Roundtable, part one

The following tape recorded program was produced in the studios of KPFA Berkeley

California under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center in

cooperation with the National Association of educational broadcasters

in connection with the series the American woman in fact and fiction recently presented

by the station. We offer a panel discussion recorded under informal

circumstances in the KPFA studios. The participants in the discussion

are Mark Schorer writer and professor of English literature at the University of

California Ethel Albert and her apologist and recent fellow at the

Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

Dr. Anna Mencken Berkeley psychiatrist Peter Gold a guard professor of

political science at the University of California and former president of Reed College

Miriam Allen the Ford writer of San Francisco and Virginia

Maynard writer and director of the series on the American woman in fact and

fiction as a starting point for the following conversation.

Each participant read the chapter entitled The ordeal of the American woman which

appears in the book America as a civilization by Max Lerner published in

157 by Simon and Schuster. The most

continuous American revolutionary rights learner is the American woman.

First there was the suffrage revolution as part of the long hard fought movement for equal

rights in which a succession of strong minded women in the face of jeers and

humiliation broke into previously barred professions and won the right to an

equal education with men to speak in public to vote for and hold office.

Second there was the sexual revolution directed against the double standard of

morality and aimed again for women and some of the same privileges of sexual

expressiveness as the men had coming in the wake of the Equal Rights Movement.

It was a phase at once of the revolt against Puritanism and of the dislocations

caused by the First World War. Related to the revolution of morals was

third the revolution of manners with women shedding their cumbersome

garments and adopting form fitting clothes and revealing swimsuits and shorts

taking part in sports driving cars and even piloting planes

serving in war time as wax and waves smoking cigarettes and drinking in

public. Fourth says Lerner there was the kitchen

revolution with mechanized kitchens and canned and prepared

foods giving some women greater leisure and enabling others to get industrial and

clerical jobs. Finally there was the jobs revolution which

transformed the American working force as it also transformed women's role in the economy.

In one thousand twenty there were eight million women holding jobs in

1955. There were more than 27 million comprising over 30

percent of the labor force. During the first quarter of the present

century says Max Lerner the American woman strove for equal rights with men

having achieved them. She has spent the second quarter wondering about the result.

A section from Lerner's America as a civilization. The

chapter the ordeal of the American woman we are about to join

the discussion now as the panelists are talking about recent book length publications

concerned with modern woman Wiley's generation of vipers as mentioned

Margaret Mead's male and female the Kinsey Report and the Lundberg says

modern woman in the last seconds someone mentions a very recent work in

titled The trouble with women. The conversation turns

to magazines and newspapers. Regular contributors to this unprecedented

flow of comment on the American woman from a large stack of clippings on the

table around which the panelists are seated. The moderator selects a number of Representative

items from recent periodicals cartoons illustrating some facet of the

so called Woman Question articles and interviews with various

commentators on the American scene. Some of the titles are red

U.S. women told to forget the qualities as one. It took courage and

research to say women are people. Goes another American

women want to be everything reads yet another report of an interview with a

British born journalist Alastair Cook. Does all this comment bear

out learner's contention that the American woman is undergoing an ordeal as the moderator.

If so what is the nature of the ordeal. The modern dilemma.

We hear the response of psychiatrist and unlike you I don't see any of

our old.

But what I think you holes in our Deal of an American woman seems

to be based on insecurity of the American woman about

herself as if there is a confusion of the role women that

think you mention the cartoons you mentioned they all make fun of the

multiple functions of an American woman today as if

she is. If he lives a number of different

levels at the same time with the result that she doesn't know where she

actually belong as if her sense of identity is confused. Well the

usual arsing wife mother or sister coming home

only to become the fool for a while then to switch back to cook and

housekeeper and in between the sophisticated lady at a

cocktail party. What is she really. She handles the budget. She

is planning practically everything in the family. It seems to me

that it is a mini general job she is managing

things. Previous times father brought the bacon and her room

and cook it and there didn't seem to be a very great problem

about the role. Now all her activities do not satisfy her.

She has to paint or learn to fly an airplane to express

herself. Why express are injured while eating

well. Only one thought at this point and possibly

because she does not say mke of herself first and

last as her family. But she sings of herself as an

individual who does an expert job and many expect

Jobs in and for her family.

Her existence does not consist in being one but in

doing something she lives in different levels of

activity.

There is no wonder of course that her sense of identity is confused. The point I wanted

to bring out is the difference in being in tune.

Doctor ordered guard and then presented his view.

It seems to me that you have to do two kinds of booze here and that there

is a kind of image of women and it is only I think there are many images of

women and there are countless different roles that women play

and I think the image that you may have of women will depend upon your close

status.

I suspect that the image of women which have been for example

by the aristocracy of uniquely in the 17th 18th

century was a quite different in the age of women than was held by the

Russian peasant. And I suspect that's true today.

And most of the discussions that appear in the paper. I've written by

leisure class people people who have time on their hands and don't know what

to do with it. Most of them are not applicable in my

judgment to the vast majority of

working women their wives and sweethearts

sisters of miners and farmers and so on

there as I see here this business of male female man and woman

is a pretty elemental business after all it's the most elementary of all the divisions of

labor. It nature and it does represent

fundamentally a difference of a division of labor

a difference of function and biological function in the world

and it's just fantastic to assume that a division of

labor and a differential of function so profit on the spot

should not result in differences of temperament or point of

view of values and so on. I

read an article some years ago by Floyd Allport a

psychologist in Harper's magazine in which he argued that the

talk about differences sex differences has a lot of nonsense

that sex differences were socially imposed never a conventional No.

Entirely so. If you see women as they

are you see them as just I suppose it's

without agenda. And this business I've had de

sexualize a vision of both the male and the female in the

process of forgetting the elementary function of this

division of labor. Makes me a bit impatient.

Well now to marry and before dying I don't want to disagree.

Yes you see me bursting. I don't want to go out on a tangent I would take you up on

that I could talk for an hour on that point.

As a matter of fact it has not be sexualizing anybody nearly 100

percent of the so-called male or female characteristics outside of the

primers sex and secondary sexual characters are the matter of

turning up conditioning of a sociology not of biology. I think this is

true but they arise from the house he thinks of nothing we want to remember is of the something

much more basic than the differentiation the male and female us a differentiation

into human beings and non-human beings we are all primarily human

and that the least important thing about most of us is that whether where

they all feel man or female feel oh god how.

Oh yeah.

It's not enough time as you say I do what I want to say Protect Your only as and far

more I got angry here now that I think if there is a

dilemma it is a much more universal dilemma Lemme either of the American woman or a

woman. I think we're living in a time of profound transition where living out of

time at present of the worst insecurity even beyond the

and security of life in them in the dark ages. In other words a time of

fear. It's a universal dilemma.

Well I heartily agree with what you've said. I think that those of us who've

done some work in anthropology are particularly impressed by the incredible

contrasts as you move from one culture to another where as I think I mentioned to you

earlier in Africa it is taken for granted that the woman is the appropriate one to

do hard labor and I think it's a role the curious that. Women in my country

are able to get the men to do the hard work and I think that's not fair because those poor chaps you know

kept carrying all these heavy things and work such long hours and they're not laws. You

know they go off and get drunk or stop and visit and you get down to

some very simple things like basket weaving in one culture this is obviously a

male occupation and another it's just as obviously a female occupation. And I

think to follow your line you go on from there to the differences out of sight between

people who have a skin one color or another or who speak one language or

another. It isn't that there aren't any differences is that we have to backtrack and find out

what the differences really are and then I think raise the question what difference it makes.

The fact that one creature is female and one male makes a certain difference at least

biologically and perhaps in other ways. But is it necessarily the case

that because you are female you are better at French than at mathematics or that you ought to stay home

and cook instead of guy out to do something I think that the differences have to be

re-evaluated later.

Dr. Olga Gardner referred again to the question of women and labor.

A social tradition custom and so on and so forth. Also

the distribution process. I just returned from the Soviet

Union for the last time 10 million people liked what even a fuel

shortage of men and a great deal of the

things that we noticed in there so few women are going they probably

would not be doing if there were not this eclipse.

I suspect the same is true of the technological revolution that's taking place in the United

States under which when going into industry and going into business