Career women and college girls have been far more active in the liberation movement than the housewives who long ago made their personal commitments "for better or for worse." But it is clear by now that many of them too, from time to time, are caught up by the cause. To capture the feelings of some of them, at least, TIME turned to Sue Kaufman, wife, mother, and author of Diary of a Mad Housewife, a novel (and later film) that early sounded the tocsin of domestic alarm.
SHE will admit, under slight pressure, that she has never really cared for the epithet "male chauvinist pig"; though she tried it on for size a few times, and though she felt a certain heady sensation of power while using it, she has come to see that it is not really her style. She has had two abortions, both premarital and illegal, and she sends contributions to organizations like the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition—but, enclosed with her check is a request that her name be withheld from the printed list of donors. She reads Sylvia Plath's poetry because she loves poetry and thinks that Sylvia Plath is an extraordinary poet; she finds it particularly exasperating that Sylvia Plath should be made into a heroine of Women's Lib, since it seems to her that there is nothing heroic about a poor, tormented, brilliant woman who was driven by the terrible inner pressures of her own psyche—not the pressures of the feminine role—to kill herself.
She bristles whenever she hears the term lady editor, lady painter, lady doctor, lady lawyer; they are, she will insist with quiet fury, editors or painters or doctors or lawyers who also happen to be women. Active, dedicated women—and lucky ones, she will often silently tack on.
She is anywhere from 25 to 45—a wife, a mother, a housewife. She is usually far from mad (crazy or angry), far from being wildly bitter —but also far from being satisfied with what or where she is. Though she isn't too clear on where she would rather be, she knows it isn't up there on the big, steamrolling bandwagon of Women's Lib, or in the front ranks of the marching phalanx, waving banners. Much as she admires them.
And she does admire them. Shirley, Florynce, Bella, Betty, Gloria, Germaine, Kate. And when one of them comes to town, she will arrange, often with great difficulty, to go and hear her speak. She will make the complicated arrangements for the sitter to come and cover the home front for her and "liberate" her for a few hours. (This is the context in which that word is mainly used in her life.)
She will go, usually with friends.