Word: unfitness
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Although it is not mentioned often, there lurks in some minds an atavistic suspicion that women are not stable enough to occupy positions of leadership. Fourteen years ago, Dr. Edgar Berman, a friend of Hubert Humphrey's, produced a baroque masterpiece of sexism when he proposed that women were unfit for public office because every month they were subject to a "raging hormonal unbalance." It is a pernicious and ridiculous idea that is refuted by experience (women in positions of power do not behave any differently from men) and by logic (presumably women of mature leadership age would have passed...
...mutters one British war veteran who on the whole liked the Americans. And indeed the walls outside American barracks were lined every night with panting couples twined in a last embrace before bed check. William D. Kendall, who represented the town of Grantham, complained in Parliament that "it is unfit for a woman to walk unescorted" there because of the "unconcealed immorality" of the G.I.s. Others of course had a different opinion; some 60,000 British women eventually became American war brides...
Practically a generation has passed since that well-intended policy paper, the notorious "Moynihan Report," prompted an angry dispute over the nature of the modern American black family. The report is still persuasive, yet the touchy issues it raised were until recently judged almost unfit for public debate. Now, however, the precariousness of so many black families has become a central concern of black leaders. Unstable and ill-formed families are, says Eleanor Holmes Norton, former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "a threat to the future of black people without equal." Last week a national black sorority, Delta...
Equally precarious is the fledgling government of Sir Paul Scoon, the island's Governor-General. Two weeks ago, Antony Rushford, a Briton who was appointed by the Commonwealth to be Scoon's legal adviser, abruptly left Grenada after attacking the Governor-General as "quite unfit" to help restore democracy to the island. The leaders of Grenada's nine-member interim advisory council, which will administer the country until elections can be held, admit that they may be dangerously out of touch with some of their poorer countrymen who benefited from Bishop's rule. "The revolution...
...rape. The October reopening of the renovated Manhattan House of Detention, better known as the Tombs, will not help much, because officials plan to limit its population to one prisoner for each of its relatively luxurious 421 cells. Judge Lasker closed the jail in 1974 after declaring it unfit for human habitation...