One of the good things for men in women's liberation is that men no longer have to pay women the old-fashioned courtesies.
In an article on the new manners, Ms. Holmes says that a perfectly able woman no longer has to act helplessly in public as if she were a model. For example, she doesn't need help getting in and out of cars. "Women get in and out of cars twenty times a day with babies and dogs. Surely they can get out by themselves at night just as easily."
She also says there is no reason why a man should walk on the outside of a woman on the sidewalk. "Historically, the man walked on the inside so he caught the garbage thrown out of a window. Today a man is supposed to walk on the outside. A man should walk where he wants to. So should a woman. If, out of love and respect, he actually wants to take the blows, he should walk on the inside--- because that's where attackers are all hiding these days."
As far as manners are concerned, I suppose I have always been a supporter of women's liberation. Over the years, out of a sense of respect, I imagine, I have refused to trouble women with outdated courtesies.
It is usually easier to follow rules of social behaviour than to depend on one's own taste. But rules may be safely broken, of course, by those of us with the gift of natural grace. For example, when a man and woman are led to their table in a restaurant and the waiter pulls out a chair, the woman is expected to sit in the chair. That is according to Ms. Ann Clark. I have always done it the other way, according to my wife.
It came up only the other night. I followed the hostess to the table, and when she pulled the chair out I sat on it, quite naturally, since it happened to be the chair I wanted to sit in. I had the best view of the boats.
"Well," my wife said, when the hostess had gone, "you did it again."
"Did what？" I asked, utterly confused.
"Took the chair."
Actually, since I'd walked through the restaurant ahead of my wife, it would have been awkward, I should think, not to have taken the chair. I had got there first, after all.
Also, it has always been my custom to get in a car first, and let the woman get in by herself. This is a courtesy I insist on as the stronger sex, out of love and respect. In times like these, there might be attackers hidden about. It would be unsuitable to put a woman in a car and then shut the door on her, leaving her at the mercy of some bad fellow who might be hiding in the back seat.
It can be concluded from the passage that ______.
A．men should walk on the inside of a sidewalk
B．women are becoming more capable than before
C．in women's liberation men are also liberated
D．it's safe to break rules of social behaviour
It is true, as the movement critics assert, that the present women's liberation groups are almost entirely based among "middle class" women, that is, college and career women; and the issues of psychological and sexual exploitation and, to a lesser extent, exploitation through consumption, have been the most prominent ones.
It is not surprising that the women's liberation movement should begin among bourgeois women, and should be dominated in the beginning by their consciousness and their particular concerns. Radical women are generally the post war middle class generation that grew up with the right to vote, the chance at higher education and training for supportive roles in the professions and business. Most of them are young and sophisticated enough to have not yet had children and do not have to marry to support themselves. In comparison with most women, they are capable of a certain amount of control over their lives.
The higher development of bourgeois democratic society allows the women who benefit from education and relative equality to see the contradictions between its rhetoric (every child can become president) and their actual place in that society. The working class woman might believe that education could have made her financially independent but the educated career woman finds that money has not made her independent. In fact, because she has been allowed to progress halfway on the upward-mobility ladder she can see the rest of the distance that is denied her only because she is a woman. She can see the similarity between her oppression and that of other sections of the population. Thus, from their own experience, radical women in the movement are aware of more faults in the society than racism and imperialism. Because they have pushed the democratic myth to its limits, they know concretely how it limits them.
At the same time that radical women were learning about American society they were also becoming aware of the male chauvinism in the movement. In fact, that is usually the cause of their first conscious 100 verbalization of the prejudice they feel; it is more disillusioning to know that the same contradiction exists between the movement's rhetoric of equality and its reality, for we expect more of our comrades.
This realization of the deep-seated prejudice against themselves in the movement produces two common reactions among its women: 1) a preoccupation with this immediate barrier (and perhaps a resultant hopelessness), and 2) a tendency to retreat inward, to buy the fool's gold of creating a personally liberated life style.
However, our concept of liberation represents a consciousness that conditions have forced on us while most of our sisters are chained by other conditions, biological and economic, that overwhelm their humanity and desires for self-fulfillment. Our background accounts for our ignorance about the stark oppression of women's daily lives.
The basic difference between Middle Class women and other women in the liberation movement is that _____.
A．Middle Class women are not married and have no children.
B．Middle Class women are not afraid of their husbands.
C．other women have less control of their own lives.
D．other women grow up with no rights to vote.
