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By Root 2022 0

into the open real differences in ideology: I think my view of the sex-role revolution will emerge as the belief of those in the mainstream, and the man-hating fringe will evaporate, having represented a temporary phase, or even a planned diversion. It would be unrealistic, of course, not to expect forces threatened by the women’s movement to try to organize or provoke a backlash—as they are doing now in many states to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. For example, women were given a week off by employers in Ohio, bused over the state line, and put up in motels in an attempt to pressure the Kentucky legislature to block the Equal Rights Amendment. But I remember that the liquor companies spent millions of dollars to prevent ratification of women’s right to vote in Tennessee fifty years ago. And today who is financing the campaign to stop the final act of the women’s movement for equality? Not a conspiracy of men to keep women down; rather, it is a conspiracy of those whose power, or profit, rests on the manipulation of the fears and impotent rage of passive women. Women—the last and largest group of people in this nation to demand control of their own destiny—will change the very nature of political power in this country.

In the decade since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the women’s movement has changed my whole life, too, no less powerfully or joyfully than the lives of other women who stop to tell me about themselves. I couldn’t keep living my schizophrenic life: leading other women out of the wilderness while holding on to a marriage that destroyed my self-respect. I finally found the courage to get a divorce in May, 1969. I am less alone now than I ever was holding on to the false security of my marriage. I think the next great issue for the women’s movement is basic reform of marriage and divorce.

My life still keeps changing, with Emily off to Radcliffe this fall, Daniel getting his Ph.D. at Princeton, and Jonathan exploring new roads of his own. I’ve finished my first stint as a visiting professor of sociology at Temple University, and I’ve written my own uncensored column for McCall’s. I’ve moved high into an airy, magic New York tower, with open sky and river and bridges to the future all around. I’ve started a weekend commune of grownups for whom marriage hasn’t worked—an extended family of choice, whose members are now moving into new kinds of marriages.

The more I’ve become myself—and the more strength, support, and love I’ve somehow managed to take from, and give to, other women in the movement—the more joyous and real I feel loving a man. I’ve seen great relief in women this year as I’ve spelled out my personal truth: that the assumption of your own identity, equality, and even political power does not mean you stop needing to love, and be loved by, a man, or that you stop caring for your kids. I would have lost my own feeling for the women’s movement if I had not been able, finally, to admit tenderness.

One mystical footnote: I used to be terribly afraid of flying. After I wrote The Feminine Mystique, I suddenly stopped being afraid; now I fly on jets across the ocean and on one-engine air taxis in the hills of West Virginia. I guess that, existentially, once you start really living your life, and doing your work, and loving, you are not afraid to die. Sometimes, when I realize how much flying I do, I think there’s a possibility that I will die in an airplane crash. But not for quite a while, I hope, because the pieces of my own life as woman with man are coming together in a new pattern of human sex and human politics. I now can write that new book.

I think the energy locked up in those obsolete masculine and feminine roles is the social equivalent of the physical energy locked up in the realm of E = MC2—the force that unleashed the holocaust of Hiroshima. I believe the locked-up sexual energies have helped to fuel, more than anyone realizes, the terrible violence erupting in the nation and the world during these past ten years. If I am right, the sex-role revolution will