More and more today, women are showing by their every action that they can't go on in the old way. They have no confidence any more that what is supposed to work really will, or what is supposed to be their lives should be. Their husbands, their children, their work, all are in conflict with them. Everything they do, every decision they make, they feel may work. Marriage, children, home, none of these things are women sure of any more.
Housewives who have never worked before are waiting until their children are old enough so they can get a job. Women who have always worked are looking forward to the day when they can finally quit. Marriages that have lasted for twenty years are breaking up. Young couples after six months of marriage decide that they'd better end it now before they have children who will suffer. Young women getting out of high school instead of running to get married, get a job and an apartment of their own and live independently.
It is not that women don't want to be wives and mothers. They want and need men to share their lives with and every woman wants children. But they feel that if they can't have a human relationship they will have no relationship at all. Women go from being married to being divorced, from being housewives to working out, but nowhere do women see the kind of life that they want for themselves and their families.
Women are finding more and more that there is no way out but a complete change. But one thing is already clear. Things can't go on the way they are. Every woman knows that.
Selma James
"A Woman's Place" was first published in the United States, February 1953, by Correspondence, a group organized around the publication of a workers' newspaper. Pseudonyms (Marie Brant and Ellen Santori) were used because of the particular form of political repression by the American State during the McCarthy era.
NOTE
1 This name came from the government department which was supposed to control prices during the second world war, the Office of Price Administration-OPA.