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University Daily Kansan, June 15, 18B
Opinion
Women are endangered
The women were alarmed to see a man standing near the showers in the women's locker room at Robinson gym. I looked up from upsetting my gym bag and stared into the face of a blond, young man who looked at me, glanced around the room and then walked out.
Two women taking showers, who had been in full view of the intruder, were exasperated. "He just walks in here, looks around and leaves," said one, obviously annoyed.
He looked like a college student and it had been hard to tell if he were participating in a private joke, or had been trying to annoy or frighten the women. He never spoke, but shortly after his appearance was reported to the towel desk, a red "Exit Only" sign was posted on the south doors of the women's new locker room.
It is presumed by the women using the locker room that the sign was posted and the door locked to the outside hallway so that women in the locker room would be protected from male intruders.
Occasionally, a woman who doesn't want to make that cold, wet trek from the swimming pool, around the weight room and into the women's locker room through the towel-desk entrance, will prop the south door open by putting a bar of soap next to the door iamb.
But other women remove the soap. They know that the locked door, in spite of its inconvenience, is meant to protect them. Women are perpetually under siege and we know it. That knowledge is disconcerting and examples of our vulnerability are everywhere.
Late at night, when the Kansan staff heads home, it is customary for the men to escort the women to their cars. No woman that we know of, has recently been raped or bothered, but in the early morning hours, on a deserted campus, the potential is there.
Although I am grateful for the concern of my male colleagues and appreciate their desire to insure my safety, I am also annoyed that I must constantly face the awareness of my own vulnerability.
It would be the unusual man who would worry about a woman invading the sanctity of the men's locker room, and an unusual woman who might try.
Men might fear darkness because they are potential victims of assault or robbery, but the concern they may have could not go to the core of their beings. They may fear being victimized, but they don't fear penetration.
Man can walk down the street free of the worry that someone might attempt to touch them, embarrass them, or simply frighten them with a disrobing glance or comment.
Last Saturday, women from Topeka and the surrounding area participated in a march called "Take Back the Night."
These night demonstrations are held throughout the country and allow women to walk together in groups, down dark streets, to demonstrate that in numbers, they are not afraid and to remind others that on most nights, women will curfew themselves rather than risk the dangers of walking alone at night.
What women take back in that brief moment of sisterhood and protection is the right to not feel afraid just this once. We are too conditioned, too forewarned to really believe that one evening march allows us to forever claim the night for ourselves.
Last year Helen Hagnes Mintiks, a violinist, was stripped, kicked and pushed, still alive, down the elevator shaft of the Metropolitan Opera House. He assailant was Craig Crimmins, a 22-year-old man who worked at the Met. He had been angered when she refused his drunken advances.
During an intermission, in a building where she worked, with hundreds of people nearby, Mintiks was killed. Her tragic death is still another reminder that women cannot consider themselves safe if men, even those we might know, are nearby.
The "Exit Only" sign is as comforting as it is discomforting. I can shower alone in the locker room and only be slightly fearful that a man will come in and that no one in the large, noisy building may hear me scream. But, for all its attempt to insure my safety, that small, red sign is a reminder of what I need no reminding of: my private entrances are vulnerable, because no place is really secure.
Memorial Day tradition brings back images of childhood and loved ones
In the crisp morning air of Memorial Day, or in the gentle evening before, my mother begins a ritual enacted in many gardens across the countryside. Like her mother before her, she plucks, cuts and pulls every available flower from its bush, vine and stem, and puts the tufts in all the clean pickle jars and aluminum-covered baked bean cans saved since last Christmas. From peonies to pansies, irises to roses, mock orange to marigold, each flower finds its place.
This tradition is, to my mother, 'what you're supposed to do to remember the dead—the ones you've lost'. It is an expression of love "they've done forever, for as long as I've known". As she covers the last make-shift vase in our big green casket, colored turtles, we are ready to leave.
We go to visit many of the local cineries ('graveyards' only to the town cynics). In those fields of stone, everyone from Aunt Addie and Untle Ollie to an unknown named Elphantis finds a small bonnet on the site where they were buried, or "planted." Multitudes of middle-aged women in green polyester slacks also set out vases on the graves of their own Elphantises. As my cousins and I had once met by the little pine tree by Gramma's grave, little kids in short run walk down the street and humbly nod to walk on the graves. Now, as then, aunts hurt together to speak in husked voices as uncles lunch against parked cars to quiet talk about "the cross."
As we walk across the closely cut grass, my mother smiles at me hopefully and says "Not many people do this anymore, Judy." "Hummmmm..." I reply.
Past the plastic flowers, past the etched marble, past the silent tombs, we walk. Past the reminders of those who were here. A boy thrown by his horse. Old John Lambert, of whom I told, "At fifty, he up and got married and made all the other Lamberts mudder 'en hell' cause he beat them out of his money." A mother buried with her baby in her arms. Young Dr. Wakum
who died in the Civil War. Many scattered markers: "Infant Son," "Infant Daughter," one with the inscription "Asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep./Where no one ever wakes to weep." A stone with a name my childhood mind thought "strange." I always wondered what a person with that name would look like. My sister ended up marrying one.
As we pass the ten-foot-high Praying Hands with the Lord's Prayer etched at the base, I'm told. "It’s always nice to leave a cemetery because you can’t always do it." And as we pass through the gate across from an old white house, I'm reminded of someone who didn’t leave—
Judy Crawford
"That's the window where Jimmy's friend Warren blew his brains out."
Beneath two spreading maple trees near the east edge of the Pumpkin Center cemetery, there lies a stone carved with the image of a lamb. My mother always stops here for quite a while, pulling weeds and remarking how close her car came to clipping the rosebush with the mower.
Unlike so many of the other graves with bouquets, this one sparks a memory for me. A confused five-year-old sat with her parents in a hospital room with big sunny windows. A man with cropped hair and black glasses, dressed in a white coat, walked in to say, "I'm sorry. We did all we could." Her parents began to cry. No more little sister to laugh at the wildlife with.
I place a small blue flower beside the rebound. Maybe this isn't such a stupid rift, after all.
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and telephone number of the writer with the University, the letter should include the writer's class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit letters for publication.
Leave the government out of abortion
Bv INAS. MOORE
New York Times Special Features
SAN FRANCISCO—I'm conservative and conventional, uncomfortable with raucous protest demonstrations, and hate even the word "abortion" since I know how traumatic they are from women who have endured them. But Irage when I hear our fetus-fixated legislators attack a school or separate of church and state through their play of "determining when human life begins."
We don't have to call upon erudite scientists or passionate politicians to find that human life begins at conception, even as we say the oak is in the acorn. Maybe even, as some believe, it begins when a soul selects a fetus as a vessel into which to be reincarnated! Who knows? But a woman can be born with a vessel when she "vessel" or whatever can viably come under "Cassas's" jurisdiction.
It is one thing for a religion to hold the belief that abortion is a sin and another for government to disallow abortion. The religious belief is embodied in a total concept of procreation from sex through parental responsibility. But in our culture, the family society, government machinery is weak at best.
Our courts do their faulty best with the complexities of custody suits, attempt to enforce (and subsidize) parental responsibility, fail utterly in regulating sexual practices (as they probably should), and are bogged down by an increase in the crime rate that is due partly to the postwar baby boom. Government can't keep children off alcohol and other drugs, and can't
educate a sizable percentage to read and write as well as people used to learn on their own. So now it needs to take on the care of fetuses? Hogwash.
Abortion is a toxic side-effect of the human condition. Would that society could ensure that there be no misconceptions. But that is utopian. Mindless nature has the task of compelling the survival of species - rabbits and whales and human beings. Those who can, breed.
But we human beings are different from the other species when, "in the image of God," we take dominion over nature's blind compulsion toward more and more; we must express our humanness when we feel and act upon concern for persons who result from our desires and instincts.
I am no expert on sex education, but I know the first lesson must be that they make babies; that babies hurt and sometimes die if they are not well cared for; and that human beings stay at the animal level if they think of themselves instead of the welfare of their offspring when they breed.
Recently I was sadly amused by some judicial decision regarding undergirl girls' "right to privacy and abortion." As I understood it, a "sufficiently mature" teenager may decide to abort; otherwise she must have the child. The court ruled that it is the dilemma of the court in adjudicating family-related problems) is that it takes less maturity to bear and nurture a child than not to have one!
No arm of government can cradle an infant as mother can, not nurture it through its gestures.
All the best that we know about nurturing us that there is no substitute for a happy mother;
thus, society augments nature by assigning women primarily this responsibility. So with them should lie the primary authority as to which babies come into this world.
Let government stand mute on the question of abortion while all of us attend our rightful business of teaching and being examples of women of responsibility toward the welfare of offspring.
We could keep mighty busy at very essential and life-promoting responsibilities before devolving ourselves to rhetoric about at what human nature fails under constitutional "protection."
Should we not begin to say with boldness that the child destined to die before gaining strength to either cry or coo should never have been born? And should we not be told that destined to fill a penal cell was innocent in some pre-fire Eden and condemned by human beings to "cruel and unusual punishment"? And must we judge the mature, responsible people who are destined to kill their children, which their compassion and judgment say "no."
Knowing, feeling, viable human life has always been cheap—in war zones, refugee camps, even in sorrowful pockets of our own cities.
So isn't it hypocritical, however well-informed? It is not correct to mention the right to life of a fertilized egg?
Of course it is a lot easier than worrying about born babies. Ask any mother.
(Ina S. Moore, a grandmother, describes herself as "an old woman without formal education who clerk-typed my kids through college." )
Editor's note: This is the first in what the Kansan hopes will be a series of summer guest editorials. Members of the Lawrence community and the University are encouraged to submit their editorials by noon of each Tuesday. Editorials should follow the guidelines set forth in the Letters Policy, and should be triple-spaced.
Are men to blame for feminists' problems?
By JOHN MACCHIETTO Guest Editorialist
Why is the women's movement dying? How dare I ever ask such a question? But yet, the more feminists I talk with, the more I hear that the women's movement is increasingly losing its steam. As disappointed as I am over dying feminism, I am not about to resign myself to its gradual death. Maybe it is my masculine training that has emphasized my logical thinking about sex and let this one go by without serious logical thought, an activity that many women criticize men for.
So why is the women's movement dying? My first impulse is to examine how it was born. But that means looking beyond the first women's protests. Let* go back to how people thought long before women's suffrage. In fact, let's look example from as far back as medieval Europe.
In those days, it was thought that men were vile, evil, ruthless, aggressive, powerful and brutal, matures, while women were the pure, tender, caring, brave, innocent, and helpless victims of wicked men.
But has this assumption changed any? We still teach our children that girls are "sugar and spice and everything nice" and that boys are "snips and snails and dog pats." It is still proper behavior that women and children escape a disaster first. It is because we as a society believe that girls are more innocent women and children are more innocent and deserving of life than men? I think the latter.
So, with this medieval assumption, feminism came to focus in the late 1960s. Awareness of how restrictive the women's role is in society became evident. When the world changed, Well, that same medieval assumption comes to life even stronger. Men are to blame for keeping women oppressed in their role! Women are the victims that are suffering from men's despicable compatriy in keeping them oppressed.
Now, not all feminists believe this. Most of my feminist friends and my female spouse accept the fact that men are as confined to their roles as women. I am often in men also suffer great costs in this confinement.
But the women's movement was founded on anger; anger that has been directed at that so-called wretched male animal. Of course, women have a right to be angry. Their traditional role is too confining. But so is that of men. Both men and women socialize their young into "sex-appropriate" behavior, and it is a cruel act to blame men for women's restrictive roles.
If blame is to be put on any group, it should be our whole society, of which women are one-half. Social values come mostly from men and women through the news media, education, parenting and other forms of socialization and not from our lawmakers.
Unfortunately, the image many people have of feminism is one of wallowing in the role of the helpless victim. In reality, feminism is such a broad concept, and victimization is not the only definition. Yet, this image is often most visible when general issues are addressed.
Men and women often do not hear the definition that does not blame men for women's
state of affairs; that equality is a two-way street,
meaning women and men are responsible for
having equal rights.
In fact, in many ways the helpless victim definition insults many feminists as well as men. How can a woman attain to an equal status with a man? It is not necessary to be an oppressor? It is not my intent to bellittle the point associated with the restrictive roles of men and women. Rather, I wish to point out that by excessively dwelling on a victim's role, the oppression is not accepted by the one playing the victim.
The result is that both men and women remain body into their tradition examples even further.
So feminism is dying. It is hoped, only the part that casts women as helpless victims and men as the oppressors will be the part that goes. I hate to think that the other ideas of feminism will die too. Like the ideal that people are human beings and need to be treated with care, love, and kindness and not with cruelty. I believe the word for this is called "humanism."
John Macchietto is a KU graduate student and a member of the Men's Coalition.
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