Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement
An On-line Archival Collection
Special Collections Library, Duke University
Steinem, Gloria. "'Women's Liberation' Aims to Free Men Too."
Pittsburgh: Know, Inc., Originally published in the Washington Post
on June 7, 1970.
'Women's Liberation'
Aims to Free Men, Too
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 7, 1970
By Gloria Steinem
THIS IS THE YEAR of Women's Liberation. Or at least, it's the year
the press has discovered a movement that has been strong for several
years now, and reported it as a small, privileged, rather lunatic event
instead of the major revolution in consciousness—
in everyone's consciousness, male or female—
that I believe it truly is.
It is a movement that some call "feminist" but should more accurately
be called humanist; a movement that is an integral part of rescuing this
country from its old, expensive patterns of elitism, racism and
violence.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but
to unlearn. We are filled with the popular wisdom of several centuries
just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means
obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means
inferior: these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking
that we honestly may not know that they are there.
Unfortunately, authorities who write textbooks are sometimes subject
to the same popular wisdom as the rest of us. They gather their proof
around it, and end by becoming the theoreticians of the status quo.
Using the most respectable of scholarly methods, for instance, English
scientists proved definitively that the English were descended from the
angels while the Irish were descended from the apes.
It was beautifully done, complete with comparative skull
measurements, and it was a rationale for the English domination of the
Irish for more than 100 years. I try to remember that when I'm reading
Arthur Jensen's current and very impressive work on the limitations of
black intelligence, or when I'm reading Lionel Tiger on the inability of
women to act in groups.
It wasn't easy for the English to give up their mythic superiority.
Indeed, there are quite a few Irish who doubt that they have done it
yet. Clearing our minds and government policies of outdated myths is
proving to be at least as difficult, but it is also inevitable. Whether
It's woman's secondary role in society or the paternalistic role of the
United States in the world, the old assumptions just don't work any
more.
Part of living this revolution is having the scales fall from our
eyes. Every day we see small obvious truths that we had missed before.
Our histories, for instance have generally been written for and about
white men. Inhabited countries were "discovered" when the first white
male set foot there,
and most of us learned more about any one European country than we did
about Africa and Asia combined.
I confess that, before some consciousness-changing of my own, I would
have thought that the women's history courses springing up around the
country belonged in the same cultural ghetto as home economics. The
truth is that we need Women's studies almost as much as we need Black
Studies, and for exactly the same reason: too many of us have completed
a "good" education believing that everything from political power to
scientific discovery was the province of white males.
We believed. for instance, that the vote had been "given" to women in
some whimsical, benevolent fashion. We never learned about the long
desperation of the women's struggle, or about the strength and wisdom of
the women who led it. We knew a great deal more about the outdated, male
supremacist theories of Sigmund Freud than we did about societies where
women had equal responsibility, or even ruled.
"Anonymous," Virginia Woolf once said sadly, "was a woman."
A Black Parallel
I DON'T MEAN to equate our problems of identity with those that
flowed from slavery. But, as Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in his classic
study "An American Dilemma," "In drawing a parallel between the position
of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a
fundamental basis of our culture."
Blacks and women suffer from the same myths of childlike natures;
smaller brains; inability to govern themselves, much less white men;
limited job skills; identity as sex objects,and so on. Ever since slaves
arrived on these shores and were given the legal status of wives — that
is, chattel
— our legal reforms have followed on each other's heels
— with women, I might add, still lagging considerably behind.
President Nixon's Commission on women concluded that the Supreme
Court sanctions discrimination against women
— discrimination that it long ago ruled unconstitutional in the
case of blacks—
but the commission report mains mysteriously unreleased by the
White House. An equal rights amendment now up again before the Senate
has been delayed by a male-chauvinist Congress for 47 years. Neither
blacks nor women have role-models In history: models of individuals who
have been honored in authority outside the home.
As Margaret Mead has noted, the only women allowed to be dominant and
respectable at the same time are widows. You have to do what society
wants you to do, have a husband who dies, and then have power thrust
upon you through no fault of your own. The whole thing seems very hard
on the men.
Before we go on to other reasons why Women's Liberation Is Men's
Liberation, too
— and why this incarnation of the women's movement is inseparable
from the larger revolution
— perhaps we should clear the air of a few
more myths
— the myth that women are biologically inferior, for
instance. In fact, an equally good case could be made for the reverse.
Women live longer than men. That's when the groups being studied are
always being cited as proof that we work them to death, but the truth is
that women live longer than men even when the groups being studied are
monks and nuns. We survived Nazi concentration camps better, are
protected against heart attacks by our female hormones, are less subject
to many diseases, withstand surgery better and are so much more durable
at every stage of life that nature conceives 20 to 50 per cent more
males just to keep the balance going.
The Auto Safety Committee of the American Medical Association has
come to the conclusion that women are better drivers because they're
less emotional than men. I never thought I would hear myself quoting the
AMA, but that one was too good to resist.
I don't want to prove the superiority of one sex to another:
that would only be repeating a male mistake. The truth is that we're
just not sure how many of our differences are biological and how many
are societal. What we do know is that the differences between the two
sexes, like the differences between races, are much less great than the
differences to be found within each group.
Chains of Mink
A SECOND MYTH is that women are already being treated equally in this
society. We ourselves have been guilty of perpetuating this myth,
especially at upper economic levels where women have grown fond of being
lavishly maintained as ornaments and children. The chains may be made of
mink and wall-to-wall carpeting, but they are still chains.
The truth is that a woman with a college degree working full time
makes less than a black man with a high school degree working full time.
And black women make least of all. In many parts of the country
— New York City, for instance—
a woman has no legally guaranteed right to rent an apartment, buy
a house, get accommodations in a hotel or be served in a public
restaurant. She can be refused simply because of her sex.
In some states, women get longer jail sentences for the same crime.
Women on welfare must routinely answer humiliating personal questions;
male welfare recipients do not. A woman is the last to be hired, the
first to be fired. Equal pay for equal work is the exception. Equal
chance for advancement, especially at upper levels or at any level with
authority over men, is rare enough to be displayed in a museum.
As for our much-touted economic power, we make
up only 5 per cent of the Americans receiving $10,000 a year or more,
and that includes all the famous rich widows. We are 51 per cent of all
stockholders, a dubious honor these days, but we hold only 18 per cent
of the stock—and
that is generally controlled by men.
In fact, the myth of economic matriarchy in this country is less
testimony to our power than to resentment of the little power we do
have.
You may wonder why we have submitted to such humiliations all these
years; why, indeed, women will sometimes deny that they are second-class
citizens at all. The answer lies in the psychology of second-classness.
Like all such groups, we come to accept what society says about us. We
believe that we can make it in the world only by "Uncle Tom-ing," by a
real or pretended subservience to white males.
Even when we come to understand that we, as individuals, are not
secondclass, we still accept society's assessment of our group
— a phenomenon psychologists refer to as internalized
aggression. From this stems the desire to be the only woman in an
office, an academic department or any other part of the man's world.
From this also stems women who put down their sisters—
and my own profession of journalism has some of them.
Inhumanity to Man
I don't want to give the impression, though, that we want to join
society exactly as it is. I don't think most women want to pick up
briefcases and march off to meaningless, depersonalized jobs. Nor do we
want to be drafted—
and women certainly should be drafted; even the readers of
Seventeen magazine were recently polled as being overwhelmingly in favor
of women in national service—
to serve in a war like the one in Indochina.
We want to liberate men from those inhuman roles as well. We want to
share the work and responsibility, and to have men share equal
responsibility for the children. Probably the ultimate myth is that
children must have fulltime mothers, and that liberated women make bad
ones. The truth is that most American children seem to be suffering from
too much mother and too little father.
Women now spend more time with their homes and families than in any
other past or present society we know about. To get beck to the sanity
of the agrarian or joint family system, we need free universal day care.
With that aid, as in Scandinavian countries, and with laws that permit
women equal work and equal pay, man will be relieved of his role as sole
breadwinner and stranger to his own children.
No more alimony. Fewer boring wives. Fewer childlike wives. No more
so-called "Jewish mothers," who are simply normally ambitious human
beings with all their ambitiousness confined to the house. No more wives
who fall apart with the first wrinkle because they've been taught that
their total identity depends on their outsides No more responsibility
for another adult human being who has never been told she is responsible
for her own life, and who sooner or later says some version of, "If I
hadn't married you, I could have been a star." Women's Liberation really
is Men's Liberation, too.
The family system that will emerge is a great subject of anxiety.
Probably there will be a variety of choices. Colleague marriages, such
as young people have now, with both partners going to law-school or the
Peace Corps together, is one alternative. At least they share more than
the kitchen and the bedroom. Communes; marriages that are valid for the
child-rearing years only—
there are many possibilities.
The point is that Women's Liberation is not destroying the American
family. It is trying to build a human compassionate alternative out of
its ruins.
Simply Incorruptible
ONE FINAL myth that women are more moral than men. We are not more
moral; we are only uncorrupted by power. But until the old generation of
male chauvinists is out of office women in positions of power can
increase our chances of peace a great deal.
I personally would rather have had Margaret Mead as President
during the past six years of Vietnam than either Lyndon Johnson or
Richard Nixon. At least she wouldn't have had her masculinity to prove.
Much of the trouble this country is in has to do with the masculine
mystique: The idea that manhood somehow depends on the subjugation of
other people. It's a bipartisan problem.
The challenge to all of us is to live a revolution, not to die for
one. There has been too much killing, and the weapons are now far too
terrible. This revolution has to change consciousness, to upset the
injustice of our current hierarchy by refusing to honor it. And it must
be a life that enforces a new social justice
Because the truth is that none of us can be liberated if other groups
are not. Women's Liberation is a bridge between black and white women,
but also between the construction workers and the suburbanites, between
Mr. Nixon's Silent Majority and the young people it fears. Indeed,
there's much more injustice and rage among working-class women than
among the much publicized white radicals.
Women are sisters; they have many of the same problems, and they can
communicate with each
other. "You only get radicalized," as black activists always told us,
"on your own thing." Then we make the connection to other injustices in
society. The women's movement is an important revolutionary bridge, and
we are building It.
Gloria Steinem is a free-lance writer and a contributing editor of
New York Magazine. The accompanying article is excerpted from a
commencement address at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Miss
Steinem says that it "was prepared with great misgivings about its
reception, and about the purpose of speaking at Vassar."
KNOW, INC.
P. O. BOX 86031
PITTSBURGH. PA 15221
Images and texts on
these web pages are intended for research and educational use only. Please
read our statement
on use and reproduction for
further information on how to receive permission to reproduce an item or
how to cite it.
[Documents
from the Women's Liberation Movement ]
[ Women's
Studies Resources | Duke
Special Collections Library ]