Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!

militant man-haters do their level worst to distort the distinctions between male and female and to discredit the legitimate grievances of american women

Revolutions traditionally appear first as clouds no larger than a man's hand, easily overlooked if you're not staring at the sky. Only occasionally are they as startling and dramatic as a clap of thunder.

You might, for instance, never have noticed the tiny cloud that appeared one night last fall at a feminist Congress to Unite Women meeting in New York, a conference attended by thousands of anxious members of women's organizations ranging from Hadassah to a small radical group somewhat muscularly named Female Liberation Cell-16. When H hour struck, the girls of Cell-16 strode on stage in tight pants, polo shirts and heavy custom-made mountain boots and announced to the awe-struck thousands that they were going to "demonstrate a liberated woman."

The only woman on stage with long hair promptly stepped forward; all the others had newly cropped locks that barely covered their ears. The longhaired girl spoke plaintively about the way men related to her tresses rather than to her as a person and complained that she was still a sex object. "My long hair symbolizes a delicate Alice-in-Wonderland thing that undercuts the image of a strong human being," she said sweetly.

"No, no, don't!" came the cry from some anguished members of the throng. But the long-haired girl held up a tiny scissors and handed it to one of the members of Cell-16 drawn up behind her, their arms folded self-consciously across their chests, like pre-adolescent tomboys spoiling for a fight. She sat down on a chair and, while the shorn curls fell around her, the various girls of Cell-16 stepped forward, one by one, to tell the audience how short hair made them feel stronger and freer. Once the ceremony was over, hostility from the rest of the congress rolled over the stage like breakers over a beach. There were shouts and protests and nobody accepted the invitation to join the hair liberation.

"Women have been denied so much for so long," pleaded an older woman with coils of white hair piled above her brow, "why deny any part of our femininity that makes us feel good?"

A striking blonde in a boy's polo shirt, obviously not wearing a bra, put it more succinctly. "I want to be liberated!" she bellowed over the hubbub. "But I'm not cutting my hair just because men like hair. When I make love, men play with my breasts and I'm sure as hell not cutting them off!"

And so the discussion went at the front lines of another revolution by women. Actually, they had begun their fight before any of today's other insurrectionary groups--in 1848, to be precise--and had seemingly won it by the 1920s and made peace.

As a revolutionary act, it sounds laughable--but Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette laughed, too, and eventually lost their heads. Modern men who cherish their own heads, and their--you know what--had better pay attention. For, since 1966, a new insurgency known as the women's liberation movement (no capital letters; it's not an organization but a phenomenon) has rapidly gained strength and is now more powerful, revolutionary, morally justifiable--and, at times, more ridiculous--than any previous wave of feminist revolution.

The ridiculousness is thoroughly misleading. While snickering at the follies of the neofeminists, one is likely to underestimate both their seriousness of purpose and the legitimacy of many of their complaints. The women's liberation movement is unique: No other recent struggle for human rights has been so frivolous and yet so earnest, so absurd and yet so justified, so obsessed on the one hand with trivia and, on the other, with the radical restructuring of male-female relationships, of family life and of society itself. It is, in short, a study in contrasts. A few examples:

Higher education: Eight Temple University coeds insist on their right to take R. O. T. C. courses, and go hup-two-three-fouring alongside the boys, rifles on shoulders, in winter wind and sleet; 20 Berkeley girls demand that they be admitted to the karate class and invade the men's locker room--catching some occupants dripping wet--to make their point; on a number of campuses, extremist women variously strip to the buff in lecture rooms, shout dirty words at professors or speakers they consider male chauvinists or even bite, punch and kick some of the latter, to prove that women are not necessarily weak, timid and inferior.

But there is another side to all this: Such women, kookie though they may be, are the advance scouts of a vast, slow-moving army of females pressing forward into all aspects of college life and into the world for which it presumably trains people. Two and a half times as many girls go to college today as did 20 years ago, and they now make up over 40 percent of the college population--the highest proportion in our peacetime history. Increasingly, they go to college on equal terms: Yale, Princeton and other redoubts of male privilege have opened their doors to women.

Equal opportunities: In the landmark year of 1969, girl jockeys ride in the races for the first time. The New York Times, pestered to death by demonstrators and lawyers from Now (the National Organization for Women), stops listing help-wanted ads according to sex. Neofeminist women march upon Wall Street, carrying placards and shouting denunciatory slogans, because it allows so few women to function as brokers and only one to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. And Now president Betty Friedan and a handful of her pals picket the Plaza Hotel, where businessmen can lunch in the Oak Room away from the sight and sound of women.

Are you amused and contemptuous? All right, but don't overlook what lies behind these frivolities--a major drive by American women, the Labor Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to give women an even break in the job market. For it is not only blacks, Jews and other minorities who are discriminated against: In nearly every part of American industry, women are systematically given, and largely limited to, the lesser jobs. Thirty-one million women work--but a third of them are secretaries and clerical workers and over a fifth are service workers (waitresses, domestics and the like); only small numbers of male workers are in either category. Not surprisingly, the average yearly income of full-time female workers is about $4150, while that of full-time male workers is $7200; only three percent of the women make over $10,000, as compared with 23 percent of the men. Apologists for discriminatory hiring often say that the discrepancies in position and income are due to the lesser abilities and lesser work drive of women, and, to some extent, this may be true. Unquestionably, the lower female average yearly income reflects the fact that many women drop out of the work market for marriage before they have had the opportunity to climb to a respectable annual salary. But even when men and women do the same work, and equally well, women are given lesser titles and lower pay. Women full professors, for instance, earn about ten percent less than their male counterparts and women chemists earn a half less than male chemists.

Feminine charm: Busloads of feminists from a number of cities disembark outside Convention Hall in Atlantic City to protest the "degrading, mindless boob-girlie symbolism" of the Miss America contest and, more generally, the exploitation and oppression of women through "sexism." The demonstrators publicly remove and burn their bras, crown their own Miss America (a sheep) and fill a "freedom trash can" with instruments of sexist enslavement: steno pads, false eyelashes, women's magazines and copies of Playboy. Before an enthralled group of neofeminists in Boston, several members of Cell-16 demonstrate the karate blows and kicks designed to keep objectionable men in their place (crumpled on the ground?) and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller provides the pièce de résistance by breaking a board with her forehead as effectively as any man--well, actually, on the second try.

Sneer at all this, if you like--but don't deceive yourself that it's nothing but the exhibitionism of a handful of neurotics, uglies and dykes. For these women are martyrs of a new faith being propagated among the multitudes. Behind the few hundred extremists there are from 5000 to 10,000--no one knows the actual figure--vociferous but less extreme women who belong to all sorts of liberation groups; and behind these thousands are millions of nonjoiners whose moderate feminism is evident in their voting, their letters to Congressmen and to editors, their reading habits, their work lives, their sexual behavior, their marriages and divorces. Not many of these millions feel the feminist rage of which the radicals speak; not many advocate, as do some of the extremists, living in female communes and avoiding men except for sex or, better yet, doing without men altogether for long periods and relying on their own hands for relief. Not many seek, as do feminists from the New Left, the total overthrow of male-dominated, sexist, family-based, capitalist-militarist society. But all of them feel at least some of the frustrations, the conflicts, the contradictions endemic in the lives of (continued on page 102)Male Chauvinist Pig!(continued from page 96) modern women, and all of them would like things to be different.

How different? They don't agree; indeed, their opinions run the gamut from moderate amelioration (better jobs, abortion reform, more child-care centers for working mothers) to a total radicalism that calls for the abolition of marriage, the transfer of child rearing from the home to communal centers and the elimination of all sex differences in clothing, education, home life, politics and manners.

• • •

Why the new feminist revolution? Didn't women win their war long ago? Oberlin, originally a men's college, first admitted them way back in 1837 and other colleges followed suit over the years. Abolitionist and prohibitionist women held the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. In the next several decades, a number of states liberalized their divorce laws (giving women greater leverage over husbands who mistreated them); and by 1900, most states had granted women the right to handle their own property, make contracts, bring suit and, in general, be persons (rather than childlike dependents) before the law. Women entered the labor force in ever-larger numbers, making their way into factories and business offices. By the Twenties, birth-control clinics were multiplying and women began to have the freedom to use their own bodies as they chose. And, finally, women got the vote. From then on, it seemed as if they were into everything, including free love, Bolshevism, flying, nuclear physics, Congress and, during World War Two, aircraft assembly lines.

There was good reason for this long, slow, sweeping change. When America was still agricultural and mercantile, women had innumerable essential functions to perform. Granted that they worked like galley slaves, had no legal rights and lived in a totally male-run society; at least what they did was absolutely necessary and gave them a clear sense of importance and achievement. In 1778, one Christopher Marshall, a thrifty and prudent Philadelphian, wrote approvingly in his diary of his wife's activities, as follows:

From early in the morning till late at night she is constantly employed in the affairs of the family.... This calls for her constant attendance at getting prepared in the kitchen, baking our own bread and pies, meat &c. [and] also on the table. Her cleanliness about the house, her attendance in the orchard, cutting and drying of apples ... her seeing to all our washing done ... add to this her making of 20 large cheeses, besides her sewing, knitting, &c.

Mrs. Marshall, it's safe to say, suffered no role conflicts; when would she have had time to think about such things?

But as America became industrial and urban, many of woman's functions were taken away from her. Factories, canneries, public schools and hospitals made her skills unnecessary (at least if her husband had some money) and left her to fill her leisure with romantic novels, tatting, gossip and attacks of the vapors. When electricity, household machinery and refrigeration became available, her relegation to the minor chores of homemaking was almost complete and her sense of devaluation increased.

No wonder more and more women began to hunger, as the 19th Century wore on, for legal rights, the vote and the chance to do some of those interesting things men did in the outside world. No wonder girls who had discovered in college their own mental power could envision themselves as scholars, scientists and businesswomen and tried to make their visions real. No wonder women felt liberated when they achieved control of their fertility and were no longer committed to 20-odd years of successive pregnancies. No wonder they felt, when they finally won the vote in 1920, that they had opened the gates to the man's world. With this victory, the revolutionary fervor died away until, by World War Two, writings about "the woman question" had a quaint bygone flavor, like the faded picture books of a war fought before one's time.

But it was a false peace. Woman had won a kind of liberation--but not from her own biology nor from thousands of years of tradition. Except for a handful of hard-driving careerists and a small corps of daring bohemians, almost all American women wanted, more than anything else, to marry; compared with that, careers, sexual freedom and the right to seek public office all took a back seat. After World War Two, this traditional orientation was particularly strong; home life had been so threatened by the War that women were anxious to rebuild familism and to play house once again. More girls than ever went to college--but worked only briefly afterward, quitting their jobs when they married and settling into suburban domesticity and fecundity, only to find, within a few years, that they were bored, trapped by household and maternal duties and resentful of men, who, it seemed, had somehow tricked them into all this. They wanted to be wives and mothers and had their wish, but somehow it meant less than they had thought it would; besides, they wanted to be people, deal with adults, use their minds, be considered interesting, "do something." Worst of all, after a few years of marriage, they could begin to see the long decades stretching ahead, when their children would be slipping away from them into adolescence and adulthood and they themselves would be idle and useless for 30 or 40 years; by comparison, Mrs. Marshall's daily toil seemed exhilarating.

Meanwhile, post-War domesticity was allowing the gains of the feminist movement to evaporate. The earnings gap between men and women widened: In the mid-Fifties, full-time women workers averaged 64 percent as much as men; but by the late Sixties, they averaged only 58 percent as much. In 1969, women held 50 fewer seats in state legislatures than they had a decade earlier. In 1940, they held 45 percent of all professional and technical jobs; but in 1969, only 37 percent, though over twice as many women were so employed. In higher education, they slipped from 26 percent of faculty positions in 1920 to 22 percent in 1964.

Odder yet, even in professions where they had seemed most likely to get ahead, they had not. They continued to make up the same small proportion of physicians (six to seven percent) that they had for half a century, achieved only token representation in politics (only ten women have served in the Senate in 50 years) and made virtually no inroads into upper-echelon business and industrial management in two decades after World War Two.

The time was out of joint and Betty Friedan, like Hamlet, was born to set it right. Mrs. Friedan, a discontented homemaker and part-time magazine writer, had her celebrated book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, the message of which was that women had been sold a bill of goods, not just for the benefit of men but for that of American industry, which stood to profit by having them stay home and consume. Throughout the country, women heard her message--they bought over 1,500,000 copies of the hardcover and paperback editions--and began to gird for combat. Noting the restlessness of the natives, but partly as a joke, Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia added "sex" to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 that banned job discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. Congress, chuckling, passed it--but women have had the last laugh: Some 7500 of the 44,000 complaints thus far filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission created by the act have involved discrimination against women and have resulted in girl jockeys, over-32 airline stewardesses, desegregated help-wanted ads and at least one female steamship yeoman.

In 1966, Betty Friedan and other feminists formally organized Now; since then, splinter groups and other women's liberation organizations have proliferated in every major city--50 in New York, 35 in San Francisco, 25 in Boston, and so on--some sporting aggressive names such (continued overleaf) as Witch (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Wolf (Women's Liberation Front), while others are more blandly labeled (Redstockings, New Feminists, New Women). In 1966 and 1967, Now seemed fierce and bristling; but some of the later groups have so greatly surpassed it in their activism and their extremism that today Mrs. Friedan looks a little like an Aunt Tabby, a sort of Roy Wilkins of feminism.

Among the small feminist contingents that take the hardest lines are those formed by disillusioned and embittered young women who had expected SDS and other politically radical groups to understand their problems but discovered, to their dismay, that men of the New Left intended to do all the planning and confronting and let the chicks fix food, type, sweep and provide sex. (Stokely Carmichael once said, "The only position for a woman in SNCC is prone"--presumably, he meant supine--while one of the New Left's leaders at Berkeley, hearing of feminist discontent in the ranks, crudely paraphrased Marie Antoinette, saying, "Let 'em eat cock.")

Today's radical neofeminists have also turned away from the contemporary sexual revolution, even though their predecessors at the turn of the century had linked the women's rights movement with contraception, free love and the female's right to orgasm. Radical feminists see the present fascination with sexuality as the oppressors' effort to imprison women by making them value themselves only as sexual objects, brainwashing them into seeking to please men and, thus, eventually trapping them in the housewife-mother role. Nudity, sexual freedom in print and on film, the emphasis on sexual pleasure, the preoccupation of advertising with beauty and sex appeal, all are considered links in the chains binding women to love and to men.

In their own words, taken from miscellaneous pamphlets of radical feminist groups published in Boston, New York and Chicago:

If your appearance is pleasing, you are sunk, for no one will ever look beyond.... We reject the soft, sexy, slender, stylishly clothed body.... [Be] inoffensively plain, thoroughly nondescript.... Bright colors and materials are wonderful to have around, but do you really want to decorate your body with them? On your body they cry out, "Look at me, I'm swinging, I'm sexy, I'm female." ... You have to be prepared to be not just unattractive but actually sexually repulsive to most men, perhaps including all the men you currently admire.

In two separate issues of the feminist journal No More Fun and Games, Dana Densmore shot down sex itself:

[Sex is] inconvenient, time-consuming, energy-draining and irrelevant.... Guerrillas don't screw. They have important things to do, things that require all their energy.... Erotic energy is just life energy and is quickly worked off if you are doing interesting, absorbing things.... [If] genital tensions persist, you can still masturbate. Isn't that a lot easier, anyway? This is not a call for celibacy but for an acceptance of celibacy as an alternative preferable to the degradation of most male-female sexual relationships.

Procreation fares no better. A memo from SDS women in Women: A Journal of Liberation: "We are the baby producers, the household slaves, who should be weak and dumb and can be successful only by being 'pretty.' ... It's all jive, a lot of bullshit."

In effect, the rallying cry of Roxanne Dunbar of Cell-16 was "Up against the wall, Mother!": "We are damaged--we women, we oppressed, we disinherited. We have the right to hate and have contempt and to kill and to scream.... The family is what destroys people. Women take on a slave role in the family when they have children."

Her opinion was echoed by sociologist Marlene Dixon in Ramparts:

The institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women; it is through the role of wife that the subjugation of women is maintained.... The Sky-God tramples through the heavens and the Earth Mother--Goddess is always flat on her back with her legs spread, putting out for one and all.

One is tempted to dismiss such women too easily as frigid or Lesbian (a few of them look and sound it, most do not), dignifying their despair with the name of revolution; one is tempted to say, condescendingly (and probably incorrectly), that all they really need is to get soundly laid. In any event, either way of dismissing them is only an ad hominem attack (dare I say so? Or would they scream that it is ad feminem?). Roxanne Dunbar, with her monkish haircut, karate postures and vicious rhetoric, or Abby Rockefeller, with her bare calloused feet and battered forehead, may not be your kind of girls, nor any man's, but the basic attack on the "oppressors" and the arguments for the elimination of sex-role differences deserve to be judged on their own merits.

• • •

The central argument of the neofeminists is essentially a moral one: Man has always enslaved and oppressed woman, assigning better roles to himself and worse ones to her; and since it is immoral to treat equals this way, eliminating all male-female role differences should be the goal of every fair-minded person.

The morality is flawless, but the assumptions on which the major premise rests are hopelessly faulty. For one thing, it is assumed that men have always divided the roles in the same fashion, assigning desirable ones to themselves and undesirable ones to women; for another, it is assumed that all role differences are assigned or chosen and could, therefore, be eliminated; for a third, it is taken for granted that the elimination of all role differences would make women happier.

On the first point, there is a wealth of contrary evidence in the collected data concerning the hundreds of separate primitive societies, as well as the various civilizations, that human beings have constructed around the world. From the record it is clear that men have not invariably divided roles in the same way and that what constitutes a "desirable" or male role in one society may be a female role in another or an ambisexual role in a third.

It is true that extremely few functions have universally or very generally belonged to one sex or the other: Some years ago, anthropologist George Murdock surveyed the available data on 224 primitive societies and found that warmaking was a male job in 100 percent of them, childbearing and suckling a female job in 100 percent, and that it was almost always men who performed the far-ranging, strenuous, risky tasks, while women very generally had the more sedentary and nurturant tasks. Nor is that surprising: This much of the division of labor is a natural consequence of the physical differences between men and women, at least in cultures where human energy, rather than mechanical, is the chief way of getting things done.

But beyond these generalizations, the assignment of male and female roles is far from uniform and the data belie the paranoid picture the feminists paint of human history. Trading or bartering, for instance, is most often a male job--but in 18 percent of Murdock's societies, women also participated in it, and in 13 percent, it was exclusively a female role. Food gathering was a male role in almost all hunting societies, but in agricultural societies, it was as often a woman's job as a man's. Pottery making, weaving and working with hides were quite often assigned to women, but in nearly a quarter of the societies, they were assigned only to men. Various household tasks were female work in most societies but were shared by men in about a tenth--and were wholly male functions in slightly more than that. Cooking, curiously enough, was exclusively a male function in nine percent of the cultures studied. (continued on page 202)Male Chauvinist Pig!(continued from page 104) Most important is the fact that for nearly every role, there were some cultures in which it was masculine, others in which it was feminine and some in which it was assigned to both sexes.

Apart from the qualities expressed in work, many of the personal traits we think of as female--especially those the feminists say have been thrust upon the exploited female by the oppressing male--have been male traits in at least some groups, and vice versa. In certain Philippine tribes, men have been the gossips, women the solid, sensible citizens; in various South Sea Island cultures, men have spent nearly all their time in artistic work or in debate, leaving women to do all the life-supporting work and to make all the daily decisions.

Nor is this diversity of role allotment peculiar to primitive societies. Even within our own Western civilization, there has been a broad spectrum of conceptions of the masculine and feminine natures and of their proper functions. It is quite true that much of the time these have been divided along the lines of which feminists complain--but not all of the time. In the Third and Second centuries B.C., for instance, Roman women were sturdy, tough, puritanical and businesslike--and had to be, for their farmer-warrior husbands were off conquering Europe, leaving things in their wives' hands. In the Renaissance, there appears the virago (at that time, a term of approbation)--a woman equal to man in her intelligence, abilities and interests: 17th Century biographer John Aubrey, describing a 16th Century virago, wrote of her, "Prodigious parts for a woman. I have heard my father's mother say that she had Chaucer at her fingers' ends. A great politician; great wit and spirit, but revengeful. Knew how to manage her estate as well as any man; understood jewels as well as any jeweler." Men, meanwhile, had new options: They could be indifferent with the sword but skillful with the pen, the crucible and retort, the brush and canvas, and still be considered manly men and lovers of women.

In the 18th Century, a male courtier could wear lace, perfume and long curls, walk with an affected sway, lisp charmingly--and be a hellion with his sword and a stud with his penis. A court lady could be a simpering confection of taffeta, high-piled hair and coy mannerisms--while secretly intriguing with her lover, openly debating intellectual issues in some fashionable salon and swaying her husband's political opinions through subtle domestic tyrannies. But in the 19th Century, the ideal middle-class woman was gentle, pure, maternal and stupid, her ideal male being strong, pure, manly and wise. In Tennyson's immortal picture of the happy couple:

Her faith is fixt and cannot move,

She darkly feels him great andwise,

She dwells on him with faithfuleyes,

"I cannot understand; I love."

Even in the relatively short history of our own country, we have had not one but several notions of the masculine roles and of the feminine ones: Our pioneer women and their sodbusting husbands dealt with each other and with the world around them in quite different fashion from the Brahmin gentlemen and ladies of Boston, and they, in turn, from men and women in the socialist movement, in the Bible belt and in the free-love movement. As models of manliness, we have had everything from Daniel Boone to Cary Grant; as models of womanliness, everything from Dolly Madison to Raquel Welch.

Human beings have tried out a very wide range of definitions of the masculine and feminine roles. The experiments have not worked out equally well, but they have shown that all sorts of variations are possible and that the feminist doctrine--that man has always made woman his slave, sexual toy and brood mare, and granted himself the position of overlord, philosopher and stallion--is a gross distortion of human history.

Yet one must grant that in Western civilization, the balance has been tipped to one side. Despite the many variations, men have always been the warriors (Joan of Arc was a notable exception) and women the homemakers; men have generally been the rulers of society, women the rulers of the home; men have, for the most part, been the educated, the inventive, the active, the logical ones, and women the ignorant, the tradition-bound, the passive, the emotional ones. What we need to know, then, is this: Is there any biological justification for this tendency? Have the societies that deviated from it--and those eras in our own civilization in which the roles were reshuffled--been mistakes in social evolution that violated innate characteristics of male and female?

First of all, it's obvious that in all societies and eras in which greater skeletal strength, muscle power, lung capacity and stature have had survival value in fighting, food getting and other strenuous tasks, man has been by nature better equipped than woman to perform such tasks. A few of today's radical neo-feminists assert that the physical differences between men and women (aside from the shape of sexual parts and hair distribution) are the product of dissimilar rearing: If girls were allowed to develop themselves in the ways boys do, they would be just as strong. This is utter nonsense. At no time and place--not even when children have done exactly the same things--have males and females been equal in size and strength. Men always average out taller, about 50 to 60 percent stronger in muscle power, heavier boned and with heavier knobs on the ends of their long bones (to bear the greater strain of their more powerful musculature), bigger of rib cage and lung. In every society but ours--the only one in which mechanical energy vastly outstrips human muscle power--the physical differences between the sexes are important determinants of certain role allocations. And these physical differences are dictated by the chromosomes, the master chemical templates in every cell of the human being.

Even in our own society, these differences are important--not in terms of survival but in determining our psychological make-up. Little girls and little boys cannot help perceiving that boys can outrun and overpower girls, throw stones farther and hit harder--and these inevitable experiences mold their thinking about themselves. Some part of that thinking is realistic and sensible: Even in a mechanically powered society, it's true that a man can generally lift heavy burdens, carry a sleeping child and defend himself and his family against attackers better than his mate can. If this does not make man innately better than woman at operating powerful machinery, directing a steel company or running the Department of Defense, at least it so conditions men's and women's feelings about themselves that they think and act as if size and muscular strength were crucial. They may not be, but they are significant: Even if a man never raises his hand to his wife, he and she are both forever aware that he is the more powerful of the two and, in almost all cases, could win a pitched battle between them. Beneath the civilized veneer, there resides still the animal reality of our bodies and emotions.

Which is no great matter, as long as it does not impair other functions. Unfortunately, it often does--most notably, the working of intelligence. The intellectual powers of men and women, though not identical, are very similar--or would be if each were not misled by traditional prejudices. For thousands of years, most men have believed women to be mentally inferior; as Lord Chesterfield succinctly put it, "Women, then, are only children of a larger growth.... For solid, reasoning, good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it." But during most of these thousands of years, very few women were educated at all; and even when they were, they were taught that it was not in their natures to understand weighty matters and that they were inherently illogical and impractical.

In modern times, boys and girls are educated together and similarly; we can, therefore, put the traditional belief to the test. And we have: I.Q. testing has consistently shown girls and boys to have virtually the same average intelligence. There are minor differences, to be sure: Boys average slightly higher in such areas as mathematical reasoning, spatial perception and mechanical aptitude, while girls average slightly higher in such areas as vocabulary, verbal fluency and memory. But the differences are so small that many females have higher mechanical-aptitude scores than the average male, while many males have higher verbal-fluency scores than the average female. In any case, the average composite scores are almost identical.

Yet in ordinary life we continually experience seeming differences; try explaining to your favorite female how much you actually save when you deduct a business expense. But most of the difference in everyday intelligence is the result of our growing up in a society in which, as boys and girls, we are continually told that men are logical and women illogical and that certain kinds of problems are a man's business, others, a woman's. Girls do poorly at logical thinking when the content of the problem is culturally masculine and better when the content is culturally feminine. Based on many pieces of evidence, research psychologists have concluded that the sexual difference in reasoning ability is very small but that culture makes boys and girls suppose the difference to be large and act accordingly. Men think better because they think they can; women don't think as well because they think they can't.

In one interesting test of women's low opinion of their own intellectual powers, a team of psychologists at Connecticut College asked two groups of college girls to evaluate a series of articles on various subjects. One group of girls received the articles in booklet form, bearing male by-lines, such as John T. McKay; the other group got the same articles with female by-lines, such as Joan T. McKay. In every case, the girls reading male authors rated the articles higher than did the girls reading the same articles by female authors. Conclusion: Women are prejudiced against women.

In much the same way, it is clearly demonstrable that many of the differences between male and female personalities are learned rather than inherent and are cultural clichés rather than innate characteristics. The classic test of masculinity and femininity, created by two psychologists and called the M-F test, asks many questions about preferences in food, jobs, amusements, and so on, and assigns each answer a certain number of points on an M-F scale, based on traditional male and female tastes. But such tastes are highly modifiable by experience: The more educated a man is, for instance, the less "masculine" is his total score, and the more educated a woman, the less "feminine" is hers.

Moreover, it has become increasingly clear in the past generation that Freud's theory of feminine psychology--on which he based his highly conservative ideas as to the proper roles for men and women in marriage and in society--was shaped by the manners and morals of the 19th Century middle-class world in which he grew up, and has little validity today. Freud sought to explain the origins of the demureness, emotionality and passivity he saw in middle-class European woman as she was at the turn of the century. He decided that the determining factor had to be her realization that nature had failed to provide her with the admirable external parts boys possess. As a result, she felt inferior, ashamed, imperfect--and adjusted to her condition by assuming a passive and submissive role in life and by emphasizing her beauty rather than her abilities. All this, Freud felt, was inevitable and therefore natural. The normal woman turned to dependency and domesticity, while the woman who sought a career was suffering from a masculinity complex and the hostile or vengeful wife was exhibiting penis envy.

A good deal of writing about female psychology has been based on this formulation and, even today, it plays a major part in the thinking of many analysts. But three or more decades ago, Karen Horney and other psychoanalysts with a more sociological outlook than Freud's began to challenge his ideas about women; and when some of them looked at woman's personality in other societies, it became clear that she was not always as Freud had seen her. In many times and places, woman has not been in the least ashamed of her lack of a penis nor forced to compensate by being pretty but dumb, sexy but helpless. Indeed, in some times and places, it's been man who was indolent and vain--even though perfectly well equipped with a male member.

Nevertheless, even if woman's personality is in large part formed by the culture in which she grows up and if Freud's penis-envy theory applies only to women in certain times and places, it is undeniable that women have some universal tendencies differentiating them from men and that these must be due to innate biological factors.

Some differences in behavior appear in infants long before they can perceive what is expected of each sex in their society. Dr. Howard Moss, a National Institute of Mental Health psychologist, has observed three-week-old and three-month-old infants for as much as eight hours at a time and has noted that they display striking differences: Boys sleep less, cry more, demand more attention, and so on; in short, says Dr. Moss, "Much more is happening with the male infants." Dr. Benjamin Spock points out in his new book, Decent and Indecent, that by the end of the first year, boys are more restless, inquisitive and striving, more interested in handling things, more fractious than girls. Girls are more compliant, quieter, can be toilet trained earlier. And these characteristics appear even in an only child, who has no models to ape. By the school years, says Dr. Stanley Yolles, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, boys are more likely to stutter, to have reading problems and to lag behind girls in their physical maturation; when they enter school, for instance, their hand muscles are markedly less mature than those of girls. Those unlearned differences can only be innate--the result of dissimilar chromosomal complements that make for different internal chemistry and, hence, for different development of the body and of the nervous system.

Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University has studied chromosomal abnormalities in children and found that where there is an extra female chromosome, there is a strong tendency in the young child toward maternalism and doll play; while in men with an extra male chromosome, there is a strong tendency toward aggressiveness.

There is, accordingly, at least a basic substratum of inherent masculinity and inherent femininity. Moreover, the very fact that we grow up in different bodies gives us different experiences, and these inevitably shape part of our personalities and behavior. Even if women do not necessarily feel penis envy, the existence of breasts makes a difference, even before they are suckled; the experience of ejaculation makes a difference, even when no child is conceived; the monthly experience of the menses, with its mood swings, the loss of blood and the reassuring return to normality, makes a difference; the omnipresent knowledge that, for all his power, man dies younger than woman makes a difference; in the sex act, the woman's need to allow entry of her body and the man's need to be firm, intrusive and bold make a difference; the contrast between the man's brief, careless throwing out of semen and the woman's long, careful harboring of the infant within herself makes a difference.

Thus our biological differences, and the experiences they commit us to, make for an inevitable core of masculinity and femininity that is present in all cultures. Indeed, we can make a distinction between two categories of male and female roles: the socially prescribed (the fashions, prejudices and customs concerning masculinity and femininity) and the psychobiologically determined (the inherent and the developmental).

When we say that man is logical and woman illogical, man creative and woman fit only for routine chores, man decisive and woman vacillating, we are speaking of traits that are socially prescribed and no more central to masculinity and femininity than styles of hairdress or clothing. Most forms of work, many forms of leisure activity, most styles of dress and ornament are considered masculine by some societies but feminine by others. To the people in any one society, however, their own mores and tastes seem to be timeless, natural and right--so much so that they attribute them to their own gods and make them divine edicts: "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree ... cursed is the ground for thy sake.... In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."

The psychobiologically determined roles, on the other hand, stem from innate differences in genetic make-up and their hormonal, neurological and structural consequences. Even in a civilized, power-energy society, men will do the heavy work, protect the women they love and sometimes beat them when angry. The sexual relationship will inevitably call for a degree of aggressiveness on the part of the male and a degree of acquiescence on the part of the female. The female's body, within which the child grows and from which, after birth, he is nourished, is better equipped, in many ways, to be tender, sensitive and responsive to the child's needs. (In an experiment performed at the animal-behavior laboratories at Rutgers University, psychologists put newborn rat pups in with virgin females and with males; after enough time with them, the virgin females and even the males began to show mothering behavior--licking, retrieving, covering--but the virgin females did so much sooner than the males. Since experience of motherhood played no part, one can only conclude that the females were neurologically more sensitive than the males to the stimuli provided by the pups.)

"Male and female created He them"--and no matter what variations human beings play on the theme of masculinity and femininity, no matter how men and women share or trade their roles, there remains an underlying maleness and femaleness in us, as in all other animals. And those fundamental and irreducible differences between male and female are the core of a reproductive system so advantageous to the species and so gratifying to most individuals within it that we can only suppose it to be the happiest accident of the evolutionary process.

• • •

This, however, is just what the extremist wing of neofeminism denies.

The less strident, relatively reasonable neofeminists concentrate their fire on the socially determined roles: They want to erase differences between men and women in employment, politics and the law. Other than that, they want to de-emphasize or modify--but not wipe out--the differences between men and women in dress and personal adornment, manners, sexual initiative and the allocation of homemaking and parental duties.

But the fiery evangelists and raging nihilists of neofeminism want to wipe out all role differences--not just the socially prescribed but the psychobiologically determined as well. (They would not, however, recognize this distinction; to them, all role differences have been the arbitrary choices of the enslaving male oppressors.) As a result, they offer women (and men) some of the worst advice since the celibate Paul wrote to the Corinthians: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I." Their fight includes an all-out assault upon purely visual differences--the clothing, hair styles and make-up that distinguish the sexes, serve as cues to sexual interaction and, according to the radicals, maintain the enslavement of women. In part, their adoption of male dress permits self-defense and attack: "Narrow skirts and high heels were designed to prevent you from kicking [men]," says Abby Rockefeller. "Our recommendation is obvious." Abby herself wears denim work shirts and pants; so, presumably, will every sensible, equality-minded woman.

This rejection of distinctly feminine clothing and of the pursuit of beauty is supposed to free women from squandering their time and energy pleasing (and, thus, being subservient to) men. But as one listens to the extremists, it becomes clear that they are after bigger game--the withering away of heterosexual desire and heterosexual intercourse. Without the many subtle cues and incitements men and women offer each other through clothing and behavior, sexuality could dwindle to a relatively minor part of life; history offers a few examples of ascetic and antisexual movements (such as the Albigenses from 11th to 13th Century France) that achieved just that. Roxanne Dunbar--termed by Marlene Dixon "one of the most impressive women in the movement"--envisions a future in which heterosexual intercourse would be unnecessary and undesirable: "Perhaps sex, as we conceive of it as 'fucking,' is doomed to die as property and power relations are changed. As for affection, we have quite enjoyable universal habits which include verbal and physical contact, which do not lead to genital intercourse, e.g., female relationships, adult and child, childhood relationships."

Nor is this antisexual future seen as any great deprivation, for it turns out that male-female sex is not only often degrading but physically unsatisfactory, as compared with other possibilities. Writes Anne Koedt, of the October 17th Movement, in The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm:

The position of the penis inside the vagina ... does not usually stimulate an orgasm in women because the clitoris is not usually located there but, rather, externally and higher up.... Lesbian sexuality, in rubbing one clitoris against the other, could make an excellent case, based on anatomical data, for the extinction of the male organ.... It forces us to discard many "physical" arguments explaining why women go to bed with men. What is left, it seems to me, are psychological reasons why women select men [to] the exclusion of other women.

Weak-willed revolutionaries may find it difficult to live up to these austere principles if they mingle with men; it may be necessary, therefore, for them to isolate themselves from men as much as possible, even as black militants today have rejected social integration with whites. Betsy Warrior, as one Boston militant renamed herself, explains it all in No More Fun and Games:

Sooner or later, if we are effective, men will become hostile. We have to be prepared to accept this fact. Not only accept it but segregate ourselves from men in many situations, to allow ourselves freedom from their criticism, opinions and dominance.... As long as we are entangled in personal relationships and group situations with men, we won't be able to clearly analyze our positions and will have a vested interest in not making males too hostile.

This is to be not just a temporary expedient but a new way of life. According to Ti-Grace Atkinson, a leader of the Feminists (a "Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles"), marriage, at long last, is to be destroyed, in order to set woman free:

The institution of marriage has the same effect the institution of slavery had. It separates people in the same category, disperses them, keeps them from identifying as a class.... To say that a woman is really "happy" with her home and kids is as irrelevant as saying that the blacks were "happy" being taken care of by Ol' Massa.

Judith Brown, in Toward a Female Liberation Movement, agrees totally:

The marriage institution, like so many others, is an anachronism.... The married woman knows that love is, at its best, an inadequate reward for her unnecessary and bizarre heritage of oppression.... She is locked into a relationship which is oppressive politically, exhausting physically, stereotyped emotionally and sexually and atrophying intellectually.

There may be some women, of course, who want to have children (the species, after all, ought not to be allowed to die out), but offspring must not be reared at home, according to the extremists, or woman remains trapped. Says Miss Atkinson: "Children would be raised communally; it's just not honest to talk about freedom for women unless you get the child rearing off their backs."

But what are those who see the light only after they have acquired husbands and children to do? One answer is to change the husband's outlook and, meanwhile, find a way to get the rearing of the children done by others. A simpler answer is to ditch them--to pack one's bag and leave husband and children, as that impressive figure Roxanne Dunbar herself did.

It is not easy to envision society as it would be if reshaped by the extreme neofeminists; perhaps ant or bee colonies, which consist chiefly of sexually neutral workers, come closest to it. Given what we know about artificial insemination and what we are rapidly learning about parthenogenesis (fertilization of the egg without the use of sperm), and given the possibility of state-operated child-rearing facilities on a national scale in order to make family life unnecessary, such a society might be possible. And life in it might be fulfilling and happy for the likes of Betsy Warrior, Roxanne Dunbar and Ti-Grace Atkinson. But they are unusual women; for most others, and for nearly all men, such a way of life might seem the worst deprivation ever visited upon mankind.

• • •

Neofeminists are forever likening the oppression of woman to the oppression of the Negro and asserting that just as equality is both possible and desirable for the races, so it is now for the sexes. But the analogy is misleading. As far as we know, whites and blacks do not have innate biological differences of such an order as to commit them to specific and dissimilar roles in education, employment, politics or leisure activities. Men and women, on the other hand, can eliminate all role differences only by ignoring and suppressing a vital part of their inherent natures and by accepting the frustration that results from unmet needs and unfulfilled desires.

Sex differences, as manifested in our looks, our personalities, our behavior toward each other and our division of roles within the home and without, are deeply gratifying to male and female alike. It is complementarity--the fitting together of two beings who serve and complete each other--that makes heterosexual love, both physical and emotional, so necessary and so fulfilling. And it's the central mechanism at work in heterosexual love, in which it's made doubly powerful by the complementarity of our sexual parts and biological traits and the psychological differences they produce.

The sexual and stylistic differences that attract men and women to each other ought not, therefore, be minimized; indeed, they should be emphasized, within reasonable limits. They delight us and are actually good for us. As Dr. Spock points out, psychosexual differences do not impoverish either sex but enrich both; male and female are more valuable and more pleasing to each other if they have somewhat specialized traits and somewhat specialized roles to play for each other's benefit--gifts of function, so to speak, that they can give each other.

It feels good, and is productive of well-being, for man and woman to look different, smell different, act somewhat different. Though fashions change, the changes are unimportant as long as sexual distinctions remain, offering clues, reassurances and incitements about each sex to the other. The unisex fad is dangerous and hurtful, or would be if it were to last; Rudi Gernreich, ardently promoting identical clothing and identically shaved heads for both sexes, ought to be declared a public enemy. It feels good, and is productive of well-being, for man and woman to play special roles for each other. It comforts and pleases a woman--not just the clinging-vine type but almost any woman--to have a man be strong, gallant and protective, at times; it pleases and gratifies a man--not just the old-style patriarch but almost any man--to have a woman sometimes fuss over him, take special pains to make him comfortable and make herself beautiful for his sake. It pleases most women to have a man be romantic before going to bed but a stallion in it; it pleases most men to have a woman be a wildcat in bed but demurely seductive beforehand.

It feels good, and is productive of well-being, for husbands and wives to specialize in some of the functions they perform within marriage, to take care of each other in particular ways, to handle certain duties for the two of them, so that they are not just two of a kind but a team, equal not in the sense of identical but equal in the sense of equivalent. The Kreutzer Sonata requires a pianist and a violinist, playing together--not two interchangeable performers but two different ones, both of them essential.

On the other hand, it's perfectly clear that most of the sex-based allocations of work by our 18th and 19th Century forebears are not only unnecessary today but highly undesirable. Woman is not needed as a producer of goods in the home, but she's needed elsewhere--and is quite capable of performing nearly all the kinds of work men do in contemporary society. As long as she's childless, there's no reason she should not do so and on equal terms with men.

To be sure, biology will still set a few limits upon her; heavy labor remains more suitable for men; they may more often prove qualified for mechanical occupations; and it might not be the best thing to have a Boeing 747, circling in the overcast, piloted by a woman during her premenstrual period. By and large, however, most of the world's work can be performed by either sex, and the principal differentiations should be only questions of specialization within a field. In medicine, for instance, men may make better surgeons because of their mechanical and spatial aptitudes, while women may make better psychiatrists because of their verbal ability and empathic capacity; in business, men may make tougher bargainers, women better administrators and handlers of personnel.

And women do want to work--not to the exclusion of love, sex, marriage and motherhood but as part of a total way of life involving all those things. In fact, a reaction to the excessive post-War domesticity had begun even before the women's liberation movement got started. Sociologist Jessie Bernard points out that five years before Betty Friedan published her call to arms, women were beginning to delay marriage, return to college, take graduate work, cut down on their pregnancies and hold jobs in ever-larger numbers (a third more women were in the work force in 1969 than in 1959).

It remains true, unhappily, that they get the lesser jobs and the lower pay and that this is, in part, due to male prejudice and exploitation. But only in part. Most of the women who use their talents and training in a career do not give this top priority in their scheme of things or do so only for a short time; they assign a higher priority to marriage (or, more accurately, love and marriage) and to motherhood. They do not view marriage and career as alternatives nor as mutually exclusive; on the contrary, every recent study of the plans of high school and college girls indicates that they expect to be able to work out a combination of the two--a combination in which marriage and motherhood will take precedence over career, the latter being started, stopped, restarted or modified as need be.

While they are still in school, it may not be clear to them that this will often seem unfair, be somewhat frustrating and make them resentful of men. Soon enough, however, they discover that in order to obey the desires of their bodies and emotions, they have to settle for second-rate careers--interrupting them, sometimes for many years, in order to bear their children and raise them at least as far as the grade school level and, in any case, dividing their energy and attention between work and home in a way men almost never have to. The result is considerable satisfaction--plus the exasperation of seeing themselves fail to achieve the level of recognition and income they certainly could have attained had they been men. Yet even if unfair and far from ideal, this scheme is more satisfying and more workable than the existing alternatives. Consider them:

One consists of having a full-time career, plus home and family--the home and family being attended to by paid help. But it is an extremely expensive answer, possible only for the women making a good deal of money. And it may be deeply disappointing, for there is little emotional reward in merely having children; the rewards come from living with them, nourishing and shaping them.

Another alternative consists of the state's operating vast child-care centers, in the Russian fashion or even in the manner of the Israeli pioneer communities (kibbutzim), where parents visit their children only a couple of hours a day. Either method solves the problems of cost and scarcity of suitable help; neither, however, yields the rewards that come from raising one's own children--indeed, these collective systems are much more detached and nonfamilial than the use of full-time help at home. They have succeeded thus far in social systems in which the need for woman's labor power is so great that personal fulfillments, such as those of family life, are considered secondary in importance. But within the American economy and culture, it seems most unlikely that the majority of women would prefer to have their children raised by others.

A third possibility consists of having husband and wife share equally in all things--each one forgoing career advancement in order to spend part of the day at home, doing household chores and tending the children. This is advocated by some neofeminists, but it is a botched answer. It greatly multiplies all sorts of practical problems (there aren't that many opportunities in the labor market for jobs that fit homemaking hours); more important, it omits two essential aspects of all successful human groups--specialization of function and a system of leadership. When there is no specialization of function, there is inefficient performance and endless decision making every day, about who is going to do what. When there is no leadership, every minor matter has to be taken up as if in committee, debated and voted upon.

It fits naturally into the biology of woman's life that she play a set of roles within the family different from those played by her husband. When husband and wife decide to have a child, biology determines which of them will have it and will be the more deeply changed by the experience. Because it is the woman whose work life is interrupted by pregnancy and childbirth, and whose nervous system and chemistry react more immediately and nurturantly to the infant, it's only reasonable that she become, at least for a while, the principal homemaker and child rearer; it's only reasonable that her husband provide, at least for a while, the principal support of the family.

And from this division of labor comes the second feature of successful group life--the system of leadership: In most marriages, it's logical that the husband become the head of the family, at least in economic and related areas, while the wife would make decisions in areas directly within her daily purview. This is not enslavement but democracy: They do discuss issues, they do have separate areas of control, but they have machinery for making everyday decisions easily and for getting work done efficiently. Psychiatrist Nathaniel Lehrman likens such a family to a tiny democracy; the husband is not a dictator but a president; the wife is not a slave but the speaker of the legislature. And although the man is the head, he owes much to his wife's managerial support. A woman said it best: Senator Maurine Neuberger, addressing a conference on working women, commented wryly, "My greatest single need, as a Senator, is for a good 'wife.'"

Thus, for American woman today and in the foreseeable future, the most workable answer--the scheme of life that most nearly fits her own needs and those of the American man--is a combination of marriage and career in which she accepts a secondary part in the world of work and achievement in order to have a primary part in the world of love and the home. This basic choice establishes the fundamental relationship of husband and wife in the economic sphere and, thereby, in many other areas of their marriage; and all this harmonizes with the inherent biological differences between male and female. As an answer, it's unfair to women in the sense that it grants them less than they might desire in one area of life; the alternatives grant them more in that area but at a cost most women--and their men--refuse to pay.

The eradication of all sex-role differences would be disastrous for mankind, but we need hardly fear that it will come to be; nothing as joyless and contrary to our instincts is likely to become the pattern of the majority. There have always been women who found sex, marriage or both intolerable and who sought to make others find them so, too. Today, they are more vocal than ever and, in part, because they are advancing the cause of normal women as well as their own, they have captured the attention of a vast audience. In the end, however, it isn't their way that will triumph.

"We mean treason!" trumpeted one incendiary feminist. "We mean secession, and on a thousand times greater scale than was that of the South. We are plotting revolution!" Her name was Victoria Claflin Woodhull and she has been almost wholly forgotten; she uttered these words a century ago, but, instead of revolution, there came evolution. Masculinity, femininity, heterosexual love, marriage and motherhood are still very much alive and are likely to be so many years hence, when Ti-Grace Atkinson, Roxanne Dunbar and Betsy Warrior have joined Victoria Claflin Woodhull in the discard pile of history.