Dear Sisters

Dear Erik,

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With your permission, I'd like to leave the quality-of-writing issue lying in the dust into which we have both pretty thoroughly ground it. Our readers, if we still have any, will just have to dip into Dear Sisters and make their own judgments. Let them do a little work for a change!

One way to look at the pieces collected here is to ask how they hold up today. We both agree that the women's movement changed America in profound and lasting ways--but some of its ideas have definitely had more of an effect than others. Historically, the "second wave" of the women's movement (the "first wave" was the suffrage movement) came out of the liberal and left end of the political spectrum--the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the student movement, certain unions. Most of the pieces in Dear Sisters come out of the left, and the rote and inflected use of a socialist or Marxist or third-world-solidarity vocabulary is one of the ways in which they seem dated today. Then, too, left thinking sometimes looks backward while claiming to look forward--and so immense amounts of energy are spent on projects that are, at bottom, exercises in nostalgia. My favorite example of this in the book is the debate over "Wages for Housework," admittedly an oddity in America although a big deal in Italy. The argument goes: Stay-at-home wives, through their domestic work, reproduce the labor force; therefore they produce profit, therefore they should be paid by the government. Correctly, advocates noted that work considered valuable is paid for with money, not flowers once a year on Mother's Day. Equally correctly, opponents countered that paying women wages to cook and clean would confine women to the home and excuse men from sharing in the work. But even as feminists debated Wages for Housework, women were entering the work force in droves as they had in fact been doing for quite some time--indeed, this move into the work force was the material basis of the women's movement itself! Paying women to stay home may have looked radical and novel, but it was an attempt to ameliorate and preserve a form of marriage that was already on the way out. Today, the only people I've found who are interested in Wages for Housework are leftist men who have persuaded themselves that when a woman makes them a cup of coffee she is striking a blow against capitalism.

Wages for Housework was a dotty idea, but the women's movement's demystification of domestic labor was a real contribution to humanity. Pat Mainardi's classic essay, "The Politics of Housework," argues that housework is not a very fascinating way to spend your time and should be shared equally; her catalogue of all the crafty things men say and do to get out of doing the chores is still fresh: "We should each do the things we're best at," "You can't make me do it on your schedule," and so on. (Full disclosure: In my household, I'm the shirker; my mate often says that he should get wages for housework). Is housework more fairly divided today? As an ideal, it certainly gets a lot of lip service. But when the sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied two-job couples for her wonderful book The Second Shift, she found that in only about 18 percent was the man really pulling his weight although typically couples had figured out ways of disguising this fact from themselves so that they could think of their relationship as egalitarian.

Sex is lots more fun than dishes, so it's not surprising that the women's movements embrace of a more polymorphous and that egalitarian sexuality has been taken up by the larger society. Anne Koedt's "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" was truly prescient: Within minutes, old prescriptions about "mature" vaginal orgasms and "immature" clitoral ones, about female sexuality as essentially passive, receptive, secondary, and dependent with satisfaction in bed the reward for acceptance of the feminine "role" were swept aside. The feminist campaign against sexual violence and coercion is still controversial--but who blinks at a vibrator? Outside of Alabama, that is, where they are illegal.

Feminists get a bad rap today--anti-sex, anti-male, anti-child, anti-fun--yet so much that we now take for granted as good and right and utterly normal came out of the women's movement. What dad-to-be today, for example, would not be enraged if barred by the hospital from being present at the birth of his child? This is the American norm now for all social classes. Dear Sisters reprints H.R. 1504, the congressional bill guaranteeing his right to be there (with the consent of the woman, of course), which was introduced by Rep. Martha Griffiths in l973. It failed (What was Congress thinking? Probably, I'm guessing, about those campaign contributions from the AMA.) but became standard practice anyway.

The movement that wants fathers in the delivery room can't really be anti-male.

Tomorrow: Where are they now?

Cheers,
Katha

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This week, our critics pore over Dear Sisters, a scrapbook of the women's liberation movement.

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