Word: birthright
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...criminals, not academics! Kirkpatrick and Weinberger's concept of "academic freedom" is crystal clear in San Salvador where their puppets shut down the National University at gunpoint. And Botha's apartheid regime exists by enslaving the country's black majority through a regin of terror, stripping them of their birthright and land, and transforming South African black workers into a migratory labor force with prison camp-like compounds and onerous pass laws...
...frustrated novelist in Manhattan, contemplating his third mid-life crisis; the divorcee in Iowa City, typing out the beastly habits of her ex-husband; such writers might well envy the panoramic scene that Nadine Gordimer inherited as a birthright. The raw material is, to be sure, stupendous: an outlaw nation on a seething, exotic continent, with a social system based on a fiction of magnificent folly. Given such stories, what author could fail? Gordimer has been fortunate in her subject, but she continues to magnify this gift, to transform what is happening into fiction not to be forgotten. -By Paul...
...would decide the wording of school prayers; the possibility of offending children from families of minority religious beliefs; and the fundamental issue of the separation of church and state. Connecticut Republican Lowell Weicker, who led the opposition, concluded the Senate debate by asking his colleagues, "Why forfeit our birthright of religious liberty for a mess of speculative, political pottage...
...women from the stereotypes and narrow possibilities that have bound their lives is one of the great movements of this century or of any other, an expansion of the concept of our human dignity and of our worth. One-half of the human race is waking to claim its birthright. The full participation of women in our national life-in our courts, capitols, boardrooms, precinct houses, theaters and universities-will flood this country with new energy and imagination and genius...
Realistically, now, it will have to stand as a birthright deferred. Feminists of both genders attached a strong symbolic importance to the passing of the ERA and find in its final and formal defeat last week intimations of national malaise (see following story). "It is an appalling obscenity not to pass the ERA, when everyone knows women have to work and society wants them to work," says Novelist-Critic Elizabeth Hardwick. "There is an illiberal and I think tyrannical minority imposing its will on obvious needs for social change," remarks Novelist John Irving, who wrestled questions of feminism and family...