Just As Darkness Is Sometimes

Men Weren't Really The Enemy - They Were Fellow Victims Suffering From An Outmoded Masculine Mystique That Made Them Feel Unnecessarily Inadequate When There Were No Bears To Kill.

The Problem Lay Buried, Unspoken For Many Years In The Minds Of American Women. It Was A Strange Stirring, A Sense Of Dissatisfaction, A Yearning That Women Suffered In The Middle Of The Twentieth Century In The United States. Each Suburban Housewife Struggled With It Alone. As She Made The Beds, Shopped For Groceries, Matched Slipcover Material, Ate Peanut Butter Sandwiches With Her Children, Chauffeured Cub Scouts And Brownies, Lay Beside Her Husband At Night, She Was Afraid To Ask Even Of Herself The Silent Question - "is This All?"

Men, Also, Have In Them Enormous Capacities That They Have To Repress And Fear In Themselves, Living Up To This Obsolete And Brutal Man-eating, Bear-killing, Ernest Hemingway, Crewcut Prussian Sadistic, Napalm All The Children In Vietnam, Bang-bang You're Dead, Image Of Masculinity, The Image Of All Powerful Masculine Superiority That Is Absolute.

The Only Way For A Woman, As For A Man, To Find Herself, To Know Herself As A Person, Is By Creative Work Of Her Own.

American Housewives Have Not Had Their Brains Shot Away, Nor Are They Schizophrenic In The Clinical Sense. But If ... The Fundamental Human Drive Is Not The Urge For Pleasure Or The Satisfaction Of Biological Needs, But The Need To Grow And To Realize One's Full Potential, Their Comfortable, Empty, Purposeless Days Are Indeed Cause For A Nameless Terror.