleaning chores
in a regular, businesslike way, and more responsibility by the entire community
for the children: all these will make it possible for
both mother and father to work, and to have equal leisure time with the children
at home. For parents of very young children, however, a special
job category, created by government and unions, would allow such parents a
shorter workday.
The revolution would not take away the option of being a
housewife. A woman who prefers to be her husband's housekeeper and/or hostess
would receive a percentage of his pay determined by the pension fund, and for a
job-training allowance. Or a divorce could be treated the same way that the
dissolution of a business partnership is now.
If these proposals seem farfetched, consider Sweden, where
most of them are already in effect. Sweden is not yet a working women's lib
model; most of the role-reform programs began less than a decade
ago, and are just beginning to take hold. But that country is
so far ahead of us in recognizing the problem that Swedish statements on sex and
equality sound like bulletins from the moon.
Our marriage laws, for instance, are so reactionary that
women's lib groups want couples to take a compulsory written exam on the law, as
for a driver's license, before going through with the wedding. A man has alimony
and wifely debts to worry about, but a woman may lose so many of her civil
rights that in the U.S. now, in important legal ways, she becomes a child again.
In some states, she cannot sign credit agreements, use her maiden name,
incorporate a business, or establish a legal residence of her own. Being a wife,
according to most social and legal definitions, is still a nineteenth-century
thing.
Assuming, however, that these blatantly sexist laws are
abolished or reformed, that job discrimination
is forbidden, that parents share financial responsibility for each other and the
children, and that sexual relationships become partnerships of equal adults
(some pretty big assumptions), then marriage will probably go right on. Men and
women are, after all, physically complementary. When society stops encouraging
men to be exploiters and women to be parasites, they may turn out to be more
complementary in emotion as well. Women's lib is not trying to destroy the
American family. A look at the statistics on divorce—plus the way in which old
people are farmed out with strangers and young people flee the home—shows the
destruction that has already been done. Liberated women are just trying to point
out the disaster, and build compassionate and practical alternatives from the
ruins.
What will exist is a variety of alternative life-styles. Since
the population explosion dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum,
parents-and-children will be only one of many "families": couples, age groups,
working groups, mixed communes, blood-related clans, class groups, creative
groups. Single women will have the right to stay single without ridicule,
without the attitudes now betrayed by "spinster" and "bachelor." Lesbians or
homosexuals will no longer be denied legally
binding marriages, complete with mutual-support agreements and inheritance
rights. Paradoxically, the number of homosexuals
Changes that now seem small may get bigger:
Men's Lib. Men
now suffer from more diseases due to stress, heart attacks,
ulcers, a higher suicide rate, greater difficulty living alone, less
adaptability to change and, in general, a shorter life-span than women. There is
some scientific evidence that what produces physical problems
is not work itself, but the inability to choose which work, and how much. With
women bearing half the financial responsibility, and with the idea of
"masculine" jobs gone, men might well fee] freer and live longer.
Religion. Protestant women are
already becoming ordained ministers; radical nuns are carrying out liturgical functions
that were once the exclusive property of priests; Jewish women are rewriting
prayers—particularly those that Orthodox Jews recite every morning thanking God
they are not female. In the future, the church will become an area of equal
participation by women. This means, of course, that organized religion will have
to give up one of its great historical weapons: sexual repression. In most
structured faiths, from Hinduism through Roman Catholicism, the status of women
went down as the position of priests ascended. Male clergy implied, if they did
not teach, that women were unclean, unworthy and sources of ungodly temptation,
in order to remove them as rivals for the emotional forces of men. Full
participation of women in ecclesiastical life might involve certain changes in
theology, such as, for instance, a radical redefinition of sin.
Literary
Problems. Revised
sex roles will outdate more children's books than civil rights ever did. Only a
few children had the problem of a Little
Black Sambo, but most have the
male-female stereotypes of "Dick and Jane." A boomlet of children's books about
mothers who work has already begun, and liberated parents and editors are
beginning to pressure for change in the textbook industry. Fiction writing will
change more gradually, but romantic novels with wilting heroines and
swashbuckling heroes will be reduced to historical value. Or perhaps to the
sadomasochist trade. (MarjorieMomingstar, a
romantic novel that took the 1950s by storm, has already begun to seem as unreal
as its 1920s predecessor, The
Sheik.) As for the literary plots
that turn on forced marriages or horrific abortions, they will seem as dated as
Prohibition stories. Free legal abortions and free birth control will force
writers to give up pregnancy as the deus
ex machina.
Manners and Fashion. Dress will
be more androgynous, with class symbols becoming more important than sexual
ones. Pro-or anti-Establishment styles may already be more vital than who is
wearing them. Hardhats are just as likely to rough up antiwar girls as antiwar
men in the street, and police understand that women are just as likely to be
pushers or bombers. Dances haven't required that one partner lead the other for
years, anyway. Chivalry will transfer itself to those who need it, or deserve
respect: old people, admired people, anyone with an armload of packages. Women
with normal work identities will be less likely to attach their whole sense of
self to youth and appearance; thus there will be fewer nervous breakdowns when
the first wrinkles appear. Lighting cigarettes and other treasured niceties will
become gestures of mutual affection. "I like to be helped on with my coat," says
one women's lib worker, "but not if it costs me $2,000 a year in salary."
For those with nostalgia for a simpler past, here is a word of
comfort. Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer studied the few peaceful human tribes and
discovered one common characteristic: sex roles were not polarized. Differences
of dress and occupation were at a minimum. Society, in other words, was not
using sexual blackmail as a way of getting women to do cheap labor, or men to be
aggressive.
Thus women's lib may achieve a more peaceful society on the way toward its other goals. That is why the Swedish government considers reform to bring about greater equality in the sex roles one of its most important concerns. As Prime Minister Olaf Palme explained in a widely ignored speech delivered in Washington this spring [1970]: "It is human beings we shall emancipate. In Sweden today, if a politician should declare that the woman ought to have a different role from man's, he would be regarded as something from the Stone Age." .In other words, the most radical goal of the movement is egalitarianism.