(4 of 6)
Opposition also comes from minority-group women, who often characterize Women's Lib as oriented toward white, middle-class professional women. Among black women, a debate has long raged over priorities: black liberation before women's liberation. Others have argued that it is necessary to reconstruct black family life first. Says a Houston woman: "Within the black community, most of the women are working both financially and emotionally to bolster their men. Black women want to unliberate themselves from the role as head of the house. We feel it is now up to us to help our men more, to enhance their manhood."
There are other opinions, however. Black women are the lowest-paid members of the work force; a black man with an eighth-grade education has a higher median income than a black woman with some college education. Los Angeles Black Activist Althea Scott says, "White women liberationists talk about the difficulties of getting into graduate or professional school. We talk about getting jobs in the five and ten. We're on the nitty-gritty level. Just let black women struggle at their own rate. They'll see they are women." Spanish-speaking women are also somewhat alienated from Women's Liberation. Most, staunchly Catholic, reject movement policy on birth control and abortion, and Latin machismo is another stumbling block.
Says Chicana Leader Cecilia Suarez: "Our issues are bread-and-butter ones; Women's Lib is trying to get equal job opportunities, but we are still trying to get our women into school. We have special problems. For example, our meetings have to be in the daytime, because the average Spanish-speaking husband won't let his wife come out at night." Nonetheless, minority participation in the movement has grown in recent months.
An entrenched group of women that is having none of Women's Liberation rhetoric is prostitutes. One failure that feminists admit was an encounter session with some New York City prostitutes. Says Susan Brownmiller: "It knocked us out for a month; we walked around reeling. No active prostitute will ever take a feminist line. She can't and still work. When she speaks, she's speaking from the man's plantation."
Nor have feminists got much mileage out of efforts to equate the marital bed with cultural prostitution. To characterize the married woman's life as prostitution, argues University of Michigan Psychologist Joseph Adelson, "denies tacitly our contemporary conception of female sexuality, one that sees it as mutual, in that the woman seeks as much as she gives." In these instances, Adelson says, Women's Lib returns to "the dark world of Victorian pornography."
Adelson also takes issue with the wing of the movement that often equates male sexuality with rape —sometimes seeing rape symbolically as the distillation of the normal male sexual attitude. Says Adelson: "As any clinician knows, these days the problem in male sexuality lies in the opposite direction, not in phallic megalomania but rather in sexual diffidence and self-doubt."