Women and the Liberation of Men

Extract

There is a loud cry of complaint. Women have a sense of betrayal, of having been subjected to male purposes in a world where they are forced to play an inferior part. Now many of them feel that the time has come to rise up and conquer this world, man’s world, and make it their own. Battle is joined, the revolution has commenced. But how can the war of the sexes ever be won ? If it is a battle it is one without real victory, for man and woman can never be anything but related, opposite but related—as right and left, day and night, heaven and earth. Women can certainly become as rational as men, they can think their thoughts, do their jobs, wear their clothes . . . unisex even returns the compliment and polarity is dissolved. So women can become as men. They can become specialists, technicians, breaking down universality into the particular, the whole into the isolated part; specializing as men have done, have had to do, in order to produce such a successful society. Women feel underprivileged, they have been left behind. They are still amateurs— inefficient, for only specialization makes for real efficiency. Women improvise, they tend to make do with what is to hand. They often go about things in a devious way which drives men mad. They seem so content to act from within the contingent. They are like Levi-Strauss’s ‘bricoleurs’, they do a variety of jobs with the limited means available. Many women do perform daily a balancing act quite illogical in its demands and immeasurable in its productivity. Of course there is the state, or the kibbutz, to release mothers for more serious business, the public rather than the private sector. There, like men, they can chart their advancement, calculate their progress and earn money. Women may have invented agriculture, cooking, pottery, weaving, in fact most of what makes life tolerable, but that was a long time ago. Now the mere job of living should take care of itself, women want more important work to do, they want to be anywhere but at home.