and pay for women that averages a third lower than men's. Husbands' help with raising children is sporadic or nil in two-thirds of the 18,500 families surveyed.

Awareness of feminism is sufficiently widespread

Birth Control

+ Warmer's Sulage

Equal Rights Legislation

Equal Employment

Jon Shanellyn

for all the political parties to accord it at least lip service-and for the first woman Cabinet minister for women's affairs to have been appointed in 1978. And there is enough interest in the issue for F to have survived the cutthroat Parisian publishing world since the beginning of 1978.

England

"A lot of people find me very radical," 18-yearold Jackie Allen comments. Her radicalism consists of expecting to pursue a career rather than staying home and raising children. With some incredulity she describes the backlash that has hit feminism in England.

Her mother, Margaret Allen, feature editor of the Times and member of the quasi-governmental Equal Opportunities Commission, concurs in this analysis. The stay-at-home-and-mind-the-children lobby is in the ascendant now, she, observes.

Mother and daughter differ somewhat, however, when asked if there ever really was a feminist movement in Britain. The younger generation doubts it. The older generation sees today's women as more self-confident and assertive, "but not in a corporate way."

Margaret Allen also sees initial gains from the 1970 Equal Pay Act and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, which her commission is struggling to carry out. Pay for women rose from 60 percent of men's in 1970 to 70 to 75 percent in 1975. (It slipped back a bit in 1977 and 1978.) The number of women studying for professions that formerly were all but closed to them has risen sharply. About a third of medical students are now women, for example. Law and architecture show similar trends. And in the past ten years, the

number of women reporters and editors has grown. Now there is even the occasional woman taxi driver, truck driver, steeplejack, plumber, and pilot.

The business and financial world has remained more closed to women, however. Only about 2 percent of accountants, and two dozen of 10,000 bank directors are women.

Equal employment and equal pay have proved elusive during the past five years of a sluggish economy. Joblessness, both for the young and for the middle-aged who are coming onto the labor inarket after a decade or two of child-rearing, is higher among women than men. Many companies still give higher basic rates to men than women. Yet numerous court suits, by men and women in equal numbers, have compelled some companies to equalize wages.

The principle of assuring women access to mortgages has been well established by now. Gross inequality in taxation, nationality claims, and custody of children remains, however. A woman's income belongs to her husband for tax purposes, and she does not get social security benefits.

West Germany

The feminist movement has fallen on hard times in West Germany. The heady early years of solidarity as the women's movement emerged from the late 1960's left student activism to spearhead the 1971 legalization of abortion have long since gone. The national women's congresses of 1972 to 1976 have been discontinued. The splintered, hostile factions have not been able to stop their quarrels long enough for a collective gathering.

As a result, there is no effective lobby for equal pay (currently averaging a third less than men's pay) or equal job hiring or resumption of the stalled program of building daycare centers.

In Hamburg, a wife and education lecturer may get hundreds of enthusiastic responses after she floats the idea of founding a housewives' trade union for "the nation's Cinderellas." In Mainz, some 15,000 women staged the first demonstration in German history against women's unemployment (which is much higher than men's). And in various cities the big publishing houses have finally come around to issuing women's books, that deal with more than recipes and dress patterns. But these are isolated incidents, newsworthy because they are exceptions rather than trend-confirming examples.

Under present circumstances, no national political party feels obliged even to give lip service to a fair deal for women in its platform. The magazine Em-

ma, the rough equivalent of Ms. in the U.S., F in France, or Effe in Italy, leads a hand-to-mouth existence. Hardly an eyebrow is raised at the joyless girlie photos and sexploitation that routinely crowd out serious newspapers and magazines on the kiosk racks. And in the home, few husbands help out with dusting or tending the children, even when wives work.

Sweden

For Swedes, abortion (fully legalized in the early 1970's), equal pay for equal work (since 1962), access to professions (some 20 percent of lawyers, 45 percent of law students, and 23 percent of doctors are women), and shared child care (12 percent of fathers of young children take paternity leave under a 1974 law) are all taken for granted.

The Swedish liberation of women came not through outsider feminists pounding on establishment doors, but through women's organizations inside the traditional parties. They have helped push Sweden's famous consensus further along the path of social care and management. By now Swedish feminists are concerned with issues that are hardly a gleam in the eye of their Italian, French, or American counterparts.

In a telephone interview from Stockholm, Maragareta Beckerus, secretary of the governmental committee on equality between men and women, ticks off the remaining gaps. Although equal pay is honored, especially in white-collar jobs, preference is still shown to men in hiring. Women account for only some 2 or 3 percent of high-level business executives. Only a little more than a tenth of university students preparing for engineering or other technical occupations are women. These Swedish shortfalls from full equality would seem miniscule to feminists in any non-Scandinavian European country.

With objective equality basically attained, Swedish feminists have moved into more subjective areas in the past five years. They have campaigned to rectify sexist advertising and to purge schoolbooks of sexist stereotypes. They have identified and removed much unconscious typecasting in textbooks, and they have made advertisers more responsible in the images they portray.

"So what is left to tackle now?" Margareta Beckerus mentions the breaking into traditionally women's occupations (such as preschool teaching) by men, expansion of parental leave, and setting up pilot school projects to teach equality.

German Women Rally for Abortion

Frankfurt(LNS)-The increasing anti-abortion campaign of the churches is making it more and more difficult for women in West Germany to obtain legal abortions. Recognition of this threat was the main result of a recent women's Congress held in Frankfurt and attended by over 100 women from women's centers in 30 German cities.

There's nothing new in the fact that not only churches but also doctors set themselves up as protectors of "morality" and refuse to help women. But the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain an abortion even in a large city such as Berlin is regarded as an alarming development.

For example, hospitals have been refusing to recognize "Indikationen"—a document written by a woman's doctor indicating that for health or social reasons an abortion is necessary.

Things are even worse in the conservative south of Germany. The only abortion clinic in Munich which accepts Indikationen will do so only if they are written by the municipal health clinic.

In West Germany as a whole, Indikationen for social reasons (such as poverty or interruption of

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school or work) are written only rarely. Even when they are written, women often cannot find either free beds in hospitals or doctors to perform the abortions.

In response to this situation, the women attending the Congress in early November formulated a demand for at least one doctor willing to perform abortions at every municipal health clinic. At the same time, the women emphasized that they stand by the right of a woman to control her own body.

To lend weight to these demands, 'a demonstration of about 3,5(XX) men, women and children took place in Mainz on November 10. The demonstration was organized to counter a rally at which Catholic Cardinal Hermann Volk presented himself as a "guardian of the weak." At the rally, Catholics in Sunday clothes scolded the pro-abortion demonstrators, calling the women "whores."

The Women's Congress also decided to hold a tribunal in February, where the experiences of women with doctors, hospitals, health insurance, the pharmaceutical industry, churches and politicians will be made public.

December, 1979/What She Wants/Page 9