(1) While my mother was in New Orleans, I was in the care of my grandparents. They were incredibly conscientious about me. They loved me very much; sadly, much better than they were able to love each other or, in my grandmother’s case, to love my mother. Of course, I was blissfully unaware of all this at the time. I just knew that I was loved. Later, when I became interested in children growing up in hard circumstances and learned something of child development from Hillary’s work at the Yale Child Study Center, I came to realize how fortunate I had been. For all their own demons, my grandparents and my mother always made me feel I was the most important person in the world to them. Most children will make it if they have just one person who makes them feel that way. I had three.

(2) My grandmother, Edith Grisham Cassidy, stood just over five feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds. She was bright, intense, and aggressive, and had obviously been pretty once. She had a great laugh, but she also was full of anger and disappointment and obsessions she only dimly understood. She took it all out in raging tirades against my grandfather and my mother, both before and after I was born, though I was shielded from most of them. She had been a good student and ambitious, so after high school she took a correspondence course in nursing from the Chicago School of Nursing. By the time I was a toddler she was a private-duty nurse for a man not far from our house on Hervey Street. I can still remember running down the sidewalk to meet her when she came home from work.

(3) My grandmother’s main goals for me were that I would eat a lot, learn a lot, and always be neat and clear. We ate in the kitchen at a table next to the window. My high chair faced the window, and she tacked playing cards up on the wooden window frame at mealtimes so that I could learn to count. She also stuffed me at every meal, because conventional wisdom at the time was that a fat baby was a healthy one, as long as he bathed every day. At least once a day, she read to me from “Dick and Jane” books until I could read them myself, and from World Book Encyclopedia volumes, which in those days were sold door-to-door by salesmen and were often the only books besides the Bible in working people’s houses. These early instructions probably explain why I now read a lot, love card games, battle my weight, and never forget to wash my hands and brush my teeth.

(1) The statistics I’ve cited and the living examples are all too familiar to you. But what may not be so familiar will be the increasing number of women who are looking actively for advancement of a new job in your offices. This woman may be equipped with professional skills and perhaps valuable experience. She will not be content to be Executive Assistant to Mr. Seldom Seen or the Assistant Vice President’s Girl Friday, who is the only one who comes in on Saturday.

(2) She is the symbol of what I call the Second Wave of Feminism. She is the modern woman who is determined to be.

(3) Her forerunner was the radical feminist who interpreted her trapped position as a female as oppression by the master class of men. Men, she believed, had created a domestic, servile role for women in order that men could have the career and the opportunity to participate in making the great decisions of society. Thus the radical feminist held that women through history had been oppressed, mainly because man chose to exploit his wife and the mother of his children. Sometimes it was deliberate exploitation and sometime:; it was the innocence of never looking beneath the pretensions of life.

(4) The radical feminists found strength in banding together. Coming to recognize each other for the first time, they could explore their own identities, realize their own power, and view the male and his system as the common enemy. The first phases of feminism in the last five years often took on thismilitant, class-warfare tone. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and many others hammered home their ideas with a persistence that aroused and intrigued many of the brightest and most able women in the country. Consciousness-raising groups allowed women to explore both their identities and their dreams—and the two were often found in direct conflict.

(5) What is the stereotyped role of American women? Marriage. A son. Two daughters. Breakfast. Ironing. Lunch. Bowling. Maybe a garden club or the very dating, non-credit courses in ceramics. Perhaps an occasional cocktail party. Dinner. Football or baseball on TV. Each day the same. Never any growth in expectations—unless it is growth because the husband has succeeded. The inevitable question: “Is that all there is to life?”

(6) The rapid growth of many feminist organizations attests to the fact that these radical feminists had touched some vital nerves. The magazine “Ms.” was born in the year of the death of the magazine “Life”. But too often the consciousness-raising sessions became ends in themselves. Too often sexism reversed itself and man-hating was encouraged. Many had been with the male chauvinist.

(7) It is not difficult, therefore, to detect a trend toward moderation. Consciousness-raising increasingly is regarded as a means to independence and fulfillment, rather than a ceremony of fulfillment itself. Genuine independence can be realized through competence, through finding a career, through the use of education. Remember that for many decades the education of women was not supposed to be useful.

(1) “We’ll give the dispenser something to do. If we go on prescribing these, he’ll lose hiscunning.”

(2) The students laughed, and the doctor gave them a circular glance of enjoyment in his joke. Then he touched the bell and, when the porter poked his head in, said: “Old women, please.”

(3) He leaned back in his chair, chatting with the house-physician while the porter herded along the old patients. They came in, strings of anemic girls, with large fringes and pallid lips, who could not digest their bad, insufficient food; old ladies, fat and thin, aged prematurely by frequent confinements, with winter coughs; women with this, that, and the other, the matter with them. Dr. Tyrell and his house-physician got through them quickly. Time was getting on, and the air in the small room was growing more sickly.

(4)…By about six o’clock they were finished. Philip, exhausted by standing all the time, by the bad air, and by the attention he had given, strolled over with his fellow-clerks to the Medical School to have tea. He found the work of absorbing interest. There was humanity there in the rough, the materials the artist worked on; and Philip felt a curious thrill when it occurred to him that he was in the position of the artist and the patients were like clay in his hands. He remembered with an amused shrug of the shoulders his life in Paris, absorbed in color, tone, values, heaven knows what, with the aim of producing beautiful things. The directness of contact with men and women gave a thrill of power which he had never known. He found an endless excitement in looking at their faces and hearing them speak; they came in each with his peculiarity, some shuffling rudely, some with a little trip, others with heavy, slow tread, some shyly. Often you could guess their trades by the look of them. You learnt in what way to put your questions so that they should be understood, you discovered on what subjects nearly all lied, and by what inquiries you could extort the truth notwithstanding. You saw the different way people took the same things. The diagnosis of dangerous illness would be accepted by one with a laugh and a joke, by another with dumb despair. Philip found that he was less shy with these people than he had ever been with others; he felt not exactly sympathy, for sympathy suggests condescension; but he felt at home with them. He found that he was able to put them at their ease, and, when he had been given a case to find out what he could do about it, it seemed to him that the patient delivered himself into his hands with a peculiar confidence.

(5) “Perhaps,” he thought to himself, with a smile, “perhaps I’m cut out to be a doctor. It would be rather a lark if I’d hit upon the one thing I’m fit for.”

(1) The business suit has for a long time been the uniform for male office workers. But it is not very satisfactory. For a start, it means that all men look the same, give or take their ties.

(2) But that is not the only problem: at the height of summer the business suit is hot and stuffy, restricting movement, and—since the suit must always be worn with a tie—it demands tightness at the neck that causes unnecessary discomfort and irritation.

(3) Women in offices are free to wear what they please, within certain limits. Some women wear business suits, too; but these are usually less formal and, most importantly, they are designed to show off the feminine shape to advantage. The same cannot be said for the male suit. Most men look unattractive in them. They are shapeless, lumpy and dull in color and do nothing for the male physique. A male office worker’s only way of expressing himself in this boring business uniform is through his selection of ties. The tie becomes his outward sign of inner personality. Unfortunately, few men have any sense of style and fewer still stop to ponder what their personality is really like. For this reason, many male office workers go to work in appallingly loud, garish ties, in the mistaken belief that they look good.

(4) Add to all this is the problem of cleaning a man’s suit. Do men actually clean them at all? A private study of male office workers indicates that they do not. Unlike their female counterparts, who are always taking clothes to the dry-cleaners even when they have only been worn once in the past three weeks, men send their suits to the cleaners perhaps once a season. And yet most men wear the same suit several days a week, with just a change of shirt and tie for variety.

(5) Why do men notrebeland find some other way of dressing at the office? Well, they have thought this problem through very carefully. They realize how many hours they can save from their morning routine by wearing the same clothes day in, day out. Whereas the average female office worker takes time to plan what she will wear in the morning before ironing her outfit and finding coordinating fashion accessories, all a man has to do is leap out of bed, fumble around in the closet for his underwear and the first available shirt that hasn’t had tomato sauce dripped down its front, select a tie at random (only the most fastidious attempt a color match between suit, shirt and tie) and step into the trousers that have been draped across the back of an armchair in the bedroom the previous night. Simple. Now, where did he leave his shoes and socks?

(1) While still catching up to men in some spheres of modern life, women appear to be way ahead in at least one undesirable category. “Women are particularly susceptible to developing depression and anxiety disorders in response to stress compared to men,” according to Dr. Yehuda, chief psychiatrist at New York’s Veteran’s Administration Hospital.

(2) Studies of both animals and humans have shown that sex hormones somehow affect the stress response, causing females under stress to produce more of the trigger chemicals than do males under the same conditions. In several of the studies, when stressed-out female rats had their ovaries (the female reproductive organs) removed, their chemical responses became equal to those of the males.

(3) Adding to a woman’s increased dose of stress chemicals, are her increased “opportunities” for stress. “It’s not necessarily that women don’t cope as well. It’s just that they have so much more to cope with,” says Dr. Yehuda. “Their capacity for tolerating stress may even be greater than men’s,” she observes, “It’s just that they’re dealing with so many more things that they become worn out from it more visibly and sooner.”

(4) Dr. Yehuda notes another difference between the sexes. “I think that the kinds of things that women are exposed to tend to be in more of a chronic or repeated nature. Men go to war and are exposed to combat stress. Men are exposed to more acts of random physical violence. The kinds of interpersonal violence that women are exposed to tend to be in domestic situations, by, unfortunately, parents or other family numbers, and they tend not to be one-shot deals. The wear-and-tear that comes from these longer relationships can be quite devastating.”

(5) Adeline Alvarez married at 18 and gave birth to a son, but was determined to finish college. “I struggled a lot to get the college degree. I was living in so much frustration that that was my escape, to go to school, and get ahead and do better.” Later her marriage ended and she became a single mother. “It’s the lardest thing to take care of a teenager, have a job, pay the rent, pay the car payment, and pay the debt.I lived from paycheck to paycheck.”

(6) Not everyone experiences the kinds of severe chronic stresses Alvarez describes. But most women today are coping with a lot of obligations, with few breaks, and feeling the strain. Alvarez’s experience demonstrates the importance of finding ways to diffuse stress before it threatens your health and your ability to function.

(1) The story that traces life from sea to land then into the multiple niches that exist there for a great variety of living things is a fascinating one, but far too detailed for our purposes. One key point for us in that story is the emergence of the biological class of animals that are called mammals.

(2) Mammals have a number of features that distinguish them from the reptiles from which they developed. They are warm-blooded; that is, they have a system of temperature control that keeps the body at a constant temperature. Mammals have a set of teeth of different shapes that serve different functions such as cutting, gouging, and grinding. Young mammals spend their earliest days of development shielded within the mother’s body and are then born alive, rather than hatching from eggs. In addition, after birth they are nourished by milk provided by the mother’s mammary glands. The enforced association between mother and infant provides an opportunity for learning that does not exist for those kinds of creatures that are hatched from eggs long after their parents have departed from the scene. Young mammals play—something that amphibians and reptiles never do—which provides additional learning opportunities.

(3) The foregoing list leaves little doubt that we are mammals. There are, of course, a great many kinds of mammals, most of which developed after the great extinction of dinosaurs and other reptiles about 65 million years ago that opened opportunities for the few small mammals that were already in existence. One of the groups of mammals that resulted was a biological order called primates which includes monkeys, apes, humans, and some smaller creatures familiar only to ardent zoo goers. Primates share a number of behavioral features that have played important roles in their evolutionary development. Most primates are arboreal; that is, they spend their lives in and among trees. Their tree-climbing and tree-dwelling habits impose needs that are reflected in primate anatomy. Although diet varies from species to species, many primates are largely vegetarian. But they can eat and digest meat, and some species vary their diets of leaves, shoots, and fruits by eating insects, birds’ eggs, and even small animals, Primates are hand-feeders, depending on their hands both to collect food and to get it into their mouths. Perhaps the most important feature of their behavior is that primates are social animals. Their genetics, habits, and even their survival are geared to living in groups. Although human beings have come to have a way of life very different from that of typical primates, the basic primate adaptation provided prehumans with capabilities that allowed them to become culture-builders.

(4) The anatomical features that separate primates from other kinds of animals relate clearly to the way primates behave.

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