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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (April 13, 1970)
rnMit 'S ft 1 1 I 8 V 'i i The safe movement Women's Liberation movement still can be classified as a "safe" movement. It doesn't spring from a specific section of the political spectrum, thus it is not yet the subject of Nix on attacks, or surveillance by one of the edgy security forces. Not yet, anyway. You could call it "left" if you classify any social change as leftist, but it is fairly hard to pinpoint Women's Lib. Besides, as with the environ ment issue, everybody LIKES women, and the prospect of a militant female uprising still appears somewhat ludicrous, even to the majority of women. So in the meantime, while the populace is somewhat open to the efforts of the fem inists, there are many things interested wom en can do, even in Nebraska. Especially at this university, "conscious" women could promote their own interests. And a curious source of strength lies m that now-defunct organization, Associated Women Students. Before the dissolution of AWS last week, members of the Congress had discussed re taining AWS for use as a "pressure group" for all women. Although the group then form ally dissolved itself, it delegated some of its remaining funds for use by a future women's organization. This money would be quite use ful to get that pressure group functioning. Ig noring those important questions like hours and Coed Follies, such a group would have more than enough projects to keep it busy. For a start, the new AWS could work for equal hiring and promotion practices among faculty and administration equal represen tation on university committees and govern ing bodies, whether CSL, Faculty Senate, ad ministration or Board of Regents efforts to attract women to traditional men's areas of study: medicine, law, engineering, sciences, and similar efforts to attract men to tradi tional women's areas promotion of efforts by the university to place women in more and better job positions after graduation ef forts to equalize the number of men and wom en who attend the university work to create and maintain a university daycare center for children of university students, faculty and employes work with other groups (YWCA, league of Women Voters) especially in lobby ing at the state legislature for laws liberaliz ing abortion and protecting women's rights., The group could also sponsor classes in child care, karate, what have you, for women in the community, and could be the main ed ucative body for the campus on the topic of women's rights. The possibilities seem end less because the need is great. Such an or ganization would fulfill a need that is more than apparent at this university. Women stu dents, faculty and employes must get together to promote a little feminine equality. Right on, ladies! Susie Eisenhart THE LIBERATED NEBRASKAN Second class poatege Mid at Lincoln. Neb. Tvierrones: editor utinee H9ff, News 471 2JC Subscription rt are 14 per wtmiir or M par veer. Publish Monday. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday during me cnoci year except during vacations ana exam pertodi. Member of Intercollegiate Prats. National educational Adver rising Service, The Dally Nebreskan la student publication. Independent tt the University at Nebraska' administration, faculty and ana dent government. Address: Dally Nebraska, to Nebraska Union University of Nebraska Lincoln. Nebraska eaaa This issue produced and directed by the women of the Daily Ntbraskan Staff. Managing Editor Susan Elsenhertt Nebraskan Staff Writers Carol Anderson. Jan Parks. Linda Ulrtchj Photographer par Peters! News Assistant Susan Schaferr Editorial Assistant Sua Schlkhtemelert Copy Editors June Wagoner. Karen Holm, Connie Winkler. , People, come Child care facilities needed urgently by Karl Ronning Kurt Donaldson Student-parents urgently need day care facilities for their children. This conclusion is supported by a recent survey of University students. Although fully 25 percent, or about 5,000 students are married there are no present facilities for child day care. And with the trend toward longer periods of advanced study and an increase expected in the number of Vietnam veterans the number of children involved cannot help but grow. THE SURVEY held during a four day period in March of ninty-four parents with a total of 137 children participated; and employment, study and care patterns revealed that in 85 per cent of the cases, both parents are gone all or part of the day. At present parents must arrange for child care In what ever way they can and sometimes the ways are complicated. Many parents arrange course schedules to make sure that one or the other is home. Some children are taken care of by grandparents or neighbors. Sometimes one student wife will care for the children of several others. THE NEED for a day care center was also demonstrated when parents were asked if and hovr they would change their study and employment patterns if day care facilities were available. Fully 75 said it would change these patterns, most frequently, in about half the cases the wife would go back to school. The present cost to parents in term of time, energy and tension in trying to be students, parents, and job holders cannot be calculated, but it is probably the child who suffers .most from present conditions. The question now becomes what can be done. With proper cooperation and management the University is in a unique position to create day care services at a fraction of their dollar value,, with benefit to the learning process and society in general, as well as individual parents and children. 1. STAFFING ARRANGEMENTS: A day care center could be integrated into the teaching-learning process of several departments and professional programs. Educational psychology, elementary education, psychology, human development and the family and social work are examples of majors that could develop programs. There is already an extremely limited program of this type on East Campus in Human Development and the Family. With the plans of the Nixon administration to greatly expand day care support, Nebraska could become an early leader in the M'dwest in training personnel for these centers. In addition many of the mothers indicated they could work part time in the center when not going to classes. Volunteers are another source for addi tional help but need not be and should not be a major source of staffing. 2. FACILITIES: Space is in short supply on campus but there are several areas in. the dormitories that could be provided on the usual "temporary" basis principally in the largely unim proved basements of Selleck or the new complexes. This would be to the benefit oLthe dormitories, for the rooms could be designed for multiple use. Food revenue would also increase with the provision of childrens lunches. 3. DOLLAR EXPENDITURE. Judging firm results of the survey, the parents themselves could probably pay a large share of any actual dollar expenditures. Parents were asked how much they could afford to pay for each child if lunch was included. There was a wide range of responses, ranging from twenty-five cents to four dollars.' For two-thirds of the parents, the range was between two and three dollars per day. The problems of coordination and development are large, but the points above indicate that university day care facilities are clearly within the bounds of financial possibility. It is a direction in which the University should go, both for the needs of its student parents, and its role providing new areas of social change. The next step: A resolution will be introduced In ASUN Wednesday asking President Soshnik to appoint a special committee of faculty students and administrators to work out a formal proposal and begin implementation. Firm support by the Senate and quick appointment of a concerned com mittee are of tantamount importance at this stage. Join our march for freedom by MARY ALINDER . Women's Action reap "If I take a breath and I keep It locked Inside of me And I don't let go .'til I see your image before me If I directed all my thoughts and the essence of life towards you Do you think that it might reach you? Do you think that it might reach you?" The essence of life. The essence of life is living. To me living must be an active experience. Living lovingly, gently and responsibly. I am a woman, and simply because of that fact, in our society my life and its powers are curb ed and dwarfed. Woman's role is wife,, housewife and mother, submissive to her man and children. I refuse to believe that there is such a pre-prescribed role for women, or for anyone. There is now a women's liberation group here in Lincoln. We call ourselves Women's Action Group. We hope to work as a positive force, not a negative one. We do not threaten men. We love men. We must change the systems and in- THS DAILY NEBRASKAN stitutlons and people, men and women, who use us. Women are brainwashed from birth to believe that what is woman is not as good as what is man. We must have pride in ourselves and what we can be but haven't been allowed to be. We must have the freedom of our minds and our bodies. Two flagrant examples: most doctors here In Lincoln refuse to prescribe birth control devices to unmarried women; the state of Nebraska refuses women the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. The powers and laws that be, nearly all male, have literally denied us the right of sexual enjoyment. By refusing us our freedoms of birth control and abor tion they sentence us to abstinence or unwanted pregnancy. We are domesticated sex objects. These rights, of birth control and abortion, are necessary personal freedoms that have been denied us. We are marching for our freedoms of abortion and birth control tomorrow, Tuesday April 14 at 8 p.m., from the mall in front of the State Historical Society at 13 and R streets to our Capitol. All day Tuesday, before the march, we will be leafletting, passing petitions, pink armbands and popcorn, and talking to our fellow citizens about our demands and asking them, you, to join us in our march. We want Tuesday to be a day of loving and personal and gentle confrontations. If you would like to help us with Tuesday and the march please come to United Ministries for Higher Education, 333 N. 14th street at 8 p.m. tonight, Monday April 13. Our march is only a first step. We hope to create an atmosphere of freedom for all women in Nebraska. The march will develop a power base to work from. We will take down the names and ad dresses of ail persons marching with us who want to remain in contact and proceed to direct change. We students, housewives, workers and mothers of Lincoln lovingly ask you, female and male, adult and child, to join us. We need your help. Ml Up against the movement by CATER CIIAMBLEE In the early sixties in the southern civil rights movement, there was much talk of freedom. Everyone read Camus, everyone spoke of the absolute need to develop an ethic which should allow all men to be what they could become. One chose or one was not authentic, one lived only as a product of others. A social system which attempted to force blacks into roils designed by whites, which denied blacks the freedom to choose their own selves, which sucked their very minds to deny them the validity of their own senses, had to change or be changed. Women in the movement typed, ran mimeograph machines, swept floors, made coffee, got balled. LATER THE ante rather upped as the movement grew and became aware that blacks were only one of the groups whose freedom of self was curtailed, whose history was denied, whose lives . were made pain by the man. . It became aware that the middle class white, the supposed darling of the system, was himself a product, whose own self must be manipulated to make him better able to "function" properly In a technology geared to produce more and more of more and more. Even stu dent as nigger. Women In the movement typed, ran mimeograph machines, swept MONDAY, APRIL 13, 1970 floors, made coffee, got balled. Then analogies were drawn between the way the system dealt with its own to the way It dealt with others in Latin America, Africa, Vietnam. Defini tions of that system were created, and the emotions intensified, but the scope of freedom had merely been broadened, for it was argued to be the right of that only privileged class the living. Women in the movement typed, ran mimeograph machines, swept floors, made coffee, got balled. WOMEN TOOK. little part In decision making. Women rarely worked as organizers. Women mainly were used those who complained didn't unders tand that the situation of the black, the Chicano, the native American, the poor, the worker, the war, the environ ment, whatever, was more Important. Qualitative pain, I suppose. Those who continued to complain were neurotic, castrators, unfeminine, pushy. Didn't know their place. Which was to type, run mimeograph machines, sweep floors, make coffee, get balled. It is not particularly surprising that, after ten years of the rhetoric of freedom, Women's Liberation should become a visible phenomenon. That it took so long can perhaps be attributed to their loving patience. Or the totality of their oppression. THE DAILY NEBRASKAN Husband-hunting? Try Nebraska 17. by KILLEEN SP ANGLER I wonder what sort of expectations the women who presently attend the University of Nebraska have in mind for themselves when they leave the U. I doubt if any of them would admit they are at the University to engage in husband-seeking. But I have heard an endless number of times the rationalization that having an "education" (institutional) will make the woman in question a "better wife and mother." If both these predisposed female roles are somehow 4,upgraded" by a bachelor's degree, I wonder in what way? Some women tell me that such a four-year study program will allow them to communicate with their husbands. They obviously believe they never made any sense to any man prior to the four-year junket. What must it be like to hold oneself In such low esteem? To consider oneself so scatter-brained that what is required is a four-year program of tightening up one's head? Perhaps, the smattering of psychology gathered in Psych 70 will allow a woman to determine how severe her four-year-old son's Oedipal complex is. That does not strike me as something I would like to spend from nine to five toying with. Nine to five, because at five, her husband will come home from the office and she can switch to giving, understanding and emotionally supporting him, Instead of her brood. That must be what "communication" means. The BA degree might prepare our U of N women for careers In much the manner it prepares their male counterparts. The career choice, of course, is education. Yes, we women have the market cornered on school teaching. Just as the great virtue of motherhood is molding some little mind, we travel from our university classrooms into the elementary and secondary classrooms of America to wave our wands over the yet unsettled minds of kids the social group we have by reason of our sex the greatest ability to deal with. Try very many other professions and you are liable to discover that the beauty 'of femininity wants and becomes a curse in the eyes of a prospective employer. Employers make all sorts of assumptions regarding the hiring of women: they will leave their positions for marriage, pregnancy, sick children and monthly cramps. It does not occur to them that some women walking this earth have come to grips with such time-honored problems. Could not a woman work even if she married, perhaps not become pregnant, make some arrangement with a neighbor for a sick child, Eass up the preoccupation with menstrual discomfort? But dw unwomanly of her II ! The ultimate goal of the women's liberation movement Is not self-determination, as in the case of the Black move ment or the Indian movement. Rigid sexual-role definitions are rooted deep In our social framework (and are as much a burden to men, as they are to women). Women must climb out their traditional beds and discover that the trick they must turn is the elimination of the simplistic division of characteristics and roles which have come to be regarded as masculine and feminine. PAGE 5 t "r V ' ( i ? 1 ? ' ..' ft U PAGE 4 MONDAY, APRIL 13, 1970