Women’s ‘clinging’ behaviour is required by the objective social situation. The female response to such a situation of male hysteria at any prospect of mutual commitment was the development of subtle methods of manipulation, to force as much commitment as could be forced from men. Over the centuries strategies have been devised, tested, and passed on from mother to daughter in secret tetê-à-têtes, passed around at ‘kaffee-klatsches’ (‘I never understand what it is women spend so much time talking about!’), or, in recent times, via the telephone. These are not trivial gossip sessions at all (as women prefer men to believe), but desperate strategies for survival. More real brilliance goes into one one-hour coed telephone dialogue about men than into that same coed’s four years of college study, or for that matter, than into most male political manoeuvres. It is no wonder, then, that even the few women without ‘family obligations’ always arrive exhausted at the starting line of any serious endeavour. It takes one’s major energy for the best portion of one’s creative years to ‘make a good catch’, and a good part of the rest of one’s life to ‘hold’ that catch. (‘To be in love can be a full-time job for a woman, like that of a profession for a man.’)
Women who choose to drop out of this race are choosing a life without love, something that, as we have seen, most men don’t have the courage to do.
But unfortunately the Manhunt is characterized by an emotional urgency beyond this simple desire for return commitment. It is compounded by the very class reality that produced the male inability to love in the first place. In a male-run society that defines women as an inferior and parasitical class, a woman who does not achieve male approval in some form is doomed. To legitimate her existence, a woman must be more than woman, she must continually search for an out from her inferior definition; and men are the only ones in a position to bestow on her this state of grace. But because the woman is rarely allowed to realize herself through activity in the larger (male) society—and when she is, she is seldom granted the recognition she deserves—it becomes easier to try for the recognition of one man than of many; and in fact this is exactly the choice most women make. Thus once more the phenomenon of love, good in itself, is corrupted by its class context: women must have love not only for healthy reasons but actually to validate their existence.
In addition, the continued economic dependence of women makes a situation of healthy love between equals impossible. Women today still live under a system of patronage: with few exceptions, they have the choice, not between either freedom or marriage, but between being either public or private property. Women who merge with a member of the ruling class can at least hope that some of his privilege will, so to speak, rub off. But women without men are in the same situation as orphans: they are a helpless sub-class lacking the protection of the powerful. This is the antithesis of freedom when they are still (negatively) defined by a class situation: for now they are in a situation of magnified vulnerability.
To participate in one's subjection by choosing one's master often gives the illusion of free choice; but in reality a woman is never free to choose love without ulterior motives. For her at the present time, the two things, love and status, must remain inextricably intertwined.
—Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”