Myrna Lamb in her play is painfully, unrelentingly didactic, but one has to admit she uses a very original, if very weird, dramatic idea. She wants to show that pregnancy, especially the accidental kind, is terrible, and that men don't usually realize it. On stage is a woman doctor who has implanted an impregnated ?terus in her old lover, who got her pregnant and deserted her to pursue a legal career fighting abortion. The horrors of pregnancy are outlined as he protests against his condition ("I don't believe it. I can't believe this nightmare."), while the woman in curt, but vivid, medical language-describes what pregnancy does to the body.

Aphra probably succeeds in showing at least an aspect of "female consciousness," but the picture it gives is somewhat bleak, since creativity is swamped by dogma, or self-pity, or trivialny.

UNLIKE the Journal, which despairs at the human condition, or Aphra. which makes us despair at its literary attempts, Women: A Journal of Liberation, also new this fall, offers hope: it is a carefully organized magazine with big, shiny, frequently illustrated pages. Numerous authors (including men) have contributed articles to it, based on meticulous research or personal experience. Specific examples of women's problems replace the generalizations that fill the Journal. Also, Women gives detailed information about women's liberation groups all across the country.

The articles revolve around the question: Is "femininity" the result of cultural conditioning or inherent nature? Most of them discuss either how women are conditioned, or how conditioned women behave.

Children's textbooks and story books, the great religions, kindergarten. Hollywood movies, popular literature, TV, female school teachers, Christmas presents, and Greck mythology are all conclusively proven guilty of conditioning women to fit female stereotypes.

For example, one author quotes this section of an Orthodox Jewish prayer: "Blessed art thou, Oh Lord, that I was not born a slave. Blessed art thou, Oh Lord, that I was not born a woman." Another author describes a story in a recently published children's textbook:

"The story ... is about Wendy Wheat, a smiling face on a wheat stalk, Wendy's ambition is to be made into puffed wheat. She is harvested, sold, bought, stored in a grain elevator. Finally, she is processed into puffed wheat. . . . A picture shows her smiling as she slides out of a cereal box into a bowl of milk, ready to be consumed . . . all along the way men are responsible for her fate."

Could the smiling wheat stalk have been called Wally Wheat? The author thinks not.

The magazine gives no editorial answer to the question it poses: cultural conditioning or inherent nature. But the reader can conclude from the articles that sex role conditioning pervades this society, and that anyone who blames a woman's actions on her sex might just as reasonably blame society.

The women in the environment, judging from the personal and liberation group letters printed in Women, do blame society. Many of them believe that liberation is impossible under capitalism. (The next issue of Women will cover this topic.) Most of them adopt the usual radical line with a few differences: they want women's liberation to be an autonomous movement, since male-dominated organizations subordinate women's struggles (for new birth control and abortion laws and for day-care centers) to their own struggles.

Maybe Women: A Journal of Liberation coolly triumphs over No More Fun and Games and Aphra as an appealing advocate of women's liberation because it is less ambitious. Each of its contributors handles just one limited topic; the authors of No More Fun and Games want to save the world; the authors of Aphra want to create art.

Also, Women: A Journal of Liberation, written by many individuals, remains consistently objective. Each of the other two magazines gives the impression of having been put together by a small group of friends who have spent too many late nights talking together.