Massachusetts News: An Independent News Source for Massachusetts Politics

This article is adapted from chapter 14 of the book "Freedom Will Conquer Racism And Sexism - The Civil Rights Act is damaging everyone in America, especially blacks and women" by J. Edward Pawlick.

We've all known a lot of competent women through the years. Nobody doubted that before World War II.

Why is there a constant "battle" occurring now between the sexes (as Prof. Horowitz of Smith termed it in her piece about Harvard President Charles Eliot)?

We must all take a deep breath and realize the world is going through great changes.
That statement may seem trite and simplistic, but it's necessary to state this clearly because many of the leaders of the "Women's Movement" either 1) don't realize it or 2) they don't want us to realize it.

So, let's look at those changes for just a minute.

Only a few years ago, the women of America were 'protected.' Do they still need this? Has the world changed? Do they still need the special help of a law such as the Civil Rights Act or can they make it on their own? Are they "competent" or do they still need special laws?

They complained bitterly in 1964 that they didn't need all the special legislation that had been passed to protect them in the workplace. "We do not want special privileges. We do not need special privilege," they thundered. But they then proceeded to demand the biggest special privilege of all time, to be included with the blacks in the Civil Rights Act.

Women were not intended to be added to the Act and were included only because a Southern, Democratic Congressman introduced an amendment on a Saturday afternoon as a trick to sabotage the Act. His amendment passed in two hours in a childish session because 96 Southerners voted for it to kill the Act. The Northern liberals voted against it.
The New York Times ignored it for the next six months and when Lyndon Johnson finally signed the Act with great fanfare, he never alluded to women. And practically no one in the country realized they had been included.

As a result of those silly two hours, billions of dollars in reparations have been paid to the women of America. We are told that they are ready for combat in the Army or Navy; tough, ready to fight and die in the mud for their country. And in the next breath, we are told that they are too delicate to know what to do when a co-worker makes a "pass" at them.

This has never been debated. "Sex" was added to the Civil Rights Act as a joke in 1964. It was not taken seriously until a very small group of women began applying great political pressure with the help of the media.

It was only a few years previous, back in the 1950's, that the professors at the top women's colleges, Vassar, Smith and others, were desperate in their attempts to engage intelligent women in any intellectual pursuit. "[T]he girls [in these colleges] seemed suddenly incapable of any ambition, any vision, any passion, except the pursuit of a wedding ring," reported Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique.

But only a few years later, some of these same women were blaming everyone except themselves for the fact that they were not trained to work outside of the home.

Before we can discuss whether women need to be 'protected' and whether they need 'special help,' or what role the federal government should take in forcing tremendous changes in our society and even censoring our thought, we must see if we can agree on some basic, fundamental truths.

We Must Not Be Upset By Change

The changes in our society have accelerated very rapidly since World War II. Those of us who were around then have observed it. But most of us have never experienced anything else. What are the tremendous changes that are causing such an upheaval in our society?

Back in the 1930's, some member of every family had to go to the grocery store and to the butcher shop (there were no supermarkets, each was a different store) every single day, because most people had only an ice box, which was marginal in preserving food. The new refrigerators were scarce and not very good and, of course, there was no frozen food at all. Meat and vegetables had to be purchased almost daily.

And there were no clothes dryers. All of the laundry was done in a washing machine with a wringer attached and then the heavy load was carried outside to dry on a clothesline. In the winter, it dried on a line in the basement. This included all the diapers; there was not even a diaper service, much less disposable diapers.

All of the cars had stick shifts on the floor and were difficult to drive. In the winter, the roads were often impassable and everyone who did use them had to get down on his back and put on tire chains. The "clink" of tire chains driving down the street was a familiar and friendly sound of winter.

Many people still had coal furnaces in the basement, which needed coal to be shoveled into them every few hours, and stoked, and the heavy cans of ashes had to be carried up the cellar stairs and disposed of.

On our farms, things were even more primitive. The wonder of electricity was just coming to the farms and the electric motor was combining with the gas engine to gradually eliminate much of the hard labor that was required.

There was plenty of work to go around for everyone. Women were not unhappy to let a man bear the brunt of the hard physical labor that was necessary, and the women were needed inside the home for all of the work that was required there.

When the garbage truck rolls up to your door, how many times do you see a woman get off?

When a snowstorm blankets your area and the electric lines go down, how many women volunteer to go out and climb the dangerous, icy poles in the middle of the storm to get your power going again? When your car breaks down on an interstate highway, how many of us look for a woman to stop and fix it?

In our rural areas, this is especially true. In the forests of America, you still don't see many women with chainsaws. And on the farms, you almost always see men out driving those big tractors.

This was the way that almost all of our world used to be back in the 1930's. It was a world of heavy labor and hard work before electricity and gasoline engines took over much of that toil.

We did it by giving women a protected role. Every man was expected to give shelter and protection to a woman so that she could bear and raise the children of the society. She needed that protection back then. If a society was able to raise those children, it was considered successful.

There was not much quarrel between the sexes. Everyone was able to see that they were all pulling together. Even one of the most radical feminists of our time, Germaine Greer, agrees. She spent some time on a farm in her teens and she had "enormous respect for the farm women, for their vigor and strong sense of integrity, their generosity, for what she had come to regard as an unadorned love of family". The farm women were, in her view, "authentic."

Many of us have found that to be true, in contrast to the majority today who have never witnessed that rural life. (Not one of the suburban women who have visited our small farm in 2002 and seen our Jersey dairy cow has understood that the cow, just like humans, needs to have a calf before it will produce milk. They all think it is a special kind of animal that exists only to provide milk, cheese, yogurt etc. for them. That is a remarkable change in our common knowledge and common sense.)

This does not mean that we want to, or could, go back to the days when manual labor was important and we needed the help of everyone, man, woman and child, to get the work done. But we must have a better sense of why life was so different in those days. We must realize that we are indeed going through enormous changes. If we approach these changes with anger, bitterness and paranoia, we will have a very difficult time.

These changes affect men as well as women. How do they affect men? Let me give a few examples that I have seen in my lifetime. And let me say that I do not disagree that some of these responsibilities should be borne by men. I am merely reporting them for what they are because this part of our society is not known by many today. We hear the strident claims that, 'Women have always been subjugated by men.' This was undoubtedly true of some men. But there have always been strong, domineering women as well. Men were also under great moral and legal pressure to take proper care of their families, i.e. their wives and children. These are examples from the 1960's.

A client of mine, when I was practicing law, had to pay his former wife so that she had $153/week for 3 people (herself and two children), while he had only $53/week for 3 people (himself, his second wife and child). That happened because at that time, a woman had no legal duty to pay any support whatsoever for her children. Therefore, my client could not introduce any evidence to the judge that his wife was also working. Whether she was working was totally immaterial as to what the father should pay. Because it was impossible to live on $53/week, he had to work two jobs and take money 'under the table.' But no one cared about his problems. I brought this case to the attention of the ACLU, but they said they were too busy. A week later, there was an article in the newspaper that the ACLU was representing a girl who wanted to be on the boys tennis team at high school.

A beautiful young woman about 20-years-old came before a judge to ask for child support from her former husband. He was suffering from the trauma of the divorce and was seeing a psychiatrist. She was not working but was having a good time while her mother was caring for the baby. The judge in no uncertain terms told the young man that he didn't care what his problems were, if he didn't have a job in two weeks he would be in jail. The mother had no duty whatsoever.

17-year-old boys went to jail for corrupting the morals of a minor, i.e. of a 16-year-old girl. Children were never allowed to live with their fathers after divorce if the mother objected. The "strongest presumption" in all of the law was that a father would not get custody of his children.

No woman was given a rifle and told by the government to go shoot other men she had never seen who might even be some of her Italian, German or Japanese relatives.

The hot, steamy commuter trains, without air conditioning, looked like cattle cars with the men pouring out of them at 6 o'clock at night only to get back on again at 7:45 the next morning to return to a dirty, hot city, while the women and children remained in the cool suburbs.

The person who was guilty of a crime and went off to jail almost always was a man, while his "woman" who had watched and applauded the money he obtained from his crimes would just go find another man. Sometimes both a man and a woman would be convicted of a crime, but we lawyers would successfully argue that the woman couldn't go to jail because she was pregnant or had children at home.

If a man got a woman pregnant out of wedlock, he would have to pay support, but he had no right to the child. This was not his child in any way, except that he had to support it. (Now that we have legal abortion, a woman can engage in sex with the knowledge that if she becomes pregnant, she can have an abortion if she desires. But a man has no such 'solution.' He has no choice as to whether or not she has an abortion. If he is wealthy or has a job and she chooses not to abort, he will be paying for at least the next 18 years. There is no "free sex" for men; it's still Russian roulette for any man with a good paying job.)

The only debtor's prison was that for fathers who did not pay their support. The average American male who had a job was paying or he was going to jail. A large number of the people in our county prisons around the country were fathers who did not make their payments. (Fathers often become totally discouraged after their children are torn from them. If we could correct the terrible bias of the courts in awarding custody of the children always to the mother, we could avoid much of the problems with fathers.)

The attitude of the old days (before 1960) was best exemplified by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. This is difficult to believe today; it is almost like a comic opera. But those men helped the women and children to the lifeboats while they went to their death. There were no cries for liberation at that point.

In earlier times, it was not a one-sided world against women, as we constantly hear today.
Harder for Women?

Okay, you'll say, so everyone is going through a great period of change. And no one knows exactly where this is going to end.

But why is it more difficult for women? Why are we seeing so much more concern among women than men?

There are two reasons. Probably the most important is that most women love babies and children, but suddenly they are being told that we have too many babies. Our society has suddenly stopped telling women that they are wonderful to be mothering; and they are now getting a message that they should stop "polluting" the world with so many little children.
This is bound to cause confusion and anger.

Another problem is that many women today have a choice. Men know that their role is to provide shelter and food for their family, but the role of a woman is often less clear. Her duties at home are much less difficult and time consuming than they were for her mother. Should she get a job or have children? Or should she do both? And if she does both, is she going to be able to handle it all? And no matter what route she takes, someone will criticize her.

These are very difficult decisions for a woman to make. And we as a society have made them even more difficult. Instead of an intelligent discussion of these questions, we have gotten off into rigid camps with everyone yelling and screaming.
The men of America have accorded the women of America the most freedom of any women in the history of the world. But they have received no thanks. When the women were marching in a demonstration on New York's Fifth Avenue, a female Italian journalist was heard to say, "Such a thing could never take place in Italy. The men would destroy them."

Along with the freedom we enjoy, we must also have less anger and hostility if we are going to successfully cope with the great changes that we see in our society.