WSW EDITORIAL vot 7, no. 10

We have all had that infuriating feeling, while staring at the television trying to decipher the meaning of a particular media event, that our intelligence has been insulted. As we listen, for example, to the President's State of the Union address, we feel somewhat manipulated, even deceived. The entire tone, cues

and ritual point to something substantial and straightforward which, of course, it seldom is.

Carter's proposal to reinstitute draft registration for female and male 19and 20-year-olds comes to us, for example, during an election year. Before the seizure of American hostages in Iran, Carter's

CONTENTS

Health

Previews...

Gray Paper: Older Women and Health Care......8-9

Reviews...

News

Poetry...

Local

Medicaid Funds for Abortion.

Network...

Women's Equity Planning Project Report.........3

Clio's Musings..

National

Women Sterilized or Lose Jobs..

Classified Ads....

OSHA Under Attack in Congress..

Deirdre Griswold: A Presidential Alternative...... 5 Letters...

Find It Fastest..........

What's Happening.

Cover Graphic by Jeanne Smith Regan

What She Wants

7, 10

back cover

14-15

What She Wants goes to production the first of the month. Copy should be submitted the third week of the month so that we can discuss it and edit collectively at our editorial meetings. Contact us for specific deadlines. Please print or type articles. Mail material to WSW, P. O. Box 18465, Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118.

WHAT SHE WANTS IS:

A MONTHLY NEWS JOURNAL PRODUCED FOR ALL WOMEN. We always like input from our readers in the form of articles, personal experiences, poetry, art, announcements, and letters. We welcome women who are willing to help us in specific areas of the paper (writing, lay-out, advertising, distribution, publicity, etc.) and/or who are interested in our collective.

WHAT SHE WANTS ADVOCATES:

...equal and civil rights

...the right to earnings based on our need, merit, and interest .access to job training, salaries, and promotions we choose ...the right to organize in unions and coalitions to advance our cause ...the right to decent health care and health information

...the right to safe, effective birth control and to safe, legal abortions .......the right to accept or reject motherhood

Vol 7, no.10

...the right to choose and express sexual preference without harassment ...access to quality education and freedom from prejudice in learning materials

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WE ARE:

Terry Bullen, Carol Epstein, Linda Jane, Marycatherine Krause, Gail Powers, Mary Walsh

CONTRIBUTORS (articles, poetry, graphics):

Jenny Reese Aberdeen, Carol Braund, Paula A. Copestick, Jeanne Smith Regan, Bev Stamp, Mildred R. Tomen

FRIENDS OF THIS ISSUE (production):

Willow Bentley, Carol Brund, Jean Loria, Pat O'Malley, Nancy Rager, Barbara Silverberg, Michelle Vanderlip

ADVERTISING, DISTRIBUTION:

Alana Clampitt, Dianbé Fiebman, Marcia Manwaring, Pat O'Malley

1979

popularity had plummeted to an all-time low. The U.S. rate of inflation has reached 15 percent. Multinational corporations are allowed to trample on the future of American working people, while they exploit laborers in Third World countries. Although we face atrociously neglected domestic problems, we are told that no money is available to send people to work-only to war.

In the midst of these contradictions, Carter tosses women a red herring-the draft-and in effect tells us, deal with it. If Carter's proposal is ratified, the first year of draft registration would affect 4.2 million females. Carter believes he can succeed at turning the draft into a women's issue because of its indirect link with the principles of the Equal Rights Amendment. His logic appears sound: if women really want equal rights, they must be willing literally to fight for them. Yet this proposal precedes the ratification of the ERA. Just as black soldiers in World War II were forced to fight for their country without gaining full equality at home, women are being coerced into a double bind.

Carter has missed the boat on feminism, by reducing its content to a superficial formula for equality. The roots of feminism have been nourished by a deep commitment to end all forms of violence, and by a vision which is antithetical to draft cards or nuclear weapons. Although the experience of liberation struggles in Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua have shown that women soldiers can fight as well as men, the current proposed American military aggression hardly compares with these genuine struggles against a repressive regime. It has much more to do with the opposite: the Pentagon's growing concern with bolstering its military prowess and increasing the defense budget, and the oil companies' interest in securing the resources of the Persian Gulf. As President Eleanor Smeal stated in NOW's March, 1980 position paper:

"NOW is against the registration of young people precisely because it is a response which stimulates the environment of preparation for war. Too many of us remember the senseless killing and destruction in Vietnam-which we also protested-and believe that violence is the 'ultimate solution' taught most typically to males in our society. We reject that solution, and believe that too many are willing to wage war with others' lives. National defense and selfdefense is one thing; aggression for economic selfinterest in quite another. To fight a war for oil is to deny that the inherent rights of all human beings must take precedence over the economic self-interest of a very few.'

The issues of the draft and the ERA are separate and distinct. Across the nation draft registration-for women and men-has been condemned by such women's organizations as NOW, the National Women's Political Caucus, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Women Strike for Peace, Rural American Women, Women USA, the National Council of Negro Women, Women for Racial and Economic Equality, the Congress of Neighborhood Women, and many others. This current challenge to the women's movement is actually a ' "non-women's issue" initiated by the President and, therefore, a potential drain on our already-limited time and energy. Yet the problem will persist and will affect us whether we created it or not. At a Washington press conference on January 31, Bella Abzug emphasized that "The increase in the military budget will hurt women as domestic spending programs are cut.”

It is in our own self-interest to protest draft registration, and it is in the interest of all powerless peoples living in this country to call for a reordering of priorities, based on human needs and not on a thirst for power and profit. No, we women have not been fooled. Together we must expose the equation of the draft with women's rights as the phantom it is before, by its mere presence, it acquires a monstrous life of its own.

-Carol Epstein

March, 1980/What She Wants/Page