Five College Forum; Public Affairs Special - Sexual Politics And The Cultural Oppression Of Women

You You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You You You You of the Department of Philosophy at Barnard College. Mrs. Millet is the Director of the Experimental College of Barnard and Columbia and Chairman of the Education Committee for the National Organization of Women. She is also a member of Columbia's Women's Liberation and Radical Women. Mrs. Millet spoke in February at Smith College. This is going to be kind of heavy, so I hope you can hang on and put up with it. And if I start to accelerate, as I always do, and if I become unintelligible, as I may be, you know, through various causes, let me know, sing out. What I'd really like to talk about is sexual politics and the cultural oppression of women.

Trying to hit two stones at once. The first part is an attempt to build a sort of historical theoretical model of the relationship between the sexes as a political category. And it's a bit abstract. Things get better later on. It's impossible, I think, to describe the cultural oppression of any subordinated class without first understanding the nature of the political context, of that group's oppression and the institutions which implemented. Thus, for instance, in the case of exploited nations, you must first take account of peonage and imperialism, in the case of the black slavery and racism, in the case of the poor wage slavery and capitalism. It is, moreover, a very interesting, very horrible little quirk of historical consciousness, that when a system of oppression is functioning, without dissent, or at least without any very serious threat to its existence, or any strong questioning of its premises, it tends to attract very little recognition, little formulation.

It tends not even to be defined. Now, such a society typically neglects to examine its most basic assumptions. It takes them for granted. And it's the most important thing always is the unstated, really. In the case of women, a comfortable kind of sedation has been invented to disguise oppression in a tissue of, well, as a linguist, I can only call semantic dishonest days. I think you know some of them, but I'll just sort of reel some off. It's been very fashionable for a long time to talk about the changing role of women in a changing world. Does that sound familiar? Or the problems of women, quote unquote, or the conflicts women experience. Is if we're all therefold and all there unique peculiar little funny thing.

Or the options, that's a very fashionable word, especially the last couple of years, the options which await them as wives and mothers. Or their career expectations. And so forth. Now, I think the time has come when this sort of twaddle won't serve anymore at all. But I should like to present to you is a pioneering and therefore quite naturally an imperfect effort to formulate the oppression of women in political terms. And then to describe the experience of those who endure it and some of these effects that such a situation has upon them. What I wish to point out is that our social system, like that of all other historical civilizations, is patriarchal. Patriarchy is a form of social organization through which one grew by virtue of a birthright status. Controls the lives and the destinies of the other. Now, this is affected in the classic manner of all political systems through the control of all avenues of power.

Now, a moment's reflection will remind you that control of finance, the military, science, the arts, the universities, industry, technology, armaments, and the repressive forces of the police. And in a police state, that's important. All of them are in male hands. The relationship between the sexes is one, therefore, of dominance and subordinates. Now, this, of course, does not operate person to person by group, by group, much as racism does or other class distinctions. Mark's favor would call this dominance and subordinates order. He would call it hair-shoffed. And that's probably a good word on the its German. The relationship between the sexes, like that say, between classes, is in fact a political relationship. And the sexes are, I submit to you, two political entities. There are a lot of other things, too, but you know all that. Patriarchy is a constant and a basic political pattern. It's pervasive.

And it underlines any number of known political, economic, or religious forms, whether it's bureaucratic, feudal, theocratic, socialist, capitalist, whether it's a matter of clan, kingdom, or empire. It's not only of great antiquity, and this is a very important thing. It's actual age. It's not only of great antiquity, but it's of great universality, and of great strength as well. And I'd like to explain why it's so strong. I think it's because it's value system. And I would suggest to you that the strength of political forms is rooted in the value system far more than it is in outward shows of power or of force. Its value system has entered into the entire psychic structure of its members of both sexes, and it's inculcated in the earliest years of childhood socialization. Now that's a very strong system. Like any other total system, patriarchy relies, therefore, principally upon the conditioning of its two classes to what amounts to a general consent to its ideology.

And I must universal belief in it, and its values. Now this ideology prevails through three interrelated mechanisms. First, a sexually differentiated system of status. Secondly, a sexually differentiated system of roles. And thirdly, a sexually differentiated system of temperament or personality. The question of status, now I'm discussing this as a political form, and I will not take into account all rationalizations about these differences being biological and so on. They are not. The question of status is the most transparently political one, because I think I've even mentioned it by pointing out that the male's prerogative to control and to command all social and cultural forms is taken for granted, and it is, in fact, there. Moreover, the weight of patriarchal tradition, and here you have to deal with the weight of the past, which is particularly strong in this area.

The weight of patriarchal tradition further facilitates acceptance by both male and female, until recently, of masculine prestige, of masculine standards and norms, and of masculine privilege and priority. But the first and really the earliest device of patriarchal socialization is the cultivation of two distinct, two even polarized temperamental patterns based upon sexual stereotypes we all know as masculine and feminine. Now these patterns have no basis in biology, and it is impossible to rationalize these temperamental differences on biological or an innate psychological grounds, but they do have a great function. They play a vital role in maintaining what is, in fact, a dominance order. You have not only split up the human race into two personalities, but one personality has the qualities which go in governing the other one in being governed, so it's rather complicated system.

What they accomplish, these two temperamental divisions, is the formation of human personality along the lines of sexual category, a sexual category that's based on the needs and values of the dominant male group, and what its ruling members would cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates. Thus, aggression, intellect, force, and efficacy in the male, and in the female, passivity, ignorance, docility, virtue, alias, sexual repression, and ineffectuality. Now this primary mechanism of temperamental differentiation is complemented as time goes by in the child's life by a second factor, sex role, which decrees a consonant and elaborate code of conduct, of attitude, and even of gesture for each sex. Now these are tremendously rigidly policed in our society. They have been particularly policed in the last 500 years when they have begun to break down.

They're policed, I think, probably most crucially in adolescence, and that's why everyone hates it so much and one suffers in it so much, because you are continually up against the terror that faces you of being judged not feminine, not masculine, which in this kind of a system more or less amounts to saying you don't exist. In that, as you're born, the first identity you're given, before your class, your race, your family, anything, is your sexual identity. If you lose it, or if it's questioned, you are in a tremendously threatened position, and so that one can be continuously coerced through this system, through the deprivation of identity. The thing, of course, lasts all one's life. I once taught kindergarten, and it's remarkably strong by five years old, already wretched division of human life. In terms of life activity, sex role, and this is what people do all their lives. Sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, and the most of the rest of human achievement, interest and ambition to the male.

The limited role allotted to the female, tens, or it seeks to tend, to arrest her at the level of what is biological experience, since all it can be described as human rather than animal activity, for after all animals also give birth and care for their young in their way. All the rest of it is culturally largely reserved for the male. Now, of course, status again follows from such an assignment. In fact, the whole area one designates as culture is itself the stated province of the male. Now that the male has not an entire monopoly on this, is something that I'll discuss a little later on. I've designated the political component as status. Role is the sociological, temperament as the psychological, yet their interdependence is unquestionable. They intermash. They form a kind of chain like this. Those awarded higher status tend to adopt roles of mastery, largely because they are first encouraged to develop temperaments of dominance. That this is true of caste and of class as well, of course, is self-evident. Politically, the fact that each group develops a circumscribed, but complementary personality and range of activity.

Politically, all this is of secondary importance to the fact that each group represents a power or status division. But the fact that each personality becomes little more and often less than half of its human potential cannot fail to attract our attention and ought to cause very grave concern. For patriarchy does not oppress both sexes equally, but it does thwart or distort the person in each category by compelling conformity to patterns that are not only unproductive and constricting but actually very dangerous. It's a symbol that wastes the contribution of half the race in the case of the female. In the case of the male, it's even more terrifying. For the result of its virility ethos is anti-social and at the extreme, it's dangerous to life itself. I think you all know you can die of virility. Virility kills. It wages war. That's what it's about.

Having constructed a rough theoretical model of the manner of patriarchy's control over women, let us look at some of the effects at closer range. Can you hear me? Do I go too fast? Until the relatively recent reforms of the last century and the beginning of our own, women had no civil or human rights. And women was no more than chattel property to be infantilized or coddled, abused, sold, victimized or exploited. But for a heroic group of women, some of them still living, we would not have the right of education, of property, of wages, of citizenship, of legal witness, or of any employment saved the most menial. Such reforms, however, have had very little overall effect. We are still systematically exploited. Consistently, as throughout history, one of the strongest means of patriarchy control remains the economic dependence of women.

Citizenship has given us no voice in government or power, and no representation, not even the most token. Authority itself, when you come to think of it, authority itself is a carefully protected male province in our culture. We know this from infancy. Consider the effect of the fact that all authority figures from God to Richard Nixon are male. Consider the effect of this upon a child. Now go beyond authority. Think of force. We don't usually think of force in connection with patriarchy. Its ideology is so effective, it is implanted so early in life, that there's very little need for outward force. But like any political system, it has force at its command, and it employs it very brutally when it chooses, and it has throughout history. Any number of barbarities come to mind in this connection, the death penalty of the adulterist, the burning of witches, the sutee, foot binding, clitoridectomy, the gynecym, purdah, rape, beatings, and murders. Something like 10,000 women in the United States die every year because they're women, because they died from illegal abortions, so that we have in fact a toll, I mean life is being taken in this system, and a great deal of life is being abused for everybody as a matter of fact.

Everywhere there is a kind of force behind the imposition of patriarchy, which we all too disingenuously call the battle of the sexes. Consider the effect of a social situation where only the male is ever armed, either psychologically or technologically. Only the male is ever armed to perpetrate violence. Now think of this in both political and in personal terms. Not only is the female unarmed, but her conditioning renders her innocuous before any kind of assault. The fact of force is always somewhere in a woman's consciousness, and I say this as a pacifist. I have never in my life been afraid of another woman, but if I'm in danger at all, through any kind of physical violence, I know, and I've known all my life, that it will be from a male.

Then there's the psychological effect of living in what is in fact a total and alien culture. As throughout history, the subordination of one such a vast human group to another has naturally its psychological effect. Very deleterious, by the way, to the self-esteem of the group, so oppressed. The effect, for example, of living in a patriarchal culture. The effect of this upon the female ego. Now this would be a tremendous area of research, but now one has ever paid any attention to it at all. It's remarkable when you come to think of it. Then there's the effect of having or of being told that you have no history, no tradition, no existence. I think all of us who study feel this very much. We are often, we feel we are studying something else. Not our lives, not our past, not our culture. And yet I would like to suggest to you that we do have a culture.

Then in certain ways it is a less corrupted culture than the one under which we live. And I have no intention of losing what I find a value in that culture. Nor do I, and this is an important caveat, nor do I want to sentimentalize it. The virtues of the oppressed are good virtues. They're often the most genial human virtues there are. But there's an awful lot of vices in the oppressed condition too. I don't want to sentimentalize it, and I also don't want to be silly and illogical and believe it's inherent. None of this is inherent. These are culturally produced phenomenal, but there are two cultures. I foresee that in the future women's liberation is going to have much less recourse to totally appropriating the culture of our oppressors, much less recourse to that than to as it were infecting our culture upon our oppressors. And that there is much in it of value, much in it of value, and much of need for the male in our culture. We have been left in a lot of ways more human, unused, and all the rest of it, but still more human.

We are in a position of all oppressed groups, I think, at the moment. Something happens to all oppressed groups when they begin to get it together. They go through a period of identity perception, often it's even kind of a crisis. I think what we have to do now is to go through a careful and irrational, and I would stress this very much, a rational inspection of the culture of our oppressors, end of the oppressed, and this is across the board, all the groups, and determine what is good and what is evil in each. This will require a good deal of thinking, but there is much I would like to suggest in our culture as women that we want to keep. There is much that we might want to as we propagate. Now, if one goes still further into the question of what is the experience of women in a patriarchal society?

To ask, what is it like to live under this form of oppression? One must first remember that the culture of patriarchy is, of course, the product of a reflection of such a form of sociopolitical organization will reinforce, it will dignify, it will perpetuate its own values. Reformed patriarchies such as our own, which unlike the more consistent varieties of, say, Islam or South America, reformed patriarchies which have, in fact, undergone those changes of the last hundred years, whereby the legal superstructure of patriarchy conceded under feminist pressures, conceded a minimum of human recognition. This kind of reformed society has not really altered its cultural media or its cultural institutions, has not altered them even to the degree that it has consented to alter its legal and to a lesser extent its economic system. Reformed patriarchy is patriarchy still.

It is patriarchy perhaps even strengthened by the purging of its most notorious abuses, and preserved through the institution of the family, and as particularly the socialization of the young into the network of status, temperament and role. Now, all this, this is quite capable of carrying on with scarcely diminished vigor, and it is very scarcely diminished in the last 50 years. Thus, while one third and more of our national market labor force is female, such a fact is not reflected in our university faculties, or in any other prestigious employment. For women are employed overwhelmingly in the most tedious and unremunerative areas of work that we have, they're employed as secretaries, as factory workers, as waitresses, and as domestics, and I've had every one of those jobs and I know what I'm talking about. Nor do our cultural media reflect any kind of change, even the paleist reform. Our novels and our cinema continue to assault us with an image of women intransiently traditional, the female as sex object, the female as defined by her relation to the male, as mother, wife, mistress, enemy, whore.

The female as a creature defined principally by, for, and through, a sexual rather than a personal or even a human identity. Now, if you're concerned with the varieties of cultural oppression of the female, I ask you to consider two representative cases, the student and the token woman. I choose these because they're ones you know, and they're where you are or where you will be. Many of you will, I think, recognize this not only as autobiography, but as biography as well. First, the student, the experience of a girl born into a male supremacist culture, conditioned to respond, if only imperfectly, and it doesn't work, you know, all the time on everybody. To systems of sexually differentiated behavior, whereby every cultural clue, every media stimulus, will discourage her from achievement and recognition.

Will remind her that her class is without a tradition in patriarchal high culture. Will encourage, will even browbeat her often towards personal passivity and a dilatant or even anti-intellectual attitude toward the life of the mind. The role, the activity, the expectation, the temperamental inclination imposed upon her, are those conscribed by a biological and a social relationship only. They are maternity and housewifery. She is compelled to occupy a vicarious or spectator position, which is a direct antithesis of cultural or intellectual participation. And this is across the board from an SDS meeting to the young Republicans for the Confederacy or whatever it is. The sense of gender identity, what the new researchers all over the country and the new biology are calling gender identity, it's the knowledge formulated by the phrase, I'm a boy, I'm a girl.

This is established by 18 months. Now, as you know, this is the time when language takes over. Mooney at Johns Hopkins says that sex stereotyping is affected by this time. I mean, it's set. It will get set harder. It will be a really laid-on and solid by the age of five. So it happens before you go to school. How does it happen? It happens from your parents. And if they don't do it, your peers will. And if they don't, your school will. And if they don't, the media will. And then you get into the culture, the larger historical culture. And if you haven't got the message by now, you probably can't read. It would be interesting to do some studies on sex stereotyping in the people-minded, for example, to see, you know, how early or completely, if they can escape it. It's a sad way to get out of it. So this is established by 18 months.

Now, money in people like this say that it's established really and most completely done through the acquisition of language. And language is here analogous to imprinting in any kind of learning process, including that of subhuman species. Further socialization only reinforces the sense of worth, of gesture, of attitude, interest, and person. That's such a phrase, I'm a boy, I'm a girl conveys. By the time a young woman enters the university now, even indeed she does, and not all that many of us do. Her interests are following the stereotype set out in early life. They are usually confined to the humanities. Now, this is part of a larger academic effect, which I call the curriculum split. Be a great idea to do some actual studies on majors all over the country. It's a phenomenon of familiar to all of us, whereby the humanities and certain of the social sciences are in the main approved as feminine,

and therefore there are fields that are becoming to undergraduate women. Although they are controlled by faculties of men, whereas who do all the work and set all the assumptions of them, whereas science, technology, business, and the professions are accepted as masculine, simply or at least largely because they currently offer higher prestige, power, and reward. Money, I mean. Now, I would suggest to you that this total thing, this totality, has the most deleterious possible effects on everyone and everything. It's bad for the areas of study, and it's bad for the people, and it's bad for the population, it's bad for the culture as a whole. The humanities are trivialized since they are associated with an inferior class of persons, carefully trained to fear and shun serious accomplishment, or such as the prevailing theory. The sciences, already over prestigious, in a technological age, are corrupted with the ethics of competitive business,

and they become the instruments of demented militarism and government policy. There is only a slim chance the young woman I have described will succeed in an academic surrounding, still less that she'll continue in it, still less that she'll be rewarded in it. Only 42% of college freshmen are women, only 33% of BA's and MA's, only 11% of PhD's. Should she earn a doctorate, her prospects are still very dim, and right now they're getting a lot dimmer, because the government has taken away education money for everybody, and that's the war, and that's what it's all about. Should she earn a doctorate, then her prospects are still very dim, at Columbia, my university, only 0.7, that's less than 1% of the tenured faculty teaching at Columbia College are women, only 2% in the graduate faculties, and yet 40% of the PhD's they produce are female.

How do you account for this? They say they don't discriminate. They're very selective, anyway. This young woman will have had none or very few role models through her career. It's very likely that she will never study with another woman at the graduate level I never have. She will be subject to continual harassment in graduate school, and after graduate school is a traumatic horrible experience anyway, but if you're a woman it becomes much worse. All the time that she perseveres immersed in a foreign, largely alien culture. Now again, if she insists, if she ignores all the accumulated social pressures to desist, if she forbearers before every discriminatory treatment, from graduate fellowships to hiring and promotion practices, the unfriendly and patronizing air of her colleagues, and even perhaps of her students. She will have arrived at the highly dubious position in which some of us find ourselves. She will be a token woman.

Now this is a plight in itself. Every motive of self interest will cooperate with a lifetime of intimidation and self doubt, so that she will be inclined to lie about her salary, to deceive herself about her opportunities for employment and promotion, to congratulate herself for her good fortune in merely surviving, or to blame herself for the treatment accorded her. But in any and in every case, to keep her mouth shut, and to live in gratitude for the permission to be an exception. Yet only slight reflection will remind her that token or not, she now has great responsibility to her fellows. The time and the opportunity, the tools of analysis and perception have been put at her disposal. Further complicity now is culpability, and she is no longer utterly alone. There is moreover, a great deal to be done.

Our universities are ripe, rotten ripe for reform, very drastic reform. But the changes which must be made in a patriarchal culture are very probably both more fundamental and more far reaching than most academic or educational reforms being discussed today. Perhaps they are more fundamental than any social reform being discussed anywhere in the United States. This revolution may go deepest of all. One does not abolish a political system of such longevity, general incidents, and rigor, without very basic, very radical social change, even to change in the psychic structure, even to changes in the structure of formal and informal education from infancy. But I believe, and I think I'm right, I believe it's an inevitable social change that it's going to happen. It's only a question of what speed and where.

I call it the sexual revolution. And guess what? It don't mean playboy. It means, I think, a tremendous change in the relationship between the sexes. And since sex is the issue, and I define sex as a political category, and since change at the most radical order is called revolutionary, political terms such as sexual revolution seem to be the most out. But let feminism call it women's liberation. It means the freeing of women from their action oppression, which will bring about and will affect the freeing of men too. For the oppressor himself is some sort of a victim. It will mean an end to the entire patriarchal system, its ideology, its psychology, its political, economic, and social functions. It will mean a drastic reorganization of the family, and of our attitudes towards sexuality itself. A very important component of this is the easing of sexual repression, creating a more humane, less brutal, less sick, puritan, and so on, kind of attitude towards sexuality than the one we have had. So that sexual freedom is a very big part of it, but it is not freedom to exploit.

I think it will also mean the end of what you might call what I call patriotic heterosexuality, like Norman Maylor. I think it's going to be the end of sex as a relationship which we have seen all too often as painful, humiliating, hostile, brutal, pecuniary, and so on. It will mean an end to sex roles, and I think, and I know this may scare you out of your minds, I think that something called gay liberation is even going to play a part in it. That's perhaps too radical for you to like, but it does, they're great at breaking down the sex roles. One might well ask just what a college or a university, what part can it play in such a total cultural revolution? Well, I think it is or it could be very large indeed. Just for starters, the university and the college must cease to be the instrument of sexual discrimination and of patriarchal values which they are at present. Learning must reexamine its basic attitudes and premises. In a number of disciplines, a great deal of knowledge and analysis must be brought to bear on the question of sexual political relations,

a competent sociology, anthropology, and psychology must be constructed in this area. We have great need now, I think, of an honest social science. Viewed as social science that is viewed in a totally different light from the traditional rationalization of the status quo which they have been for so long. You know, in America, the social sciences are the great pacifiers, especially for women. Women must come to find in the university a counterforce because it's too late to go back and change the first five years of your life or of the freshman class for the next 20. Women must come to find in the university a counterforce to the detrimental early conditioning they receive. They must be able to find in the university motivation and encouragement and a sense of themselves through an objective rather than a survival learning. A great force here must be the study of their own past. And I think the greatest service the university could do right now is to institute women's studies in history, literature, the social sciences, in minority law, and in the history of the education of women.

In Columbia, in Columbia Women's Liberation, a group of us have just begun to develop syllabus in this area. We did it first to be reasonable. Columbia Women's Live has a slogan, sweet reason first and after that the book. So we're working on sweet reason sign. We wanted to demand women's studies with real content. But we're doing it now for a very different reason because as undergraduates, as graduate students and as junior faculty, as students and scholars in short. We were so excited by the academic potential of a field of learning just discovered half the human race until now utterly overlooked in the curriculum. You know, when you think of it, that's a great accomplishment in oversight. Now, you ask yourself, can all this be done in the university? Well, it's going to be. Let me warn you though, it will not be easy because American colleges have never seen women as a group to be served.

With the exception of a handful of Eastern women's colleges founded under the impetus of the first feminist movement, colleges I might add, which have long ago forgotten their mission. So education in America was and still is undertaken principally to ease financial pressures on male colleges. This is how we got to go to the university to start with enrollment went down before and after the Civil War and we pushed and they let us in. Princeton, let some women in because they were losing money. Women pay, I don't know. Because this is so, it will not be easy to do, yet it must and it will be done. Women will have need of and they will avail themselves of the intellectual resources that the university now monopolizes. For knowledge is not only power, knowledge is freedom. The question is whether the academic world will continue to be part of the problem or whether it will desire to assist in being part of the solution.

Now if the former, then the progressive tendency of sexual integration and education will be frustrated, I think, as separatist pressures and the resentment of women students will necessarily assert themselves. But if the latter, then the entire invidious and really tragically crippling system of sexual role and temperament will come under the most searching, rational attack from faculty and students alike. We could use the mind to build a decent society. Now should this become the case, we might indeed fulfill our claims to scholarship, to humanism and even by God to intelligence. We might just possibly proceed amicably and without further waste of time to undo the ravages of this longest and most pervasive system of oppression, cultural and personal and create a world we could bear out of the desert we inhabit. APPLAUSE

Right on. Do you want to ask questions or wrap or something? Well, the same is true. I think it does exist, we haven't realized it. To give you just a very concrete example, the whole history of the feminist movement that is women as a political force is documented all over the place, but much ignored for a long time. Now, there you've got, you know, hardcore political history, but when you're doing cultural history, you can't depend on that most of the time.

I think that, as I said, I think that it would be silly to try to describe the history of blacks in America without knowing what racism was, without knowing what slavery wasn't just how it worked. I feel the same way about patriarchy, unless we understand how it functions, how it works, what it does to people, how it has operated through history, it's pointless to describe the experience of women. Now, there's plenty of information on this. The laws of all societies are one place to start right there. You can find documented through common law, through continental law, through the Potesta's in Rome. A lot of this work was done in 19th century. The early anthropologists were really into this, and I borrow their term, patriarchy, I'm sure you've heard of at one point or another. Now, it's descended to a term that is used in kinship relations or to describe bearded creatures in the Bible or something, patriarchal, and so on, the serene early patriarchal culture of Noah or Abraham or something like that. But, in fact, this is the term through which 19th century early social science saw this thing. Now, this is one aspect of this kind of history.

There are great, to give you some clearer notion. The first section of the course in women's history, I think, should examine the structure and function of patriarchy. And, particularly, deal with a very vexed question, and that is the origins of patriarchy. How did this relationship originate? How did it arise? Now, all you've got is this series of contending theories. We do not, and cannot prove what the social organization of prehistoric peoples was. We can't prove it. Maybe someday we'll be able to. Right now, all you've got is archaeological findings, and they don't tell you. But, you have got the institution. So, while you can debate its origins, you can study its structure, because it's right there, and it's what we've lived with through historical time. The second section of such a course would be given the constant of patriarchy to see certain variables and trends operating in it through the historical period. And, because this is so vast, it's best to confine it to the west with projects for students to do on the east, so that you would say examine the effect of Christianity, the ideas of the fathers on women, the ascetic quality of early Christian life.

What effect did that have on the relationship between the sexes? What is the effect of marionology? What is the effect of Luther and other reformers? To go into the ideology of courtly and romantic love. Now, of course, you realize what enormous documents there are in this whole area. To go into the whole business of the effect of industrialism. This would be another large sort of thing. And then, having examined a number of these kind of trends and so on, then in the last section to do the political history of women through the feminist movement, its beginnings at the end of the 18th century to the present, which would give you planning to do. This could be a very elaborate kind of course of study. Does that give you some on-dem? Now, in literature, I think it's pretty clear what we do, too. It seems to be the greatest emphasis that you have in male definition of women rather than that.

Precisely, but look, if you're going to know what the experience of a group is, to know the Roman law. For example, what was the position of woman in Roman law? Here's how the male defined her. She is part of his family. His family include his children, his wife and his slaves. He can't sell or kill any of them in any moment. Now, that may be a male definition, but if you don't know that, you know very little about Roman society. I think when perhaps discrepancy in the many comparisons that are made to women's liberation and lack of movement and this particular course of studies, is that you seem to accept that the feminist movement, all the areas to describe are about women, how the situation has affected women rather than anything where women are the source. Oh, excuse me, I didn't mean to imply that. First of all, as you realize, we have had very little chance to express ourselves through our history, but we have done it nevertheless.

And I think the literature which describes female consciousness, it's not very recent, best of it is in the Victorian period. This is a great source of study, so are all the documents of the first movement. I'd rather talk to some women too, yeah. Right, yeah. And it's a system we wish to study objectively. Right on, yeah. Yeah. If you make them do it, they will.

I might, I would even worry a little bit, they might co-opt you there because they're looking around for reason for their continued existence. But in the meanwhile, since they won't integrate tomorrow afternoon, all of them, they could do a great service to women, I think. Well, it's so hard because we never know what each other means by family. People who love each other go on living together, I mean they've done that, I suppose, more recently than ever. Whether they bother to go and register it with the government seems sort of immaterial by now. So that you'll have lovers. Now the question, the real question is how about kids?

Besides having lovers, you might have lovers who live apart, together, lovers of every imaginable sex, lovers short-term, long-term, you name it. Probably people grow into an ability to have a mature long relationship with each other, so it's good for young people who experiment a lot. And they grow into learning how to live with another person. But children are now the question. I think that we very strongly support the idea that children should not be the victims anymore of the family system. That they should have, now there's one caveat to this, I would keep the social function of the family. Family has a lot of functions. It's a big coercer for the state, especially in fascist societies. You know, you've got all those heads and families lined up, you can tell them the furor says and then they can't go home and play furor, it's wonderful. You only need to control one out of ten people or something.

It's also economic, the relationship between family members, and that's not very nice. It's very hard for people who are economically unequal to be equals. It's hard to be an economic dependent or any other kind of dependent, emotional or social. It's hard to be that, and unequal. But there is something nice in the family, and that's the sociality. A lot of families don't even have it, and the great many through history have never even wanted it. But we may feel that that's a good thing. So if you have a set up like saying, I think the model you're most familiar with, for example, is a kibbutz, where the children come and visit. And you have an hour when you have fun together, a couple hours or an evening, so that you have reduced the family now not to punishing, not to coercing, not to teaching stereotypes and so on and so forth, but simply to its best aspect, the one of love. But it seems to me very important that children be rescued from the family because the family has in the past and continues to abuse them. Battered kids are, you know, like every place. It's only a few of them that get to the hospital. But what happens in their heads? How about that battery?

You are literally the victim of your family. If your family is poor, too bad. See, the class system. The family, by the way, is the biggest institute of class systems and perpetuator of them there ever was. The whole stratification system depends on it. So in fact, to all sorts of racism and ethnic hatreds and so on, through endogamy and exogamy. So if kids are now brutalized, victimized by the family, they at least right now ought to have a place they can go. And you know that they really don't have a place they can go. There isn't anything you can do. You know, your 12, you go to family court and say, you know, my daddy just raped me. Well, you know, where would you get up the courage to do this if it happened? Who's going to believe you? And so on. The kinds of brutality that the family inflicts on children is horrible. And right now, I think we ought to begin to institute a whole measure of civil liberties and civil rights for children who presently don't have any at all. Children's liberation, the liberation of youth is very tied to women's liberation. Under patriarchy, you know, women and kids are in it together and we're both minors and nudnics.

But children really have to have a lot of rights that they don't have now. And they will, I think, have to have, you know, the enjoyment of their own peer group, too, without being oppressed by it, either. Yeah. Well, as far as abortion is concerned, where do you draw the line between where a mother's rights and the child's rights? Well, the child of somebody who's been born. So you say after birth? Yeah. Up to that point, it has no viable life of its own. It lives in parasitic existence. But if you legalize abortion, people aren't going to do or not very often that a bloody awful stupid thing of waiting till the sixth month or something. If they can, I mean, I've done a lot of abortion and counseling for my students. I guess no, I can go to jail for having said it, but I've said it before thought. Anyway, I've done a lot of this. And if they had resources, they wouldn't wait so long. But, you know, they get so scared. There really is so few places to go.

You used to be, when I was your age, there was nothing to do, but jump off cliff or something. Disappear into the countryside. Give it all up. Now it's an awful lot better, but you won't have abuse of abortion. If you have it, not only free and legal, but also you've got to set up clinics because people don't know their rights until they're told. 16-year-olds aren't going to realize that people who in strong religious backgrounds, which frown upon it, aren't going to feel free about it. People in the ghetto aren't, if they choose to use it. So you have to make it really available because the doctors aren't going to want to do it that much. This is the English experience. And between free abortion and a great deal of better feeling about contraception, this sort of thing doesn't really have to happen very often. Sexual politics and the cultural oppression of women. Today's Five College Forum. A talk given at Smith College in February by Kate Millett,

the Department of Philosophy at Barnard College. Mrs. Millett is the director of the Experimental College of Barnard and Columbia, and Chairman of the Education Committee for the National Organization of Women. Her book, Sexual Politics, will be published by Double Day in July. Five College Forum. A time for candid conversation about a variety of issues, ideas, and events is a production of WFCR Five College Radio in Amherst Massachusetts. Five College Forum. A time for candid conversation about women.

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