”The personal is political,” said feminists of the 1970s. They believed that small groups of housewives eventually could change the world by sitting around in each other`s living rooms, pouring out their deepest feelings about sex, marriage, housework and children.
And they did change the world, asserts author Anita Shreve in her new book, ”Women Together, Women Alone: The Legacy of the Consciousness-Raising Movement” (Viking, $19.95). Ironically, though, the very effectiveness of consciousness-raising, or CR, insured its doom as a movement: All those homemakers, liberated to pursue careers, got much too busy sandwiching sex, marriage, housework and children into their lives to spend any more time talking in one another`s living rooms.
And this, Shreve argues, is a grave loss for womankind. Not till women once again unite to examine their lives, she writes, will the dilemmas of
”post-feminist” life be resolved: how to reconcile our ”male” drive for achievement with our ”female” desire to nurture; how to create a work world that genuinely respects the needs of women who want to bear children; why there`s so much hostility between mothers who work outside the home and those who choose to say home; why men won`t really share domestic responsibilities; why violence against women and children seems to be on the rise; how to be liberated sexually in the age of AIDS; and why standards for female appearance are still as unrealistic as they were before bra-burning.
Shreve`s book contains a blueprint for how these and other questions could be tackled by a group of friends, colleagues or neighbors who want to continue changing the world-gently.