The traditional approach: part one (Episode 1 of 12)

Nancy Reeves, attorney, lecturer, and writer tests the traditional approach to the status of women “down through the ages and up to the minute.” This episode examines external (male) counseling (of women). Reeves reads a series of quotations illustrating the traditional approach to the status of women, resulting in the conclusion that woman is primarily wife and mother, that the private is her exclusive sphere, that the public world of work and politics belongs to man, that rivalry with man in these pursuits is unnatural and dangerous, that woman cannot successfully enter the intellectual realm because her genius is affective, that any knowledge she might have should derive intuitively, and that it is her destiny to be nurturing and passive. Reeves then proposes to evaluate the arguments advancing this model by the criteria of logic, by a comparison with the patterns of the past, and by an examination of other contemporary societies. Part One contains the examination through logic.