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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN March 26, 2006 Issue 
Sex Wars By Marge Piercy HarperCollins, 2005 
The Women's Movement as a Battle of the Sexes Today the word feminism and all its derivatives have been rendered completely meaningless. Trivialized and reduced to cliché definitions, today's interpretations of feminism have nothing in common with the movement for women's rights that started nearly a century and a half ago when the lives of women were truly grim and when the word feminism had not yet come into use. Women's rights in the U.S. have come a long way from those early days of the Women's Movement. Yet, with the exception of the vote for women, most women, young and old, take these rights for granted and are ignorant of what they are. Out of curiosity I conducted my own unscientific survey about knowledge of the Women's Movement. I asked my son Zack and all his friends, now college students, who took the advanced U.S. history courses in high school, if they had studied the Women's Movement. "A little, I guess," was the predominant answer. Then I asked if they had studied the Abolitionist Movement. The answer was a resounding "yes." Read! Read and learn before making ridiculous and embarrassing pronouncements about feminism and feminists at al. Marge Piercy's new novel with the hot title "Sex Wars," is one of those books that provide an accurate account of the Women's Movement in the post-Civil War era. We experience the struggle for survival and the hardships endured by women through the life of the book's fictional protagonist, the Jewish immigrant Freydeh Levin. Woven into the immigrant story are the Women's Movement legendary leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull. The novel also portrays the destructive role the self-appointed moral Gestapo man, Anthony Comstock played in the movement and in the lives of many women. In the post-Civil War United States the lives of women were bleak. Since women could not vote, they could not participate in the making of laws that affected them directly. A woman's body, children and inheritance belonged to her husband. There were very few jobs open to women - domestic service, teaching and prostitution. "Women were exiled from society for missteps men committed with impunity and boasted about," writes Piercy. She exemplifies this with intimate details of the duplicitous life of the powerful and hypocritical minister Henry Ward Beecher. Simultaneous with preaching Christian values and chastity for women he engaged in numerous affairs with married women from his congregation. Victoria Woodhull tired to expose his affair with Theo Tilton's wife by publishing its account in her newsletter. For this she and her sister spent one year in prison, complements of Anthony Comstock, the nemesis of women. Many of the women leading the Women's Movement were leaders in the Abolitionist Movement. But after the Civil War, the abolitionists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton's friend Frederick Douglass, abandoned woman suffrage. Piercy documents the schism in the Women's Movement and in the friendship between Stanton and Anthony. While Elizabeth wanted to address labor inequities, birth control and other women's issues, Susan wanted to focus only on woman suffrage. The book also contains a wonderful segment on how Victoria Woodhull and her sister wooed Commodore Vanderbilt and how their association with him helped them open the first brokerage firm by women. Woodhull's business sense and her belief in free love, in the superiority of women and in herself, lead her into the Women's Movement, to speeches to Congress and finally, to being the first woman to run for President of the United States. Meanwhile, immigrant Freydeh starts making and selling condoms and eventually becomes rather successful. Her survival depends entirely on her ability to adapt to the conditions of life in her new country, conditions just as harsh as the previous ones but with opportunities for anyone willing to break with old restrictive beliefs. The book's Epilogue takes us into the early 20th century when these characters have already passed in the history annals. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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