Word: chesler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Women, Money and Power, Phyllis Chesler and Emily Goodman deplore the reluctance of the business world to admit women. Anyone who's glanced at its full-page business promotions in The New York Times, knows that Cosmopolitan, say, provides some of advertising's most lucrative exposure. Women are constantly manipulated by business firms, yet they rarely have a say, as executives, in how this is done: the tradition of the nurturant and emotionally unstable female gets in the way of such careers...
Women often work as volunteers, claiming their "help" is needed, without examining what these activities satisfy in themselves. Chesler and Goodman have found that the average female volunteer believes that she is not really worth taking seriously. She shirks being judged by "professional" standards, being fired, reprimanded or competed with. "She is a 'good' woman: although she is working outside her home, everyone knows that most female volunteers are primarily loyal to their families--and not to their unpaid volunteer work...
...sexual experience A woman is supposed to let sex sort of happen to her. Traditionally, she's not supposed to want to make sex; nor, as a wife, is the woman traditionally allowed to make money. In her domestic role she is supposed to provide sexual services, among others. Chesler and Goodman note the stigma that results when the married woman's usual duties are connected with money--both the prostitue and the maid are commonly labeled low-class creatures. In a pretty devious way, a predominant feminine image turns out not to mix with a yen for money...
...their bodies and their sexuality. Sometimes it seems hard to get men to listen to a woman unless she humbles herself a little--there are too many jokes about the shrewish type. When a woman says no, her body tends to find ways to soften or deny her words; Chesler and Goodman call it using her body "deferentially." She adopts certain mannerisms as a way for daring to threaten, rather than to put men at their ease. It is more acceptable for women than men to behave childishly, thereby rendering themselves less imposing as sexual beings...
With no pretense of objectivity, Chesler includes herself among her 60 subjects (in the feminist category). Moreover, as she interviewed the others, she often argued to bring them around to her way of thinking. When she is unable to provide documentation, she simply prefaces generalizations with "probably" or "I suspect that . . ." Furthermore, she does her cause a disservice by her advocacy of a society in which women are not equal but dominant and her suggestion that "science must be used to release women from biological reproduction-or to allow men to experience the process." Such eccentricities obscure both the legitimate...