The book organizes itself into 8 topics or sections with about 5-8 articles per section, they are:

• Native Americans
• Slavery
• Peace
• Women
• Labor
• Civil Rights
• Poverty
• Civil Liberties

These are stories told usually by people who actually lived or were living during many important times in our American history but their stories are not often told or heard anymore. They are certainly not taught in our history classes and are certainly not well known within the general American public.

Native Americans

With 9 articles this section covers a number of issues regarding America's history with Native Americans. You can find a transcript of Chief Sharitarish's speech to President Monroe in 1822, an 1850 law "for the government and protection of Indians" which essentially guaranteed nothing but slavery, the congressional testimony of John S. Smith regarding the Sand Creek Massacre of 450 Cheyenne (mostly women and children, in case you were wondering), and perhaps the most moving was the excerpt of Luther Standing Bear's Land of the Spotted Eagle in which he retells being shipped off to an "Indian School".

Slavery

With as much as slavery is covered in American History classes you would think the story would have been told and that a section such as this would simply be a rehashing of the same old stories. You would be wrong and so was I. The first article as an excerpt from The Life of Olaudah Equiano an African boy who was kidnapped from his village by other African villagers where he was bought, sold and traded into slavery within Africa until he was finally sold to Europeans and made the infamous "Middle Passage" to America, from the article,

O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would mean should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery with the small comfort of being together and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery.

In addition, are fugitive slave narratives, Frederick Douglass' July 4th, 1852 speech in Rochester, New York and an excerpt from Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery

Peace

Did you know that conscientious objectors were required as late as the Civil War to either "[furnish] a substitute [to go in your place] or payment of commutation money"? And that some of the pioneers in this field such as the Quaker Cyrus Pringle helped to break down this system.  You will also find Mark Twain's diatribe against the Spanish-American War, My Country Right or Wrong. An interesting (and almost prophetic) article is the Feb. 12th, 2003 speech by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) in the run-up to Bush Jr's War in Iraq. But perhaps one of the two most moving articles is a series of emails by American Rachel Corrie to her mother. Rachel Corrie was a volunteer in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. Her emails tell of an almost impossible situation that the Palestinians have to live in as bulldozers and Israeli police push the borders of Israel out to make way for more settlers. Rachel Corrie, 23,  was crushed to death by bulldozers on March 16th, 2003 while attempting to stop more Palestinian homes from being destroyed. The modern Jews act an awful lot like the Jews of antiquity, but then again they are Chosen People so who am I to argue.

Women

The section on women contains essays and speeches from some of the big hitters in the women's rights movement, Sarah Grimke, Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Sallie Tisdale. Sally Tisdale's essay, We Do Abortions Here, is the second of the two most moving articles of this book. Her essay details her life in an abortion clinic. She talks of the different kinds of women who come in to have abortions, so many with all the options in the world and so many without any but this one. So many women who she knows will be devastated the rest of their lives for the choice they are making and others who should be putting more thought into their choice especially after the 4th, 5th or 7th abortion. She is astounded at the almost total lack of education women have about their bodies, pregnancy and most critically birth control.

Labor

This was a tough chapter for me. I've always had this love/hate relationship with unions. I realize my problem with unions is the modern versions vs. the absolute critical role they played in providing fair wages and safe working conditions. Minimum wage laws, 40-hour work weeks and paid vacation and sick time are all benefits even rights that we enjoy today because of the blood, sweat and tears of many union organizers. You'll find essays on the lack of commentary on social class in American classrooms, oral histories compiled by Studs Terkel, the Dearborn Massacre in which police shot and killed a young immigrant among others shot and wounded marching on the Ford plant in Dearborn, MI. The author Barbara Ehrenreich tries to live on minimum wage and Katherine Mieszkowski tells the story, Can My Mommy Have Her Paycheck, of Hewlett-Packard's shift to a temporary work force and the impact that has on wages, benefits and getting your paycheck.

Civil Rights

Each of the articles retell the story of the struggle of black people for Civil Rights in America. Langston Hughes starts off with an essay decrying the shift in middle-class Black America to act white and why black artists try to "do" white art.  He starts his article with the following,

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white."

His essay then focuses more or less on this theme. I'm not sure I agree with his characterization of the young poets comment. How about,

... the young Negro poet said to me once, "I want to be a poet - not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want my poetry to be evaluated, rejected or accepted based on it's beauty, not on the color of my skin".

My interpretation requires one step to the heart of the matter whereas Lanston Hughes has to go through three steps to get to his interpretation. It just seems like a bit of stretch. But then again he's Langston Hughes and I'm not ;)

Many of the articles are from some prominent civil rights figures, such as, Bayard Rustin and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Others are told from the perspective of just ordinary folk, coming of age in the 50's and 60's and their experiences as they watched a nation change around them.

Poverty

This section has more oral histories compiled by Studs Terkel during the Great Depression and the lives that people led just to feed themselves and how they had to live. John Steinbeck, author of Grapes of Wrath, offers his commentary on migrant workers during the Great Depression and James Agee follows the stories of three sharecroppers during the 1940's. Barbara Ehrenreich is back with another excerpt from Nickel and Dimed and James Newfield tells us How the Other Half Still Lives both offer commentary on the current state of poverty in America.

Civil Liberties

This is section is bit more eclectic and includes transcripts of testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and Margaret Chase Smith's Declaration of Conscience a response to the growing power of Joseph McCarthy. The final three essays speak to more recent efforts by the global justice movement, the current Bush administration's outrageous moves to remove our constitutionally-protected rights and the current State of our rights in a post 9/11, Patriot Act Union.

There is so much I have not covered in this book but it is well worth the read. If anything it gives you a different perspective and offers a different voice on American history.

In the book's first section Gilbert described the long-term trend among American women toward having fewer children and investing more of their time in paid labor.  In the second section he explains how capitalism, feminism, and government policy influence the choices women make about whether or not to have children and how to raise them. 

First for capitalism.  Historically, capitalism and strong families have gone together: 

Family bonds reinforced a future-oriented perspective, which encouraged the kind of planning and discipline that kindled entrepreneurial behavior.... Children, in particular, inspire parents to sacrifice material pleasures of the moment in order to save and invest in the future.

And yet capitalism has proved, ironically, to be the undoing of the family values that fostered capitalism in the first place.  Today's "affluent capitalist societies require a flexible labor force and extravagant consumption of the ever-expanding supply of modern luxuries."  It turns out that postmodern contrasexuals (see my previous post) make better consumers than traditional mothers, so that's what American business tries to cultivate.  DINKs ("double income no kids") are a prized market because they spend so lavishly on leisure goods.  Divorce is good for business if you're a therapist, family lawyer, real estate agent, or child-care provider.  Working mothers are able to use their extra income on a wide range of goods and services (e.g. eating out more because there's no time to cook).  Historic maternal labors are increasingly "outsourced," which is good for the economy but bad for family bonds (and for children's waist-lines).

Gilbert surveys many studies on how men and women spend their time and concludes again that capitalism has not been kind to family values.  There has been a 20% decline in housework between 1965 and 1999, a 12% increase in percent of food budget spent at restaurants from 1987 to 2000, and the cost of raising children has soared.  Capitalism's tendency to teach us all to think of our life choices in terms of dollars and cents makes childbearing and rearing seem a poor life decision. 

Next comes Feminism.  Gilbert begins by recounting some of the gains women have made since 1960 (when, for example, women accounted for 37% of college enrollments, compared with 57% in 2002).  Such gains, however, have only helped along capitalism's tendency to promote "preferences for the immediate and tangible gratifications of material consumption over the distant and transcendental satisfactions of creating and nurturing a young life." 

The irony is that the second income feminism has celebrated for so long is in fact of only marginal financial benefit to the family when you factor in all the costs working mothers have to pay for good childcare, food preparation, housecleaning, transportation, taxes, and so forth.  Working motherhood only makes financial sense for those in higher income brackets, and it is those sorts of women of course who tend to write books about feminism and work.  The winners in the feminist revolution were the "intellectual elite of well-paid professional women."  The losers were everyone else.  But this successful minority has so effectively sold the country on the virtues of female employment that it is now the standard view.  If men work continuously from their twenties to retirement, then so should women.

What the feminist celebration of work missed, however, was that for the vast majority of workers, working is not fulfilling, challenging, and fun.  For most it's drudgery.  Feminists may complain about the tedium of domestic chores, but it is far more interesting to make a grocery list and purchase the items than it is to restock grocery store shelves every day.  The "privileged few with high-status, stimulating, and well-rewarded jobs" tend mistakenly to extend their own satisfaction to all work.  Betty Friedan's "problem that has no name" really does have a name.  It's called burnout, and it happens more at work than among mothers at home.  Most men don't relish work--they relish retirement.

Finally, we consider Public Policy.  Gilbert describes how many "family-friendly" government policies in fact undermine motherhood.  Welfare reform in the 1990s, for example, shifted away from payments to "unmarried women to stay home and care for their children" and began to insist that such women get out and find a job.  Conservatives and feminists both applauded. 

Gilbert spends a good bit of time on day care programs.  He surveys the research on whether paid childcare helps or hinders children, concluding that the quantitative studies are inconclusive but qualitatives studies reveal a bland routine.  One study he cites describes a child's daily activities, "he roamed independently.... He got no individual attention, because he didn't demand any.  he got no special instruction, because none was offered.  No one talked to him or hugged him, because there weren't enough adults to go around."  Though he treads carefully here, Gilbert concludes that day care tends to weaken emotional bonds between mother and child, increase behavioral problems, and have little long-term academic benefit except among the most disadvantaged children.

Finally, Gilbert presents evidence from the U.S. and Europe that suggests that the more government spends on families, the lower the fertility rate falls.  Why?  Though it is a complex issue, Gilbert thinks that social policies are less family friendly than "market friendly" in that they reward working mothers.  Parental-leave benefits and government sponsored child care will likely not affect the choices of traditional or postmodern women, but for neo-traditional or modern women (again, see my previous post for this terminology), they might tilt the scales away from having a second or third child. 

If capitalism, feminism, and social policies designed to keep women working even as they have children have all conspired to steer increasing numbers of women away from full-time motherhood and large families, and if we wish to reverse these trends, is there any other policy direction we might take?  In my next post I will describe Gilbert's proposal for crafting a public policy that affirms motherhood as a social good.

I'm not sure I said enough about domestic violence last week, while attacking a vicious "public service" advertisement from the Canadian Women's Foundation, designed to focus hatred on "white males" -- though perhaps I did say enough to satisfy some of my feminist readers (or as I call them, affectionately of course, the "shriekie sisters.") I mentioned the ad as a token for what has in fact been a long-rolling social and political campaign, nay melodrama, dating back before the "take back the night" spectacles of the 'nineties, before the "recovered memory syndrome" hysteria of the 'eighties, before the "pantsuit revolution" of the 'seventies, to the pioneers of "second-wave" feminism in the 'sixties of the last century.

The history is itself interesting, and let us quickly surf those waves to understand at least the received jargon of this ideological movement, which has tended to fill all the spaces between Communism, Environmentalism, and Islamism.

"First wave" feminism is taken as having consisted of the various women's rights, suffragette, and temperance crusaders of the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. The women, and allied men of this wave, sought to remove actual legal impediments to a woman's full participation in public life. These were all removed shortly after the Great War.

The "second wave," dating roughly from Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique -- a polemic of 1963 that wove strands of earlier feminism together with neo-Marxism and neo-Freudianism into a stinging lash -- began with the observation that women remained "subjugated" by false consciousness even after being legally freed, and demanded that the de jure accomplishments of previous generations be consolidated de facto. The target became "patriarchy," and with this, men qua men. Beneath the radar, the target became women who persisted in behaving like women.

This is the feminism I was raised in, and I remember how slowly its tenets seemed to spread -- though in retrospect it was an historical blink of an eye. The cutting-edge "hippie chicks," who were my precise contemporaries, sought liberation, but continued to dress and behave in stereotypically feminine ways. Indeed, for many men of my generation, those were the last real girls we ever got to see, and we remember them fondly.

In what came to be known as the "third wave," which has now been with us for two decades, the partially comprehensible motives and intentions of the second wave diverged, then converged, and resurged, in a great heaving flood of moral acids, and in the blather of post-modern irrationalism (or "subjectivity" as its exponents call it) -- e.g. "womanism," "ecofeminism," "sex-positivity," "post-colonial theory," "anti-racism," "queer theory," "transgender politics," and so forth. In this wave, the hatred has become focused on the one remaining excluded group -- the heterosexual white male. And the one remaining rational link between the various acidic "theories" is the need to demonize, then destroy, or at least geld, this sorry masculine creature, wherever he can be found.

Needless to say, among those who can count higher than three, various "fourth waves" have been announced more recently.

As a "heterosexual white male" myself, the eagerness of many other HWMs to buy into all this was long a mystery. Why try, when you are disqualified by race, "gender," and sexual orientation? But I've come to understand these men. My affectionate term for them is "the castrati" -- nominally heterosexual males who seek the protection of a dominant female, on the analogy of the yappy little poodle on a leash. We all know the type, although for obvious reasons it is seldom in everyone's interest to admit what we know.

Nature continues to assert herself, however, and as I continue to observe at first hand, women prefer men to poodles, at least sexually. (Well, not all women.) Alas for them, the diminishing supply means that more and more must settle for a nasty core of actual psychopaths, who give flavour to the proposition that men are inherently violent. This is in turn another by-product of a "feminized" social and educational order, that denies the value of any kind of manliness -- for it often appears that only the psychopaths survive the indoctrination.

So: if the reader has followed my analysis this far, he will grasp that the focus of demonization has further narrowed: to heterosexual white males other than yappy little poodles. These are the men responsible by definition for all the violence in the universe, who must be caged for the sake of everyone else: women, children, the various transgendered, whales, dolphins, monkeys, snails, and all the endangered species of the rainforest.

The idea that men, and men alone, are inherently violent -- and that therefore women need special State protection from them in any intimate relations they may enter into -- is among the received premises of the "meta-logic" of post-modern feminism. It is why in a country like Canada today, where statistics still show a remarkably even distribution of actual domestic violence, we have approximately 500 shelters for abused women, and approximately zero for abused men.

Oh dear, I have run out of space. Will continue these reflections next Sunday.

Gee.  I.  Can.  Hardly.  Wait.

via Broadsides

Diana Chapman Walsh, the former president of Wellesley College, remembers the first time she heard Byllye Avery's voice. It was more than 20 years ago, and Walsh had taken her daughter to a women's health rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It was a boisterous, carnival-like atmosphere, Walsh remembers, and the speakers, whom she couldn't see but could hear through a loudspeaker, were being drowned out by the boisterous crowd. Then Avery came on, and the crowd fell silent.

"She was absolutely riveting," Walsh remembers of the passionate voice that boomed through the speakers. "She brought herself into the story with this wonderful, modern perspective. She wasn't harsh or judgmental, but she brought this moral authority because she was a charismatic persona who was telling the truth, the reality from her perspective."

After more than 30 years as a healthcare activist, Avery, who has close-cropped salt-and pepper hair and purple glasses, is still bringing her perspective to women's health issues, particularly in the black community. As the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project (now known as the Black Women's Health Imperative) and the Boston-based Avery Institute for Social Change, she has spent her career fighting to get people to look at problems through ethnic eyes, to consider cultural and social circumstances, such as race and class, as relevant factors in medical treatment.

Sitting in her Jamaica Plain home last week, gently stroking her cat, Fudge, Avery explained that she came to this realization the hard way. In 1970, her husband - who was just months away from earning his PhD at the University of Florida - had a massive heart attack and died at the age of 33.

"Just before he died, he'd read 'The Feminine Mystique' by Betty Friedan," she said, referring to the book that is credited with starting the "second wave" of feminism. "He really wanted me to read it, but I never had the time. About a year later, I finally picked it up and it excited me."

She was working in child psychiatry at the time, but began thinking about bringing a feminist view to healthcare, a new tack to counter the days when, she said, a woman who asked a doctor a question about her pregnancy was told to leave the worry to the doctors.

"The important thing that feminism taught me about women's health is you have to look at it from your own perspective," she said. So, in 1974, still in Florida, she created the Gainesville Women's Health Center, and helped pioneer the use of self-help groups for women facing poverty, crime, and violence - bringing social issues into the medical equation to help explain and combat the poor health that was statistically higher in the black community. Four years later, she helped create "Birthplace," an alternative-birthing environment that created an intimate, at-home feeling for the childbirth process.

In 1983, she founded the National Black Women's Health Project to do something about the statistical discrepancies on a national level, and organized the first conference on black women's health. Organizers expected 200 people to attend; they got 2,000. It was, for Avery, a "magic" moment that set the black women's health movement off and running.

The organization celebrates its 25th anniversary next month, and while Avery says there's still much work to be done - "There are a lot of issues, like reducing infant mortality, that could take generations to accomplish," she said - she's proud of the fact that the movement has been able to significantly raise awareness.

"We've broken a conspiracy of silence," she said. "People are more willing to talk about what's wrong with them. Talking out loud helps. And I think that has improved self-esteem dramatically. People accepted that there were a lot of other forces involved in what was happening to our health. That's our biggest accomplishment, but the second big one is getting [the medical community] to look at health problems through ethnic eyes."

Though she's 70 now, Avery says she still has plenty of fight left in her (her mother, after all, is pushing 100). In recent years, much of her work has centered on healthcare reform through the Avery Institute, which she founded in 2002.

"The topic [of healthcare] can numb you. People roll their eyes," she said. "They always ask, how are we going to pay for it?"

But Avery sees the issue as just a continuation of the question she's been asking her whole life: What do we need that we're not getting?

"We're bringing a human rights perspective, with people at the center. By dint of birth, we have a right to healthcare that's readily available, affordable, and culturally relevant.

"What I want," she said, with a hint of a knowing smile creeping across her face, "is a healthcare center for every bank and liquor store."

Hometown: Deland, Fla.; lives in Jamaica Plain.

Education: Bachelor's degree in psychology from Talladega College in 1959; earned her master's degree in special education from the University of Florida in 1969.

Family: She is married to her partner, Ngina Lythcott, the associate dean for students at the Boston University School of Public Health; Avery has two children from her first marriage: Wesley, 46, a UPS driver in Florida; and Sonja, 42, who works at the University of North Florida.

Genius: In 1989, Avery was recognized with a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, which is commonly referred to as a "genius grant."

Hobbies: Avery said she enjoys The New York Times crossword puzzle, homemaking, and gardening, but said her real hobby is making magic. "I don't make things disappear, but I like to bring 'ta da' to ordinary situations."

"The Problem that Has No Name"

Betty Friedan

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire--no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights--the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.

By the end of the nineteen-fifties, the average marriage age of women in America dropped to 20, and was still dropping, into the teens. Fourteen million girls were engaged by 17. The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped fro m 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. A century earlier, women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a husband. By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar. Colleges built dormitories for "married students," but the students were almost always the husbands. A new degree was instituted for the wives--"Ph.T." (Putting Husband Through).

Then American girls began getting married in high school. And the women's magazines, deploring the unhappy statistics about these young marriages, urged that courses on marriage, and marriage counselors, be installed in the high schools. Girls started going steady at twelve and thirteen, in junior high. Manufacturers put out brassieres with false bosoms of foam rubber for little girls of ten. And on advertisement for a child's dress, sizes 3-6x, in the New York Times in the fall of 1960, said: "She Too Can Join the Man-Trap Set."

By the end of the fifties, the United States birthrate was overtaking India's. The birth-control movement, renamed Planned Parenthood, was asked to find a method whereby women who had been advised that a third or fourth baby would be born dead or defective might have it anyhow. Statisticians were especially astounded at the fantastic increase in the number of babies among college women. Where once they had two children, now they had four, five, six. Women who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies. So rejoiced Life magazine in a 1956 paean to the movement of American women back to the home.

In a New York hospital, a woman had a nervous breakdown when she found she could not breastfeed her baby. In other hospitals, women dying of cancer refused a drug which research had proved might save their lives: its side effects were said to be unfeminine. "If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde," a larger-than-life- sized picture of a pretty, vacuous woman proclaimed from newspaper, magazine, and drugstore ads. And across America, three out of every ten women dyed their hair blonde. They ate a chalk called Metrecal, instead of food, to shrink to the size of the thin young models. Department-store buyers reported that American women, since 1939, had become three and four sizes smaller. "Women are out to fit the clothes, instead of vice-versa," one buyer said

Interior decorators were designing kitchens with mosaic murals and original paintings, for kitchens were once again the center of women's lives. Home sewing became a million-dollar industry. Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children, or attend a social engagement with their husbands. Girls were growing up in America without ever having jobs outside the home. In the late fifties, a sociological phenomenon was suddenly remarked: a third of American women now worked, but most were no longer young and very few were pursuing careers. They were married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or to help pay the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting families. Fewer and fewer women were entering professional work. The shortages in the nursing, social work, and teaching professions caused crises in almost every American city. Concerned over the Soviet Union's lead in the space race, scientists noted that America's greatest source of unused brain-power was women. But girls would not study physics: it was "unfeminine." A girl refused a science fellowship at Johns Hopkins to take a job in a real-estate office. All she wanted, she said, was what every other American girl wanted--to get married, have four children and live in a nice house in a nice suburb.

The suburban housewife--she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife--freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of

In the fifteen years after World War II, this mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children's clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rughoolag class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: "Occupation: housewife."

For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women used when they talked to each other, while their husbands sat on the other side of the room and talked shop or politics or septic tanks, were about problems with their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children's school, or cook chicken or make slipcovers. Nobody argued whether women were inferior or superior to men; they were simply different. Words like "emancipation" and "career" sounded strange and embarrassing; no one had used them for years. When a Frenchwoman named Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book called The Second Sex, an American critic commented that she obviously "didn't know what life was all about," and besides, she was talking about French women. The "woman problem" in America no longer existed.

If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never knew how many other women shared it. If she tried to tell her husband, he didn't understand what she was talking about. She did not really understand it herself.

For over fifteen years women in America found it harder to talk about the problem than about sex. Even the psychoanalysts had no name for it. When a woman went to a psychiatrist for help, as many women did, she would say, "I'm so ashamed," or "I must be hopelessly neurotic." "I don't know what's wrong with women today," a suburban psychiatrist said uneasily. "I only know something is wrong because most of my patients happen to be women. And their problem isn't sexual." Most women with this problem did not go to see a psychoanalyst, however. "There's nothing wrong really," they kept telling themselves, "There isn't any problem."

But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, "the problem." And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home. Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later, after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to know they were not alone.

Gradually I came to realize that the problem that has no name was shared by countless women in America. As a magazine writer I often interviewed women about problems with their children, or their marriages, or their houses, or their communities. But after a while I began to recognize the telltale signs of this other problem. I saw the same signs in suburban ranch houses and split-levels on Long Island and in New Jersey and Westchester County; in colonial houses in a small Massachusetts town; on patios in Memphis; in suburban and city apartments; in living rooms in the Midwest. Sometimes I sensed the problem, not as a reporter, but as a suburban housewife, for during this time I was also bringing up my own three children in Rockland County, New York. I heard echoes of the problem in college dormitories and semiprivate maternity wards, at PTA meetings and luncheons of the League of Women Voters, at suburban cocktail parties, in station wagons waiting for trains, and in snatches of conversation overheard at Schrafft's. The groping words I heard from other women, on quiet afternoons when children were at school or on quiet evenings when husbands worked late, I think I understood first as a woman long before I understood their larger social and psychological implications.

Just what was this problem that has no name? What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a woman would say "I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete." Or she would say, "I feel as if I don't exist." Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. Sometimes she thought the problem was with her husband or her children, or that what she really needed was to redecorate her house, or move to a better neighborhood, or have an affair, or another baby. Sometimes, she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: "A tired feeling. . . I get so angry with the children it scares me . . . I feel like crying without any reason." (A Cleveland doctor called it "the housewife's syndrome.") A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms. "I call it the house wife's blight" said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. "I see it so often lately in these young women with four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn't caused by detergent and it isn't cured by cortisone."

Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn't laugh because she doesn't hear it. I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst's couch, working out their "adjustment to the feminine role," their blocks to "fulfillment as a wife and mother." But the desperate tone in these women's voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation.

A mother of four who left college at nineteen to get married told me:

I've tried everything women are supposed to do--hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, running PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn't leave you anything to think about--any feeling of who you are. I never had any career ambitions. All I wanted was to get married and have four children. I love the kids and Bob and my home. There's no problem you can even put a name to. But I'm desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I'm a server of food and putter-on of pants and a bed maker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I?

A twenty-three-year-old mother in blue jeans said:

I ask myself why I'm so dissatisfied. I've got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money. My husband has a real future as an electronics engineer. He doesn't have any of these feelings. He says maybe I need a vacation, let's go to New York for a weekend. But that isn't it. I always had this idea we should do everything together. I can't sit down and read a book alone. If the children are napping and I have one hour to myself I just walk through the house waiting for them to wake up. I don't make a move until I know where the rest of the crowd is going. It's as if ever since you were a little girl, there's always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there's nothing to look forward to.

A young wife in a Long Island development said:

I seem to sleep so much. I don't know why I should be so tired. This house isn't nearly so hard to clean as the cold-water Hat we had when I was working. The children are at school all day. It's not the work. I just don't feel alive.

In 1960, the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife. In the television commercials the pretty housewives still beamed over their foaming dishpans and Time's cover story on "The Suburban Wife, an American Phenomenon" protested: "Having too good a time . . . to believe that they should be unhappy." But the actual unhappiness of the American housewife was suddenly being reported--from the New York Times and Newsweek to Good Housekeeping and CBS Television ("The Trapped Housewife"), although almost everybody who talked about it found some superficial reason to dismiss it. It was attributed to incompetent appliance repairmen (New York Times), or the distances children must be chauffeured in the suburbs (Time), or too much PTA (Redbook). Some said it was the old problem--education: more and more women had education, which naturally made them unhappy in their role as housewives. "The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one," reported the New York Times (June 28,1960). "Many young women--certainly not all--whose education plunged them into a world of ideas feel stifled in their homes. They find their routine lives out of joint with their training. Like shut-ins, they feel left out. In the last year, the problem of the educated housewife has provided the meat of dozens of speeches made by troubled presidents of women's colleges who maintain, in the face of complaints, that sixteen years of academic training is realistic preparation for wifehood and motherhood."

There was much sympathy for the educated housewife. ("Like a two-headed schizophrenic . . . once she wrote a paper on the Graveyard poets; now she writes notes to the milkman. Once she determined the boiling point of sulphuric acid; now she determine s her boiling point with the overdue repairman....The housewife often is reduced to screams and tears.... No one, it seems, is appreciative, least of all herself, of the kind of person she becomes in the process of turning from poetess into shrew.")

Home economists suggested more realistic preparation for housewives, such as high-school workshops in home appliances. College educators suggested more discussion groups on home management and the family, to prepare women for the adjustment to domestic life. A spate of articles appeared in the mass magazines offering "Fifty-eight Ways to Make Your Marriage More Exciting." No month went by without a new book by a psychiatrist or sexologist offering technical advice on finding greater fulfillment through sex.

A male humorist joked in Harper's Bazaar (July, 1960) that the problem could be solved by taking away woman's right to vote. ("In the pre-19th Amendment era, the American woman was placid, sheltered and sure of her role in American society. She left all the political decisions to her husband and he, in turn, left all the family decisions to her. Today a woman has to make both the family and the political decisions, and it's too much for her.")

A number of educators suggested seriously that women no longer be admitted to the four-year colleges and universities: in the growing college crisis, the education which girls could not use as housewives was more urgently needed than ever by boys to do the work of the atomic age.

The problem was also dismissed with drastic solutions no one could take seriously,. (A woman writer proposed in Harper's that women be drafted for compulsory service as nurses' aides and baby-sitters.) And it was smoothed over with the age-old panaceas: "love is their answer," "the only answer is inner help," "the secret of completeness--children," "a private means of intellectual fulfillment," "to cure this toothache of the spirit--the simple formula of handling one's self and one's will over to God."1

The problem was dismissed by telling the housewife she doesn't realize how lucky she is--her own boss, no time clock, no junior executive gunning for her job. What if she isn't happy--does she think men are happy in this world? Does she really, secretly, still want to be a man? Doesn't she know yet how lucky she is to be a woman?

The problem was also, and finally, dismissed by shrugging that there are NO solutions: this is what being a woman means, and what is wrong with American women that they can't accept their role gracefully? As Newsweek put it (March 7, 1960):

She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of. Her discontent is deep, pervasive, and impervious to the superficial remedies which are offered at every hand.... An army of professional explorers have already charted the major sources of trouble.... From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman's role. As Freud was credited with saying: "Anatomy is destiny." Though no group of women has ever pushed these natural restrictions as far as the American wife, it seems that she still cannot accept them with good grace.... A young mother with a beautiful family, charm, talent and brains is apt to dismiss her role apologetically. "What do I do?" you hear her say. Why nothing. I'm just a housewife." A good education, it seems, has given this paragon among women an understanding of the value of everything except her own worth. . .

And so she must accept the fact that "American women's unhappiness is merely the most recently won of women's rights," and adjust and say with the happy housewife found by Newsweek: "We ought to salute the wonderful freedom we all have and be proud of our lives today. I have had college and I've worked, but being a housewife is the most rewarding and satisfying role.... My mother was never included in my father's business affairs. . . she couldn't get out of the house and away from us children. But I am an equal to my husband; I can go along with him on business trips and to social business affairs."

The alternative offered was a choice that few women would contemplate. In the sympathetic words of the New York Times: "All admit to being deeply frustrated at times by the lack of privacy, the physical burden, the routine of family life, the confinement of it. However, none would give up her home and family if she had the choice to make again." Redbook commented: "Few women would want to thumb their noses at husbands, children and community and go off on their own. Those who do may be talented individuals, but they rarely are successful women."

The year American women's discontent boiled over, it was also reported (Look) that the more than 21,000,000 American women who are single, widowed, or divorced do not cease even after fifty their frenzied, desperate search for a man. And the search begins early--for seventy per cent of all American women now marry before they are twenty-four. A pretty twenty-five-year-old secretary took thirty-five different jobs in six months in the futile hope of finding a husband. Women were moving from one political club to another, taking evening courses in accounting or sailing, learning to play golf or ski, joining a number of churches in succession, going to bars alone, in their ceaseless search for a man.

Of the growing thousands of women currently getting private psychiatric help in the United States, the married ones were reported dissatisfied with their marriages, the unmarried ones suffering from anxiety and, finally, depression. Strangely, a number of psychiatrists stated that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married ones. So the door of all those pretty suburban houses opened a crack to permit a glimpse of uncounted thousands of American housewives who suffered alone from a problem that suddenly everyone was talking about, and beginning to take for granted, as one of those unreal problems in American life that can never be solved-like the hydrogen bomb. By 1962 the plight of the trapped American housewife had become a national parlor game. Whole issues of magazines, newspaper columns, books learned and frivolous, educational conferences and television panels were devoted to the problem.

Even so, most men, and some women, still did not know that this problem was real. But those who had faced it honestly knew that all the superficial remedies, the sympathetic advice, the scolding words and the cheering words were somehow drowning the problem in unreality. A bitter laugh was beginning to be heard from American women. They were admired, envied, pitied, theorized over until they were sick of it, offered drastic solutions or silly choices that no one could take seriously. They got all kinds of advice from the growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors, psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists, on how to adjust to their role as housewives. No other road to fulfillment was offered to American women in the middle of the twentieth century. Most adjusted to their role and suffered or ignored the problem that has no name. It can be less painful for a woman, not to hear the strange, dissatisfied voice stirring within her.

It is NO longer possible to ignore that voice, to dismiss the desperation of so many American women. This is not what being a woman means, no matter what the experts say. For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough. I do not accept the answer that there is no problem because American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of; part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold. The women who suffer this problem have a hunger that food cannot fill. It persists in women whose husbands are struggling intern and law clerks, or prosperous doctors and lawyers; in wives of workers and executives who make $5,000 a year or $50,000. It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness. And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse.

It is no longer possible today to blame the problem on loss of femininity: to say that education and independence and equality with men have made American women unfeminine. I have heard so many women try to deny this dissatisfied voice within themselves because it does not fit the pretty picture of femininity the experts have given them. I think, in fact, that this is the first clue to the mystery; the problem cannot be understood in the generally accepted terms by which scientists have studied women, doctors have treated them, counselors have advised them, and writers have written about them. Women who suffer this problem, in whom this voice is stirring, have lived their whole lives in the pursuit of feminine fulfillment. They are not career women (although career women may have other problems); they are women whose greatest ambition has been marriage and children. For the oldest of these women, these daughters of the American middle class, no other dream was possible. The ones in their forties and fifties who once had other dreams gave them up and threw themselves joyously into life as housewives. For the youngest, the new wives and mothers, this was the only dream. They are the ones who quit high school and college to marry, or marked time in some job in which they had no real interest until they married. These women are very "feminine" in the usual sense, and yet they still suffer the problem.

Are the women who finished college, the women who once had dreams beyond housewifery, the ones who suffer the most? According to the experts they are, but listen to these four women:

My days are all busy, and dull, too. All I ever do is mess around. I get up at eight--I make breakfast, so I do the dishes, have lunch, do some more dishes, and some laundry and cleaning in the afternoon. Then it's supper dishes and I get to sit down a few minutes, before the children have to be sent to bed. . . That's all there is to my day. It's just like any other wife's day. Humdrum. The biggest time, I am chasing kids.

Ye Gods, what do I do with my time? Well, I get up at six. I get my son dressed and then give him breakfast. After that I wash dishes and bathe and feed the baby. Then I get lunch and while the children nap, I sew or mend or iron and do all the other things I can't get done before noon. Then I cook supper for the family and my husband watches TV while I do the dishes. After I get the children to bed, I set my hair and then I go to bed.

The problem is always being the children's mommy, or the minister's wife and never being myself.

A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers' comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me through the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood. Many of my friends are even more frantic In the past sixty years we have come full circle and the American housewife is once again trapped in a squirrel cage. If the cage is now a modern plateglass -and-broadloom ranch house or a convenient modern apartment, the situation is no less painful than when her grandmother sat over an embroidery hoop in her gilt-end-plush parlor and muttered angrily about women's rights.

The first two women never went to college. They live in developments in Levittown, New Jersey, and Tacoma, Washington, and were interviewed by a team of sociologists studying workingmen's wives. 2 The third, a minister's wife, wrote on the fifteenth reunion questionnaire of her college that she never had any career ambitions, but wishes now she had. The fourth, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, is today a Nebraska housewife with three children.. Their words seem to indicate that housewives of all educational levels suffer the same feeling of desperation.

The fact is that NO one today is muttering angrily about "women's rights," even though more and more women have gone to college. In a recent study of all the classes that have graduated from Barnard College, a significant minority of earlier graduates blamed their education for making them want "rights," later classes blamed their education far giving them career dreams, but recent graduates blamed the college for making them feel it was not enough simply to be a housewife and mother; they did not want to feel guilty if they did not read books or take part in community activities. But if education is not the cause of the problem, the fact that education somehow festers in these women may be a due.

If the secret of feminine fulfillment is having children, never have many women, with the freedom to choose, had so many children in so few years, so willingly. If the answer is love, never have women marched for love with such determination. And yet there is a growing suspicion that the problem may not be sexual, though it must somehow relate to sex. I have heard from many doctors evidence of new sexual problems between man and wife--sexual hunger in wives so that their husbands cannot satisfy it. "We have made women a sex attire," said a psychiatrist at the Margaret Sanger marriage counseling clinic. "She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there, night after night, tiny for her husband to make her feel alive." Why is there such a market for books and articles offering sexual advice? The kind of sexual orgasm which Kinsey found in statistical plenitude in the recent generations of American women does not seem to make this problem go away.

On the contrary, new neuroses are being seen among women--and problems as yet unnamed as neuroses--which Freud and his followers did not predict, with physical symptoms, anxieties, and defense mechanisms equal to those caused by sexual repression. And strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework--an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. Educators are increasingly uneasy about the dependence, the lack of self-reliance, of the boys and girls who are entering college today. "We fight a continual battle to make our students assume manhood," said a Columbia dean.

A White House conference was held on the physical and muscular deterioration of American children: were they being over-nurtured? Sociologists noted the astounding organization of suburban children's lives: the lessons, parties, entertainments, play and study groups organized for them. A suburban housewife in Portland, Oregon, wondered why the children "need" Brownies and Boy Scouts out here. "This is not the slums. The kids out here have the great outdoors. I think people are so bored. they organize the children, and then try to hook ever' one else on it. And the poor kids have no time left just to lie on their beds and daydream."

Can the problem that has no name be somehow related to the domesroutine of the housewife? When a woman tries to put the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads. What is there in this recital of comfortable domestic detail that could possibly cause such a feeling of desperation? Is she trapped simply by the enormous demands of her role as modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur, expert on interior decoration child care, appliance repair, furniture refinishing, nutrition, and education? Her day is fragmented as she rushes from dishwasher to washing machine to telephone to dryer to station wagon to supermarket, and delivers Johnny to the Little League field, takes Janey to dancing class, gets the lawnmower fixed and meets the 6:45. She can never spend more than 15 minutes on any one thing; she has no time to read books, only magazines; even if she had time, she has lost the power to concentrate. At the end of the day, she is so terribly tired that sometimes her husband has to take over and put the children to bed.

Thus terrible tiredness took so many women to doctors in the 1950's that one decided to investigate it. He found, surprisingly, that his patients suffering from "housewife's fatigue' slept more than an adult needed to sleep -as much as ten hours a day- and that the actual energy they expended on housework did not tax their capacity. The real problem must be something else, he decided-perhaps boredom. Some doctors told their women patients they must get out of the house for a day, treat themselves to a movie in town. Others prescribed tranquilizers. Many suburban housewives were taking tranquilizers like cough drops. You wake up in the morning, and you feel as if there's no point in going on another day like this. So you take a tranquilizer because it makes you not care so much that it's pointless."

It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.

How can any woman see the whole truth within the bounds of her own life? How can she believe that voice inside herself, when it denies the conventional, accepted truths by which she has been living? And yet the women I have talked to, who are finally listening to that inner voice, seem in some incredible way to be groping through to a truth that has defied the experts.

I think the experts in a great many fields have been holding pieces of that truth under their microscopes for a long time without realizing it. I found pieces of it in certain new research and theoretical developments in psychological, social and biological science whose implications for women seem never to have been examined. I found many clues by talking to suburban doctors, gynecologists, obstetricians, child-guidance clinicians, pediatricians, high-school guidance counselors, college professors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists and ministers-questioning them not on their theories, but on their actual experience in treating American women. I became aware of a growing body of evidence, much of which has not been reported publicly because it does not fit current modes of thought about women--evidence which throws into question the standards of feminine normality, feminine adjustment, feminine fulfillment, and feminine maturity by which most women are still trying to live.

I began to see in a strange new light the American return to early marriage and the large families that are causing the population explosion; the recent movement to natural childbirth and breastfeeding; suburban conformity, and the new neuroses, character pathologies and sexual problems being reported by the doctors. I began to see new dimensions to old problems that have long been taken for granted among women: menstrual difficulties, sexual frigidity, promiscuity, pregnancy fears, childbirth depression, the high incidence of emotional breakdown and suicide among women in their twenties and thirties, the menopause crises, the so-called passivity and immaturity of American men, the discrepancy between women's tested intellectual abilities in childhood and their adult achievement, the changing incidence of adult sexual orgasm in American women, and persistent problems in psychotherapy and in women's education.

If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and puzzling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home."

NOTES

1. See the Seventy-fifth Anniversary Issue of Good Housekeeping, May, 1960, "The Gift of Self," a symposium by Margaret Mead, Jessamyn West, et al.
2. Lee Rainwater, Richard P. Coleman, and Gerald Handel, Workingman's Wife, New York, 1959.
3. Betty Friedan, "If One Generation Can Ever Tell Another," Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Northampton, Mass., Winter, 1961. I first became aware of "the problem that has no name" and its possible relationship to what I finally called "the feminine mystique" in 1957, when I prepared an intensive questionnaire and conducted a survey of my own Smith College classmates fifteen years after graduation. This questionnaire was later used by alumnae classes of Radcliffe and other women's colleges with similar results.
4. Jhan and June Robbins, "Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped," Redbook, September, 1960.
5. Marian Freda Poverman, "Alumnae on Parade," Barnard Alumnae Magazine, July, 1957.

So is it any wonder that many of today’s black women feel detached from the concept of feminism? Famed author Alice Walker coined her own term for black feminist (womanist) in an attempt to connect who she was in terms of race, gender and societal p.o.v. In our current society, we are somewhat forced to choose either black or female. We’ve been seeing it everyday in this political race. Some have said that Obama’s campaign doesn’t connect with women, and many of Clinton’s supporters have continued to bolster her campaign as a feminist achievement while saying some pretty dicey mess about Obama as a Black person.

This is just a representation of the constant social quandary that black women face. We are constantly asked to “ban together” with white women in the quest for female liberation, a movement that has and continually ignores the plight of black women unless it aligns with their own. At the same time many a black woman has been chastised or discouraged from the outward focus on her needs as a woman within the black community.. We see it time and time again when black rape victim speaks out against her Negroid attackers, then she’s accused of causing more problems within the black community (Dunbar Village, Mike Tyson, Clarence Thomas just to name a few). That is because many times the term black= “black man” and his needs came first. Historically, speaking it was important to be a unified front and many times the needs of black women were secondary, and the job of a good black woman was to stand by her man. Some of the most revered women in black history were women who were married to powerful men. (Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, etc) that’s not to diminish their roles in history, but we need to start asking why women like Ida B. Wells and Angela Davis are not praised right along with them.
I actually went to a Black History month forum and there was only one female panelist. She had the most education, the most credentials and the most relevant information. And yet she said the least. As soon as she said that her emphasis was on the history of black women, she got bombarded with negative comments from males in the audience, men who said that “all this male female stuff was just dividing us as a culture.” Now it would be one thing if she were straight bashing brothas, calling them lazy, or dumb, or no good ( like many woman do) but these men felt that just talking about the work and needs of black women is divisive. How can that be so? If a nation is only as strong as its women, how strong does that make the black community? (I’m not talking about that fake “strong black woman crap, I mean real strength).
And so these issues linger in the hearts and minds of black women. Hundreds of years later, we're still asking "Ain't I A woman?" what does it mean to be both black and woman? and trying to figure out how to end the divide within ourselves?

Here are some really good reads on the topic

The Angry Black Woman
The Root
The History of Black Feminists

The authors call the more recent tradition that emphasizes how women have been oppressed "slaughtered saints' feminism" in contrast to the earlier "sleeping beauty feminism" of Betty Friedan. The authors write, rather provocatively:

Sleeping Beauty feminism was poorly adapted to becoming a mass movement despite Ms. Friedan's program for making it one. It was aimed at the minority of elitists whose non-spiritual problems had been solved and who were summoned to confront the spiritual crisis signaled by "the problem that has no name." The failure to recognize this crisis as a spiritual one has led not to its solution but to its burial, its replacement by problems at lower levels in the "hierarchy of needs," things like paying the rent and the utilities and coping with roleless men--problems which have made today's Slaughtered Saints feminism what the Sleeping Beauty feminism of a generation ago could never have been, a mass movement.

The best thing for the women's movement now would be (if it were possible) to restore the patriarchal family and hope that it could once again solve women's lower-level needs and bring them back to where is could be said, "Blessed are those who feel their spiritual need." Let the Scriptures be fulfilled. The patriarchy which brought them this far couldn't carry them all the way to moksha experience but it was the best friend women ever had.

Slaughtered Saints feminists now affect to interpret the free ride as itself an affliction, as what feminist Jessie Bernard calls "the woman's extra load of economic dependency." She thinks this burden "has to be lightened" because "A union between a man and a woman in which, when it breaks down, one loses not only the mate but also the very means of subsistence is not a fair relationship."

It is not a relationship at all when it breaks down; and it breaks down chiefly because (thanks to the feminist/sexual revolution's insistence on a woman's right to control her own reproduction) marriage has become a non-binding contract. Women do not suffer from an "extra load of economic dependency"; they want to hang on to the dependency or get it back again--without having to fulfill the marital obligations which justify it.

The patriarchal system benefits women by marriage. The feminist program of wrecking the patriarchy aims to make it provide the same benefits outside marriage, thereby destroying marriage, the family, the male role and the whole patriarchal system--and restoring matriliny. The only way for men to restore the patriarchy is to insist that there shall be no free ride outside of marriage and the acceptance of sexual regulation--no alimony, no child support payments, no affirmative action and comparable worth programs, no quotas, no goals-and-timetables. To be independent means not to be dependent.

Fat chance on that last proposal. The whole meaning of the modern innovations like "no fault" divorce, mandatory alimony, and affirmative action is heads-I-win-tails-you-lose treatment of established elites. The goal is not fairness; the goal is destroying traditional role of men (and other bad people) in society.

Thus, the goalpost always moves: procedural fairness (Title VII) gave way to racial and sexual parity (Affirmative Action and "Diversity") and then there emerged the openly stated goal of the complete elimination of any role for white males and other traditional elites in public life (Black Power and Contemporary Feminism).  Here we are.  The "dumb dad" is our cultural symbol, and he is dumb indeed for giving up his power and the prerequisite of civilization, the traditional family, so readily.

Hi friends.

I know it seems like I haven’t been the active little blogger since South Dakota, but I am the woman behind the scenes, behind the man, behind the motherfucking wheel--except when the road is:

(a) winding
(b) icy
(c) poorly lit
(d) paved

as Ryan doesn’t let me drive in those conditions, feeling I am not a “safe” driver, just because I swerve every time I:

(a) adjust the iPod
(b) adjust the GPS
(c) pet Mati
(d) eat veggies and hummus
(e) think I see the shadow of a deer

My point is, that I do DO shit, including:

(a) upload and rough chop video so Ryan can work his editing skills more smoothly
(b) be a kind and maternal tech support/girlfriend whenever Ryan has computer rage and wants to throw one of our Macs out the window of La Quinta ____________ (insert city here).
(c) search for places to live in
(d) write and post Craigslist ads
(e) write and make friends with people who respond to our Craigslist adds
(f) microwave dinner and/or pack road lunch and make sure Ryan has enough chips, Reese’s peanut butter cups, salted oil in a Ziploc, and other foods which will expedite death, to last x amount of driving hours
(g) handle all logistics, including motels, checking the tires/oil, laundry, and the last time Ryan washed road trip hair
(h) making sure mati/ryan shit daily and the family is content--nay--happy
(i) nay--ecstatic
(j) search and apply for jobs for the both of us
(k) hit my friends and family across the nation up for housing
(l) file Ryan's unemployment claims
(m) make lists of all the things I do, to elevate my self-
(n) esteem
(o) post lists on blog
(p) continue to add things to list
(q) One Hundred Years of Solitude
(r) The Lives of Others
(s) Ben and Jerry's Half Baked
(t) my sister
(u) in the 6th grade

I’m telling you all this because:

(a) I wish I blogged more
(b) I hate Ryan because he kicks my ass at road trip games and at blogging
(c) I am woman, therefore I bitch, but accurately and concisely, about all the things (a through u!!!) I do and cannot claim wealth and glory for
(d) The End!

I got this.

As a girl growing up in the '70s, I learned to view with condescension women who cared whether their floor wax had yellowed or whether their hubbies' shirts bore the dreaded ring around the collar. Obviously, the conventional feminist wisdom went, these women did not have a satisfying life; instead of winning boardroom battles, they settled for such fleeting victories as a shiny floor or a ringless tub. Why didn't they get themselves real jobs?

A lot of girls in my generation took to heart this message of liberation from the perceived drudgery of housework and grew up to have careers that our mothers never even dreamed of. But apparently, even with the monetary and psychic rewards of paying jobs, we still yearn for that cozy, clean nest.

Wait, wait, wait . . . the "perceived drudgery of housework?"  Rena, honey, housework is the very definition of drudgery.  Not that career women (and men) manage to avoid drudgery in the workplace.  We do not.  However, we get paid for performing menial, thoughtless tasks.

Don't get me wrong.  I place a high value on housework, child care, cleaning and laundry.  Just don't try to convince me that Betty Friedan was wrong, or that I'm being condescending towards stay-at-home moms if I question why sparkling floors would make them, or anyone feel delirious with joy.  A sense of satisfaction over a job well done - no matter what the job - is a universal emotion.  I get the same feeling from entering data into a database, but if, with two college degrees and decades of experience, I had to sum up my career in terms of this level of satisfaction and elevate the experience to a "vocation,"  I'd be fairly depressed.  Which brings me to your repeated references to Betty Friedan.

References like this one:

      Betty Friedan must turn over in her grave, I think, to see me derive gratification from such menial (and unpaid) labor.

I disagree.  Betty Friedan would applaud you for turning your menial labor into a controversial essay for which you were no doubt handsomely paid by The Washington Post. 

And, Rena, you can thank a feminist for that.

Ok. I am still missing Toni Childs with the sickness.

 But there were indeed some universal messages for all comeback girls in the Girlfriend’s premiere last night. At times I think Ms. Joan Clayton was channeling your’s truely. Particularly on the parts  where she unwittingly emasculates Aaron when challenging him on needing his approval on an oven range purchase.

 He dramatically throws his jeans at her and asks if she would like to wear the pants-but not before Joan makes a dig at how broke Aaron is.

Oh woa is me. Every successful black woman has done it before. Even if you count yourself as progressive and evolved with occasional “urban” outbursts-about how you don’t need a man yabba dabba do–we all slip up from time to time.

And being that I am the all too common product of a single parent household and of an all women’s university—well lets just say sometimes I am slidding on a very slippery slope. But I do know this (3) recognizing the “problem” is the first step. (isn’t that what they say in A.A??)

 (4) As much as I hate to admit (looking away from the bookshelf with Betty Friedan, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Gloria Steinem), power in relationships bring forth those damn gender roles you (**) told me didn’t exist, ladies (yes yall)…dead and alive- and that they are negotiated. (5) A man sometimes needs to know that you need him in ways that aren’t always sexual. (6) This doesn't’t mean that you play dumb. but (7) if you are living with, married to, engaged or in a deeply committed  relationship you can’t make “single” decisions (8) particularly with a man who has proven that he is worthy.

If she was living, Betty would probably be as mad as hell at me right now (being that I did do a lot of work citing of the “Feminist Mystique”) but hey that’s life on the other side of planet comeback girl.

(**) ok for the record I do sometime have inner dialogue with Betty, Bell, and Alice. And yes occassionally I cuss at them. LOL

The second book is Hollywood Nobody by Lisa Samson. Hollywood arrived in the mail today and I was so excited I had to start reading it. I am loving it so far! Lisa Samson and this book will be on my feature author page in November so I'm happy to be reading it. Don't worry, I'll have a book review before then.

I am waiting for Woman's Inhumanity to Woman by Phylis Chesler. A friend of mine is reading this book and kept talking about how excellent it is so her, another friend and I will be reading it together and then discussing it. It should be interesting. Our next book to read will be The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. That book will bring some interesting discussion. I have been wanting to read Mystique for several years. I tried reading it when my youngest was a baby but kept falling asleep due to the fact I had a baby and was getting no sleep. Now that kiddos are a little older my interest has been awakened. (Ha. Ha.)

Let's see...I don't see any other books in my immediate future. I do want to read Uglies (Uglies Trilogy, Book 1) at some point in time. I checked it out from the library a few weeks ago but didn't get around to reading it.

Oh! I know what I want to read! Best Friends kiddo is reading the Dear America books. One of the books K has read is My America: Our Strange New Land, Elizabeth's Jamestown Colony Diary, Book One (My America). K enjoyed it so much that I wanted to read it also. I love finding someone who loves to read as much as I do especially someone as young as K.

I am all about reading. I am starting to see my kiddos start to enjoy reading. They love reading the Bone graphic novels. So does R (Best Friends kiddo). When R is over at our house, it is not unusual to see them sitting around reading Bone. (This is of course after they have all gotten hurt or in trouble and have to settle down). Anyway, back to books and reading.

I love to read. If I do not have a book started and another planned I don't know how to act. I start to get panicky and start looking for something to read. It's like the world is falling apart. Books and reading are a part of me. Books are my passion. I don't think I can go a day without reading...as a matter of fact, I will schedule it into my day if I have to. That is how important reading is to me.

I am always looking for new reading material so feel free to leave suggestions.

The Return of the Equal Rights Amendment

By Sarah Katherine Mergel, Bread and Circus contributing writer

Back in April, as I was preparing to teach a class on the women's movement in the Sixties and Seventies, a colleague asked if I had heard that the Equal Rights Amendment had resurfaced in Congress. (I, of course, had not). Apparently on March 27, 2007, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (NY) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (MA) introduced the Women's Equality Amendment (H.J. Res. 40/S.J. Res. 10). Section 1 declares "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Section 2 gives Congress the power to enforce the provisions of the amendment. Both mirrored the wording of the original ERA. The House and Senate subsequently referred the proposed amendment to their respective judiciary committees where no further action has been taken. Should Congress vote in favor of sending the WEA to the states, ratification by three more states might make it the next amendment to the Constitution. (See note 1 below)

When the ERA sailed through both houses of Congress in 1972 it seemed to members of the women's rights movement that their long-hard fought for equality would soon be made easier-the states were sure to ratify it. Few expected that the amendment would be undone by other women, but it was. As grassroots campaigns emerged in key states, legislators began to withdraw their support. After ten years the ERA failed to receive backing by enough states to add it to the Constitution. Public opinion polls at the time suggested that a majority of Americans supported equal rights making the amendments defeat all the more confusing to members of the women's rights movement.

The Democratic sponsors of the "new" amendment hope that the time has come to move forward with gender equality. Proponents have reintroduced the measure before, but now feel they have a better chance at getting the two-thirds votes necessary to see it move back to the states. Opponents still maintain that the amendment will add nothing to the present laws of the country and remain confident that no additional states will ratify the amendment. Given that the Women's Equality Amendment is likely to spark some heated debate when and if Congress votes on it, I thought it might be a good time to look at both the history of the amendment and its relationship more generally to the women's rights movement.

In the nineteenth century, the feminist movement began to advocate for the political equality of women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other women sought to make their political voice heard. Women tried to demonstrate they could move beyond their roles as good wives and mothers although they had little success in securing voting rights. These early feminists passed the torch to Alice Paul whose experience with the more radical women's rights movement in England caused her to take a more aggressive approach in pushing for suffrage. Members of the National Women's Party risked respectability to garner women's rights. Paul's favorite tactic was to picket the White House. The move was especially effective during World War I when Woodrow Wilson had turned the war into a crusade for democracy. Once Wilson agreed to support the suffrage cause, Congress voted in favor of the 19^th amendment and the states quickly ratified it.

While Paul and the NWP fought for suffrage other women during the progressive era had different goals-primarily better working conditions. Members of the progressive movement, like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley thought protective legislation would bring moral uplift to the working class. Working class women, although somewhat concerned about potential financial impact of the proposed legislation, came to support laws that would improve their working conditions and limit their hours. They also saw protective legislation as a substitute for union activity (which the heads of the largest unions often excluded them from).

Protective legislation caused a rift among women in the women's movement. Working class women supported suffrage, but feared the Equal Rights Amendment proposed by Paul in 1923. The amendment, they thought, would bring an end to protective legislation because it would make women and men equal in the eyes of management. The hours men were expected to work, women too would have to work. Working class women in the 1920s could not actually conceive of a time when industry would agree to reduced hours for all workers. (See note 2).

While Congress seemed reluctant to support the ERA, the number of women in the workforce increased in the 1920s because the decade's consumerism. Vacuum cleaners and automobiles cost money-money that a one-wage earner family could not afford so more middle-class women sought jobs. They often took white-collar service related positions. During the Great Depression fewer women worked, but that could be said of men too. However as soon as the nation began to mobilize for war in the 1940s the rate of single and married women in the work force rose steadily. Working women pushed for equal pay for equal work, but the war's end lessened their bargaining power in the workplace. In the 1950s even more middle-class and college educated women joined the workforce. At the same time, married women began to experience changes in their home life. As relationships became more reciprocal, some married women began to wonder why they had accepted the traditional role for so long.

Much to the dismay of women's rights advocates, John F. Kennedy did not endorse the ERA in his 1960 platform-he was the first Democratic candidate not to do so since 1944. Once in office, he appointed a commission to study the status of women. Women's rights advocates, especially the NWP, could not prevent the administration from stacking the commission with members who opposed the ERA. It came as no surprise then to members of the NWP when the commission suggested that an equal rights amendment was not necessary (at least not necessary in the early 1960s). The introduction of the Equal Pay Bill, which passed through Congress in 1963, followed on the heels of the commission's work. The Department of Labor's Women's Bureau had been a strong supported of the ideas represented in the bill since 1945; however, the NWP thought the bill merely distracted from the more important goal of securing the passage of the ERA. The bill had flaws, but it did commit the government to the cause of ending gender discrimination. A year later Title VII of the Civil Rights Bill prohibited gender discrimination in the workplace. Regardless of how it got into the bill, the women's rights movement saw it as another step towards equality.

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique proved to be the spark that ignited the new, more aggressive, women's movement in the late 1960s. The founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966 provided a place for women from various backgrounds to join in the fight for women's equality. Longtime feminists joined with members of the labor movement in a common cause-something that had been hard to do in the past. The new organization gave women a collective identity, which for longtime activists seemed an important step to achieving the goal of equality for women. NOW added its support to the ERA, at the urging of Alice Paul, and quickly became the most vocal proponent of the measure (much to the NWP's dismay). However, what seemed to be more important in the ultimate Congressional acceptance of the ERA was Title VII. The Civil Rights Act undermined protective legislation. Women associated with the labor movement felt they could finally support ERA-the Women's Bureau endorsed it for the first time in 1970.

Just as NOW brought together women who supported the ERA, a grass roots movement of women opposing the ERA emerged in the early 1970s. Phyllis Schlafly, who led the STOP ERA campaign, had shown no interest in the ERA until 1971 when she was asked to debate the issue. Schlafly and her followers successfully raised doubts about what the amendment might do ultimately slowing down its momentum. As much as it appeared in 1972 that a majority of the population supported equal rights, the US in 1972 was a different place than it had been several years before when NOW was founded. The social, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s caused some Americans to rethink the country's post-WWII commitment to liberalism. The New Right of the 1970s used the ERA as just one of the ways to demonstrate how liberalism had run amok. Support for the ERA decreased in the 1970s. By 1980, the Republican Party felt comfortable refusing to endorse the amendment. By 1982 it became clear that proponents of ERA could not garner enough support to secure ratification.

The thing that most people forget about the women's rights movement is that even members of the movement have not always been on the same page about what constitutes the best course of action for promoting women's interests. Middle and upper-class women had different goals than working class women even before women gained the right to vote. Even women in the same class did not agree on the question of voting rights. For example, Julia Ward Howe concluded that suffrage increase the dignity of women, but Emily P. Bissell thought giving women the right to vote was a reform against nature. (See note 3) The same was true for the ERA. Members of NOW assumed that no woman in her right mind would oppose equality, but the STOP ERA campaign proved otherwise. Moreover, although labor supported the ERA after Title VII there was still some concern that the amendment would harm working-class women. Myra Wolfgang, a leader in the labor movement, recognized discrimination in the workplace as a real problem; however, she did not think the ERA would solve the problem because it was too sweeping. (See note 4)

So where does this little review of the history of the women's movement and ERA leave us? First, I think, it remains important to recognize that the question of gender discrimination and equal rights is complicated and there is more to the debate than just being for or against the ERA. Just because someone-man or women-does not support the ERA, does not mean they are for gender discrimination. Second, even without an ERA women have made progress towards equality. Title VII may not be perfect, but it is something. As a Ph.D. student I worked part-time in retail unloading new merchandise off incoming trucks. I never sensed any hesitation by my co-workers to throw heavy boxes my way-and to think fifty years ago I probably would not have gotten the job.

The debate over the ERA is likely to continue in the future, whether it passes this time or not. If it does not proponents of gender equality will find new ways to fight; if it does the government and the courts will begin debates on how to enforce the law. So as you look to the future of this important question, remember it has a past, too.

• Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: The History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982)
• Elizabeth Pleck, "Failed Strategies, Renewed Hope," in Rights of Passage: The Past and Future of the ERA edited by Joan Hoff-Wilson (1986)
• Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987).

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Capítulos do livro:
1. O problema sem nome
2. A heroína doméstica
3. A crise de identidade da mulher
4. A vibrante jornada
5. O solipsismo sexual de Sigmund Freud
6. O congelamento funcional - o protesto feminino e Margaret Mead
7. A educação orientada para o sexo
8. A escolha errônea
9. Sexo e comércio
10. Expande-se a função doméstica para preencher tempo livre
11. Em busca do sexo
12. Crescente desumanização: um confortável campo de concentração
13. A personalidade desperdiçada
14. Um novo plano de vida para a mulher