FIRST, LET’S GET rid of the transsexual mash notes. According to Letty Cottin Pogrebin (“an unabashed man fan”) most men are “emotionally honest and uncomplicated … professionally realistic and straightforward … not devious or malicious in their personal relations … usually dependable confidants, lavish with praise, fair-minded, and seven and a half times out of ten they have fascinating intellects, interests, or opinions.” According to me, without women the world wouldn’t be worth living in; seven times out of ten, working women make better wives and mothers than the girl who settles for a tornado in her kitchen; and ten times out of ten, working women are more interesting than any other anybody. So much for the castrating feminist and all those hairy oafs who, never having graduated from the Cub Scouts, want for companionship a combination of Den Motherhood and Tupperwariness.
What’s left? One side practicing karate chops, the other fantasizing about the primordial hunting party? Left is a society that wastes half its brains; a culture dividing its sexes according to work objects and play objects; a tax structure pinning women beneath a glass bell that is furnished only by a bed, an oven, and a diaper pail. (The daily $25 business lunch is tax-deductible; the daily $20 child care is not.)
To that society, culture, and tax structure both Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Cynthia Fuchs Epstein address themselves in very different but superbly complementary books. Mrs. Pogrebin—if you read her book you will realize how silly it seems to refer to her so formally—advertises the satisfactions of a career in publishing, advertising, TV, newspapers, motion pictures, and the stock market for women. Mrs. Epstein—who acknowledges her husband as “my most spirited educator in the dynamics of role allocation”—explores why women have a hard time making it as doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, and engineers.
Presume a “Letty,” at nineteen a graduate of Brandeis; at twenty-one director of publicity, advertising, and subsidiary rights for Bernard Geis; at twenty-nine a lawyer’s wife, mother of three, happenstantially beautiful, loving every minute of it. Finishing her book, you want to mount a white stallion, gallop off, whisk her up, carry her to your castle where she can write your press releases, throw your parties, stun your friends, improve your mind. (Let’s not deceive ourselves: possession is nine-tenths of sexual fantasy.) Alas, she’s married. Then bottle her energy and sell it as pep pills; substitute her common sense for Muzak at all midtown business mausolea; feed her wit intravenously to Doctors Spock and Bettelheim; assign her to promote her book to the best-sellerdom it deserves.
She’s Supergirl. How to Make It in a Man’s World is an enchiridion for young women who don’t want to deposit their brains in the sugar canister. “Anyone who doesn’t like travel, parties, tasteful surroundings, good food, and intelligent people should have her head examined,” she says, and then proceeds to spell out how to get paid for it. Whether the chapter is “The Helping Hand and How to Keep It Off Your Body” or “If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Back to the Kitchen,” she has more to say about sexual chauvinism, interoffice envy, the thoughtful boss, lying about your age, how to take a man to lunch—strategy—than Norman Podhoretz and Robert Townsend in triplicate. And her account of the time Brendan Behan tried to rape her is … mind-expanding.
But what if you aren’t a Supergirl? Mrs. Epstein, assistant professor of sociology at Queens College and a project director at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, weighs in with the grim facts. Women’s Place is sociology with a vengeance (tables, footnotes, clotted prose), but there is more hard data, perception, cross-cultural comparison, and historical grasp in this book than in any other tome on the Woman Question that I’ve ever seen. (Mrs. Pogrebin doesn’t mention the fact that publishers push bright young women into publicity instead of permitting them to become editors.)
Mrs. Epstein looks at American child rearing, role conflict, the professions, women’s status in radical movements, the psychological consequences of piercing the Sex Curtain, and the ways that other countries cope with the problem. She isn’t as breezy as Mrs. Pogrebin—e.g., “To the extent that a status is institutionalized within a body of other statuses and there are definite prescriptions as to the total composition, and to the extent to which one social pattern (social circle and social customs) is integrated with another social pattern (occupation and mode of operation within the occupation), the range of other possible statuses will be limited”—but she cuts deeper.
As of 1960, less than 10 percent of our lawyers, doctors, engineers, and scientists were women. (Eighty-five percent of our librarians, 97 percent of our nurses, were.) Women receive only 11 percent of all the Ph.D.s awarded in this country. Professional women are less than half as likely to be married as professional men. Mrs. Epstein explains why. It is an unsavory story. We should be doing better not only because society needs those female brains, but also because women happen to be people.
In my family, there is one Ph.D. It doesn’t belong to me. There are two children. They are better than most. Betty Friedan may be right in interpreting sex bias as a means of preoccupying women with consumership. Mrs. Epstein may be right in deciding that “few middle-class women put the playthings of childhood behind them…. Their babies take the place of their dolls.” Mrs. Pogrebin may be right in contending that most women are bored and failure-fearful. One thing’s sure: Anyone still disposed to laughing off “Women’s Liberation” is stupid.