University of Virginia Library

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.