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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!wlcrjs!zubbie
From: zubbie@wlcrjs.UUCP (Jeanette Zobjeck)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: women's place
Message-ID: <617@wlcrjs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 28-Feb-85 16:10:30 EST
Article-I.D.: wlcrjs.617
Posted: Thu Feb 28 16:10:30 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Mar-85 20:38:57 EST
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Organization: chi-net, Public Access UN*X, Chicago IL
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	Recently a women's talk show air on a Madison,Wisconsin TV
station featured3 transexual women (male to female ).
One of them was the first in the United States. Another one was 
a housewife and the third was pre-surgical.
	The interesting, or perhaps unsettling thing I noted was
during the part of the show when questions from the audience were
answered.

	One older woman who apparently, judging only by her accent,
asked the questions:

	1) Can you have children?
		A) No.

	2) If you can not have children than what good are you as
	   women?
		A) We feel equal, whole, a part of the world.

	The thought here which bothers me is How many of us out there
in the world feel that our prime function in this world is to have babies.
I feel I have a lot more to contribute then simply increasing the population.
Since there are also many women who, for one reason or another, can not
have children. Does that fact also make them useless, non-contributing
hangers on in society or does the fact that they were born with a
females body make them exempt from that concept. Is it only wrong to
BECOME  (physically) a woman who can not have children because your
body once had the wrong parts on it.
I am perhaps oversimplifying the sex change asspect because it is only
important as background. The important, as I see it, issue is the attitude
which says we, as women, have a requirement to maintain our place and
to live as if reproduction was our only job in life.
Since procreation takes both sexes why then shouldn't males also
be burdened with guilt for not being primarily concerned with the
making of babies and with a career or what ever second?

Women will never be free of the fact that they carry the child inside them
but this is not, again to me, the main reason we exist nor should it be.
As a group in the working arena we must work very hard as individuals
to keep attitudes like this (which we probably grew up with) from
holding us back.


jeanette l. zobjeck				All opinions expressed
						in this article are
       wlcrjs!					strictly my own !!!!
ihnp4!<       >zubbie			
       ihlpa!

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