roberta@bronze.UUCP (Roberta Taussig) (09/22/83)
This is in response to Michael Ellis, who feels that feminism is barren because it hasn't proved to his satisfaction that it can produce "many happy well-adjusted children." I am submitting it to the net because his path contains the element !FLAIRMAX!, which seems to make the mail system feel the way his article makes me feel. > Traditional roles for men and women do not exist because of some `male > conspiracy' to keep women down. They exist because they've solved the > problems of survival and reproduction better than any other social pattern > to emerge (yet) -- evolution, pure and simple. A new solution that produced > more creative, fertile, vigorous, and open-minded offspring would easily > wipe out the old decaying `chauvinistic' paradigm. How about parthenogeniture? "Virgin birth", for those of you who prefer shorter words. It can be done now in frogs, and with just a little more research, children can be produced without any intersexual involvement at all. Since we are all interested in producing super-children, and since men cannot do the biological work required, it only seems logical that men should take over the crucial work of raising the offspring produced by those of us with the equipment to do so. Since men would no longer contribute genetic material to the new generation, it would be important to keep women in the forefront of all areas of human activity so that only the strongest, most creative, most vigorous of us would survive to propagate. Only women would be allowed in combat, for instance, or into leadership positions or into high-pressure occupations -- not for any reason of sexual superiority, of course, but simply for the advancement of evolution, pure and simple. Men, whose evolutionary task would now be the nurturance and training of the next generation of breeders, would be sheltered from such disturbing influences as education, financial responsibility, or the acquisition and manipulation of military or political power. This would preserve the family, encourage the production of healthy, happy children with a protected, warm early childhood, and give men (who would, in this context, be evolutionarily irrelevant) something to do with their time. Perhaps this would encourage them to don aprons and change diapers, activities which Mr. Ellis feels feminism as it is currently constituted does not sufficiently encourage. Do I actually believe that drivel? Of course not. But it makes as much sense and has as much basis in reality as Mr. Ellis' otherworldly proposal of a family model in which men and women hop happily back and forth between work and parenting for 15 to 30 years, totally fulfilled as parents, professionals, and people. I am neither a radical, man-and-home-hating, elitist, hardcore libber nor a more moderate potential mother. I am an actual mother, raising three children by myself and working as an engineer to support my family. I am a feminist because I would like my daughters to be able to have lives as independent, as challenging, and as suited to their individualities as the life available to my son. I wish I had a partner to help with raising my children, but I don't. I wish my children could have the benefit of the smiling, cookie-baking, how-was-your-day-at-school-dear mothers in the Pillsbury ads, but they can't. I give them what I have, and they give me what they have, and we muddle through. When it comes down to it, that is what people do. If feminism is anything, it is an effort to make that process a little easier. It is not intended to re-educate pompous young men who go into the sulks if they aren't treated with the gentleness and understanding they feel they deserve. And one must, of course, ask whether I, in my righteous indignation, have managed to raise "more creative, fertile, vigorous, and open-minded offspring" as validation for my ideas. Who knows? I find my children lively-minded, infuriating, challenging, exhausting, intimidating, and exhilarating. Sometimes they are happy, sometimes they're not. I won't know until I see their children, if any, whether I've "succeeded" or not, and neither will anyone else. And the untestability of his hypothesis makes me wonder whether Mr. Ellis' suggestion that we feminists get back to producing "good" children is not simply his way of sending us all back to "proper" women's work where we won't make him feel so uncomfortable. Roberta Taussig Tektronix Beaverton, Oregon ..!decvax!tektronix!tekmdp!roberta ..!zehntel!tektronix!tekmdp!roberta
mason@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Mason) (09/24/83)
Hear! Hear! Well said Roberta! (the only nit is that if the men were not genetically contributing, men in the kitchen would be an extremely short term problem!)