University of Virginia Library

For Our Liberated Women
'Personhood Is Our Right'

by Charlottesville Women's Liberation

Several months ago a group
of women from the
Charlottesville area began
meeting to examine and
re-evaluate the circumstances
in which we find ourselves as
women in today's world. For
with the awareness of our own
ambitions and potentialities,
we are profoundly conscious of
the ways in which our present
economic and social system
frustrates these ambitions by
confining us within rigid sexual
roles.

We have all been raised to
believe that women have one
set of innate characteristics -
nurturing, soft, maternal,
weak, supportive while men
have another - aggressive,
strong, competitive,
competent, unemotional. In
reality, all of these are human
characteristics and should not
be attributed exclusively to
one sex or the other.

These differences are socially
imposed, and then used to mold
both sexes into narrow roles by
excluding one side of each person's
humanity.

The results are stifling for both
men and women: men are forced to
assume the entire burden of
supporting a family, while women,
if they are permitted to work at all,
are channeled primarily into service
positions nursing, teaching,
secretarial - and told that real
fulfillment comes only through
marriage and maternity.

As women we gather together
out of an urgent need to resolve
this conflict between the
stereotypes society requires of us
and the full humanity we know we
can achieve.

In the course of sharing our
various experiences as women, we
feel that we have moved toward a
better understanding of our
condition and have made some
progress toward improving that
condition.

Consciousness Raising

Our most important activity
remains our meeting, weekly in
small "consciousness raising"
groups, to share our feelings about
ourselves and society, and to try to
combat our oppression and feelings
of helplessness in the face of a
social system which is not
responsive to our needs.

Out of this growing awareness
have arisen more concrete actions
which help alleviate our situation.

We maintain a literature table in
Newcomb Hall where material
(some free and some for sale) is
available to acquaint university
women with the movement.
Beginning in the fall, we will also
offer birth control and abortion
counseling.

Most of the literature we have
now is written from a woman's
perspective; unfortunately very
little is available that speaks to a
man's experience in relation to the
movement. Hopefully there will be
some men this year who are
interested enough to meet, as we
do, to discuss and perhaps write
about their own oppression by
societal stereotypes and how this in
turn contributes to the oppression
of women.

Another of our activities has
been the establishment of a free
cooperative child care center. For
children of working or student
parents, the need for day care is
obvious.

Moreover, we feel that only
through responsible and creative
child care can women be freed from
the burden of 24-hours-a-day
mothering which cuts them off
from any outside activity; and only
in this way can children be freed
from constant confinement with
mothers who feel trapped and
unfulfilled.

Full And Equal

The center is now operating two
days a week (Thursday and Friday
from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.) at
Westminster Presbyterian Church.
As more volunteers become
available for staffing, we hope to
have it open seven days a week.

Men or women interested in any
of these activities should stop by
the Women's Liberation table on
the second floor of Newcomb Hall
any weekday between 11:30 and 1.

Our hope for the women coming
in this fall is that we will be
received as full and equal members
of the university community. There
has been considerable resistance to
coeducation here, even among
students, and a tendency to regard
women in class as biological
oddities - strange sub-male
creatures taking some deserving
man's place.

We must not be steered away
from such "masculine" fields as
science and engineering and
channeled into more "feminine"
areas, like language and the arts,
unless, of course, that is where we
want to be. It is now time that
women students be recognized as
full human beings with the same
aspirations and potentialities as
men.

We further hope that we will see
each other as sisters rather than as
competitors for male approval. It is
important that we not feel cut off
from or above other women
because we have been "blessed"
with admission to this sanctuary for
men. Above all, we must be free to
define ourselves, to create our own
identity. We must not succumb to
images imposed from without by a
community which is predominantly
male. We are more than mere
playthings, adornments for
fraternity parties or future
homemakers of America marking
time until we find a man.

Despite the fact that women
have been at this university for fifty
years, the entrance this fall of 450
undergraduate women seems to be
something of a watershed for
Virginia.

Sexes Together

We hope that responsible men
here, instead of reacting with
hostility or indifference, will
respond with a reassessment of the
traditions of this "all-male"
university, as well as of the values
which have led to the exclusion of
women from full citizenship in this
community for so many years.

This re-evaluation on the part of
men as well as women is vital to all
of us. For women's liberation is
only a part of the larger movement
for human liberation. It does not
mean the liberation of women from
men, nor that women want to be
like men.

Rather it is the liberation of
both men and women from
confining societal roles which deny
to each sex one half of their full
personhood. Female liberation is
the liberation of the female
principle in all human beings -
both by freeing and encouraging in
men those attributes which are now
defined as female, and by no longer
relegating women, because of their
"female" attributes, to a secondary
status in society.

Our vision is of women and men
working together to free themselves
and each other from the tyranny of
sexual stereotypes which now
prescribe and limit the shape of our
humanity.