The Second Stage
by Betty Frieden.
It was a man, the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who first drew my attention to anthropological data from the studies of many cultures which indicate that the more isolated and polarized the role of men and women – as, for instance, in those societies where women are shrouded in veil or chador, walled in the harem or sexual ghetto and not even allowed to move in the city at all, their only point of contact with men the sexual act itself – the more sex becomes an obsession and is defined as ‘dirty’.
…and in such societies, where basic human sexual needs for intimacy are alienated, violence breeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Stage
page 206
But the sexual politics that distorted the sense of priorities of the women’s movement during the seventies made it easy for the so-called Moral Majority to lump ERA with homosexual rights and abortion into one explosive package of licentious, family-threatening sex.
There is no doubt that the radical right, with its mysterious sources of endless money behind that pious Moral Majority front, is using abortion and homosexuality as sexual red herrings in its frighteningly successful drive to take over the United States Government and repress dissent, whatever its real aims.
…
page 207
But up through history to Hitler and the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran – and not exempting Stalinist Russia and most communist regimes today [1981] – control and manipulation of sexuality and the family, and suppression of the rights and personhood of women, have been key elements in authoritarian power.
The manipulation of sexual hysteria and the repression of women are more than diversionary: they build a reservoir of impotent rage and frustrated energies in the family which can be diverted into violence, for one thing. The emotions and repressions linked to sexuality are so powerful that it is relatively easy to divert people’s attention from their own basic economic interests and even from asking the tough political questions simply by manipulating sexual hysteria (just as it is easier to sell people things they don’t really need with those subliminal sexual messages.
Of course, the more real sexual liberation – and real satisfaction of people’s needs for love and intimacy, which may be possible only when women and men can live as relatively secure, self-respecting equals – the less possible for any dictator or demagogue to manipulate people that way, against their own interests.
…
page 250
…I heard a report on ‘The Professionalism of Feminism’ …at Columbia University. The [unnamed] political scientist had tried to find out how the women’s movement had accomplished so much in less than 20 years.
But what she found, in 1980, was a ‘professionalization’ of feminism very different from the women’s movement as it began (or as I experienced its actual history). She found the ‘the movement’ was now a set of professional feminist groups organized around single issues, operating from headquarters in Washington, like all the other lobby groups, its activities consisting of the professional efforts of a relatively few well-trained women graduates of the best law schools.
…
What worried her was their lack of ‘ideology,’ lack of funds, lack of ‘charismatic leaders,’ and lack of ‘members’ in a grass-roots sense.
page 258
Do they [radical Right] really want o force women to have more children? Do they rally want to outlaw abortion? Or do they want to keep pushing it as a diversionary issue, twisting and manipulating the agonizing conflicts people can’t help facing now, about the costs and problems of having children, and their own values in life – diverting the rage away from those who profit from inflation, with sexual, ‘moral’ red herrings? But the power of their campaign, and the rage they are able to divert against those who speak openly and honestly about the choices all must make now, come, at least in part, from the pain and the deep insult to their human core that people may be truly experiencing as they are manipulated deeper and deeper into the depersonalizing material rat race, loosing control of their lives.
page 288
The Grand Domestic Revolution – A History of Feminist Design for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities by Dolores Hayden (MIT Press 1981) – Downloaded PDF version
Material Feminism: group housing, communal kitchens, shared child-care, professional cleaners
Women’s magazines – Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Home Companion, enthusiastically covered these ‘cooperative housekeeping’ experiments. There were dozens of community dining clubs or cooked food delivery services, some which lasted for decades.
page 292
In 1919 the Ladies’ Home Journal sponsored a contest, giving prizes for new schemes for living involving community kitchens, laundries and day-care centers, as well as kitchenless houses and apartment hotels. ‘The private kitchen must go the way of the spinning wheel, of which it is the contemporary.’
page 293
“And then, suddenly, it all ended. At the end of 1920, the women’s magazines abruptly stopped warning women against domestic appliances which did not meet their real needs and stopped advocating cooperative household services. Hayden reveals that advertising and marketing firms spent one billion dollars in 1920 to promote the glories of the isolated domestic housewife – and the science, or new religion, of mass consumption. Ads for vacuum cleaners and toasters to make women ‘free’ – using the very language of feminism to undo it – were strengthened by new consumer-credit systems to encourage the housewife to buy.”
page 294
“And a massive Red-baiting campaign was launched against all feminists. In the ‘Red scare’ of 1919-20, a spiderweb chart of all feminist activists and organizations was circulated by the Navey Department, indiscriminately smearing the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the YWCA, The American Home Economics Association, the American Association of University Women, and the League of Women Voters, which was the successor of the great suffrage organizations. But their attacks were were especially venomous against the material feminists, who they claimed were advocating ‘free love,’ ‘unnatural motherhood,’ ‘futurist baby-raising,’ and ‘social hot-beds’ like apartment hotels, which would undermine the family as an ‘institution of God’ if women did not stay at home and stick to their own housework.”
page 310
“It was a man, the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who first drew my attention to anthropological data from the studies of many cultures which indicate that the more isolated and polarized the role of men and women – as, for instance, in those societies where women are shrouded in veil or chador, walled in the harem or sexual ghetto and not even allowed to move in the city at all, their only point of contact with men the sexual act itself – the more sex becomes an obsession and is defined as ‘dirty’…And in such societies, where basic human sexual needs for intimacy are alienated, violence breeds.”
page 311
“The way capitalism has exploited the alienated human needs for love and dignity, and has, above all, exploited the resulting sexual obsession for profit and power, has diverted people from paths towards true autonomy.”
page 312
“In some profound symmetry, which Freud and others have depicted as ‘life’ force’ and ‘death force’, there is a basic energy, which, if thwarted in its service of life and growth, ultimately serves death.”
page 322
“Fully self-realizing people, as psychologist Abraham Maslow found, can reach ‘peak experiences’ akin to religious ecstasy in sex, but they are no longer driven by it.”