What She Wants is...
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a monthly news journal produced for all women. There is no subject unsuitable for our readers and therefore you will find articles on every topic from poetry to politics in each issue.
. equal rights and civil rights
the right to decent health care and health information
the right to control our bodies
the right to support ourselves and our families
the right to oppose war
...the right to organize in unions and coalitions to advance our cause
... the right to excellence in education and freedom from prejudice in learning materials
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...the right to accept or to reject motherhood
We are...
Laurel Brummet, S. J. Caldwell, Laurie Campbell, Jane Darrah, Marian Dorn, Pat Flanagan, Linda Freeman, Kathy Greenberg, Nancy Handley, Sandy Handley, Rita Hawkins, Barbara Holden, Meredith Holmes, Gail Hopkins, Gaila Klimas, Sheri Pawski, Barb Reusch, Valerie Robinson, Linda Rothacker, Karal Stern, Mary Waxman, Jackie Wessel, Helen Williams
What She Wants has open meetings, and any women interested in feminist newspaper work are welcome to attend. The response to our paper has been exciting and we really need to have more people working on it. All of us in the WSW collective have other jobs or go to school, and we put the paper out on our own time. Not only do we need writers and people to sell the paper, we need people to write us letters and give us feedback. We usually meet on Saturday afternoons. Write to us at
P.O. Box 18072
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
"Mother, what is a Feminist?” "A Feminist, my daughter,
Is any woman now who cares
To think about her own affairs
As men don't think she oughter."
Alice Duer Möbler, 1015
MOM NEEDS HELP
The staff of What She Wants finds it appropiate at this time to introduce a series of monthly articles pertaining to pregnancy and childbirth. We are agreed that if women are to be free and equal, they must be liberated from the existing social structure of pregnancy and childbirth. This is the most important work for feminists today, because the inequities and injustices of being born female all stem from the cultural belief that a woman's place is in the home. Victories in the struggle for suffrage are meaningless until this concept is eradicated from the minds and hearts of men and women.
It has been my personal discovery that feminism has not made much progress in relieving the problems that face women with children. To demonstrate the need for change, I will give a brief account of motherhood as it happened to me during the past year. I do not believe my experiences to be particularly horrifying or unusual; on the contrary, it was all probably very typical, which is all the more reason for alarm.
In the beginning, I would have found it most helpful to speak to a pregnancy counselor. Having a child (or an abortion, for that matter) is a major life crisis and I was highly unprepared: a fetus and an IUD had been residing simultaneously in my uterus for several months! The university doctor who gave me the news,asked,
Are you married?
No, I replied.
Well, your student insurance will cover the cost of an abortion
He was apparently pleased to relieve me of this worry.
I was rather taken aback.
What if I want to keep the baby?
The doctor shrugged and looked at me skeptically. This hospital has no maternity services.
Period.
And so, I had one month, thirty days: to abort or not, to have a free and antiseptic abortion and forget it ever happened or to assume an eighteen year financial, emotional and physical responsibility. A major portion of those thirty days was spent casting about for someone who could help me sort out my feelings. One abortion counselor told me he could only help me with problems concerning the abortion a kind of after the fact approach.
Everyone was pro-abortion, especially feminists. I almost got completely turned off to feminism because it seemed women were so busy liberalizing abortion laws, they reguarded anyone having a baby as unenlightened and no to be taken seriously. I knew I could get support from Right-to-Life people and my family, but that kind of support I didn't need.
Once I had made peace with my decision, I turned to preparation for childbirth. To my dismay, there were no midwives available to the general public in Cleveland. I am not looking for a return to deliveries at home amid buckets of boiling water, merely a simpler, pleasanter experience. Obstetrics has become an over-rated, over-complicated, over-priced con game. If men are jealous of women's ability to reproduce, as has been suggested in feminist literature, this is where they most clearly demonstrate it. I had two doctors: the first treated me like a piece of meat; the second was not present at my delivery and charged me several hundred dollars to send in his substitute for twenty minutes. This is a female experience that we have allowed men to denigrate. It must be restored to beauty and dignity, so that women can feel the creativity that is an integral part of childbirth.
I will certainly be gratified when more women start keeping their own names. I had the uneasy feeling that I was the first to do so in this particular maternity ward. I married shortly before entering the hospital, and the records supervisor thought I was trying to pull a fast one when I asked her to put my husband's surname on the birth certificate. The personnel at the visitor's desk had a hectic time matching visitors with my baby and me. Although I was only in the hospital three days, peoples' attitude about my name became an ordeal. I wrote a letter of complaint to the hospital, and the reply inferred that I was simply over-emotional at the time. (Of course, who expects a woman to be rational after she's given birth? SIC)
I was surprised to find that there is so little housing available for people with children. Before marrying, I had been considering renting a house with other women and children. Now I wonder if it would have been within the realm of possiblity. It took a month to find a moderately priced place that would accept just one child! Surely this is unjust discrimination.
Day care is overwhelmingly inadequate. I was planning to return to school after the baby was born, but cannot afford child care. How can women ever begin to be autonomous when it costs money just to get out of the house? Even if they have a paycheck, they easily spend half of it for babysitters, which continues a vicious circle of poverty. This is the point at which many women abandon lives of their own, believing it isn't worth the struggle. This is a great tragedy, in terms of wasted human resources and unfulfilled lives.
It is easy to be independent when no one is dependent on you. But the answer to the quandary of motherhood is obviously not to remain childless. That is a one-person solution to a many-peopled problem. It is a unalterable fact that women are responsible for continuing the human race. The dilemma is how can women continue to be childbearers and be whole people too? In the coming months, What She Wants will research and report on Cleveland area hospitals, clinics, day care centers, renting practices, available counseling services, and other relavent subjects. We hope that you, our readers, will find this not only enlightening, but be stirred to response in resolving this foremost plight of your sisters.
page 2 What She Wants/ January 1975