Sisters--sisters!

SISTERS ~ SISTERS!

In this issue of the Ann Arbor SUN we are running part III & IV of "Some Myths About women" (reprinted from "Our Bodies Our Selves"). Parts I & II appear in Issue 22 of the SUN and we do have extra copies here at the Rainbow House if you'd like a copy. Watch for a complete analysis in the next issue of the Ann Arbor SUN.

Now we come to the myth that women are the beautiful sex. What is pernicious about this deal of feminine beauty is how it functions in the society. It seems to work against women in that we all are demanded to be beautiful - an impossible demand that breeds insecurity in women. Now only is it unfair to demand beauty from women as a group, but the standards by which we are judged conform to white anglo-saxon notions of beauty and don't incorporate other ethnic and racial group's ideals. No wonder women tend to feel inadequate about their appearance.

Let me here quote a dialogue from a therapy session between psychologist Albert Ellis and a patient.

"How do you feel about yourself?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You know, your intelligence, ability to get along well with others, looks and things like that."

"Oh, I guess I think I'm intelligent enough. And others like me well enough - I think - if I give them a chance to."

"And your looks?"

"Awful."

"Awful?"

"Yes, why my hips are too high. I don't like them. And my back's too thin and my shoulders, they're not rounded enough and - Oh - just everything, awful."

Ellis talked with 27 women patients, ranging in age from 16 to 50, to investigate the possible relationship between women's emotional disturbance and concerns about beauty. Every woman was concerned about her looks. Ellis feels that half of these women would have fewer psycholigical problems if they weren't concerned with deficiencies of face and figure. He set up a control group of women who were not in therapy and all but one woman had feelings of inadequacy about her looks. Indeed we have internalized society's demand that we be beautiful and hate ourselves when we don't conform to the impossible standards.

With modern birth control, we have the possibility to define ourselves as more than mothers. Even though children give us pleasure, the role of mother is confining alone. Child care does not provide women with meaningful life time work. What's incredible is that so many women choose it. Why? Part of the reason might lie in the fact that most jobs open to women, particularly uneducated women, are more demanding and less interesting than being a housewife and mother. Another reason is that middle class women find it hard to do housework and childrearing as well as independent work since the society does not provide childcare centers. But most important is the idea that in our society all women are expected to play this role and their motivation to define themselves differently has been suppressed.

Let's see how women are told to become wives and mothers exclusively. A prime influence is parents. Children emulate parents. Little girls begin to notice that mother is at home and daddy is at work; men and women do different kinds of work. Schools influence sex roles. Educational institutions differentiate the sexes and provide different education for boys and girls within the same classroom. Marked sexual differentation is made as early as kindergarden through the kind of games they play and the kinds of toys they play with. Girl's playing space is the Doll Corner, an area where motor activity is restricted. Her toys are dolls, household cleaning things, makeup sets, food products sets and ironing boards. She gets the message that taking care of baby dolls and doing housekeeping tasks are appropriate behavior -- just like mother. Meanwhile boys have large spaces to play in and are encouraged to be active and independent. They have trucks, kites, models, and blocks to play with.

As girls enter elementary school they learn their sex roles from books in addition to toys and games. Jamie Kelem Frisof's article entitled "Textbooks and Channeling" analyzes the sex roles men and women play in America as depicted in five Social Studies texts written for grades 1-3. Here is a summary of some of the findings. In the five texts combined men are shown or described in 100 different jobs and women in less than 30. Women's jobs serve people or help men do important work or do work that was once done at home. On one page the child is to match instruments of work with the worker. There is one woman depicted and she had to be matched with a shopping cart. Men go places, struggle against nature, direct large enterprises, make money, and gain respect and fame. Women have few jobs of interest so they might as well be home. But their work at home as a housewife and mother is not considered work or as important as men's work. The books lack interesting and competent female figures. Even though girls do better than boys in elementary schools they are taught in these years that their futures are limited.

Another major influence in defining sex roles is the media: television, magazines and newspapers. In the media the role of housewife and mother has been glamorized and romanticized. Major responsibility for the over-glamorization of the housewife and mother role lies with the household appliance and food industries. They've created the image of the happy housewife and make women feel unfeminine and inadequate f they do not feel fulfilled in this role. Why encourage the woman to be at home? Because women at home tend to be the best consumers and the industries want profit. So women are manipulated by advertisements to believe that they will get a sense of identity, purpose, self-realization and joy by buying things for the homes and staying at home. Rather than look for new means of fulfillment women buy the line and look for fulfillment at home.

Advertisers of fashion and cosmetics industries play on women's vulnerability because their profit depends on women trying to compensate for their physical inadequacies by purchasing products. Women are bombarded by industries' advertisements in magazines, newspapers and TV advertisements which look at women's looks, prey on women's insecurities, and then offer beauty aids to compensate for major and minor flaws. Women can buy vaginal deodorants, falsies, make-up, plastic sugery, wigs, hip-flattening or hip curving girdles and weight loss courses, to mention a few. As soon as one "beauty problem" is solved, industries create a new flaw to be compensated for. For example, it wasn't until recently that women felt a need for false eyelashes or colorless lipstick for the Natural Look. Women become so hung-up on this search for beauty that will make them loveable, sexual, and acceptable that they fail to realize that they are being manipulated as consumers. This trend continues into the seventies engulfing men as well. And why this frantic search for beauty? Society makes it impossible for us to function if we don't. It gets us a man and a job. Why is this crippling us? Because we are forced to be preoccupied by how we appear to others rather than be concerned by how we feel from within. We would like the reverse to be true.

IV

Now for the last myth that women's work is in the home as homemaker and childrearer or in related nutrient, serving, and maintenance jobs such as nursing, elementary school teaching, or waitressing. This attitude is expressed in a letter written by a professional man which appeared in the Confidential Chat Column of the Boston Globe on March 6, 1970. Here are some excerpts:

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Sisters Sisters cont.

My problem is how to persuade my wife, a junior college graduate, that it is her job to provide her family with clean clothes, decent regular meals, and a reasonably clean home.

Recently she has built one of her hobbies into such a time-engrossing thing that she actually hasn't time for her home or her family ... I thought hobbies were what you did "in addition" to required work in your spare time, not instead of.

What protection does the modern husband have? Where does he go wrong? Is the modern girl too emancipated? Is sliding into bed between clean sheets every week too lavish to even dream of? Is coming home to a wife who has given of herself during the day for your comfort a Utopia?

Disillusioned and Disgusted

We cannot know exactly what psychodynamics are going on between this husband and wife, but it seems that Disillusioned has made a common mistake in that he has equated his wife's loving with housework and child care. Rather than considering housekeeping and 24-hour childrearing as work, and rather menial work at that, and realizing that this work and family income eaming work can be divided up between marital partners in a multitude of ways, Disillusioned assumes it's his wife's duty to provide these services and that any other interest that she has that does not concern the home must be subordinate.

When we begin to examine the role of housewife and mother, we can see why Disillusioned's wife has not found it totally fulfilling. A woman spends her day cooking, shopping, cleaning, laundering, ironing, and house cleaning; a set of fragmented tasks that must be repeated daily. Life is a series of errands. Often for middle class women, this takes place in a suburban setting which can be lonely since families live isolated from each other. Also the urban and suburban environments are so spread out that a woman spends much time in a car in order to accomplish what she has to do.

We can conclude from this discussion that by the time a girl reaches her twenty-first birthday much of her motivation is directed to be wife and mother. Other roles are made to seem inappropriate or unfeminine.

Women today are trying to break down myths concerning feminine sex roles that they were taught and are beginning to think of themselves in a new way. For this new self definition to be more than just an idea we must work for changes in the society.

THE END

Image caption: Rainbow sisters, Peggy and Una getting it on in the Arb

Photo: David Fenton