(See Cover)
In the heyday of U.S. feminism, an indomitable suffragette gave a discouraged follower some militant advice: "Call on God, my dear! She will help you!" But the Deity ignores wrongly addressed prayers, and He has kept to the old system, under which women bear babies and men pretty much run everything. No woman has yet been elected President, and, as Critic Diana Trilling once remarked, it is hard even to imagine "a play called Death of a Saleswoman." Women are still at sea, and their rule is men and children first.
American men do not really want the world to be half female and half free. The passion, patience and intuition of loving women are obviously good for more than dishes and diapers. And since about 1833, when Oberlin College first gave "the misjudged and neglected sex all the instructive privileges which have hitherto unreasonably distinguished the leading sex from theirs," it has been taken for granted that most little girls are smarter than most little boys. Yet what has it got them?
Moderate and Outraged. It turns out that women are mainly free in sex and speech. They have scarcely begun to use their brains. Of the top-rank high school seniors who skip college, two-thirds are girls. The proportion of girls in college has slipped from 47% in 1920 (a vintage feminist year) to 37% now. Only a little more than half of all college girls get a bachelor's degree. For every 300 women capable of earning a doctorate degree, only one does. In utilizing women's brains, Russia outdoes the U.S.: 30% of Soviet engineers and 75% of doctors are women. In the U.S., only 6% of the doctors and 1% of engineers are women.
One woman who has thought about all this and taken a reasonable, constructive, moderate and just slightly outraged stand is Mary I. Bunting, 51, mother, microbiologist, and the new president of Radcliffe College. U.S. girls, she thinks, grow up in "a climate of unexpectation," willing to be educated but convinced by "hidden dissuaders" that they will not really use their education. Mrs. Bunting, who describes herself as "a geneticist with nestbuilding experience," finds unexpectation hidden everywhere. As she puts it:
"Adults ask little boys what they want to do when they grow up. They ask little girls where they got that pretty dress. We don't care what women do with their education. Why, we don't even care if they learn to be good mothers."
"Who Needs Me?" The fuel of a free society is people freely pursuing some consuming interest, be it physics, poetry or plumbing. Nothing is more joyfully consuming than motherhood, but the proportion of any woman's life spent in motherhood is dropping fast. In 1890 the average woman lived 14 years after her last child turned 21; in 1961, between earlier marriage and longer life, the same period spans 30 years.