|
|
|
|
...This failure [of the women's movement] must be accounted a tragic one-for women are kept from their fair share of dignity and achievement; women's talents and moral qualities are too often wasted. A sense of inferiority still clings to the position of women today. The question is, what can be done about it? The history of the women's movement itself provides, I believe, the basis for an answer. The movement is less than two hundred years old. That some men had power -- and women did not -- that some men monopolized the privileges and achievements -- and women did not -- had never before given rise to a movement for female emancipation, or even to any articulate awareness that women were unfree. That awareness did not come until the late eighteenth century, and it came with the rediscovery of political liberty as the Greeks understood it. Not until men asserted their right, as men, to the dignity of the citizen and their right to share in public power was it first borne in upon women that they, as females, were unequal and unfree. The early leaders of the women's movement grasped this principle firmly. They saw that if men were equal insofar as they were citizens, men and women would be equal when women, too, were citizens. This is why the major struggle of the original women's movement was the fight for the franchise, that necessary condition for political equality between the sexes. The leaders of the movement, women like Susan B. Anthony, saw more in the vote than the simple act of voting. They saw that women would win their dignity -- the citizen's dignity -- by actively entering public life. They hoped that women by their political activity would help overthrow the political machines that corrupted -- and still corrupt -- representative government and render the citizenry powerless in all but name. In this they grasped a profound political truth: that men and women would share equally in the dignity and freedom of the citizen only if the republic were truly a republic of self-governing citizens. In a republic where power is monopolized by a few, the very status of "citizen" is empty, and the equality of citizens -- male and female -- a phantom. In such a corrupted republic women might very well believe that "liberation" is paid labor. It is often said that the old suffragists were wrong, because enfranchised women did not seize their opportunity. This only proves, however, that the opportunity was wasted. Today, that opportunity lies open as never before. From the point of view of public life women today might even be called privileged. Far more than men, they enjoy the precondition for public life, which is leisure, or at any rate the prerogative of managing their own time. The second advantage they enjoy might be called a sense of locality. While men must shuttle back and forth between their homes and their places of work, it is women who live in local communities, who know what a community is, and it is in local communities that politics begins -- at least in the American republic. The opportunity to enter public life is there, and the will to do so is there as well. There are literally millions of women who thirst for public activity, though they are shunted by the established party machines into mere civic work or stultifying chores in the ranks of party bureaucracies. The old suffragists, however, were talking not of party politics but of nonparty politics, free republican politics that challenged party machines and their monopoly over power. This was -- and still is -- the crucial point, and there are tens of thousands of communities in which women can make a beginning. When they make that beginning, male ascendancy will near its end, for they would break the hold men still retain over human achievement. As Susan B. Anthony said a hundred years ago, "they who have the power to make and unmake laws and rulers, are feared and respected." For those women whose gifts and ambitions turn them toward careers in the sphere of work, the public, political activity of women will open doors now shut. Who will be able to say that women are unfit to run a business when they share in that far more demanding activity of governing a community and a nation? In playing their role as citizens, in helping to restore representative government by their free political activity, women would help restore to men and women alike the freedom and equality of the citizen, "our power and our glory," as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another pioneer of woman's rights, reminded her audiences a century ago. In helping to do that -- and what nobler venture can we undertake? -- women would restore to motherhood itself its rightful and proper dignity. That dignity will not come from mass exhortations and mass propaganda, but from the knowledge that freedom bestows upon a free people: the knowledge that it is indeed a grave and noble task to bring up children when we are bringing them up to live in freedom and independence. This, I believe, is the path that women must take in their struggle for liberation -- and because it is a true liberation, it means the enhancement of liberty for all... Reprinted with permission from Horizon. Spring, 1971, Volume XIII, Number 2. Copyright © 1971, American Heritage Publishing Company Inc.
|
A Return to the Roots of Feminism