Women Plan Many Protests

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32386, 27 August 1970, Page 15

Women Plan Many Protests

(N Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) . NEW YORK, Aug. 26.

Militant feminists of America plan to carry their protests from bedroom to boardroom today in a nation-wide strike against male dominance, and march for liberty and equality down New York’s Fifth Avenue.

“It’s too much of a man’s world,” the women activists say. They plan to put matters right “We are taking our equal-ity—no-one ever gave it to us,” declared the strike organiser, Mrs Betty Friedan, resplendent in a low-cut lavender dress covered in strike buttons. “We will converge—take to the streets—for the essence is solidarity of sisterhood,” she told a press conference. “We will march on to protest against the unfinished business of equality.” • The Fifth Avenue march by thousands of women might bring chaos to home-bound rush-hour traffic tonight The Police Department has granted permission for the demonstrators to march down

one lane of the avenue, but the feminists have said that they will defy the restriction and “liberate the whole street if necessary.” The march is one of hundreds of protests planned from Maine to Montana commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage On this day, women have been urged to “girlcott” males, whether husbands or employers, dump babies in the men’s laps and converge on city halls to toss away their symbols of oppression, whether onions or sex manuals.

A mock “New York Times” "too late city edition” ran a banner headline “Women’s Strike Emasculates a Stunned Nation.” The National Organisation for Women (N.0.W.), which printed the mock newspaper, was formed by Mrs Friedan in 1966, and is one of the main groups participating in the strike. Other supporting organisations include the American Radical Nuns, 8.1.T.C.H. W.I.T.C.H. (Woman’s International Terrorist Conspiracy Against Hell), the Young Woman's Christian Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Not all women are in favour of the strike and a Santa Barbara, California, house-

wife and mother of eight has proclaimed that September 30 should be “celebration of womanhood day.” Mrs Helen Andelin has posted a newsletter to 30,000 women across America urging them to “wear your most frilly, feminine dress, sing to your husband and tell him he is the most important person in your life and especially that you enjoy being a wife, mother and homemaker and making him happy.” The strike has urged abstaining from sex today, but Mrs Andelin said: “1 don’t want to nail my campaign to sex. I just say give men and children the best you have in you.”

In San Francisco, the Mayor, Mr Joseph Alioto, said that any female city employee who took the day off to march in a feminist demonstration would not be paid. “I don’t understand this struggle,” Mr Alioto said. “I’m trying to get a handle on it” He added that if his wife joined the protest he would not pay her if she worked for the city. Other parties opposed to the strike are the Texas Bar Association, which passed a resolution against adoption of any Constitutional amendment providing for equal rights to women at a state level. A

constitutional amendment giving equal rights to women was passed in the House of Representatives earlier this month.

Several major employers in Georgia have threatened to dismiss any worker who took time off to participate in the strike event, according to Martha Gaines, a writer for the Georgia Department of Labour.

One anonymous male caller told the New York strike headquarters that all the feminists should go to Sweden to have a sex change operation.

However, women will holo “guerrilla theatre” at many city business districts and city halls, smash tea cups in Rochester, New York, and Durango, Colorado, demonstrate in churches in Boston t” demand women get higher posts in the clergy and picket shops which sell products of which the advertising is offensive and degrading to women.

We’ll make our demands heard and we'll do whatever is necessary,” Mrs Friedan insisted.

The women strikers are making three specific demands —free abortions on demand, free day care centres for children and equal job opportunities.