AMERICA
The Betrayal of the Women
From MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK
GOVERNOR ROCKEFELLER'S campaign for re- election is keyed to his notion that no prob- lem is insoluble and no mind ineducable, and runs, so far, to seminars on unfilled social needs. But there was the sense, on getting the news that he had summoned a Conference on Women, that Nelson Rockefeller had gone at last too far in the invention of oppressed minorities to liberate; it seemed altogether as though Nelson Rocke- feller were Mayor of Carthage and had invited us to consider measures for the relief of the poor Romans.
But then it is our custom to excuse our deficiencies by blaming them on our wives; American men have developed that ultimately refined ruling class, the one which knows how to command and to whimper at the same time. One part of that plot is to give the world to think that ours is a society dominated by Gorgons. But the sight of the Governor's guests in the mass was entirely destructive of that illusion; New York turns out, after all, to be full of girls just like the girl who married dear old Nikita Khrushchev.
We have, in fact, fooled Woman with so much of the shadow of authority that she seems entirely confused about the substance of what she has missed. Her conference sessions, while highly in- telligent, were curiously without focus and definable only for their vague longing for some- thing better in life. When the day was over and their demands were laid before the Governor, Nelson Rockefeller could reflect that, for the first time since he was old enough to vote, a group of petitioners had come into his presence and not one of them had asked him for a dollar.
The session on 'The Problems of Women in Today's Society' began suspiciously enough with a Catholic sister explaining the Church's work in the Spanish-speaking colony near the Brook- lyn Navy Yard. The problem, she said, was to get the Puerto Rican woman out of her own home and into the real life around her. The Puerto Rican husband expects his wife to stay home all day so she'll be right by the stove whenever he chooses to come home. There was a vivid moment of interior reflection that things have come to a pretty pass when even the Church forgets how important it is to leave well enough alone. But the thought could not survive a morning full of evidence that not even the Church can upset the order we have so cunningly and intricately devised.
Dorothy Height of the Young Women's Christian Association defined our victory when she reminded those present that their single great problem is `to teach women not to be against women.' She had just come from the beauty par- lour where she had. witnessed the grievous insult inflicted on a female hairdresser by a woman customer who insisted on a male hairdresser.
Of course. We beat them by giving them the vote. The moment women became an absolute majority of the voting population we were for- ever safe from being ruled by a woman president.
The suffrage seems, in fact, to have been our prime device for emasculating the American woman. The day's luncheon entertainment was a history of American fashion presented by the Brooklyn Museum. One of the models was dressed as a suffragette of the 1900s, all soft muslin in theory, an arsenal in fact, her reticule a club for scoffers on the sidelines, her parasol a broadsword for policemen and her hatpin a dagger for their horses in her path.
Women just aren't the menace they used to be; there are a few harpies but no Gorgons, and harpies are merely annoying where Gorgons were fatal. They have no Carrie Nations to disturb our peace; but we can really scare them to death with our Curtis L. LeMays.
W.ck at the conference it all seemed terribly sad. One lady arose, sounding oddly like James Baldwin, to say that now she was free to go to work but that she didn't know what jobs the society offered that were in the class with raising children. And a career expert coldly replied that she would have to go into industry as an entry worker until she has a production record, and that she had better retrain and retool so she will have something to sell. That is what has hap- pened to the revolution begun fifty years ago when women insisted that they must no longer be treated as things.
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