What you and everyone else who has pointed out that different historical
circumstances justify different treatments fail to address is the fact that
the very law that is being called upon here is the law that was raised to
ensure equal treatment for women. Clearly you can see that no law would
have ever been enacted were it to have been phrased as such. So this is the
contradiction. But that contradiction, I have suggested since the very
beginning, is due to the fact that feminism itself is a partial expression
of the fundamental source of oppression. The paper I cited makes the case
that the women's movement only became prominent when women's labor came into
the market, approximately during the 50s and coinciding with Simone de
Beauvoir's THE SECOND SEX. At that point, women's labor came under the same
fundamental capital-labor relations as previously characterized male labor.
Now the limitations of the partial expression of the underlying
contradiction (capital/labor) come to the fore in any act directed at
resolving that contradiction in those partial terms. It's the essence of
the situation, the contradictory essence. It will never be resolved as a
partial solution addressing women's issues as women's issues but only as
part of a much larger struggle.
Paul H. Dillon
p.s. As to Blake, the Contraries are nice, almost koans, but I still love
the Fugs singing "Ah, Sunflower" best and especially enjoy the Huntington
Library's superb collection of his engravings. But then, Urizen doesn't
figure significantly in Jerusalem does he?