20,000 women of Massachusetts whose names are enrolled on petitions which have been submitted to the Legislature....These petitions relate to the great and solemn subject of slavery....And because it is a political subject, it has often tauntingly been said, that women had nothing to do with it. Are we aliens, because we are women? Are we bereft of citizenship because we are mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people? Have women no country no interests staked in public weal no liabilities in common peril -no partnership in a nation's guilt and shame?

The golden words rang out in the hall. Women's influence on the nations, the speaker asserted, had been largely as courtesans and mistresses through their influence over men.

If so, then may we well hide our faces in the dust, and cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes. This dominion of woman must be resigned --the sooner the better; in the age which is approaching she should be something more--she should be a citizen....I hold, Mr.Chairman, that American women have to do with this subject, not only because it is moral and religious, but because it is political, inasmuch as we are citizens of this republic and as such our honor, happiness and well-being are bound up in its politics, government and laws.

Angelina held her audience spellbound. Her voice took on a passion that gripped her listeners' emotions:

I stand before you as a Southerner, exiled from the land of my birth by the sound of the lash and the piteous cry of the slave. I stand before you as a repentant slaveholder. I stand before you as a moral being and as a moral being I feel that I owe it to the suffering slave and to the deluded master, to my country and to the world to do all that I can to overturn a system of complicated crimes, built upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies of my countrymen in chains cemented by the blood, sweat and tears of my sisters in bonds.

The Grimke sisters' speaking tour, which culminated in Angelina's appearance before the Legislature, took place a full ten years before the Seneca Falls convention. In working for the liberation of the slave, Sarah and Angelina Grimke found the key to their own liberation. They knew they were ushering in a new era.

The Ice Age, by Margaret Drabble

Knopf, 295 pp. $8.95

"On a Wednesday in the second half of November, a pheasant, flying over Anthony Keating's pond, died of a heart attack, as birds sometimes do: it thudded down and fell into the water, where he discovered it some hours later." This would have been a minor incident in Anthony Keating's previously undisturbed life of entrepreneurial success, good health, and entertaining friends, had it not been a portent of things to come. True, there were the usual divorces and casual "other" relationships, even in his own experience, but these small unhappinesses never tainted his enjoyment of life. Then it all begins to fall apart -almost overnight. Anthony suffers a heart attack at the age of 38 and is forced into semi-retirement and must give up drinking, smoking and sex. Within a week's time his good friend and business associate is found guilty of fraud and sentenced to jail; an older couple, friends, are innocently dining out when a terrorist bomb hits their restaurant, leaving the husband dead and the wife without a foot; his father dies; and finally, Allison, an ex-actress with whom he is to make his future, receives news of her daughter's arrest in a hostile Eastern European country. It was hard to believe things had once been so rosy. Middle age doesn't set in overnight.

But, in part, The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble is a novel about two characters, Anthony Keating and Allison Murray, both in their 30's and both experiencing their first intimations of mortality. The peripheral characters who move in and out of the novel are all struggling with the problems of modern urban life. The complicating influence of these friendships on Allison and Anthony's lives, as well as their own troubles, initially lead them to remove themselves to the English countryside in hopes of greater simplicity. At the same time, the characters are affected by pressures outside their control, because the setting of the novel is the hard-pressed England of today. As the economy falters, it takes an increasing toll on individuals of all classes. In the last 15 years of publishing, Margaret Drabble has taken us through her own developing sense of the complexity of woman's life and its choices. She is possibly the best woman novelist writing today. Her first novel, A Summer's Birdcage, 1963, focuses on two sisters, attractive Oxford graduates who find themselves at sea after graduation. Neither of them can envision a career in academics. One comments, "I used to fancy myself as one (a don). But I'll tell you what's wrong with

that. It's sex. You can't be a sexy don. It's all right for men, being learned and attractive, but for a woman it's a mistake. It detracts from the essential seriousness of the business." One sister opts to marry for money and her marriage ends with an adulterous bang; the other dreamily awaits her overseas lover and probable marriage.

For the heroine of The Waterfall (1969), a poet who has ceased publishing, the choice of marriage and childrearing is a disaster. She descends into a semi-catatonic suicidal stupor and lives in a selfenforced isolation scarcely able to do the weekly shopping. She is "saved" only by a sexual liaison with a friend's husband a liaison which has no future but enables her to function in a minimal capacity.

In Realms of Gold (1975), Drabble gives us Frances Wingate, a 35-year-old divorcee, mother of four, who has persevered to become an eminent archeologist. Not housebound, she is in great demand at conferences around the world. The con. fusion and despair of some of Drabble's earlier women culminated in a movement that allows a Frances Wingate to exist in the 1970's. Although she is plagued by fond memories of her ex-lover throughout the narrative, she is no way incomplete without him. Drabble has finally given us in Frances, who loves discussing kinship theory and the extended family in primitive culture, her first woman who can see beyond a personal interpretation of life. She has come a long way from the two sisters in A Summer's Birdcage to Frances Wingate. In her first seven novels, Drabble emphasizes that most of a woman's early choices are initially isolating: marriage; divorce and spinsterism; success as well as failure; education or the lack of it; childrearing or childlessness.

Both the form and character portrayal in the novels Margaret Drabble is now giving us reflect her own maturing. The integrated, all-encompassing scope of her most recent works is matched by the full and rich lives of characters who are learning to accept the decisions of the 20's. Despite the social upheaval associated with a nation in decline, The Ice Age gives us hope with the weathering of the last 15 years that we will survive and enter a new era. What cannot be described in a review of this kind is the extraordinary delicacy of Drabble's dialogue and her painfully acute perceptions of feelings. Margaret Drabble must be read.

--Penny Orr and Freddy Scott

Sent to a woman attorney:

Do We Want This Man to Pass Judgment?

THE CONTRARY WOMAN

Woman She's an angel in truth, a demon in fiction. A woman's the greatest of all contradiction; She's afraid of a cockroach, she'll scream at a mouse, But she'll tackle a husband as big as a house. She'll take him for better, she'll take him for worse; She'll split his head open and then be his nurse; And when he is well and can get out of bed, She'll pick up a teapot and throw at his head. She's faithful, deceitful, keen sighted and blind. She's crafty, she's simple, she's cruel, she's kind. She'll lift a man up, she'll cast a man down. She'll make him her hero, her ruler, her clown.

You fancy she's this but you find that she's that, For she'll play like a kitten and fight like a cat. In the morning she will, in the evening she won't. And you're always expecting she will but she won't.

ELECT

Judge Dahling Alfred E.

OHIO SUPREME COURT

John 1 Quers Charman Dancing for Judge Committee

1809 MMO NO MOINAR

April, 1978/What She Wants/Page 7