ABSTRACT
Scholars quarrel about the universality of male dominance and female subordination, but not about its presence in past and present. Yet, both men and women call out for women's freedom and independence and for gender equality. The position of women dramatizes the tension between hierarchical practice and more individualistic, egalitarian theory. To serve as the author compass, she will borrow from an anthropologist, Peggy Sanday, and her theory about the conditions in which women escape subordination. As Carolyn Heilbrun says: one can act, sometimes shocking oneself at one's courage, or audacity. One lives with the terror, the knowledge of mixed motives and fundamental conflicts, the guilt but one acts. Yet, Zane's protest against the war is part of her process of liberation; and her feminist politics, though tactically they prefer shock to terror, are militant and often warlike. Both Louisa May Alcott and Alix Kates Shulman add some oddly congruent prescriptions to Sanday's analysis for the repudiation of subordination.
