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By Root 1976 0

of real values in women’s experience that were hidden beneath the feminine mystique. There is much talk lately of a third sector, of civic virtue, Harvard professors and others discovering that the real bonds that keep a society flourishing are not necessarily wealth, oil, trade, technology, but bonds of civic engagement, the voluntary associations that observers from De Tocqueville on saw as the lifeblood of American democracy. The decline of these organizations is blamed in part on women working. All those years when women did the PTAs, and Scouts, and church and sodalities and Ladies Village Improvement Society for free, no one valued them much at all. Now that women take themselves seriously, and get paid and taken seriously, such community work, in its absence in 1996 America, is now being taken seriously, too. Some social scientists and political gurus, right and left, propose that the third sector can take over much of the welfare responsibilities of government. But the women, who constituted the third sector, know that it cannot all alone assume the larger responsibilities of government. Our democracy requires a new sense of combined public, private, civic, and corporate responsibility.

In 1996 I flew back to Peoria, to help give a funeral eulogy to my best friend from high school and college, Harriet Vance Parkhurst, mother of five, Republican committeewoman and ingrained democrat. Harriet went home to Peoria after World War II, married a high-school classmate who became a Republican state senator, and while raising five kids chaired and championed every community campaign and new cause from a museum and symphony to Head Start and women’s rights. There were front-page news stories and long editorials in the Peoria papers on Harriet’s death. She wasn’t rich and famous, she had no male signs of power. I like to think this new serious tribute to a woman who led the community in nourishing those bonds once silently taken for granted as women’s lot was not only a personal tribute to my dear friend, but a new sign of the seriousness with which women’s contributions, once masked, trivialized by the feminine mystique, are now taken.

In other ways, too, it’s the widening of the circle since we broke through the feminine mystique, not the either-or, win-lose battles, that stirs me now. A reporter asks me, in one of those perennial evaluations of whither-women, “What is the main battle now for women, who’s winning, who’s losing?” And I think that question almost sounds obsolete; that’s not the way to put it. Women put up a great battle, in Congress and the states, to get breast cancer taken seriously, get mammograms covered by health insurance. But the bigger, new threat to women’s lives is lung cancer, with cigarette advertising using feminist themes to get women hooked on smoking while men are quitting.

The large sections in bookstores and libraries now given over to books analyzing every aspect of women’s identity, in every historical period and far-flung nation or tribe, the endless variations on “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus,” and how-to-communicate with each other (“They just don’t get it”), are surfeiting. Men’s colleges have become almost extinct in America. When the courts decree that the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel can no longer be funded by the state unless they give women equal, and not separate, military training, the new attempt to claim that separate sex colleges or high schools are better for women, that the poor little dears will never learn to raise their voices if they have to study and compete with men, is, for me, reactive and regressive, a temporary obsolete timidity.

In colleges and universities from the smallest community college to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, women’s studies are not only taught as a serious separate discipline, but in every discipline now, new dimensions of thought and history are emerging as women scholars and men analyze women’s experience, once a “dark continent.” In June 1996 the first national conference devoted to female American writers of the