Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Linda LeClair is not hip. She's a housewife. And she doesn't even know it.

"Public interest in sex on the college campus is insatiable," says Miss Martha Peterson, the president of Barnard College, in a letter to alumnae.

Everyone is talking about Linda LeClair, the Barnard sophomore who's living with her boyfriend. Here's the article on LeClair that came out a couple weeks ago in Time:

Pert, lank-haired Linda LeClair, 20, from Hudson, N.H., enrolled as a freshman at Manhattan's Barnard College in 1965. Soon afterward, she met Peter Behr, a Columbia University freshman from New York City, at a dormitory dinner. Romance blossomed, and when Linda became ill and had to drop out of school a few months later, the couple moved into a West Side apartment together. Last year, still living off-campus with Peter, Linda resumed her studies.

... Peter and Linda freely explained that they began living together because they regarded marriage as "too serious a step."

She and Peter, a draft resister who has dropped out of Columbia, began cranking out mimeographed leaflets calling the case a "Victorian drama." They also distributed questionnaires asking other Barnard students whether they had violated the housing regulations in any way, triumphantly reported to newsmen that 300 girls had answered yes....
Miss Peterson assures the upset alums that the controversy will be put to "constructive purposes." I don't suppose the "constructive purposes" are supposed to be more sex on campus, but that's what it's likely to be whether it pleases Miss Peterson or not.

Frankly, I'm less worried about sexual freedom than I am about this tendency of young people to limit their freedom by setting up a marriage-like living arrangement with the person they happen to be having sex with. This way of life may shock some people, but it's not very liberating. Be independent. Live on your own. Don't tie yourself down. Sure: Have sex. But don't fall prey to the ridiculous idea that keeping house together is something excitingly modern. It's just common law marriage and it's the most boring, stodgy, stunting thing in the world. Linda LeClair is not hip. She's a housewife. And she doesn't even know it.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1968.

6 comments:

rhhardin said...

But don't fall prey to the ridiculous idea that keeping house together is something excitingly modern. It's just common law marriage and it's the most boring, stodgy, stunting thing in the world. Linda LeClair is not hip. She's a housewife.

Compare R.Emmett Tyrrell on Betty Friedan

The movement was born amid the sounds of the morning wash being automatically battered and dried in the laundry rooms of suburbia. The last crumbs of breakfast had been lugged away, the coffee was poured, and a scowling Miss Betty Friedan sat with the most awesome circle of women ever gathered under the roof of a modern ranch-type house. Together they deliberated, as rage feathered the linings of their bowels. The whole day yawned before them. Soon it would be back and forth, back and forth to the powder room. Coffee and house work can have that effect. These brave women were trapped with a vast expanse of desolate hours stretching out to that remote time when the kids returned from school and the idiot traipsed in with his evening paper. It was insanity, and still the infernal washing machine kept vibrating in the background. Soon the maid would be emptying it and feeding it, emptying it and feeding it. There would be telephones and shopping and God knows what all. Rosa Luxemburg had been right ; so had -- their genitalia notwithstanding -- C. Wright Mills and Norman O. Brown. It was time to hoist the black flag. Penis envy, ha!

The women began to read, and in time they began to shout. Millions of witches had been burned in the Middle Ages, yet here we were in the early 1960s and still no inquest had been held. Not even many books on the atrocity could be found. There was much work to be done...


``Betty Friedan and the Women of the Fevered Brow''
_Public Nuisances_ R.Emmett Tyrrell, 1978

Ron said...

Plus, she's "pert." I haven't heard a woman described that way in quite awhile...

Eli Blake said...

Isn't the justification for women's colleges that mixed colleges are still overly dominated by male students? I wonder if women will ever reach parity? Or maybe even a majority? Or maybe even a 2-1 or 3-1 majority at many colleges?

Nah. won't ever happen.

Ruth Anne Adams said...

Good thing she didn't marry him and do the hyphenated name thing. She'd be Linda LeClair-Behr...creator of this monstrosity.

reader_iam said...

Is it just my browser, or are the fonts weird here? And not just that, but the point size?

I have a comment in mind ... but, frankly, looking at this, based on the visuals referenced, I pause, in case I'm missing (and lest I "mis-attribute") something.

ricpic said...

Yes, as we all know, free love is the true and only path to supreme happiness and realization.