KANSAN COMMENT
Touchy Subject: An Explanation
Ever since the appearance of my editorial on the Women's Liberation movement, I have been beseiged by irate women. They have come at me from all sides—the female part of the Kansan staff, girls in my classes, and one particular sorority on campus. I even have a report of a call to the Kansan from one of the ladies in Strong Hall.
To listen to them was the same as having done an entirely different line of research. Most of the problem, it now seems, centers around the almighty dollar. Women's Lib is not really a search for over-all equality, but for equal pay scales.
One may ask why the beginning female reporter on one of the state's largest newspapers receives $40 less on her starting salary than the beginning male reporter. This question is not only being asked in the field of communications; it's happening throughout society.
Many women are classified as career girls when they get married. They work as nurses, teachers, secretaries, lab assistants and many other things. Along with their jobs, which they usually keep for a time after they are married, they also have housework, and I feel nothing but pity for the woman whose husband doesn't raise a finger to help her.
When two people are starting out their lives together, both should pitch in. After the woman becomes pregnant (no fault of her own, some tell me), the normal procedure is to quit work and concentrate on raising a family.
After her baby is born, she should concentrate most of her energies on her child and her home. Only in extreme circumstances should a woman have to work when her child is very young. The child needs a full-time mother—not a sitter and a mother.
If the job of wife and mother is the ultimate goal of the woman, then she will probably be able to attain that status without much trouble
However, if it is her goal in life to achieve something more, both in prestige and money, then she should by all means be given the right to go after such job offerings. Yet there is one problem with this situation today. Many men are after those same jobs.
Because of this, men may be thought to be more fit for the job. And considering the ratio
of men to women who are going after the same job, this is true. If a woman is denied a job and it goes to a man—one man out of 100 male and one female applicants—she should not start sounding off about her "Constitutional rights' being violated."
Many women have proven that they can achieve the status they so dearly desire. Yet, few people really come to remember them.
Dr. Frances Kelsey used to be a neighbor of mine. She did her job as a qualified physician and mother to two girls and nanny to a St. Bernard. In the course of her work, she made a discovery which at that time revolutionized the study of obstetrics. Now, how many of you remember Dr. Kelsey, and what she did?
Helen Keller attained high status and a kind of power by overcoming handicaps which were almost unsurmountable. But she was a special case.
Women all across the land are being brought into most, if not all, forms of work that were at one time reserved for men. It is a gradual move that is going to take time and patience on the part of both men and women.
Before women can obtain the power and status to which they aspire many traditions are going to have to be broken. Before women can obtain the equality they want, many laws are going to have to be rewritten or thrown out. And this cannot be done overnight. It is going to take time—not just a month or even a year. It might not really take place in our generation or the next, but it will.
Blessed are the women who are going to take an active part in this movement. No, not the ones who are burning their bras, but the ones who are getting an education so they can be qualified to step into a job now held by a man. Education is not the only preparation a woman can seek. She has to be many things and hold onto many qualities which are too numerous to mention.
While some of the women are out parading in the streets, calling men dirty names and, again, burning their bras, the real leaders of the women's liberation movement will be in factories, offices, laboratories and in the world in general, adding more to the fight for equality of women than they now believe is possible.
—Charlie Cape
$ \textcircled{4} $David Sokoloff 1970
Graphical Chairs
To the editor:
Thank you for publishing the article called "Class Can't Get off Ground." It brought to many peoples' attention the acute problem within the graphic design program. As it pointed out, no funds were given to this new curriculum. Students of graphic design met on the floor of their classroom in Lindley Annex their first day and couldn't meet the rest of the week for lack of facilities. After protests from students and their parents, the University agreed to let the graphic design faculty draw up another budget request showing costs for the barest of necessities. (Thank you, administration!) This was done, and we learned that this week we could meet because we had been provided desks!
Well, class met this week and we found that the desks did come. However, they were beaten-up rejects the University had in storage. Another bare necessity—the stools to sit on—had been overlooked. Once again we felt like we were back where we began. The facilities are still so bad that we cannot do any work in the room, unless the administration expects us to stand at those desks for the four hours we meet.
We have been faced with the question of just where to go from here. We do not want to see graphic design dropped from the curriculum, for that would mean that most of us would lose 6 hours of credit and a major. Yet are we to just meet every now and then to get assignments and do all our work at home (if we have a place at home to do it)? Why should we have to pay money to a university which in return provides us with such teaching conditions?? We do not feel we should, and for that reason are withholding payment of our fees. We are not procrastinating in paying the fees; we are waiting until the University wakes up to this ugly problem and gives us something to pay for.
Shelley Dieterichs Kirkwood, Mo., junior
Egyptian Missile Boost May Harm Arms Talks
By K. C. THALER UPI Writer
LONDON—The prospects for wider arms limitation agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union have been hurt in the view of diplomats here by the dispute over Egyptian violation of the Middle East cease-fire.
Israel has charged Egypt with the violations and the U.S. government says it has confirmed them from its own intelligence sources.
Increasingly, diplomats are likening the events along the Suez truce front to the 1962 Cuban crisis, which resulted in withdrawal of Soviet-placed missiles in Cuba.
Then, as now, crisis events coincided with efforts to improve Russian-American relations.
Whatever the outcome of the Middle East truce crisis, Russian connivance in, or approval of the alleged violations has given rise to fears about the impact on the current attempts to negotiate wide and more far-reaching East-West agreements.
The most important now under consideration is a freeze on offensive and defensive rockets, negotiated in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).
Diplomats have been following the latest Middle East events with great anxiety have cautioned that unless credibility and dependability are secured, agreements in themselves may prove of dubious value.
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