THE WASHINGTON SCENE ADVOCATE OF HUSBAND LIB. PATROLS THE WHITE HOUSE

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32880, 1 April 1972, Page 16

THE WASHINGTON SCENE ADVOCATE OF HUSBAND LIB. PATROLS THE WHITE HOUSE

(By'.

TERRY COLEMAN

writing to the "Guardian" Manchester, from Washington)

(Reprinted from the "Guardian" by arrangement)

It would not, I suppose, be entirely unfair to call Harry Britton a nut. Only he and Norman Mailer have had the courage to speak out so clearly against Women’s Lib. in America. Mailer, having a good agent, probabljr makes more out of it, but on the other hand it is Mr Britton’s whole weekly income, all $2O of 'it, which he makes from selling Husband Lib. news-sheets outside the White House, Monday through Saturday.

Some of the White House guards think he is a nut, but he says most agree with him. Also, it is important not to misunderstand Mr Britton’s views. He is not- against woman. On the contrary, he thinks every man should own one. He .is swimming against the tide. Only the day after I met Mr Britton, Mr Secretary of State Rogers attended the swearing-in of Virginia R. Allan of Wyandotte, Michigan, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and uttered a few necessary, sycophantic words to the effect that there was no job a woman couldn’t handle with great distinction. Virginia R. Allan, so it was reported with some awe, was sworn in on an 1856 Bible, and her salary will be $36,000 a year, and moreover she was sworn in by Deputy Chief of Protocol Marion Smoak, who from the name might also be a woman. Going too far Anyway, Harry Britton is against all this, and so a few months ago he descended on the White House from Erie, Pennsylvania and picketed the White House with 28 signs coloured green and orange. He had meant to go to New York, where there is a bigger audience, but then Women’s Lib held a march in Washington carrying a banner saying, “Starve a Rat. Don’t Fix Supper Tonight,” and Mr Britton thought this was going too far, and came to Washington himself. Mr Britton is 46, and a married man. Back in Erie he has a wife, Lillian, and two sons and a daughter, all in their teens. He was an engineer, non-graduate he says, but pulling in an aboveaverage income, planning the production of diesel electric locomotives. He also was a preacher, and once did a series of 20 religious television shows.

They had a threebedroomed house, also above average he says, ranch-type, but they did not have a deepfreeze, colour, television, stereophonic, or wall-to-wall carpeting. His wife wanted these things, and the fashions, with the dresses changing up and down, and so four years ago she went back to work as a typist.

“She was,” he says, “coming home tired, uptight, giving me television dinners, which are cream of garbage.” That’s a frozen dinner? “Right. Cream of garbage.”

He remonstrated with her, suggesting she should stay at home and that they should live on his single income. She disagreed. The movement was bom. “Husband liberation didn’t come until she packed my suitcase and told me to go fly a kite. She used the index finger of her left hand. She pointed to the door. I was upset. I mean. I couldn’t believe it. Twenty one years’ service. (He and his wife had been married 21 years.) I was shook up.” He left. They are now separated, but not divorced because neither believes in divorce and because he could not afford it.

At this point in our conversation, Mr Britton remarked that women’s suffrage had been going 51 years now. I said that surely he was not opposed to women voting, but yes he was, because it was useless, and because if a man voted Democrat and his wife voted Republican, well that man didn’t have a vote, did he? I thought this was primitive and inquired if it wasn’t one of those Truths Held to be Self Evident that all Americans were created equal, but he knew his Declaration of Independence better than I did, and said it was only all men. He also quoted several verses from the Bible to the same effect, and when I objected that Middle Eastern tribal practices of 2000 and 3000 years ago had precious little to do with picketing the White House he told me he was a Billy Graham style fundamentalist I bet Mrs Britton now regrets teaching her husband the Bible. When they first met, in 1948, she insisted that every time they dated they should read the Bible together for 10 or 15 minutes. One ship, one captain And surely, I said, he did not seriously think women were inferior to men? A man’s whole experience of women, the experience of his reason and of his senses, should tell him this was rot, shouldn’t it? He patiently explained to me. “It’s the King/Queen relationship. The woman is Queen. And the man has to treat his wife as a queen, and she is on a pedestal, but in return she lets him have the final decision. One ship, one captain.” I was wondering how it suited the White House, with its presently fashionable Women’s Lib views, to have Harry Britton hanging round

outside Monday through Saturday, and asked him if anybody seemed to mind. He said he had a permit, and produced letters from the United States Department of the Interior. t

One noted his proposed demonstration, but said records had shown that he did not draw the crowd of 100 which he had expected and that therefore they would be “reducing the participant number.” All the permits he fished out of his pocket seemed to be out of date. He said they didn’t bother to reply to him now, although he still wrote in, but the guards knew him and let him stay. Then he produced from another pocket his Husband Liberation book, containing the signatures and remarks of about 900 men and 360 intelligent women. By an intelligent woman he means one who agrees with him. Here are three remarks, all from men: | “I’m the head of my house. | My wife doesn’t tell me how to do the dishes.” "Husband and wife were fighting for 40 years of their marriage. Finally he died, and she put on his tombstone. ‘May he rest in peace. Until we meet again’.” “(The woman) should not ask what can my husband do for me, but what can I do for my husband.” The Ms symbol And how did Mr Britton get on with Gloria Steinem? Miss Steinem is part journalist, part agitator, all Women’s Lib, and very good at it. She is a sort of combination Germaine Greer/Jill Tweedie, and has recently brought out a magazine called “Ms.” It is jolly entertaining. Ms is the preferred title for a woman, preferred to Mrs or Miss, because it does not indicate whether a woman is married or unmarried and she thus cannot be thought to be inferior in being married, and therefore an appendage to a man, or unmarried and perhaps Jacking a man. Harry Britton calls her the enemy, and says MS means Man Servant.

He said the magazine was no good, though he had not read it, only looked through it. But he thinks she is sadly mistaken and that she is taking the divorce rate in America to one in two. [Mr Britton is not sure of this figure. At other times he says one in three, or even one in four.] Britton and Steinem once met when he offered her a pamphlet, which she read, and then, according to him, said cryptically that he was the sort of man she should marry. But for his religious views Mr Britton might consider it. He reflects that she is only 38 or so. But his real message to her seems to be, “Male and Female, Adam and Eve, He and She, Boy and Girl, Mr and Mrs is beautiful.” This is his moderate, forgiving message, and it just happens to make her sound like a rabid sexracist. The henpecked male But why, I said, looking round at the assembled crowd of none, did Husband Lib have so few supporters? He said the American male was henpecked. America was one huge chicken coop. Two Chinese girls had once told him to go to Asia, where he would get a better deal. When Asian and European women spoke to him they spoke softly, and he had to lean forward to hear what they said. When an American woman talked to him he leaned backwards. I asked how he managed to make a living. He said that for the pamphlets he had given me, reporters generally paid him a quarter. He could get a bed and two meals at the gospel mission for $1.05.

And what chance did he think his movement had? “I’m right in the middle of a news coverage which is getting better and better,” he said.

And what did he say to people who thought he was a nut? He said they only saw the 28 signs in orange and green. They did not realise that conformity was not a virtue, and that he was telling the truth as it was. I gave him the regulation reporter’s quarter, and walked away leaving him in the middle of a news coverage which was at that moment nil.

He went back to his signs, which say, among other things, that men want out of the kitchen, women are the best other sex we have, but husbands should be loving dictators, and, anyway, were we men or mice? Sunnyside Club.—Officers elected at the annual meeting of the Sunnyside Social Club are: President, Mrs E. EGlen; vice-presidents, Miss D. McLean, Mrs M. Thompson; secretary, Mrs C. Milne; treasurer, Mrs D. Rastnck; committee, Mesdames H. Johnson, M. Costello, M. Freeman, M. Flood, I. McAnergney, L. Jones, E. Smith, J. Townsend; hostess, Mrs E. Cox; auditor, Mr H. L. Dorn.