PARTISAN
REVIEW
187
women free themselves from their "nature" and start creating and
inhabiting another history.
2. In the process of liberating women, do you give equal importance
to economic liberation and to sexual liberation?
The question seems to me to reveal the underlying weakness of the
very concept of "liberation." Unless made more specific, "women's libera–
tion" is an empty goal- and one which blurs the focus and dilutes the
energy of women's strugyle. I
am
not sure that the economic and the sex–
ual are two different kinds of liberation. But suppose that they are or, at
least, that they can be considered separately. Without more clarity
about what women are being liberated from and for, it is meaningless
to ask whether both liberations are equally important.
The notion of "economic liberation" can be used to cover up the
real issues. That women have access to a wide variety of jobs outside the
home for which they are properly paid is certainly a primary, unnego–
tiable demand. The key to women's psychologioal and cultural under–
development is the fact that most women do not support themselves–
neither in the literal (economic ) nor metaphoric (psychological, cul–
tural) sense. But it is hardly enough for women to secure the
possibility
of earning money through the opening up of more jobs, through the crea–
tion of free facilities for the care of young children. Work must not be
merely an option, an alternative to the still more common (and norma–
tive) "career" of housewife and mother. It must be
expected
that most
women will work, that they will be economically independent (whether
married or not) just as men are. Without work, women will never break
the ohains of dependence on men - the minimal prerequisite for their
becoming fully adult. Unless they work, and their work is usually as valu–
able as their husbands', married women have not even the chance of
gaining real power over their own lives whiah means the power ,to change
their lives. Tihe arts of psychological coercion and conciliation for which
women are notorious - flattery, charm, wheedling, glamor, tears - are
a servile substitute for real influence and autonomy.
Simply being able to work, however, hardly means that a woman is
"liberated." Large numbers of women already do work, and of these a
minority already earns wages that guarantee economic independence;
yet most women who work remain as dependent as ever on men. The
reason is that employment itself is organized along sexist lines. The
colonialized status of women is confirmed and indeed strengthened by
the sexist division of labor. Women do not participate gainfully in mod–
em work on the same footing as men. They play a supportive, back-up
role in the economy. What they do in "the world" tends to reproduce
