sdb@shark.UUCP (Steven Den Beste) (08/29/83)
When I was younger and the issue of equal rights for women did not mean anything to me (gasp) one way or the other, I found that certain tactics used by the more militant members of the Women's rights movement tended to offend me - and tended to turn me against them, when without those tactics I would have stayed neutral. Yes, friends, I was against ERA the first time around. (I have since come to my senses.) Why? First, I strongly dislike the use of blackmail to pass laws - they ought to pass based on their merits, not on the economic power of their partisans. I was offended by the boycott against non-passing states. Second - you want to join the game, you gotta play by the rules. The two year extension was and is unconstitutional - there is nothing in the constitution to allow such a thing. Even if the three extra states had passed in those two years - a supreme court test would have tossed it out. Third - I found it difficult to take seriously any person (and by extension any movement) that put a vast almost-hysterical emphasis on points that to me seemed really trivial. I think that responses such as these were very common, and served to alienate a large population of men (and women too) who would have been neutral or slightly positive otherwise. That brings me to the title of this article and the point of it: I think that feminists are doing themselves a disservice by concentrating on points such as sexist language useage. Most of the people using the language in that way are probably neutral or slightly positive towards the women's rights issue - but if you make that a major point of your drive, you have successfully driven many of them into your enemy's camp. If you could only change one thing in the next 20 years, would the language be it? Hell no! Get economic equality first - concentrate on the big one. When half of the CEO's in this country are women, you can bet that the lower executives are going to quit referring to human resources as "men". If you get the big one out of the way, the language problem will solve itself. An organization that contributed greatly to my reversal of opinion was the League of Women Voters. When I see an organization as well run, as dignified and as effective as that one, my feeling is "Not only do I want them in the process - I think maybe they should be running it!" Isn't that the attitude you want to engender (oops) in the vast neutral population? By concentrating on the language problem - which is admittedly sexist - you could win a pyrhic victory. You might change the language, but you could alienate so many people doing it that you might make it twice as hard to win the really BIG issue. May I dive for my foxhole now? INCOMING!!! Steve Den Beste [decvax|ucbvax]!tektronix!tekecs!shark!sdb