UNNATURAL EQUALITY

should be dominant. I want my husband to feel he is the head of the household. We decide things together, but I think the final word should mostly be his.” Marcia also found time for social service activity like teaching Sunday school, playing the church organ, and so on. She is deeply proud of the life she has carved out for herself: ‘Being married and having a family were the most important things for me. I’m very happy with my profession.” • Lynn Young is 33, attractive, unmarried and likes it that way. “I wanted to be a surgeon,” she admitted, “but a friend at Stanford medical school discouraged me. He showed me how tough medicine is for a woman.” Lynn never feels the least pressure to marry. “There simply aren’t that many marriages I envy,” she said. “A lot of women are just hanging in there for the security, but that’s a dumb reason to get married.” • I used to call my husband, “AB — arrogant bastard,” started Eleanor Driver. “And he was, but he was strong and dominant, and I liked that. When the university offered me a job, he said, ‘Go ahead — but I want my socks washed.” A revealing portrait of the average American housewife and her response to “women’s lib” was drawn by author, wife and mother, Sue Kaufman:16 She is anywhere from 24 to 45 — a wife, a mother, a housewife. She is usually far from mad (crazy or angry), far from being wildly bitter -— but also far from being satisfied with what or where she is. Though she isn’t too clear on where she would rather be, she knows it isn’t up there on the big, steam rolling bandwagon of Women’s Lib, or in the front ranks of the marching phalanx, waving banners. Much as she admires them. And she does admire them ... She is overwhelmed by a terrible sense of wrongness, of jarring inconsistency. There was that surging, powerful feeling in the hall (when she went to hear a prominent feminist speak), and now, stranded on the linoleum under the battery of fluorescent kitchen lights, there is this terrible sense of isolation, of walls closing in, of being trapped… She has begun to think about the necessity of financial independence… About a job, part-time now, full-time later. If she has money of her own, she has begun to ask questions about separate bank accounts ... But most likely she will not divorce. At least not casually, and certainly not for any principle or idea. Moreover, she like, or loves, her children, and though they are often a terrible drain on her emotions and strength, she is simply not prepared to delegate most of their care to someone else. She also likes, or loves, her husband, and though she is no longer willing to put up with anything she considers an infringement on her rights or dignity, she is not about to blow up the whole works by refusing to do what was contracted at