Feminists Tackle Own Bias Against Wife-Mother Role
New York (Reuter) - The cliches have been: "I don't work, I'm just a housewife and mother" and "How can the little woman behind the man get behind the women's movement?"
Injustices of the "just-a-housewife-and-mother" mentality, and its exorbitant costs to women and men alike, were explored here at a recent national conference on family problems.
The National Assembly on the Future of the Family, sponsored predominantly by the U.S. National Organization for Woman (NOW), also marks a major change in the women's movement, which had frequently spurned housewives and mothers as alien from feminists and working women as a whole. The thought was that anyone dependent on a man in traditional female roles was suspect and could not believe in equality of the sexes, much less work for it.
The movement for years had focused on options other than wife and mother and emphasized work opportunities and individual fulfillment.
According to Betty Friedan, author and NOW co-founder, the original image of the modern feminist was that of a career superwoman "agitating against marriage", motherhood, sexual intimacy with men". But "women must now confront anew their own needs for love and comfort and caring support, as well as the needs of children and men, for whom, I believe, we cannot escape bedrock human responsibility", she said.
Eleanor Smeal, the current president of NOW, the world's largest feminist organization with more than 100,000 members, was one of the first to demand that women and men stop discriminating against wives and mothers like herself.
Mrs. Smeal told some 2,000 attendees what she recently told a U.S. House of Representatives select committee: "Women have been society's built-in, unpaid house workers, caring for the very young, the sick, elderly, disabled -- those for whom society is unwilling to provide..."
The NOW president in her testimony had urged Congress to enact laws giving educational and economic benefits, similar to those for war veterans, especially to middle age and older women: "To homemakers, who have also served their country, society offers a lifelong handicap -- a blank resume. Where is the recognition and preference this country owes homemakers?"