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Steinem Hits 'Sexist' Law School

"The humanization of Harvard Law School is inevitable," Gloria Steinem told a group of Law School students, faculty and alumni Saturday at a closed banquet of the Law Review. "Part of living the revolution is that the scales fall off our eyes a little bit every day."

Speaking at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel-"probably so I wouldn't have to come in the back door of the Harvard Club," she said yesterday-Steinem sharply criticized the Law School for its insensitivity to anti-female biases. "I am here to talk about the half of the human race that is women," she said. "The first problem for both men and women is not to learn, but to unlearn."

"It is very odd speaking before so powerful a branch of the white male establishment," said Steinem-a New York writer and prominent spokeswoman for the women's movement-addressing her speech to "friends and sisters."

"It is clear we need courses in women's studies just as we need courses in black studies," she said, speaking of "the first 5000 years of human history when women were treated as equals. Were worshipped, in fact, because of childbearing, as paternity was not yet discovered."

The discovery of paternity, Steinem added, necessitated "locking up women to make sure who the father was-the beginning of marriage. We were the original means of production."

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Speaking yesterday before an informal discussion group in Harkness Commons, she commented, "It was a strange experience for me. Suddenly I found myself speaking about penis-envy and menopause as a symbol of oppression before the Harvard Law Review. "

"The penis-envy theory of Mr. Freud," Steinem told the Law Review, "I had stopped talking about. Then I found that a professor in the Business School still tells women students, 'You're only here because you want a penis, and you'll never have one.'"

"Women are the outs too," she said, comparing the oppression of women with the oppression of blacks. "They are suffering from the same myths: a childlike nature, smallerbrains, naturally passive, that they lack objectivity (which a few Harvard Law professors are still saying), and that they lack the ability to govern themselves, God forbid to govern white men."

"I'm not attempting to equate the suffering of the two groups," she added yesterday at Harkness. "Women lose their identity, while black people lose their lives."

"The generalized differences between two groups-male and female, black and white-is so much less great than the probably physical and temperamental differences between two women, or two white men," Steinem said. "It's time we based all job requirements on individual ability."

She called on her audience to use their power, "as students and faculty and alumni and friends of the Law School," to work for social change. "The problems of the Law School in changing society for the better become your problems, too," she said.

"I was trying to convince them that as students and faculty they had influence," she explained yesterday. "I'm not sure of the effect."

At the banquet, Steinem presented the Review audience with a series of demands, discussed last week in a private meeting with women Law students. They include:

Recruitment of women students, with a goal of 50 per cent in mind, "carrying at least the weight that geographical distribution is already given";

That qualified women be sought out immediately for positions on the Faculty;

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