(4 of 6)
Both the radicals and the women of NOW also do "actions," little guerrilla theatricals intended to raise consciousness generally, and a little hell besides. This fall they entered a secret candidate for Miss America, but their elaborate plans to have her denounce the contest from within fizzled. At Grinnell College in Iowa last February coeds stripped to the buff when a speaker expounded the Playboy philosophy. To draw attention to their cause, women in Chicago are concentrating on what they call "little dainties," such as elaborately opening doors for men and lighting their cigarettes.
The feminists have solid legal grounds for other actions. Partly as a joke, Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia, then 81, added "sex" to the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of "race, color, religion or national origin." There was a good deal of laughter, but the House passed the bill. It has taken a while for feminists to grasp what they can do under Title VII, but charges of discrimination against women in business and industry account for about 7,500 of the 44,000 complaints filed so far with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Restrictions as to hours were swept away, airline stewardesses won the right to work after age 32, and women got jobs as jockeys, steamship yeomen and telephone switchmen, which were formerly denied them. Soon we may expect legions of female firemen, airline pilots, sanitation men and front-line soldiers (although Anthropologist Margaret Mead thinks that they would be too fierce).
It is fitting that women should be protected along with Negroes by civil rights legislation, because the metaphor of Woman as Negro has been expressed by practically every observer of feminine subjugation from John Stuart Mill to Yoko Ono. As Gunnar Myrdal noted in his classic American Dilemma, both groups have been hampered by the same prejudices: that they were inferior in many ways, and also that they believed themselves to be inferior.
The new feminism parallels the black movement in many ways. Both are encumbered, for example, by a huge fifth column—for blacks, the Uncle Toms; for women, Aunt Tabbies, also known as Doris Days. Like the blacks, the feminists too are asking, with some success, that their "hidden history," the story of women's rights, be taught in schools and colleges. The law school at N.Y.U. has inaugurated a course devoted entirely to the legal problems of women, including divorce law. (Law is one profession that is attracting increasing numbers of women as well as blacks, both groups eager to promote legal reforms.)
The Lonely Ovum
The redoubtable Elizabeth Cady Stanton, mother of seven and one of the few first-rate intellects in the suffrage movement, was so often confronted with Biblical "truths" putting down women that she made it her business to set the Holy Book to rights, publishing a Woman's Bible. The Scriptures bear the "impress of fallible men," she assured her readers. She particularly objected to the authors' use of the expression "The Lord saith" whenever they wanted to make a point. The story of Eve, she was happy to announce, was a fable, and woman was in no way responsible for the problems of the universe.*