exploit women or put them down

on the contrary he, like most FPs, had a special regard for and feeling toward women. So it was not a specific personal sort of guilt but a generalized class guilt. I had been a member of the class MAN which was collectively guilty of exploiting the class WOMAN and as such I felt a need to expunge or expiate this guilt. It was a strange and almost sub-conscious sort of a feeling but it was real. I gradually woke the rest of the way and got up and dressed but I didn't forget this feeling. I realized on more mature thought that this feeling represented a psychic manifestation of my switching of roles from masculine to feminine. I had been exposing myself to a lot of indoctrination on the subject through my reading and other activities and this was the result. I could now begin to discern the areas and ways in which men have relegated women to a second class position and more than that I could begin to feel about it the way they did. It was now my problem as it is the problem of all women even when they don't realize it. My interest in the movement has since become more personal and less intellectual.

I might add at this point for those who might say, "Well, Virginia can join NOW but I can't because I'm a man." Men can join this or- ganization and do. There are several in our local chapter.

But why should this movement be worth an editorial in TVia for the rest of you regardless of how interested I become in it. For two reasons: 1) because to whatever extent your femmeself becomes functional in society to that same extent you are involved in it. You may like masculine courtesies when you are out as it confirms your feminine status (I must confess that I do too) but you must also realize that such courtesies are not given to women as equals but as compensa- tions on the level of chivalry for denying them most of the rest of the perrequisites of human equality; but 2) and more important, is the fact that the Women's Lib movement has as its opponent essentially the same thing which causes our social ostracism and condemnation, namely male superiority. I realize that it may be difficult to imme- diately see the connection but let me elaborate.

On a very primitive anthropological level the male became aware. that the female could do two things that he could not do, a) have a baby, and b) to nurse it. In short to create and nurture life. By way of compensation he began to make much of his male attributes and his masculine abilities. Being larger, stronger and faster and not being tied down with pregnancy, lactation and child care, hunting and the violence that went with it became his specialty and he glorified both

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