375 - Voices of the New Feminism

Voices of the New Feminism
Edited by Mary Lou Thompson
246 pp. Boston, Beacon Press, 1970. $5.95.

The editor of this compact collection has aimed at furthering the progressive goals of the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation, of which she is associate director, by providing (in her words) "an educational tool for all women who wish to examine the situation of women in the world today" (p. vii). Indeed, the tenor of Thompson's book is didactic in the best sense of this abused word.

The essays (a number of them classics) are factual, practical, logical, cautiously optimistic, ringing with the notes we have come to associate with the liberal establishment. In feminist terms this sector of opinion is identified with the National Organization for Women (NOW), two of whose founders, Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, have essays included here. There are more strident "voices of the new feminism." Almost entirely tuned out by Thompson, they emit forcefully in, for example, Robin Morgan's recent compendium, Sisterhood Is Powerful. However, Thompson's omissions are offset in some measure by the useful annotated bibliography of writings on women, excerpted from Lucinda Cisler's larger listing, with which the book closes.

In the present collection, then, one hears mainly the voices of women committed to working for women "within the system," whether that of international or American politics, higher education, or the church. The one exception (palliated by its theoretical level of discourse) is Roxanne Dunbar's "Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution," which takes a Marxist-Engelian stand on the need for a wholly new social order.

More typically, the 1968 Report to the United Nations on the Status of Women in Sweden, written by Maj-Britt Sandlund, blandly recounts major social service innovations in the apparent expectation that other

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member nations will see the same light. But it broke in Sweden because, as a primary factor, women of childbearing age were so committed to the economic benefits of working outside the home that the population began to decline. Granted that the Swedish day-care centers and split-shift arrangements for parents are extremely admirable and worthy of emulation, it will also be evident that this particular national situation has few analogues in a world overburdened with people. On the American front, Martha Griffiths (U. S. Rep., 17th Cong. Dist. Mich.) and Shirley Chisholm (U. S. Rep., 12th Cong. Dist. N. Y.) speak out candidly about the difficulties of combatting the widespread discrimination against women that continues to exist at all levels of Federal government. One wonders at their lack of disenchantment with what purports to be an egalitarian democracy.

From within academia, Alice S. Rossi, a prominent and much-published sociologist specializing in studies of women, presents a blueprint for sexual equality in what she calls a "hybrid model" of society. She sees its projected roles for men and women as breaking with "traditional psychological assumptions and the institutional structure we have inherited," but she foresees, nevertheless, no more drastic means of implementation than "women's liberation groups across the country, particularly on the university campus" (pp. 72-73). Rossi believes that arousal of female consciousness as to basic rights and options will sufficiently impel social change.

In a related matter, Doris L. Pullen's "The Educational Establishment: Wasted Women" gives evidence that eastern women's colleges have served their matriculants by training them for a separate (secondary) female destiny. Yet, without disillusion, Pullen appeals to these same institutions to lead the way in abolishing the academic variant of the double standard, which restricts career options for young women to the social sciences and humanities primarily, places higher premiums on male faculty than on female, and so on.

But even in the ladylike, modulated "voices" of this volume there is a considerable component of agony and outrage. Readers of this journal particularly would do well to ponder Mary Daly's "Toward Partnership in the Church," a chapter from her book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), which takes up from a Roman Catholic point of view the question of the ordination of women. Daly, an associate professor of theology at Boston College, is not unschooled in the dogmatic and ecclesiastical hindrances which twenty centuries of patriarchal Christianity pose to the equal vocation she advocates. Indeed, while she rightly characterizes these hindrances as psychological and cultural, deriving only from the obsolescent belief in "the subordinate position

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of women in creation," Daly's sense of their insurmountability is so intense that she is driven again and again to tones of existentialist absurdity. Our language (with its weight of tradition) renders her logic virtually a contradiction in terms, yet she clings to a kind of visionary faith:

"There is an awareness, in some cases explicit, in others half-buried in the unconscious, that we stand at a turn in the road and that there is no going back. That is the reason for the strange power of the women priests issue to arouse violent and irrational responses, In fact the very expression 'women priests' juxtaposes in the most striking way two symbols which in a former age, the age from which we are emerging, had been understood as occupying opposed positions in the hierarchical scheme of things. The very suggestion that the same individual could be the bearer of these two images is a declaration that an age has ended and another has begun" (p. 150).

A new age has surely begun. Whether the institutionalized church will adapt itself is yet to be seen. The ordination of women is not the whole issue, for those denominations that admit women to the Christian ministry are not so far inclined to place them in positions of prominence or high visibility where their presence could operate to change attitudes and aspirations. The insidious effect of token equality upon efforts to remedy gross discrimination is an old and oft-told tale in American history and need not be repeated here. The negative example of the nation is there for the church to heed, if it will. But will it? Can Daly's faith be genuine? Or is hers the cruelest of all forms of idealism-self-delusion?

Janel M Mueller
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois