Letters

NOW and the women's movement

EDITOR: My commendations to Bari Watkins for her cogent essay, "The Women's Movement: Place and Power." In this letter, I will share a few comments on its contents. It is not the women's movement that has "failed" to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, but legislators in a few states, including Illinois, who have failed to accurately represent the majority of their constituencies and to therefore ratify ERA. Watkins did not note that Betty Friedan is wrong in asserting feminists derogate (denigrate is a racist word) the family; feminists reject the patriarchal model of the family which is unilaterally anti-equalitarian. Human societies did not create the dichotomies and dualisms that Watkins articulates well; androcentric and male-dominated values and mostly men created these unhealthy phenomena, and males equal less than half of society, not the whole of society, as implied.

NOW, National Organization for Women, Inc., is the world's largest feminist organization and not merely a group, as the essay states. Contrary to the essay, NOW and other organizations did not "focus almost exclusively on removing the barriers to women's upward mobility." When I became president of NOW in 1971, we organized 28 task forces and several committees on everything: population choice, peace and internationalism, art, sexuality, health care, economic systems, politics and religion and many more. Androcentric media filter out most of our work intended to totally transform society, not merely reform a few areas. Finally, I would recommend that Illinois Issues itself include feminist perspectives on all issues. An occasional article or essay about the women's movement made to seem peripheral and marginal to the many other issues (including all of the other many Illinois Issues articles, for example), implicitly devalues the fresh and holistic perspectives of feminists on all human affairs.

4 | September 1982 | Illinois Issues