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But most German women prefer more traditional attitudes. In a recent poll of German women, 68% considered unmarried career girls to be not quite normal, while 82% regarded the care of husband and child as their primary goal in life. Though 40% of all married women in West Germany hold jobs outside the home, most of them would be appalled if their Ehemann did the dishes or dusted the shelves. Says one well-educated Hamburg housewife: "If I saw my husband running around the house with a dust cloth in his hand, I couldn't go to bed with him any more. He'd be more like a brother to me." Nonetheless, a group called Frankfurt Women's Action Group 1970 last month held its first teach-in in Frankfurt. The feminists marched outside the main railroad stations with signs proclaiming OUR BELLIES BELONG TO US. Within two hours they had collected more than 1,000 signatures on a pro-abortion petition—including that of the mayor of Frankfurt. Tired of being used only as secretaries and bed bunnies, the female members of Germany's student S.D.S. staged a walkout—but not before hurling invective and rotten tomatoes at the organization's male chauvinists.
Anti-Liberation. So goes the catalogue of female complaints. With good reason. Professionally, European women firmly hold down the bottom rung of the ladder. Though every third woman works in Germany, only 3% of that nation's top jobs are held by women. In the exalted world of big business, the nearest thing to a tycoon is Beate Uhse and her sex shops. In England, for every 50 men earning £5,000, there is only one woman. Out of a total of 2,448 practicing barristers, there are only 133 women. In Sweden, 53 women legislators out of 384 is considered impressive. Meanwhile, women there constitute only 1% of the university teachers, 1.3% of the physicians and 6.1% of the lawyers.
But just as in the U.S., many European women simply do not want to be liberated. In Switzerland, some women are even prepared to fight against it. Next February Swiss men will vote on whether to give women the right to vote. Some Swiss women have banded together into an organization whose sole goal is to keep the ballot away from women. "We can't risk destroying the man's role in the world," says the president of the League of Swiss Women Against Suffrage. "We must give him a task to perform and allow him to be chivalrous."