adivertiment',

Non-Traditional Career Training at its

BEST

Electronics

Drafting

Microcomputers

No prior experience necessary Job Placement Assistance

Accredited member NATTS Approved for veterans training Grants and loans

Call 696-2626 Hickok Tech. Institute 2012 W. 25th & Lorain Cleveland, OH 44113. Reg. 72-11-0359 T

COVENTI

OVENTRY BOOKS

Magazines from

Start to Finish:

Come & meet Mary Walsh from What She Wants and other local voices of the Cleveland alternative press, April 18 at Coventry Books, 2-4pm.

932-8111

10 to 10 weekdays, 10 to 7 Sat, noon to 6 Sun 1824 Coventry Road

CLEVELAND & AKRON

ABORTION

• Very Early Pregnancy Tests

• Local or General Anesthesia

• Professional Counseling

FOR AN APPOINTMENT CALL:

in Cleveland 421-8600

in Akron 535-9191

non-profit medical services

11955 Shaker Boulevard

639 East Market Street

Akron, Ohio 44305

Cleveland, Ohio 44120

CENTER for Reproductive Health

Guns or Butter Conference (continued from page 1)

spokeswoman for. these concerns and gave a major address and a workshop on the subject.

Macy says several things about the historical place we find ourselves in today. "There are no models for the way we need to start to live because the certainty of a future is lost to us. This is unprecedented because there is no private salvation and no place to hide; we are all in it together, and must experience our commonality of living under the bomb. We live on the edge of time. The recognition of our precariousness changes the way we have to live. It rips away the veils of familiarity and the traditional responses" (winning, getting even, manipulating, etc.). For Macy the constant awareness of the state we are in means that whenever she walks into a new

·Incest (continued from page 9)

somehow I sexually enticed them. After several months of therapy, I quit going because it was all too painful to think about. I wanted to bury it again and go on with my life.

Shortly after that my younger sister told me she had been molested by our brothers since she was six. She was then 18 years old and living at home with my parents in Florida. My brothers lived nearby. I suddenly realized the problem was not just about me as a child. Here were two grown adult men molesting a young woman. She told me she had also tried to get help from a priest but he told her not to talk about it or people would think she was enjoying it.

A week after she told me, my sister came to live with me in Cleveland. Before she left, she told my parents why she was leaving. I learned with anger that they had known about my brothers since she was six years old. They had taken them to confession, then dropped the issue. The priest had warned my parents not to make my brothers feel guilty. My parents were surprised by our anger. My mother again called me an hysteric and asked us to forget the whole thing.

I was so full of rage and hate at this time I couldn't even speak to them. My mother called me one day and cried. According to her, I was splitting up her family by talking about the incest and bringing my sister to Cleveland. She was also angry because I had told one of my younger brothers out of concern for his young daughter. My brother confessed they had also molested him as a young boy.

During this time I felt the guilt disappearing. Since I wasn't the only one, it must have been their problem. It became very important for me to go back to the Free Clinic to understand why this had happened in my family and how to deal with it. My sister was also getting help.

Most of the people in my family didn't understand why I would see a psychologist. They wanted to keep running from problems. Throughout this period, my lover was always there when I needed him. He still is. At the Free Clinic I was in a group therapy program with other women incest victims. We shared our common problems and how they had affected our lives. I was amazed to find that many of the women felt exactly as I did. We all share our dirty little secret and somehow that makes it easier to cope with.

I still get angry a lot. I feel like a part of me has been robbed and violated. I don't have a happy childhood to look back on. There is no security in my family. I can never see myself forgiving my parents for allowing this to happen. I can speak to them now, but there is a wall between us. As for my older brothers, I hope someday they get the help they need and accept the fact that they hurt us, but they are no longer my brothers:

situation she says to herself, "These may be the people I die with".

The problem then is how to live with the realization of potential destruction and work to do something about it without going crazy and without burning out.

The purpose of the workshop was to allow people to begin to see and confront their despair, express it to themselves and each other, and begin to work through it. This behavior is the very opposite of psychic numbing, which is the way many people understandably need to act in order to get through the day.

Part of the workshop ideology is to have the experience of our despair and pain for the world validated and taken seriously. Because of the mecentered perversion of much of modern psychology, it is easy to fall into the trap of calling our despair personal or private, a "hang-up". Others are often quick to respond in this fashion when we try to talk about our feelings.

We completed several exercises in the workshop. Grouping in threes, we told each other what event in the past week had made us aware of the extreme state of the planet. One woman mentioned Reagan's predictable reaction to the latest Soviet proposal for weapons' cutbacks. I had seen a program on whales that left me weeping. It was good to find other people who feel as strongly about other species as I do. The end of the planet won't affect just our species but all species, plant and animal, and for some of us this is a sadness deeper than words.

In another exercise we told a partner what we did with our feelings about despair and what happened when we tried to talk to others about it. Each of us put our hands on our partners' shoulders to share what the burden of despair felt like to them. I thought. I had found an explanation for the headaches that I've had daily for over a year.

In the limited time we could only begin the long process of breaking down defenses, admitting and feeling the pain, and struggling through it to find new energy. It is important to be clear about one thing. The exercises were not a way to make us feel better, adapt us to the situation, and forget the problems. They are a way to help us confront a central truth of our time and the feelings we have about it. Macy talks about how much more working energy she found when she faced her despair. She quoted T.S. Eliot, who said, "Where does one go from a world of insanity, Somewhere on the other side of despair". As Macy said, "On the other side does not mean around it, or over it, or anything but through it”.

A copy of Macy's very fine article "How to Deal with Despair" is available free with a self-addressed envelope. Call 229-3753 for information.

Feminist Writers (continued from page 1)

English gentleman". She went on to explain, "The tradition I teach in, live in and write in is an English upper-class tradition". However, she said, feminism has altered her perspective. "I'm more interested in the effects novels have on women. Feminism has made me far less interested in what men think”.

Heilbrun sees a growing trend toward feminist analysis of literature, and a more feminist bent in literary criticism. “Feminism is very sexy now on the *Eastern seaboard," she said. "The brightest students coming through now are feminist students--even the

Their feminism shows through in their work-and they are the ones doing the very best work".

"It's the Elizabethan era for us," Piercy added. "It's a new continent we're walking into. Every woman who deals with something that hasn't been dealt with before is freeing all of us"

ين عيد ا

Page 10/What She Wants/April, 1982