Excerpt

"There have always been many things you can do short of actually ending a bad marriage--buying a house, having an affair and having a baby are the most common, I suppose--but in the early 1970s there were at least two more. You could go into consciousness raising ... And you could sit down with your husband and thrash everything out... drawing up a list of household duties... This happened in thousands of households, with identical results: thousands of husbands agreed to clear the table. They cleared the table. They cleared the table and then looked around as if they deserved a medal. They cleared the table and then hoped they would never again be asked to do another thing. They cleared the table and hoped the whole thing would go away. And it did. The women's movement went away, and so, in many cases, did their wives. Their wives went out into the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyers' market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women's movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.