NOTES FROM THE SECOND YEAR: Women's Liberation‐Major Writings of the Radical Feminist.

Published by Notes (Box AA, Old Chelsea Station, New York, New York 10011). $1.50.

NOTES FROM THE THIRD YEAR: Women's Liberation‐Major Writings of the Radical Feminist.

Notes. $1.50.

More and more, as the literature of the movement began to reflect the thinking of women who did not really understand the movement's ideolog ical base, one had the sense of this stall, this delusion, the sense that the drilling of the theorists had struck only some psychic hardpan dense with superstitions and little sophis tries, wish‐fulfillment, self‐loathing and bitter fancies. To read even desultorily in this literature was to recognize instantly a certain dolorous phantasm, an imagined Everywoman with whom the authors seemed to identify all too entirely.

This ubiquitous construct was everyone's victim but her own. She was persecuted even by her gynecolo gist, who made her beg in vain for contraceptives. She particularly need ed contraceptives because she was raped on every date, raped by her husband, and raped finally on the abortionist's table. During the fashion for shoes with pointed toes, she, like “many women,” had her toes ampu tated. She was so intimidated by cosmetic advertising that she would sleep “huge portions” of her day in order to forestall wrinkling, and when awake she was enslaved by de tergent commercials on television. She sent her child to a nursery school where the little girls huddled in a “doll corner,” and were forcibly re strained from playing with building blocks. Should she work, she was paid “three to ten times less” than an (always) unqualified man holding the same job, was prevented from attend ing business lunches because she would be “embarrassed” to appear in public with a man not her husband, and, when she traveled alone, faced a choice between humiliation in a res taurant and “eating a doughnut” in her hotel room.

The half‐truths, repeated, authenti cated themselves. The bitter fancies assumed their own logic. To ask the obvious—why she did not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why she did not get out of bed and turn off the television set, or why, the most eccentric detail, she stayed in hotels where only doughnuts could be obtained from room service—was to join this argument at its own spooky level, a level which had only the most tenuous and unfortunate relationship to the actual condition of being a woman. That many women are victims of condescension and ex ploitation and sex‐role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.

But of course something other than an objection to being “discrimi nated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one's sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children. One is constantly struck, in the accounts of les bian relationships which appear from time to time in the move ment literature, by the empha sis on the superior “tenderness” of the relationship, the “gen tleness” of the sexual con nection, as if the participants were wounded birds. The dero gation of assertiveness as “ma chismo” has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal with a man more overtly sexual than, say, David Cassidy. Just as one had gotten the unintended but in escapable suggestion, when told about the “terror and revul sion” experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too “tender” for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the move ment, the impression of women too “sensitive” for the difficul ties and ambiguities of adult life, women unequipped for re ality and grasping at the move ment as a rationale for denying that reality.

The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never hap pens: we only thought it hap pened because a male‐chauvin ist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should. The power of sex is just an oppressive myth, no longer to be feared, because what the sexual con nection really amounts to, we learn in one liberated woman's account of a postmarital affair, is “wisecracking and laughing” and “lying together and then leaping up to play and sing the entire Sesame Street Song book.” All one's actual appre hension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable dif ference of it—that sense of liv ing one's deepest life under water, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death —could now be declared in valid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.

One was only told it, and now one is to be re‐programed, fixed up, rendered again as in violate and unstained as the “modern” little girls in the Tampax advertisements. More and more we have been hear ing the wishful voices of just such perpetual adolescents, the voices of women scarred by re sentment not of their class posi tion as women but at the failure of their childhood expectations and misapprehensions. “Nobody ever so much as mentioned” to Susan Edmiston “that when you say ‘I do,’ what you are doing is not, as you thought, vowing your eternal love, but rather subscribing to a whole system of rights, obligations and responsibilities that may well be anathema to your most cherished beliefs.”