The Study of Women: New Challenges, New Directions || REALITY GAP

Department of Sociology, Humboldt State University

REALITY GAPAuthor(s): Nancy ReevesSource: Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, Vol. 10, No. 2, The Study of Women: NewChallenges, New Directions (SPRING/SUMMER 1983), pp. 215-229Published by: Department of Sociology, Humboldt State UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23262326 .

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REALITY GAP

Nancy Reeves Member of the New York Bar Member of the California Bat

Director, Center for the Study of Change International College

ABSTRACT

Integration for women has been largely an effort to insert themselves

into the existing system. While feminists were concentrating on this

goal, a social metamorphosis has occurred. This paper seeks to

explore the distance between the assumed and the altered, with special emphasis on the impact of unprecedented change on women in con

temporary society. The transformations considered will be: a) the scientific revolution in production, b) the scientific revolution in destruction, c) the revolution in manipulation, d) the revolution in

concepts of time and space, and e) the biomedical revolution.

Feminism has two goals; autonomy in private life, and integration in

public life. In the current period, emphasis on the first has tended to

eclipse the second. Yet it is perilous for women to plan in terms of the

past; rather it is imperative that they address the challenge of adapting received institutions to the new realities.

Preamble

In a room where people maintain a conspiracy of silence, notes the Nobelist

Czeslow Milosz, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. 1 would submit that in most cases the patterns of silence are not conspiratorial; they are instead

an ensemble of shared illusions insulated from comparison with reality. For on

campuses, as well as in the community at large, the very act of contemplation is colored by inherited norms internalized by the contemplator. Perhaps that is

why Georg Simmel stresses the importance of The Stranger, the one who observes without the spectacles the particular society has placed upon his or her nose. This essay, conceived as a collection of pistol shots, is written by such a

stranger. Its object is to challenge the doctrinal approach, the dependence on

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precedent, which has defined the chance situation as absolute in explaining the

destiny of women. Such precedent, such preconception, cannot serve today in

the conditions of an interdependent and interwoven planet which has become a

single ecosystem. Moreover, it is increasingly evident that the disciplines which continue to resort to such models offer a version of reality which is very much cut off at the knees. "The situation we are considering is entirely new and has no discoverable precedent. For it does not proceed, from a simple phenomenon of quantitative growth, but from a qualitative transformation" (UNESCO, 1972). All our pre-conceptions must now be reconsidered, must now be recast.

True, the emergence of the invisible woman has prompted many social observers to reexamine classical assumptions respecting the second sex. But the conventional goal continues to be an effort to insert females into the existing grammar of existence; with familiar structure still accepted as standard, and woman's place still defined as a subset, an addendum, to the way things are. This is not surprising for scholars, even dissident scholars, even feminist

scholars, are imprisoned in the traditional ideologies, the established methods of their fields. (If they were not, they would have no credibility there). This has led to unconscious censorship of data as well as theories which do not fit established definitions of what is objective, of what is probative, of what is true. Challenging the hypnotic power of dominance has begun, therefore, to extend beyond the mechanics of admission and addition—of letting women in to the society and into the academy; or of adding unstandardized ideas to the universe of discourse and the curriculum. For integrating women, we are now in a position to see, is no longer a matter of rectifying error, of correcting in

justice. The stunning task for those concerned with the status of women in

society has now become to discover a new paradigm for the species. As already suggested, while feminists and their allies were engaged in ques

tioning the patterns of ingenious obfuscation which defined woman's place, a social metamorphosis has occurred; and neither women's movements nor women's studies have accorded it what lawyers call "judicial notice." Rather the practice has been to focus on gender biases and to assume (or hope) that other social factors would remain relatively constant. It is a perilous perspec tive, virtually denying the quality and the extent of current cataclysms.

To document this reality gap between the assumed and the altered, I shall

begin by outlining the principal contemporary revolutions and suggesting how

they have changed the parameters of possibility—in habitat and in humans.

Clearly the givens of the environment and the givens of the species have both been transcended: (1) the earth has become a single ecosystem; and (2) the peo ple of the earth have been provided with prostheses beyond their organic reach. In summarizing these transformations, I shall place special emphasis on the

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impacts they have produced and the options they continue to pose tor women in society. Together, these revolutions encompass the reasons life has become like a parachute jump. In the words of Margaret Mead: "You have to get it

right the first time" (1975:xxii)).

The Scientific Revolution in Production

Toil as an essential economic enterprise is being virtually eliminated. "Only an

extraordinarily elaborate exercise in social camouflage," writes John Kenneth

Galbraith, "has kept us from seeing what is happening" (1966:183). What is

happening? We have entered the era of cybernetic and robotic revolutions, forms of technical mutation which are radically altering the traditional relation

ship between human and habitat. The first industrial revolution extended muscles: the species could exceed its native physical capacities through prosthetic contrivances. The current, second, industrial revolution extends minds: the new prostheses have their own nervous systems. We have moved from a partnership between human and machine to a partnership between machine and machine. People as automatons, as attendants, as "hands," no

longer have the pivotal position in production that was imperative in the past; their role has been transformed to one of programming and of planning. The whole relationship between people and process must, in consequence, be reconceived and reevaluated.

It is a paradox that most of the outgroups, women among them, are waking up, knocking on the doors to demand entry into the labor force, just at the time when people are becoming expendable, when the very possibility of earning a

living, as a precondition to staying alive, is no longer available to a larger and

larger proportion of the population.

Easy optimism, as well as inattention to developing patterns falling outside traditional postulates, have already given rise to formidable social problems. Let me offer one instance. The breaking up of complex tasks into simple increments which can be performed by semi-skilled workers has triggered an increase in the recruitment of women. Why? The answer is plain. Women

possess a special appeal: they can perform standard work but are able to command only substandard wages. It is customary to hail the rise in female

employment in the last years as progress. But to accurately comprehend events, one must recognize their interrelatedness and their complexity. Suppose that the vaunted "progress" was a consequence of the continuing vulnerability of the second sex in the marketplace? Suppose the new

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openings were designed not to include women but to exploit them? We must be

wary when we are faced with a won war.

In 1976, the Women's Bureau reported that the income gap between men and women increased in the last twenty years (U.S. Department of Labor, 1976). What does this mean? The cited twenty years was precisely the period when the aforesaid increase in the numbers of women workers was cited as a giant step forward. To put it another way, the augmented female labor force was now in

competition with the slave labor of machines. As Norbert Wiener noted at the

inception of the cybernetic revolution:

Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke (1950:162).

Nor does one have to be an expert to notice the relationship between woman's position in the work force and the rapidity with which the first industrial revolution is being supplanted by the second. When women and minorities are available as marginal labor, there is no need for employers to make sizeable investments in sophisticated machinery. So soon as women and minorities press demands for wages above the costs of technological "slave

labor," it becomes more profitable for corporations to shift to cybernated robots. For machines do not insist on benefits, vacations, rest periods overtime, health insurance, sick leave, and meal breaks. Nor are they, to date, union members. Moreover, as the world shrinks and the new machines obviate the need for skilled workers, there is always the option of factory flight to the Third

World, where people are plentiful, wages are low, and where the expenses of distant production can be translated into tax benefits.

Another illustration: technological mutation in the blue collar industries has resulted in employee retrenchment. In the classical language, this has meant laid-off "primary breadwinners." Ironically, in some of the coal mining areas, New England textile plants, running away from union labor, are now hiring the wives of the unemployed as the standard workforce: "So the miners do the housework and hang around the saloon and the wife has become the bread winner" (Harrington, 1974:28). To the student of change, the trend toward the two-income family is less significant than this movement toward a one-income

family supported by a woman, for it is among the increasing number of such




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families that the incidence of poverty is highest. Women are almost eighty per cent of the adult poor. Almost eighty percent of working women are in low

pay, low skill jobs (Women for Equality, 1981). Nor is current change in the direction of improvement. As late as last year, a Labor Department study reported that women were paid less than men virtually across the board, even in the same occupations.

Let me offer additional data relating to the tenacity and consequences of static concepts in a dynamic context. 1 refer to a new version of "homework" which is being introduced into the Canadian clothing industry. Unions belated

ly have discovered that garment shops are shutting down and bundles are being farmed out to women, with only the cutters (mainly men) retained as regular employees. There are, moreover, no standards respecting income or conditions. And the rationale offered is a cynical one: that the women can now look after their children while they work (Gillette, 1982). The paradox is completed when one considers that this trend toward sweated hand labor is occurring in the industrialized world at the same time that sophisticated factories are

mushrooming in the underdeveloped world. Such emerging patterns may appear irrational until one considers the logic of profit and loss statements. Piece work, by housewives, is not covered by the minimum wage in the First

World; semi-skilled women, to service the new machinery, are available at minimal wages in the Third World.

Again, a recent newspaper headline announced: "600 U.S.-Owned Factories

Brighten Mexico Economy." Cited in the article is the "huge, cheap, willing" labor force there, as well as the bonus of two tariff schedule provisions which make it possible for corporations "to avoid certain customs duties on $15 billion worth of imports from 23 countries, including Mexico." Profit is maximized because duty is paid only on "value added" and that means that "the cheaper the labor the cheaper the duties" (Los Angeles Times, Sept., 27, 1982). Most of this cheap labor is female. An analysis of international trends and their effect on American conditions tells the story:

...the poor nations of Asia, Latin America, and soon Africa, long the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the international economy, are increasingly becoming the principal sites of new production. This dramatic shift from north to south, which could not have been predicted even ten years ago, is changing employment patterns and living standards in the United States (Barnet and Muller, 1974:214)




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The Scientific Revolution in Destruction

Scientific developments in destruction include chemical, biological, radiological, psychological, laser, and satellite techniques for waging total war. The choice offered parallels that posed by the revolution in production: is it the intricate machines, apocalyptic agencies employed for mindless ends, or is it the

changing anatomy of the human condition which shall fix the odds and deter mine the options before us? Loren Eiseley observed that "it is man's ideas that have evolved and changed the world about him" (1957:89). Through intellect

alone, using the highly evolved organ of the brain, a virtually unchanged human body has been able to alter the universe. Dennis Gabor points to two

types of mind, creative in different ways, which have made this possible: those

responsible for technical innovations and those responsible for social inven tions. Unfortunately, he notes, both have been eclipsed throughout history by a third type of mind, which cared neither for technology nor for society but only for power: "We have come," he insists, "to a point in the evolution [of the

species] (1970:1) when such history must have a stop." Unique in human

annals, the critical choice before us now, is in the formulation of Buckminister

Fuller, Utopia or oblivion: both now conceivable, both now possible (1969). Yet all over the world, those who comprehend the dimensions of the crisis are thwarted by those who do not, but have the power to decide.

The Nobel Laureate, Max Born, conscious of the conceptual shifts mandated by scientific change and the challenges they pose, speculated that perhaps, in

evolutionary terms, the species may not be able to adapt fast enough to preserve itself.

1 was haunted by the idea that this break in human civilization, caused by the discovery of the scientific method, may be irreparable. Though 1 love science I have the feeling that it is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization (1968:58).

Arthur Koestler goes even further. He discerns a basic flaw in the evolution of our species, a pathology that results in a gap between technological achieve ment and social competence so that "Prometheus reaches out for the stars with an insane grin on his face and a totem-symbol in his hand" (1978:3). Koestler then lists the things that went wrong, stressing particularly "the most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history. . . the beating of war drums."

(1978:2) Like other writers, Koestler talks of the species and cites modalities man

dated by men. Clearly, women have had very little to do with war drums. They




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have been sacrificed on the altars of the tribal gods more often than they have been ritual slayers. I would suggest that before we condemn the whole species as

pathological, it might be appropriate to reexamine the presumed attributes of more than one half of it.

I take some hope from that fact that there are indicators which suggest cer tain differential positions taken by women respecting the issues of peace and war. Thus, it was generally conceded that "the women elected Eisenhower" after his pledge to end the Korean war. Similarly, their militant campaign against nuclear testing was crucial in the political decisions relating to that issue. Later, in 1967, a Gallup Report found a gender differential in opinions respecting the use of ultimate weapons. The question polled was "should atom bombs be used in Viet Nam?" and one out of four Americans responded in the affirmative. However, "a sharp difference is found between the views of men and women, with the latter being far more inclined to favor immediate withdrawal" (Gallup Opinion Index 1967). More recently, President Reagan's defense posture has, according to newspaper comment, damaged his appeal to

women voters.

How does this differential come about? 1 think it is related to the fact that women are outsiders. They rarely have been formulators and interpreters of

ideologies; they have even been excluded, by and large, from acquiring a per sonal or professional stake in existing idea systems. This is not to say that they have been impervious to prevalent assumptions; but rather, that they are not in siders among the power elite. 1 like to think that it may be easier for those in an outside position, those who come (to refer again to Simmel) as strangers, to free themselves of shibboleths, to scuttle hallowed formulas, to seek new truths without fear of losing old privileges, to arrive at disenthrallment. I have the millenarian hope that it may be possible for women, at this juncture, to marshal historic oppression for positive ends, to play a life-preserving political role at a time when survival, in the most literal sense, has become the question, and when the continuing stance of the decision makers is all too reminiscent of Melville's Captain Ahab: "All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."

The Revolution in Manipulation

Groups in power, political and economic complexes, derive their leverage from the consent or the compliance of the governed. Traditionally, this consent or compliance has been obtained by persuasion and coercion, with argument a hit-or-miss affair, and the big stick readily available for crisis management.




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Today's sophisticated techniques, on the other hand, make conditioning a con scious enterprise with predictable ends. People can be programmed. Persuasion has become a social science, and naked coercion is no longer—even though it is still employed—an operative necessity. Once again, a new revolution provides an unprecedented spectrum of choice:

The growing capacity for calculating instantly complex interactions, and the increasing availability of biochemical (and psychological) means of human control increase the potential scope of self-conscious direction, and thereby also the pressures to direct, to choose, to

change (Brzezinski, 1967). This means, in the context of the manipulative revolution, that the new techniques

and mechanisms of communication can be used to convert a democratic consensus into a society saturated by media input and manageable as a mass. Jacques Ellul sees what is happening as "a tremendous effort of psychic mutation" in which:

"The intelligensia will no longer be a model, a conscience, or an animating intellectual spirit for the group, even in the sense of performing a critical function. They will be servants, the most conformist imaginable, of the instruments of technique" (1967:349).

"Purposes," says Robert Merton, "drop out of sight and efficiency becomes the central concern" (Ellul, 1967 :vii). What I find present and perhaps predict able in the analytical studies of our period, including those to which I have referred above, is that the whole society is considered, but women are nowhere mentioned. Of course, I know that it is taken for granted, in any treatment of total populations, that women are subsumed in the whole. That is the tacit

paradigm. It may have served in earlier epochs, when standardized perceptions could provide appropriate models, and when the recognized community of

experts could solve outstanding problems. But there comes a time, as Thomas Kuhn (1967) has noted, which demands a change in the perception and evalua tion of familiar data. In this sense, the revolution in reality demands a shift in

paradigm, a fundamental reconceptualization. Kuhn suspects that mere

parochialism makes us suppose that the route from stimulus to sensation is the same for members of all groups.

I, for one, postulate that women do not share the same experience, language, education, or power, as the mainstream group; that they are not a subset of the same community but have been relegated instead to a subculture, an alternate world; that they are programmed differently from those who have internalized the patterns of the existing exemplars; and that their very mindsets constitute a distinctive design in the human tapestry.

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One of the overall scholarly issues is moral development, and specialists in the field have long judged women to be arrested in this dimension. Why? Women tend to be concrete, to literally enquire about the specific details of a

particular dilemma. Carol Gilligan, in her study of the perspective women bring to the issues of morality, reports their tendency to reconstruct a dilemma in its contextual particularity, and in so doing, to become engaged in the causes and

consequences of the situation, instead of limiting themselves to its abstract classification. "The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth," she notes, "has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life" (1977:515). Gilligan illustrates the principle through two contrasting Bible stories: Abraham's demonstration of true faith in being prepared to sacrifice the life of his son; and the woman who comes before Solomon and relinquishes truth in order to save the life of her child.

Another distinction discovered in research on women is that the male view focuses on rights. The female view, in contrast, focuses on responsibilities in

volving a broader conception of care, not only for others, but for the real and

recognizable trouble of the world (Gilligan, 1979:442). This very compassion and tolerance inherent in the feminine sense of justice have been dismissed as a

deficiency by acknowledged authorities such as Freud, Ericson, Kohlberg. Gilligan elaborates:

The proclivity of women to reconstruct hypothetical ilemmas in terms of the real, to request or supply the information missing about

the nature of the people and the places where they live, shifts their judgment away from the hierarchical ordering of principles and the formal procedures of decision making that are critical for scoring at Kohlberg's highest stages (1977:512).

Such tendencies are usually interpreted as gender characteristics. For various

reasons, I see them instead as a part of the feminine subculture. Moreover, in a time when traditional rules reinforce an illusory system, imprisoned in symbols of the past, and abstracted from the grotesque realities of the present, they may make salutary difference. The vantage point of women, concerned with con crete conditions and with actual pain and suffering, may point a path which is the obverse of alienation, of seeing people as statistical abstractions, of accept ing the logic of an American officer during the Vietnam war: "We had to

destroy the village in order to save it." Given the manipulative revolution, I do not argue that females are invulnerable to its messages, but that they internalize them differently, and that it is time to say, in consequence: Vive cette

difference!




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The Revolution in Concepts of Time and Space: Communications and

Transport

Manipulative programming derives from quality controlled production and

consumption of ideas, in continuous visual and auditory contact. Its immediacy levels old boundaries of lag and latitude. Moreover, it is commonly said that with the new modes of transport, distance no longer exists, and indeed, the

species has vanquished space. Given instantaneous communication, especially via satellite, the same may be said about time. What this signifies, quite apart from the greater ease of manipulation already suggested, is a shift in human values. Jacob Bronowski provides the theoretical key:

...at the basis of human thought lies the judgment of what is like and what is unlike...human values are bound up with what we judge to be like and unlike; and when science shifts that judgment, it makes as profound a shift in these values. The Greeks built a wonderful civiliza tion, yet it did not outrage their sense of values to hold men in slavery. They did not feel the slave and citizen to be alike men. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was felt in the western world that all white

men are alike: but William Wilberforce spent a lifetime in persuading his generation that black slave and white are alike in human dignity. Science helped to create that sensibility, by widening the view of what is like and what unlike (1951:134).

Like the authors cited earlier, Bronowski wears traditional blinders and under takes to consider the human condition without noticing women. So he seems insensible to the fact that women were slaves to, and that it did not outrage the Greek sense of values to delegate to women tasks beneath the dignity of

citizens, who were never female, even when such women were not slaves. Nor does this distinguished scholar note that white women were "unlike" in the

eighteenth century, and that white women and black women, in fact all women are "unlike" in many senses today. Nonetheless, Bronowski's insights, unqualified as they were, are instructive.

Unprecedented communication and transport, byproducts of science, have

steadily expanded the perception of likeness between peoples. This is clear if one considers that the annihilation of distance, through alterations of time and

space, is equivalent, in a mathematical sense, to the contraction of the planet's surface to an area smaller than England, measured by steam-age and oral com munications standards. True, these changes have not yet created the global village. In fact, nationalism, tribalism, racism, and of course sexism go forward




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unbounded. But alternatives to xenophobia seem less visionary as represen tatives of the human nation come within sight and sound of one another.

Surveyed as a whole, a shift in perception has already occurred, triggering another revolution. This is the revolution of rising expectations, emerging as the insulating factors of time and space are replaced by increasing awareness,

among traditionally excluded groups, of alternative designs for living. Nor is it an accident that this is the moment when under-privileged nations, under

privileged minorities, and the under-privileged sex all demand integration; all insist that hunger, disease, want, ignorance and second-class status have become conditions supererogatory and not to be borne. I think women must be

aware of the direct relationship between these phenomena—that women must

develop a sense of connection between their own aspirations and social struc ture. It is in these terms—the relationship between personal biography and the historical epoch in which we conduct our lives—that we must define ourselves.

For, in this sense, neither our anatomy nor our psyche determines our destiny. Rather, we create our destiny as members of the specific society in which we find ourselves.

I look forward to meaningful exchanges by outsiders, women among them, across the limits of nationalism to effect a shifting of other values rooted in

xenophobia. For in terms of its survival, the human population has become a

single tribe, and it behooves us all to avail ourselves of this transcending quality intrinsic to the contemporary scene in order to discover that we have a common

destiny in a cosmic age.

The Biomedical Revolution: Life Prolongation, Life Limitation, Life Transformation

"Man," writes Paul Ehrlich, "has been extremely successful at lowering the human death rate, but has made no significant effort to lower the birth rate"

(1969). This may be because man has not consulted woman! I say this somewhat wryly, for the key word in Ehrlich's comment is "significant." Un conscious conceptual freight has in my view, censored significant approaches to the issue. Population control is perceived as a technical question, and the fact that the technical is viewed in virtually all countries of the world as a male

preserve has had curious consequences. Let me offer one example. The critical

problems of the Third World, to use Elise Boulding's felicitous phrase, is Bread and Babies: too little food, too many infants. And who are the producers of both? The women. In Africa, seventy percent of the food crop is grown by women (Boulding 1975). Moreover, it comes as a surprise only to the experts




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that one hundred percent of the baby crop still is produced by women. Yet

development schemes, despite the need for more food and the need for fewer

infants, are directed by men, for men. The male experts decide how to conduct birth control campaigns, and the male tribesmen are the recipents of

agricultural aid. And where are the women? Out in the fields with the short

hoe, water jug on their heads, infants on their hips, struggling alone. Somehow, nobody asks "who farms?" So, in the absence of help from the outside, women continue to manufacture their own assistants. If the specialists from the first world continue to carry their preconceptions about "the little woman" like fifth columns in their consciousness, women in the third world will continue to

reproduce more helping hands, and the high birth rate will continue unabated. One of the telling research discoveries which continues to be

overlooked—possibly because it violates conventional wisdom—is that there is a negative correlation between increasing levels of women's education and

fertility rates. In all the crash programs for population control, this variable

largely is disregarded. So women remain the majority of illiterates throughout the world and the last to be integrated into the industrial sectors. To be sure, this is a simplification, but it suggests why the development decades have failed:

the concrete circumstances of real women have been eclipsed by the pictures in the heads of powerful males—presidents, prime ministers, popes, politicians, professional planners—who are the decision makers.

Similar blindness affects the imperatives for change in other categories of the bio-medical revolution. Just as there is the need to examine rather than to assume what is happening in human multiplication, so it is necessary to notice the consequences of human longevity, especially for women and the extent to which social concepts and social arrangements must be altered to adapt to such

profound demographic shifts. Two attitudes prevail: (1) that every woman, no matter what her age, has a good provider; and (2) that, after menopause, women have outlived their usefulness. In concluding his paper on "The

Biological Makeup of Woman" at a 1963 symposium on "The Potential of

Woman," a professor of obstetrics and gynecology offered this incautious comment:

When you come right down to it, perhaps women just live too long! Maybe when they get through having babies they have outlived their

usefulness—especially now that they outlive men by so many years. That is a rather shocking way of pointing up a question which many gynecologists are asking today, namely, "Is a woman's post menopausal status a normal physiologic condition, or is it actually a pathologic disease state?" Take note of what obtains in the rest of the animal kingdom. . .(Overstreet, 1963:22).




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This statement in all likelihood would not be made with such candor today, even in jest. But the concept probably still exists since the idea of biology as woman's destiny still prevails, especially in a nation obsessed with youth.

In the above instance, and in general, what is at issue is the fetishism of the

concept, and it is summoned whenever change occurs. Nonetheless, and in spite of static fetishes (especially when the subject is woman), possibilities inherent in recombinant DNA, in organ transplant, in artificial insemination, in surrogate birth, and in drug manipulation, are transforming the human condition. Moreover each change must be approached contextually. I like to think that women scholars can bring fresh vision to such unprecedented phenomena—because their very outside position generates scepticism and may incline them to question the absolutes of bypassed dogma. The matter is urgent: "Our time is cursed with the necessity for feeble men masquerading as experts, to make enormously far-reaching decisions" (Chargoff, 1976). I do not suggest that women are wiser than the acknowledged experts; simply that they might offer an outsider's insight and a stranger's originality to unprecedented dilem mas.

CONCLUSION

The traditional definition of a woman has been a body who belongs to

somebody. Contemporary women not only want the right to own their own

bodies, but the right to be somebodies in their own right. Their goals, then, are

autonomy in private life and integration in public life. But the emphasis on the

private equation between woman and body has somehow tended to eclipse awareness of the critical public equation between people and planet. It would be unfortunate, even tragic, if the focus on physical and psychological libera tion results in the neglect of profound problems in the social milieu, especially as they are triggered by technological change.

Today, all our possibilities are suspended, in the ultimate sense, from the social rafters. We notice and welcome small increments of change which make life more convenient, but are only marginally aware of the revolutionary impact change has had on everything that heretofore seemed settled. Perhaps this

explains why campaigns by feminists tend to be foreground affairs, tactical rather than strategic, frontal rather than analytical. Yet all effective reconstruc tions of reality have been guided by the mappings and projections, the unique imaginings, and the systematic studies of reflective giants.

Women must be added to that roster, especially at this time when so much that is happening serves not to free them but to place them in new boxes.




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Random passion is no substitute tor intellectual rigor, lo be scientifically and

economically literate become increasingly imperative tor those seeking to

challenge official definitions of reality at a time of structural cataclysm. The task is to fracture the universals. to deal with what Clyde kluckhohn has termed "culturally standardized unreason" (1963:26). Vision, on the other

hand, is not the only variable. One has to take account of an altered and provi sional social matrix. I think women must be part of this appraisal, this

recasting, this metamorphosis. In focusing on their status as an isolated prob lem in a superseded universe, they will find themselves outside the new

dynamics. When new identities are dealt out, they may even find themselves

relegated to a new sexual ghetto—to a post-industrial apartheid.

RKKKRKNC KS

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Bronowski, Jacob. The Common Sense of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.

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