Word: journal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Evidently, the Journal is to serve as a manifesto and handbook for potential women liberators. Its opening editorial tells, step-by-step, what action a woman must take to liberate herself. Among these steps are: meet regularly with a group of women for education and support: learn judo or karate; don't get married or have babies; live completely alone if possible or in a female commune), and finally, don't wear cosmetics or sexy clothes...
UNFORTUNATELY, this explanation of the "female principle" does not appear until late in the Journal. Before it appears, the magazine seems to be a messy collage of radical cliches. Articles like "The Oppression of the Male Today" and "Contemporary Capitalism; Drag Queen Intellect" are bitter, weary laments against the system. Only later does one see that the problem is not the system so much as the absence of the female principle. There is the usual set of articles, too, that talk about how degrading the female role is, or about how women are not intellectually inferior ("The Slave's Stake...
...blocking evolution.... Until he gives up existence, there will be no relief from suffering nor any moral progress on this planet." She is smiling slightly, we hope, even though her tone is grim. But she is serious. Her anti-male attitude is a big facet of the Journal's version of the liberation movement...
Radical rhetoric shows up throughout the Journal, giving the impression to an uncareful reader that female liberation is just the female branch of the movement to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. But these three women don't want just to change the political structure. They want to transform human (more than man's) nature, since they see men, regardless of class, as historical enemies to the "female principle." In "American Radicalism: A Diseased Product of a Diseased Society," Betsy Warrior severely criticizes the members of the movement for having, under an idealistic disguise, the same competitive mentality as other Americans...
MORE CLEARLY apolitical, another women's liberation magazine aims at a wider audience than the Journal Aphra, published this fall for the first time, is a small literary magazine that proposes to "give outlet to the feminine consciousness." Its preamble says: "The emphasis will be on art, not on ideology." The consequence is: a collection of bon voyages for the magazine's maiden trip from literary "friends" (Anne Sexton and Simone de Beauvior included) ; two entirely didactic (unproduceable) plays; two laborious poems; two light-as-whippedcream poems: two remarkable short stories; and a list of "Aphraisms" -quotations relating to women...