To Critic Irving Howe, the book is "a farrago of blunders, distortions, vulgarities and plain nonsense," and its author is guilty of "historical reductionism," "crude simplification," "middleclass parochialism," "sexual monism," "methodological sloppiness," "arrogant ultimatism" and "comic ignorance." Howe's attack seemed certain to stir up an unholy war between the sexes. For it was directed against both the bible and the high priestess of the Women's Liberation movement: Sexual Politics and its author, Kate Millett.
Howe was not alone. Last week, while Kate and her allies were girding themselves for a new equality strike on Dec. 12, other critics were also dissecting both book and movement. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger, Harper's Editor Midge Decter, Janet Malcolm in the New Republic, and Esquire Writer Helen Lawrenson raised some provocative questions. Can the feminists think clearly? Do they know anything about biology? What about their maturity, their morality, their sexuality? Ironically, Kate Millett herself contributed to the growing skepticism about the movement by acknowledging at a recent meeting that she is bisexual. The disclosure is bound to discredit her as a spokeswoman for her cause, cast further doubt on her theories, and reinforce the views of those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians.
Female Impersonator. Howe was unaware of Kate's confession when he reviewed Sexual Politics for Harper's, but he nevertheless sensed a sexual ambiguity in its author. Kate, he writes, "shows very little warmth toward women and very little awareness of their experience. There are times one feels the book was written by a female impersonator."
What bothers Howe even more is Kate's "lack of intellectual sophistication," betrayed, he says, by her "dominating obsession" with the idea that all male-female differences except anatomical ones are culturally rather than biologically determined. Besides, he continues, she maligns Freud when she brands him a counterrevolutionary whose theories set back the cause of women's freedom. On the contrary, Howe believes, Freud's ideas paved the way for today's concern about sex roles. He tried to free women from "subordination to domineering fathers," and to help them like themselves as women. That, says Howe, is not necessarily the same as trying to make them stay in the kitchen.
Masters and Chattels. Though he admits that women have been exploited, Howe points out that men have, too, and in the same way: as members of disadvantaged classes rather than as members of one sex or the other. Moreover, "males may have been 'masters' and females 'chattels,' but this is perhaps the only such relationship in human history where the 'masters' sent themselves and their sons to die in wars while trying to spare their 'chattels.' "
Howe has nothing but scorn for the Millett assertion that only men have human work to do. Asks he: "Is the poor bastard writing soap jingles performing a 'human' task morally or psychologically superior to what his wife does at home, where she can at least reach toward an uncontaminated relationship with her own child?"