University of Virginia Library

Robert Gillmore

Trying To Liberate Women's Lib

There she was, the most
glamorous number in the class of
'56 but still in her heart a Smithie,
and thus able to reassure her
"sisters" - of sex and of college -
that Women's Lib was really okay.

"But we don't want to be men,
either," Gloria Steinem also said.
"We don't want to walk off with
slim line briefcases and work for
IBM."

During the big Women's Lib
rally in New York last year, there
were the Lib types on the tube:
whimpering little bitches steaming in
the heat of their own newly found
ideology and showing with every
poignant frown and every clumsy
gesture and every safari in search of
a new word, their oh-so-serious-u-o-n-e-e-r-n
about the
m-o-v-e-m-e-n-t.

And of late there is that Hebraic
tough, Norman Mailer, dueling with
the smoke he fills too (incredibly!)
much of Harpers' magazine.

As Norman has so well
demonstrated, and as he himself
likes to say, there is just too much
crap obscuring the simple clarity
and the moral force of an otherwise
rather splendid movement.

Women's Lib at its highest and
purest form would stand for a value
which many of us consider the
most fundamental: individuality. It
would speak for a society that
would enhance the freedoms and
the capacities of everyone and at
the moment especially of that
group, which because it is female,
has less than its share of both.

True Choice

But Gloria dear, Women's Lib
does not necessarily mean that
women will not tool off to IBM.
They may or they may not. The
point of Lib, I hope, is that women
ought to have the true choice of
deciding what they want to do -
whatever it might be.

Women's Lib, I would hope, is
something bigger than the New
Left: because its highest value is
individuality, the movement must
be able to tolerate all political
styles.

Early Struggles

And to all those who would
delude themselves that Lib is
something new under the sun, I
would suggest that if its goals are
fundamental ones, its precedents
are ancient and numerous.

Its roots are the early struggles
for women suffrage and
abolitionism; its spirit should be
nothing different from the most
impeccable premise of the civil
rights movement: that an individual
is that first, and a black man and/or
a woman or anything else second.

For a woman to be thought of
as a woman with certain things that
as a woman she must do is a kind of
tyranny of convention - from
which happily Women's Lib hopes
to free them - and all of us.

There are no logical reasons why
women inherently must do
domestic or other such things or
play social, economic or any other
roles. Of course, as someone once
reminded Margaret Mead, "in no
society do the men have the
babies," the list of necessary
feminine functions tends
necessarily to end about there.

Unfortunately for Women's Lib,
this kind of spirit is forgotten in the
hodgepodge of its rhetoric.

Needs Will

Women's Lib fundamentally
must not be a movement in the
usual sense; it must have nothing
fundamentally to do with a group.

If it must be a movement, it
must be one of each woman, alone:
it is the doing, truly, of her own
thing.

It must therefore be the product
of a large will and vast
inner-direction. It must be heroic.
And therein lay its glory.

Its models, perhaps, might be
John O'Hara's women, or Mary
McCarthy or Mary Bunting or
Claire Booth - women who are
captivating not because they are
women but because they are
women who are great individuals.

And so if Women's Lib is in
need of things, it has little need of
Gloria Steinem - and none at all of
Norman Mailer - but a lot of the
will to do.

Slowly, it seems, in spite of all
the rubbish, women are developing
this kind of will.

And men, for their part, would
do very well to realize that
Women's Lib is hardly a curse but a
long-overdue blessing. For if it goes
well, more and more women will be
public entitles in their own right:
creatures as interesting and worthy
of knowing as their husbands.

Lib, happily will allow marriage
to be put at arm's length: the
family, the home and all that
horribly ordinary stuff will lose its
present over-importance: with
women wanting and having careers -
if such they want - men themselves
will also be "liberated" from the
need to give time and attention to
the family.

Both men and women will thus
be spared the absurdity of washing
floors, dishes, and children's noses
if they do not want to and if they
want to do something else and can
find a maid to do it better and
more willingly than they.

In time, perhaps, the logically
indefensible - but rather barbaric
and very inconvenient and
inefficient idea of male initiative
may die also.

Sex For Lust

And in even more time, women
as well as men may be able upon
occasion to enjoy sex for the sake
of lust alone and feminine sexual
reticence (once but no longer
genetically functional) may also go
the way of the hoop skirt.

Perhaps history's most fruitful
marriage was between John Stuart
Mill and Harriett Taylor. They had
no children but a housekeeper.
Their family was the world; their
home was philosophy. And,
thankfully, neither one was bored.