UNNATURAL EQUALITY

Survival, Betty explained, was her primary concern. Women’s lib? “I’m not interested.” Religion? “I don’t go to church. They’re robbers. I can prey at home, and He’ll hear me just the same. I don’t have to pay for it.” • Luaretta Galligan married in 1944. She found herself alone most of the time when her husband’s company assigned him a job that kept him away from home six days a week. To make friends and keep busy, Lauretta opted for a job and attended night school. As her household expanded to include five sons, she dropped her outside interests to spend more time at home, “making sure everyone is going in the right direction,” as she put it. At age 52 she still rises at 6:30 to prepare her husband’s breakfast and get the two sons off to school. She smiles happily when her husband, Thomas, calls her his “greatest asset.” Said Lauretta: “My first priority is my family and my husband’s work, and then I work on other things.” She never plays bridge and only occasionally goes to fashion shows or luncheons. Most of her social life revolves around her husband’s business. “Being a homemaker and mother is very stimulating. I realize there are many things about homemaking that are a little bit monotonous, but a lot of things about a woman’s career or a man’s career can be monotonous too.” • “Why should I have children?” asked Suzanne Sape, 23, and a happily married woman who is upward bound in a management planning career. “I’m glad I’m married,” Suzanne said, “and I enjoy being feminine. I like to sew, and I was once really interested in fashion.” But Suzanne’s bent toward homemaking and shared joys did not extend to having children. “If I were to conceive,” she stated frankly, “I would have an abortion. I like children very much. I consider it an enormous challenge to raise them the way they should be raised. It takes an awful lot of time and energy and intellect to raise them to cope with the problems of a pretty crummy world.” Suzanne had talked with doctors, she said, about sterilization, but concluded that she did not want to risk the possible physical and psychological side effect. “If you are a career woman, how can you bring the child up?” Suzanne asked. “If a woman has a child, it should be a full time occupation for at least the first year, perhaps two or three. Three years is an awful big bite out of a career, and I’ve spent a long time preparing for my career.” • Noraine O’Callaghan is against abortion — “It’s murder she told Time -— and she worried that some mothers use day care centers as a substitute for child rearing. But she sympathizes with most of the aims of women’s liberation, she said. Her one reservation: “In order to get into the system, a woman has to become like a man, and is therefore, probably no better.” • Marcia Heuber’s world is one of seasons and crops, dawn-to-dusk farm chores, the kitchen and children in a rambling farmhouse. When she was in high school, Marcia told Time, “My biggest goal was to get married.” Though she works just as hard as her husband, Roger, she has no doubts about where she stands in relation to him: “I still feel the male sex