![]() Penner, whose husband, Eugene, Is a guidance counselor in the Westport school system, formerly was an art teacher and is now working seriously at her own paintings. Hoffman, who guides several con sciousness‐raising groups through their weekly sessions and has added a course in women's studies at the college called “Philosophical and Psychological Aspects of Women's Roles,” carries her liberated mood into her private life. “The fact that most suburban housewives don't realize this is irrelevant,” she insisted.ĭr. “Even though the suburban woman may be among the world's wealthiest, her opportunities for identity and selfdetermination have been nonexistent,” the 42‐year‐old educator said. Dorothy Tennow Hoffman of Westport, a professor of psychology at the University of Bridgeport who is deeply involved in the feminist movement in Fairfield County, said she considers women's lib “very much a suburban movement.” Of course, it leaves me open to attack, but the delicious headiness of being able to define myself has been worth it.”ĭr. “I've always been conditioned to be dependent,” Suzanne Benton, who is 39, noted, “but I'm much more independent since I've joined the movement. “I see the liberation of women as a progression from one kind of blindness to a little light,” 37‐year‐old Kitty Penner said. While they support the familiar women's lib cries for equal job and pay opportunities, day care centers and abortions, one of the things that seems to place suburban feminists apart is that they appear to place greater emphasis on their inner needs and a search for identity. More formally structured groups, such as Connecticut Feminists in the Arts, Western Connecticut National Organization for Women (NOW) and Fairfield County Women's Liberation, all have recently made their appearance. In the county, informal discussion groups and consciousness‐raising sessions, under the banner of women's lib, are cropping up. In Connecticut's Fairfield County, the second largest of the state's eight counties in population, with a cross‐section of communities that vary from such working‐class cities as Bridgeport to such affluent residential communities as Westport and Darien, the women's liberation movement appears to be proliferating in a manner that may be representative of suburbia in general. Arnold Benton of Ridgefield, a sculptor, wife of a psychiatrist, mother of two young children and one of the leading figures in the Connecticut feminist movement, “you have a large group of educated women who can show their political talents by licking envelopes and serving coffee, their economic talents by running bake sales, their organizational talents by overseeing the Brownies.” Women's liberation in suburbia… It's there, it's growing, but it's layered over so that women seem to be isolated from the mainstream of life.
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