Word: howe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Female Impersonator. Howe was unaware of Kate's confession when he reviewed Sexual Politics for Harper's, but he nevertheless sensed a sexual ambiguity in its author. Kate, he writes, "shows very little warmth toward women and very little awareness of their experience. There are times one feels the book was written by a female impersonator...
What bothers Howe even more is Kate's "lack of intellectual sophistication," betrayed, he says, by her "dominating obsession" with the idea that all male-female differences except anatomical ones are culturally rather than biologically determined. Besides, he continues, she maligns Freud when she brands him a counterrevolutionary whose theories set back the cause of women's freedom. On the contrary, Howe believes, Freud's ideas paved the way for today's concern about sex roles. He tried to free women from "subordination to domineering fathers," and to help them like themselves as women. That, says...
Masters and Chattels. Though he admits that women have been exploited, Howe points out that men have, too, and in the same way: as members of disadvantaged classes rather than as members of one sex or the other. Moreover, "males may have been 'masters' and females 'chattels,' but this is perhaps the only such relationship in human history where the 'masters' sent themselves and their sons to die in wars while trying to spare their 'chattels...
...Howe has nothing but scorn for the Millett assertion that only men have human work to do. Asks he: "Is the poor bastard writing soap jingles performing a 'human' task morally or psychologically superior to what his wife does at home, where she can at least reach toward an uncontaminated relationship with her own child...
...Howe asks, "cannot intelligent and humane people look upon sexual differences as a source of pleasure?" From Sexual Politics, "you would never know that there are families where men and women work together in a reasonable approximation of humanness, fraternity and even equality...