Word: lysistrata
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...impositions of motherhood" to be "an expression of self-hatred." Here she senses the movement's "true grievance": "Not that women are mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are ...women." Kicking against "the womb itself," Women's Liberation perversely drifts, like a bad update of Lysistrata, toward "female chastity," and a world of boycotted relationships...
...involved with the movement. To her horror, she is beginning to suspect that he's spending the time she is away fooling around with other women. "It's just possible," she says, "that all men are male chauvinists on some level. It just may be that the Lysistrata idea is the only way to get any sanity across...
...there is to fall in love with is sexual racists." But most of the sexual segregationists have sterner reasons. Their chastity is not so much a Lysistrata tactic, it seems, as a self-disciplinary measure. "Love between a man and a woman is debilitating and counter-revolutionary," argues Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, daughter of David of the Chase Manhattan Bank and a member of Women's Liberation hard-core Cell 16 in Boston. Declares Boston's Roxanne...
...finest performances belonged, as they should, to Amy Allen as Lysistrata and Charles Sanders as the Commissioner. These are the diametrically opposed forces, Femininity and Insurgance versus Masculinity and Authority. Sanders more-or-less consciously tries to create of the commissioner a sort of Greek W.C. Fields. It's a rather dangerous thing to do; if he didn't have the voice inflections, facial expressions, and gestures (especially flicking the cigar ash) timed so well, if they didn't seem to fit naturally, it would be the sort of characterization one could easily resent...
With the blending of arachaic and modern speech, the role of Lysistrata becomes much harder. She must be an intelligent, perceptive woman, a natural leader and clearly a cut above her fellow dames--but, on the other hand, one must not be shocked when she indulges in vulgarity for emphasis. Miss Allen succeeds admirably in making Lysistrata an authoritarian, and yet feminine, figure. That is why her finest line is her last, as she embraces the Commissioner and then demands, "Is that a pickle in your pocket--or are you glad...