Page Eiehi SCARLET AND BLACK Friday. November 2i. I969 Women's Deliberation: An Anti-Declaration (Robert Finley, resident ad- viser for East and west Nur- ris Halls, is unmarried He wrote the following article in response to Sally Moore’s art- icle in last week’s 5&3 entit- led “Women’s Liberation: A De- claration.) By Robert Finley Utterly without fanfare, in a lemon grove in Southern California, the wisest and most ancient sage of China, Lao Tzu, was recently reincarnated as a migrant farm - laborer. l-litch. hiking across the country to Washington, last week he stop» ped at Grinnell for a look at the state of the ”small liberal- arts college” Knowing his espousal of tenderness and non resistance as the true way of life, you can imagine his reaction on reading in the 5&3 the diatribe entitled, “Women’s Liberation: A Declaration." His legendary imperturbability was blown, and he was moved to speech. ”Is this the famous American woman?” he cried. Such blather was unimportant in itself, be explained, but it distressed him that young ims pressionable minds be poisoned He pleaded that his views be passed on and quickly drunk as an antidote. He remarked that he was pleased to see that in California, a land where half the marriages and in divorce, the pendulum was swinging backi Young women were dis- covering the joy of being them- selves. They were abandoning their Ph.D.s and finding again the joy of baking wholesome bread, preparing nutritious meals, of being again the center of the home. In all cultures and all religions, the sage reminds us, the universe is conceived as a play of opposites, in China these were called Yin Yang, Yin being the feminine, the feeling, expansive, subjective. negative pole of reality, Yang, the masculine, thinking, cone tractivc, objective, positive pole. All opposites are comple- mentary. Yin cannot exist with- out Yang, nor Yang without Yin; but properly they are in free interplay and balance. Never have they been more imbalanced than today. All our misguided efforts to create, through force, a Heaven on earth, all our science and technology, our vaunted “victory over nature" is the positive, Yang way it is at last becoming obvious to all that there is no victory over nature, that nature has the last word. But this truth is not so easily seen in human relations as in man's corruption of the environment, or his saving through the wonders oi medicine millions of llves only to doom them [0 starvation. The Yang way is the positive, external, extroverted, outward seeking way, and it is this way we extol] to high Heaven (another word for Yang). We would deny altogether Yin, putting always knowledge before wisdom, achievement before being, compulsive ac- tivity before observation and understanding. ideas before feelings, seriousness and egotism before play and enjoy- ment. This is pure suicide, said the sage. All the problems of modern life are due to this one cause—for it is the Yang- polarized mind that makes the problems. Most especially it disturbed the sage to see meen dcserting the way most natural to them. and thinking they Will find real fulfillment in the outside world He said they are dooming themselves to lives of empty soliseeking. The solution to all problems of life is not to be found in striving to mold the world to your petty desires, in complaints and pro- grams, in perpetual discontent and reformation, but in adapting the self to what is. If you are empty, your world is empty. If you are filled, your world is filled. But Without the feminine dimension the world is a sterile, ugly, unieeling, un- regencrate place tit only for toads and newts. The sage then quoted from his one immortal work of twenty-five hundred years ago, the Tao Te Citing the only previous time he was moved to recorded speech: Understand the masculine, but follow the feminine, And you will become the whole world’s channel, Eternal virtue will not depart from you And you will return to the state of the infants Knowing every assertion has a contrary, the master trans slated “Woman‘s Liberation: A Declaration” out of the shrill and febrile air of intellect into the deep reverberaticns of the heart. The following is the same article rendered paragraph by paragraph into its authentic emotional correlatives. 1) An old Woman is being born, who thinks herself new. She is the chromevplated, can- dy-striped, stream—lined, 1969 gen-you-wine Viragoi this old new woman has given over her time-honored place to technology, and she has found herself without 2i place at all. She rejects what she mistakenly understands as the “superior attitude of men,” and thus rejects the wonderful. my- sterious ccmplementariness in which man is the leader, woman his helper, who by putting hcrsclf second is out first. 2) Having forsaken her place, the new woman is so insecure and confused that she must go about crying and demanding her equality. Can he who must demand his equality ever be equal? He who is equal dmsn’t demand. 3) She is prccessed through an educational regime which could not be better designed to cripple and dcmean her ingrained capacities as wife and mother and render her fit only to intellectualize about the “problems of women." Since she receives the identical, irrelevant mindstutiing as the malc, all sensitivity to, and love of the inherent differences of mm: and woman are destroyed. 4)- Deeply infected with the disease of the times, she puts herself before all things. Self- exploitation is her end. Neither happiness, children nor husband can come before herself and her desires. 5) So intellectualized is she. she has lost contact with her body, her hands, the joy of movement and making. Her home has become meaningless U: her. 6) She is becoming a fulle blown shrewi 7) She is utterly alienated from her own emotional life and the emotional life of simple humankind. Her children are such blank enigmas to her that caring for them, nurturing and guiding them is without meaning. 8) She is worthless as a mother. if her husband will not relieve her of her burden she will crack. 98:10) A Victim cf sociclogical theories reduce which attempt to masculinity and femininity to mere acquired role-playing, she will raise Children as confused and lost as herself. 11) She is full of self-pity, blaming the meaninglessness oi her home life on commercial advertising. Because she cannot distinguish herself from the stereotypic images of the mass media, she looks for fulfillment in the “important concerns of society.” 12) She has never known what it feels like [0 be a woman. She will do all she can to spread discontent and destroy the home 13&14) She has lost the sense of gracious living, of simple leisure, of meaninglul triviality. She Will sacrifice all to self-ad- vancement and "serious" o:- cupation. Having no inner security, she must seek identity in a social definition. 15&16) She puts money and self-aggrandizement before his tangible rewards. 17) unavoidably afflicted with a body that gets pregnant, she begrudges the time necessary to bear a child She will Wait out gtstation, drug herself during delivery, and quickly rush back to. her “serious" pure suits. She will 53 her best to obliterate from her mind that she is a mother. 18) Because she has nothing to give her Children, she wil- lingly (and perhaps for the best) consigns them to nursery homes and the care of “specialists," rationalizing the matter with copious verbiage from child psychology texts. 19) She will submit to nothing undcr Heaven. 20) She has lost touch with the intuitive sense of play in courtship. For the ancients. Eros \vas a god. For the new woman he is an intellectual puzzle. 213122) She will have her sexual gratification when and where and how she wills it, and demands that science rescue her flom the consequences. 23) She is so humourless and inscsure she cannot laugh at the absurdities of commer- cialism and advertising. The images of the media overpower her shredded feminity. PRE