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It seems certain, at least, that sex is too important to be left entirely to ideologues. Some men have spoken of it as the last frontier of free expression. Yet in a way, the opposite is true. The appeal of sex, at least to some, is not freedom but order, represented by the clear definition of roles. Marriage is a remnant of a fixed social order that, in the past, was thought to be a reflection of a fixed natural order. In sex, of course, men and women feel that they must prove themselves, but they do not so often feel under the bewildering obligation to define themselves. It is one area in which definition is usually unambiguously understood—one simply is a man or a woman. Perhaps for this reason, many people, male and female, are troubled by the notions of sexual equality and interchangeable social roles.
In its belief that old traditions can be changed and that men and women can learn anything—even how to be men and women—the feminist movement is characteristically American. As Critic Elizabeth Hardwick has noted, the movement rests "upon a sense of striving, of working, and it has the profoundly native ethical themes of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and equality. Preparation, study, free choice, courage, resolution: these are its images and emblems." The women's movement, she points out, is antipathetic to "the youth culture, which appeared more as a refusal, a pause in the labor of the vineyard, sometimes a sort of quietism."
Miss Hardwick notes that when Hawthorne wrote his great parable about men and women in America, The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne decides to make a lonely stand against Puritanism and hypocrisy, Mrs. Hawthorne read it and said that she liked it, but "it gave her a headache." In a sense, that is where we are still.
The women's issue could involve an epic change in the way we see ourselves, not only sexually but historically, sociologically, psychologically and in the deeper, almost inaccessible closets of daily habit. Its appearance has startled men and women into self-perception. It has outraged some, freed others, left some sarcastically indifferent. Men and women have shared equally in all three reactions.
It is for such reasons that
TIME is devoting most of this issue to an exploration of the status of women in America today. Our cover story is an overview of the American woman. Because the subject touches so many facets of life in different ways, each department of the magazine explores the question of women in its specialty. Most of the sections include situation reports, the facts and figures of the feminine condition—not that the numbers tell anywhere near the whole story.
In the midst of such an enterprise, it seems prudent to admit that the subject remains mysterious. If men to some extent have lost their mystique as gods and kings and hunters, women somehow have not yet lost—not quite—the aura of earth mother or Kali. To say that over 99% of women are not lawyers—and why not?—reckons without the residual mystique of women defined not so much by what they do as what they are. Perhaps all of that will change and should change. Meanwhile, we have attempted to describe what women are doing and thinking, what they are and might become.