- You sure know a lot about- - 1938. - To a "Feminist Perspective." This program is brought to you by the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center located in the Dean of Women's Office, 222 Strong Hall. The purpose of our program is to provide a forum for women to speak out on issues of concern to them and comment on the women's movement, which is remaking the shape and substance of women's and men's lives. We invite you to stop by our office in 222 Strong Hall to examine our library on the women's movement, to look over our career counseling and employment materials, or to talk with any of the staff members who would be interested in hearing about any problems of concern to women. This evening, the topic for our program is "So You're Single in a Couples World," and we have with us tonight as a guest moderator, Barbara Wald who has joined us from Kansas City. Because she has driven up to be on the program, this program has been prerecorded, and we will not be able to take any live phone calls during the program, but we invite any of you who are listening and have comments or questions concerning the topic under discussion to call our office or come by if you'd like to explore them any further. Barbara is the coordinator of the Women's Resource Service at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, which offers counseling and academic education, part- or full-time employment, volunteer work, aptitude testing, and job training programs. The service is part of the Division of Continuing Education at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Barbara received her master's degree in sociology at the University of Louvain in Belgium. She also, from 1958 to 1963, served as the national vice president of The Grail, an international movement for women working in Europe and Latin America. Currently, Barbara is working on a PhD in social science at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and the topic of her dissertation is the growing phenomena of the single woman in contemporary society. She has also been doing many workshops in the Kansas City area on single women and with single women, and through one of these workshops, one of the staff members in our office became acquainted with her, and invited her to come here this evening to do a mini workshop on the air. Also with us in the studio tonight are three single women who have come to share a little bit of their situations, their struggles, and joys, and their particular lifestyle, and we welcome them, so this evening we have with us Judy, and Susan, and Dina, and now here is Barbara Wald, our guest moderator. - Thank you, Janice. I'm really glad I could come up to Lawrence. This is my first visit here, and I'm especially glad that we can be together to talk about some of these important issues for women. I thought it might be helpful, since the audience can't really see us, if we would go around, and each one of us begin by saying where we're at at this point in our lives as single women, why we're here, and how we see ourselves, and from then, we can take off into some of the ideas, and they will be more meaningful if you have a little bit of introduction to us as persons, so I'll tell you a bit about myself. I am one of those things called a college dropout, at least at the time that I dropped out of college it was not en vogue to do so. That was many years ago, and I was 19 at the time, and I was very much inspired by the needs of the developing countries outside of our own country and the whole movement of human development, so I left college. I went through a training with an international organization called The Grail, which has its international headquarters in Paris, and has bases all throughout the world, and which was already, at that time, giving a great deal of encouragement to women to become competent professionals and to make some kind of positive contribution in society. My work with The Grail took me to all through Latin America, and for four years, I concentrated on Brazil, and, well, it's a whole story in itself, but actually, I helped to set up a social medical project in the interior of three years' duration, which is now completely under Brazilian leadership. Then, gradually, from there, I was offered a scholarship to the University of Louvain in Belgium, where I finished my college degree, and got my master's degree, at the same time, having a lot of contact with women in France, in Holland, in Belgium, in Portugal, and more and more ripening in my ideas about where we are as women at this point in history. Then I found myself, after that, having been invited to start an Institute of Social Research in Mexico, but really feeling the need to come back and define my own roots, and through a certain circumspect way, I finally came back to my hometown, Kansas City. I think it was at this point, and that was three years ago, that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I began to feel what it was to be a single woman in a couples world. Up until that time, I was very much caught up in a movement with a lot of esprit de corps and a lot of dynamism, and I was looking in other directions. Suddenly, I found myself in a one-bedroom apartment in a big complex in a city where I had to make friends all over again, not finding, easily, a job slot in which, with my international background, I fit, and beginning my studies for the doctorate at the university. My studies in social science led me to think a lot about the whole idea of the single woman in our society, and as I began to study, and I began casually to talk about these ideas, and here and there, people asked me to give talk. I began to get, more and more, the feeling that the more I talked about this, that I was hitting a real nerve center of human need because whenever I would mention this, I found such a response, and I began to get phone calls, and articles in the paper, and invitations, and I found that, really, very little has been done, very little focusing in on the needs and the possibilities for single women, but this is a very, very important area for more concentration. There's very little actual research that has been done on this, so this has become more and more a absorbing interest for me, not only from a study point of view, but from my own personal working out of my own life, so I guess that gives you some background about myself, and I'd like to ask some of the others now, Judy, to say something about where she's at. - Good evening. My story is sort of similar to Barbara's, I think, in that although I finished college before I went out into the world, I finished college in 1961, and then went to New Mexico to work as a housekeeper. During that time, the Peace Corps was developed, and I joined the Peace Corps in November of '62 and went to the Philippines to work as a teacher. After my two years' service in the Philippines, I worked in Washington on the Peace Corps Washington staff, and then, for about 3 1/2 years, and then I worked in training programs for new volunteers, mostly in Afghanistan, and my last service in the Peace Corps was in Afghanistan for about a year and a half or so. Toward the end of my Peace Corps career, I felt that I should make some career plans. Peace Corps is sort of something that grabs you up, and you sort of just keep going with it, and I had done that, and I didn't feel that it was going to be a good lifetime career, so I chose to go into law because I felt that that would be a good, give me a good sort of a basis to work from, and I guess sometime in there I realized, or something, that I wasn't going to get married, and I'm not married, and I never have been, and I kind of don't really think about it. I'm really caught up in developing my new career. I'm still a student in law school, but time will come when I'll be out in the working world again, and I know there'll be problems as a single person that I haven't ever seen. Again, the Peace Corps is kind of unique in that there's an esprit de corps that Barbara mentioned that you're all working together, and you have a goal, and there's not too much concern about the single woman, or the married man, or any, people just don't have that kind of label, so I expect I'll have somewhat of a rude awakening when I start my law practice, but I feel pretty confident I can handle it, so that's my story. - I don't know if I wanna follow these two fascinating stories. My story's gonna be shorter because I'm younger, than the others on the panel. I graduated from college last year in a major that I really had decided a couple of years before I graduated I didn't really wanna pursue in any kind of career way, but I do presently have a job that I feel is fulfilling, and I'm happy with that, and that's about... I'm single, and I had never been married. That's the of my story to this point, anyway. - I'm Dina, and now with my story. I entered the single world three years ago when I got a divorce. Prior to that time, I had been married for seven years. I got married when I was 18, left home, was at that time a student living at home, so I went from my parents' home into the home that I made with my husband. I have a daughter who will be five this month. I'm also a member of the professional world. I got my PhD in February, and made a major move here to Kansas to pursue my career, and I'll have to admit that even though there was a marked change in my lifestyle at the time of the divorce and adjustments that had to be made, all of the changes were not negative in nature, and it has been quite a challenge coping with some of the problems. It's also been very rewarding finding out many of the advantages of being single, and all in all, I'm very optimistic about the whole thing, and I'm really looking forward to the discussion tonight. - There's something that strikes me as we talk, and maybe this is a good point to mention it, and I don't know how the rest of you feel, but I don't think I particularly wanna come out as a kind of singles liberation movement in the discussion, at least the way I feel about it, and I don't know how you feel. I'm not advocating that everybody become single, or I have nothing against marriage, but I think that there are many, a growing number of women who, for many different reasons, are finding themselves in that boat, and my concern is, for myself and , how to make a full and creative lifestyle there. If that would ultimately, if marriage would come, that also could be a very full and creative lifestyle, much more of a partnership kind of situation, but sometimes I'm concerned, in a discussion like this, that we make that, least I'd like to make that clear, that this is not against marriage, as such, but much more how to make the most of this one particular type of life, which is single life. Would you sort of agree with that? - Yeah. - Yeah, most definitely. I think, whatever situation you happen to find yourself in, you have to develop as a person, and not feel that you're labeled in any way, and there's no one lifestyle that's perfect for everybody. - Right. - I really strongly agree. - Yeah, maybe it would be good, then, to take a certain overall look at the perspective of a single woman in the United States. In some ways it's, when we look at it, there's a lot of negative things that can be stressed. On the other hand, I personally feel that this is an exciting time to be a woman and to be alive. I think, as Toffler says in his book "Future Shock," that this is very much a turning point in which everything is being re-evaluated, in which institutions are feeling very uncomfortable about their own goals, and are resetting and rethinking in radical ways, and, well, we hear a lot about the restructuring of family life, the whole open marriage concept about the redefining of sex roles, and I feel that this is a marvelous time, also, for the single person, and specifically the single woman, to take a new look at herself, and rather than accept a certain derogatory connotation, which I think, for generations, has been associated with single women, even very, semantics like spinster and old maid, and we don't use those so much anymore, but I think the same derogatory connotation still, even the word single woman. I always, I like to think about the TV commercials of 7 Up, and look, I can mention it here, but it just seems to me that that was always sort of the second-best thing. The important thing was to be a cola, and I think a kind of clever reevaluation of uncola has given it, instead of a derogatory, a very positive connotation, and it seems to me that that could be maybe a small example of what we're facing as single women. Well, what is the situation of a single woman in the United States? First of all, if we realize that, according to the 1970 census, that single women over 30 represent 8 to 9% of the population. That may not seem a very large figure, but when we realize that the black population in this country of both sexes and of all ages represents from 10 to 11%, then we see that it's a substantial and powerful group. Out of the 20 million unmarried women, both never married, divorced, and widowed, the figures show that 12 million of these single women are never married, and of that group, nearly half are in their middle years. I guess I have a particular concern for the, what we might term the middle-aged single woman 'cause I think this is maybe one of the people in our American society that is the least recognized and the least utilized of all the resources that we have. I think, I was very interested in Susan Sontag's article in the "Saturday Review" on the double-standard of aging, and it really struck me when she said that men age with apprehension because all, for all people, aging is difficult, but that women age with shame, and she said part of the reason for that is that men have been socialized from their childhood on towards a certain competence, and autonomy, and success-achievement motivation, which actually does not diminish as the years go on, but increases. Whereas Sontag says, and maybe it's a little bit too much black and white the way she says it, but I leave that to your discretion, but nevertheless, I think her point is well-made, that women are socialized from their childhood on as she says, to be perpetually, quote, the girl, and that means to have sex appeal, to be the girl that is always sexually arousing, and therefore, when she begins to lose that aspect, if she really does lose it, it depends on how you define sex appeal, but in the way that we, our society understands it, if she begins to lose that, she really doesn't have much to go on for the rest of her life in the point of being, of social recognition. Moreover, as Sontag says, too, she's socialized not only to be the one with sex appeal, but also to be the one who is the non-adult, the dependent, the passive, the indecisive, not controlled emotionally. Well, you can give a number of descriptions, which do not describe any one woman, but overall, form a kind of stereotype of the feminine personality in our society, and again, that sort of dependent, passive approach doesn't go well with aging. As you age, you tend to become more adult, and so woman loses, on all counts, the things that qualify her for social recognition. - I think another detrimental effect that this social conditioning has upon the individual, especially the single woman who's trying to cope with her role in society... Excuse me. Yeah, it's very difficult for her to then become a competent individual, even though this may have been by choice, the decision and the role that she assumed, for example, being a professional. A man who is just as competent is highly reinforced, is pointed to and given credit for his ability to stand on his own, whereas the woman not only usually does not receive positive recognition for this, but usually it's a very negative sort of feedback that she's receiving from society in general, family, and friends, this very independent woman, that's bad. It's very difficult for her, then, to maintain her own behavior, this pattern. I think what needs to be pointed out here is the importance of the self-concept of a woman. How does she view herself? Rather than basing her own self-concept so much on what other people are telling her, to start recognizing the value in what she's doing and be able to handle this, and sort of counter the negative forces that she's getting into. - That's a very good point, Dina, and I think we should gradually talk more about that, very specifically, how this develop this self-concept. I'd still like to say a couple of things about the overall profile of a single woman in our society. We looked at a little bit of the percentage of women, the fact that this could be a powerful group, and that it isn't, I think is linked to the fact that the single woman in our society is characterized by a certain invisibility and marginality. She is invisible in these vast urban complexes, very often living alone, not feeling any contact and support from any network of women in her situation or within the women's movement as a whole. She has very little voice in decision-making. We know that the job market, that there is a very real fact of discrimination against women, and that, well, I know for instance, one large industry in Kansas City where 89% of the women working there in the lowest clerical rung of the ladder, and I think this is typical for many single women. There are very few who make it to the top, who have a real share in policy-making or decision-making, but there are many, many single women who are working eight hours a day, pouring their energy into jobs that really don't interest them, and which they have no part in shaping, and therefore, all this reinforces that poor concept of themselves, and this kind of invisibility, this kind of marginality, makes for a mass group of single women who are untapped, as far as what they could be giving in society, untapped because they don't believe in themselves, and because society as a whole doesn't believe or recognize them, and I sort of think that's the point where we're at right now. - That last point you made, I think is really important in that it's really a two-way type of thing. I think a lot of women take a self-defeating approach, and they don't develop their own competencies because, for whatever reason, they don't develop them, perhaps because of what society's told them about themselves, but I'm kind of a strong believer in making it worth people's while to hire me, to have those competencies, which I used that word several times, but I really think that's important. If I'm competent in whatever they, whatever job I get, that's a plus for me and a plus for women too. 'Course I have to get the job, and that's the other side of the coin. - Yeah, well, we'll come back to our panelists and to Barbara Wald, who are discussing "So You're Single in a Couples World," right after this station break. Welcome back to a "Feminist Perspective," and we have with us tonight our guest moderator Barbara Wald, and three panelists who are discussing "So You're Single in a Couples World." Judy, you were saying something. I can't remember if it was when we were on the air or off the air, which maybe would be good to talk about now. Were we on the air when you said it? - I think so. Perhaps I can rephrase it. We were talking about self-concept and developing our own selves as human beings, and developing competencies, and not kind of just waiting for whatever people wait for, but not sitting back and waiting for a nice job offer, waiting for a husband, or waiting for the mail, or whatever, but getting out into the world, and competing, and growing as a person. - Yeah, I heard it said very well by someone recently. She said that a lot of us single women are like the meat that we put up in the freezer. The longer you leave it up there, the more taste goes out of it, and I think that's so true that we have been socialized to feel that marriage is it, and that somehow that's gonna drop out of heaven, and until it does, you wait, and I think it's so important to build a different attitude, what you were saying of really making a life of our own, assuming control of our circumstances, and I can just remember a little example of this myself of... I think a lot of single women have difficulty going through holidays. Holidays are very much a family kind of thing, and this is where you really feel yourself hanging onto the margins of the nuclear family, and I remember a few years ago myself dreading the Christmas season, and there's always the big question: Are you going to have a New Year's Eve date, and somehow or other your status hangs in the balance on that, and I remember suddenly saying, "Barbara, you're in control of yourself "and your circumstances," and sitting down, and really thinking out how I wanted to celebrate the holidays, and making a list of all the things I really dig, and also asking the all-important question how important is it, really, to have that date on New Year's Eve? - Right. - Like what do I do if no one asks me out? Do I stay home and brood about it and pity myself? Or do I ask would I enjoy going over to my friend's house alone? - Yeah. - Which, in many cases, is much preferable to staying at home alone. - Yeah. - So why not go? - Well, actually, what I did, I sat down and made a list of the people I wanted to celebrate New Year's Eve with. , you and I have friends in common, and I invited them, and we had a marvelous time, and it's just a little example, but I think it's the difference between the meat in the freezer- - Being passive, . - Or this assuming control of life and circumstances. How do you see that, Susan? You have anything to add to it? - Well, the one thing about being preferable to sit at home or go with friends, either one of those may be more preferable than the date that you with anyway. - That's a really good point. - I think that's really what you feel is something that you should do, that you, if you have, if someone calls you, and it is a date situation, should that be your, and I think women are kind of taught to grab at that before really thinking, "Now, would I have more fun with this person "that I may not know as well "as my other group of single women, "or married couples, or whatever?" And you're kind of socialized into thinking, "Well, of course, "a date would be better than doing anything else," so think we have to think about that too. - Yeah, we have to get out of that whole dating-and-mating bag, in a way, and think in a much broader way. I have a nice story, which might fit in here about this whole idea of building a life of your own. I have a friend who is from Wichita, and she came from a rural background, and from her earliest childhood she had a hope chest built up. Every year, the family and all her relatives would put gifts in it, and everything was building up to the moment when she'd announce a marriage and a shower would come. Well, she got to be 25, 27, 29, 31, and she said, "Look," she said, "I'm just moving into the city, and I have a good job there, "and I wanna start setting up an apartment, "and I would like all you relatives and family "to get the hope chest out, "and I wanna have an adult shower, "and I wanna start living, and not waiting," and this was a kind of an astonishing idea, but the family all pitched in, and they had a big shower, and they set her up in the apartment, and she was able to entertain, and to make something of her life, and it may be a little example, but I think we have to set new patterns and new styles, and I think that was a very clever thing- - Yeah, I, right, the kind of reinforcement that she got from that, the kind of affirmation that they accepted her as a person, and she didn't have to be a half of a couple or something that- - Yeah. - That she was a viable person in her own rights. - Mm-hmm, yeah. I think you really hit upon something crucial when you said a changing of parent. I think, too, oftentimes, we identify ourselves in terms of our roles based off upon sex alone, like I'm a female, therefore I must engage in only female-type behaviors, and oftentimes, we look at men in similar situations where they're alone, and they're also pursuing a career, setting up housekeeping, et cetera, and we say, "But they're different," and we neglect the fact that the commonalities are there, and what do men, what do people who are alone do when they go to a new city, for example? How do they go about contacting others? And I think, oftentimes, we can get some good information from males. How do they go about it? Taking the initiative, like most men will say, "Well, I call up people "that I've contacted through work, "or that I met through the church, "or some civic organization, "and I've invited them out for coffee, "or invited them to go to the show, "or invited them over to my home," and most women are somewhat askance, look askance at this type of behavior, and they say, "Oh, that's acceptable for a male to do, "but it really is unacceptable "for me to do something like that," and I think you really have to question that. Why is it so unacceptable? You are lonely, and you would like to meet people, and if you sit around waiting for the phone to ring, I think you're going to, oftentimes, wait from a very long time, and in the meantime, be lamenting the fact that you're not doing anything. - Yeah, that's an important point too. I know, whenever you get, in the workshops that I've been having, whenever I have single women together and I ask them, now, what do they really wanna discuss? What are some of the most urgent things they're coping with? That it comes down, again and again, that they really feel lonely and isolated, and, as they say, men call the shots, and we have to wait until something happens that will get us out of our loneliness. - Mm-hmm, the whole thing about waiting again. - There it is. It's- - But, well, I think the time has come not to buy into that stereotype, and as you say, to open up, to realize what Bach says in his book on "Pairing," he says that intimacy and closeness in relationship is right under our nose all the time if we would only open up to it. I mean, everybody's looking for warm, close, good relationships, and the question is to take advantage of the situations. That doesn't mean to be out on the make. It's quite different, I think, the kind of signals you send out, but it does mean to be open to genuine relationship, and I don't know about you, but I've been very impressed with the human potential movement, some of the kinds of things, like transactional analysis, and gestalt awareness, and some of these human encounter groups that help you to learn just very simple techniques for opening up to people and establishing contact, just such simple things as eye contact, or being able to say where you're at, not always, I think a woman so often is always pleasing, and always wanting to know where the other person is at, or what they want to do, but really being able to say where you're at, and then ask them where they're at, and in that way, to create a genuine kind of meeting. - The kinds of things you have fight in that really are almost overwhelming, that, of course, this woman is looking for a husband, and the kinds of signals that you may be giving may not be perceived the way that you want them to be, especially, say, you're young. If you're 22, everyone expects that of course she's gonna get married, and she's looking at someone else, and that's the reason, and think that's a problem too. - I like this too, except that I do think you send out different signals. It'd be kind of interesting to talk about this with men, whether they perceive the difference between just the attitude of flirting, or an attitude of being open for genuine relationship. - Well, I think, typically, though, the female, single female, is going to be somewhat suspect when she starts making overtures of any nature, and I think, if you bear this in mind, and be able to be a little thick-skinned, like, okay, you may be misperceived and misinterpreted at times. I think the important thing is to kind of turn off the idea of, well, gee, what are the neighbors going to think? Or gee, what is that guy gonna think if I say hi to him, and I wanna be friendly, and will he think I'm the wrong kind of a girl? The important thing is once you've made the contact, once you've established the relationship, then it can grow from there, and then the misperceptions and the misinterpretations can be ironed out. The thing you have to bear in mind is if you never make the contact, if you never open yourself up for a relationship to start anyway because you're so fearful, then it isn't going to go anywhere. - Right. - And you're going to stay in your own little lonely shell. Like, oftentimes, men are going to think maybe you're just on the make, but you're you, and once they get to know you, maybe this is going to change, and maybe you're going to have a friend. Maybe not, but at least it opens up new avenues for you to explore that weren't open for you before. - Yeah, and I think the more you have to give to the relationship in terms of your own experiences, and your own self-confidence, and so on, and in your working world or whatever, the less it seems that you're just, you just have one thing in mind, and that's to get married. I mean, I went through that sort of thing when I was younger, that I just sort of sat back and didn't give much to any relationships, and you are misperceived, then. I mean, there's more of a chance of it than if you're kind of an interesting person in itself, and you relate, one interesting person to another. If the other person isn't very interesting, well, you can always say goodbye. - Right. - I heard it said once that the greatest risk you can take is not to open up to a relationship, but then you really risk isolation. That's what you were saying too. - Right. - But that brings up a further point, and that is that we're talking now about relationship, and kind of typically, we're talking about the man-woman the single man, single woman, but it seems to me, and I think this is something maybe you meant too, Judy, that what all of us need, actually, is a wide range of relationship in our life, and we have to get out of just the zeroing in on dating and mating as the only kind of relationship, and, well, I've heard it said, for instance, that one person can actually realistically fulfill about 20% of your intimacy needs, even in the most perfect marriage situation, and it seems to me that we have to open up, as single women, not only to other men, but to other women. I think it's very important that we see women no longer as competition, but people that we're not ashamed to be with on Saturday night in a public place, and that can give us a great deal. There's a great deal of a network of support that we can have among ourselves. I also think the single woman can have very nourishing relationships with married people, and for instance, with married couples, together or apart. I hope that the time is coming when that kind of thing is not always misunderstood, and we're not always the threat to the home in trying to establish that kind of relationship. - I think oftentimes, it isn't just being viewed as a threat to the home. I think there's some awkwardness involved, and I think a lot of that is self-imposed. You feel awkward because you're single and the other people are a couple, and you feel like you're not contributing your full share, only 50%, and again, it goes back to the old idea what is your own self-concept? Aren't you, in reality, contributing 100% in the sense that you are a significant part of this triad? It doesn't have to be four individuals. - Right. - But it can be three, and hopefully, each of them is contributing 100%. - Exactly. - Right. - One thing that comes to mind on loneliness, which you've mentioned several times, Barbara, I think it's kind of a dangerous thing to look for an end to loneliness, that something is gonna happen that you won't be, ever be lonely before. I think a lot of married people who are living together are very lonely as individuals, and I think it's, part of it is just the human condition, perhaps, but it isn't something that only single people have, and it's something that all of us have to deal with. - Right. - Whether, whatever our situation is, and it's not always a bad thing to be alone. - No. - It's kind of nice sometimes, in fact, just to have your solitude, and to develop things within that solitude that are rewarding to you. - Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because I think, exactly, aloneness is often the thing we run away from. We sort of thrash out to get away from it, and Clark Moustakas has written a book called "The Creative Experience of Loneliness," and he says these are the points of breakthrough in our lives, where we come, often, in touch with ourselves in a way that we can never do with another person, and I think, again, a single woman has a chance to arrange her schedule in such a way that she has times of being alone. She can learn to enjoy herself, and instead of running away from this, I think if we would sort of embrace this to, now, I don't mean embrace anxiety, neurosis kind of loneliness, but embrace aloneness. It often is the key to real relationship with other people. If you're in touch with yourself, then, when you reach out, you can be in touch, in a much deeper way, with someone else, so I think that's well-stated that this idea of centering, of the within-ness of life is something that we have to deal with, and that can be an advantage. - Mm-hmm. Yeah. - Well, what else shall we talk about? We could go on and on with all these points. I guess the most important thing, it seems to me, we're trying to say, through all of this, is the question that at last women are waking up to the fact that we have to be adults, that we have to be decisive women who take responsibility for our life and for our circumstances, and the time of... - And to feel proud in the case where we are able to do this, rather than feeling ashamed because we're showing independence for coping with a single life. - Yeah. - Rather than fitting in into a mold that, perhaps, society has placed before us. - Yeah, I think maybe I could read a quote here from Sontag's article that might sum this up. I liked it very much when I read it, and I think she states it very powerfully. She says, "Women today have another option. "They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice, "to be competent, not merely helpful, "to be strong, not merely graceful, "to be ambitious for themselves, "not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. "They can let themselves age naturally "and without embarrassment, "instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, "who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women. "They can become women much earlier "and remain active adults, "enjoying the long career of which women are capable. "Women should allow their faces "to show the lives they have lived. "Women should tell the truth," and I think it's... - Wow. - It's... , and I like the idea of letting your face show the life you have lived, and I think, as single women, maybe that's where, the point we could end on. If we really would tell the truth, be authentic to where we're at, make something of the situation we're in, be authentic in our relationships, then I do believe that the uncola would become a viable and a very positive kind of thing. - Well, thank you Barbara, for coming here this evening and sharing some of your ideas and expertise in the single woman with us, and I wanna thank the three panelists, Judy, and Susan, and Dina for joining us. I would wanna say, for Barbara, we didn't talk about this, but she's doing a number of workshops in Kansas City, "So You're Single in a Couples World," for people who are trying to grow and cope with their situation. If you would be interested in finding out any more about this subject and participating in any of the workshops, you could contact our office, the Dean of Women's Office, 222 Strong Hall, and we would be glad to provide you information on participating in the workshops. I think the statistics that you gave us earlier would make us realize that there are probably a great many single people listening this evening, and perhaps some of them would like to pursue this further, and maybe meet other single people, and start coping with their situation with a different attitude, so I thank you very much for that. The "Feminist Perspective" will be back next week on Monday, December 11th, and the topic under discussion next week will be "Women in Politics: "Did We Make a Difference in '72?" Terry Edwards, a staff member from our office who went to the Republican National Convention, has been doing an overview of the outcome of the election and analyzing what has happened. Did women make a difference? What were some of the issues of concern to women? Did they vote differently on relationship to the issues? And so she will be with us next week to talk about the past election and analyze how women voted and what they did, so again, thank you, Barbara Wald and our three panelists, and listen again next week to a "Feminist Perspective."