UNNATURAL EQUALITY

more comfortable, pampered by gadgets. But there is a worm in the apple. She is restless in her familiar familial role, no longer quite content with the homemaker-wife-mother part in which her society has cast her ... Many are in search of a new role that is more independent, less restricted to the traditional triangle of — children, kitchen and church.” According to Angelo, all but the staunchest advocates of “women’s liberation” agree that woman’s place is different than man’s — but the restless American woman of the 1970s was not so sure just what that place was. The “new feminism” increasingly influenced young women to stay single, and transformed marriages by ending once automatic assumptions about woman’s place, stated Angelo. Widespread commercial dissemination of oral contraceptives — the Pill — together with the overturning of state laws prohibiting abortion on demand — a process which began in the mid-1960s, but remains enmired in controversy today -— had the effect of separating sexual relations from the solemn institution of marriage. In 1972, women already made up one third of the U.S. work force, but their pay was much lower than men and they were generally confined to the lower ranking and lower skilled jobs. A soaring divorce rate, however, meant that in 1972 some 20 million Americans lived in households dependent on women as the sole or principal bread winners. A Psychology Today survey at the time found that even among male respondents, 51 percent agreed that “U.S. society exploits women as much as blacks.”2 In the more colorful phraseology of the American politician, diplomat and author, Booth Luce: “Power, money and sex are the three great American values today, and women have almost no access to power except through their husbands. They can get money mostly through sex -— either legitimate sex, in the form of marriage, or non-married sex.”3 Indeed, the changes in sexual morality in Europe and the United Status during the 1960s and 1970s were drastic and pervasive. Unlike their parents, many members of the young generation view premarital sex as good instead of bad. A Gallup poll in 1970 in the United States found that three out of four students were indifferent to virginity, or the lack of it, in the person they marry.4 Said British gynecologist John Slome: ‘‘The kiss of the 1940s and 1950s has become the sexual intercourse of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”5 The effect on women has been dramatic. For those feminists who decried the fact that woman’s reproductive role made her a “prisoner of sex,” the Pill appeared as the key to freedom. “Without the full capacity to limit your own reproduction,” wrote Lucinda Cisler in Sisterhood Is Powerful, “a woman’s other freedoms are tantalizing mockeries that cannot be exercized.”6 But in the view of University of Michigan psychologist Judith Bardwick, instead of liberating women to enjoy sex, the Pill has replaced fear of pregnancy with fear of being used. “Far from giving young women the sexual license that men have so long enjoyed, the Pill has caused some women to resent male freedom even more,” Bardwick stated. “Far from alleviating anxiety over sexual use of the body, the Pill has exacerbated it.”7 The pill notwithstanding, unwanted pregnancies still occur by the tens of thousands, and the fight over legalization of abortion-on demand remains on center stage. And, the effects