in essential parts of men's experience. Women are seen as the "carriers" for society of certain unresolved aspects of the total human experience, which Miller says is one reason why women are so mistreated and degraded and why men do not fully integrate these areas into their own lives. Certain issues have emerged in the women's movement, notably physical frankness, sexual frankness, emotional frankness, human development, service functions, objectification, humanizing society, private and public equality, and personal creativity. Miller is excited by the idea that women may have been inadvertently empowered to achieve the cooperation and creativity necessary for human life and growth.
Miller then turns to an analysis of the strengths of women and to how those strengths are manifested and how the can be harnessed in service of humanity. She finds, however, that in society certain divisions have been made:
What I am saying is that human experience has obviously been divided in two--not down the middle, but somewhere askew of it. One moiety, the part assigned to women, has been devalued and treated almost as if it did not exist, or as only important enough for women to do (74).
Yet this is still an essential part, a part desired by every man at least at certain times.
Having noted many of the psychological qualities that women have developed, Miller turns to the qualities they will need in the future, qualities that arise out of women's specific experience and the values that experience has engendered. Among the elements Miller finds as crucial for women's development are creativity, cooperativeness, authenticity, self-determination, power, and the necessity for engaging in conflict. Miller does not ignore one of the most important elements shaping human development, the factor of ties to others. This element is affiliation, called by Miller something valued as highly or even more highly than self-enhancement. Mille...