Beyond Sex Roles…Toward a Human Liberation

A weekend symposium, May 1979

From the symposium: In the past fifteen years, all of us have had to face an increasingly significant challenge to one of the most basic parts of ourselves: our sense of masculinity or femininity The traditional models of appropriate masculine and feminine behavior are breaking down We are confronted by a contemporary panorama of working mothers, daycare children, househusbands, telephone line-women and airline stewards. women who live thirty years after their last child is grown, and men who at midlife discover the emptiness of successful upward mobility even as women avidly pursue the executive suite In the face of this seeming chaos, we search for meaning and order. often by longing for the good old days, when both men and women knew what was to be expected Hearth and home were the spheres of women; business and the world the provinces of men But the good old days are gone for good. Now we must be prepared to examine new alternatives and choose new models.

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