Question: Well, my question is, the role of the women, is characterized by three factors: oppression, subordination, and exploitation. These three translate into moral dependency, political and social subordination. Great revolutions, ruled by scientific and philosophical paradigms, have not changed the education of women. My question is: What is, for you, the concept of the identity of the female person, within a view of building, construction? Thank you.

LaRouche: Well, I think the problem, first of all, let's get concrete, not generalities, we're talking about the macho problem: machismo. Actually, the process of scientific and technological development has changed the status of women, from that, in many cases, of virtually human cattle, today.

For example, let's take the case of childbirth deaths, and other kinds of conditions that affect women, who are treated largely as chattels, in many cultures. We've gotten beyond that. The problem has been, today, is that, especially since 1964, the counter-cultural movement has produced new problems and new issues, which center upon the lack of any positive conception of the future, any sense of identity.

For example, let's take the case of the U.S. woman: Now, what's the characteristic that's faced by the typical young woman in the United States today, say of the 18 to 24-25 age group. What's the family? How many step-parents do these young people have? How many siblings and quasi-siblings do they have? What is their relationship to the family relations, of the parent and so forth? What we have is, we have a general cultural degeneration, of the institution of the family. And the ideas of the feminists, often, today, are strongly colored by, actually, the degradation which goes with this cultural transformation of the post-1964 period.

So, the essential problem--I don't believe in a feminine identity. I believe, of course--the obvious thing is the obvious: I've always believed in the essential intellectual equality of women--period. But, intellectual equality doesn't mean anything, unless you have a yardstick for what you mean by equality. Equality of what? Equality, in my view, is a sense of personal identity; it's a sense of participation in a meaningful form of society, intellectually as well as physically. And, the problem we have, I think, is not so much a discrimination against women--we can talk about machismo; I could go on with that, with what I've seen in my experience of machismo, alone, and its various forms and manifestations in various cultures: a horror-story.

For example, the case of Polish culture, as reported by Bronislaw Malinowski, about the habit of the Polish peasant to come home and beat the family and wife and children. We have that kind of problem. That is not, generally, a policy problem, a cultural policy problem, in modern society. It's a vestige of a pre-modern society, or a quasi-feudal society, or backward societies of the past.

The problem today is, no one has a good sense of identity, in this culture. And feminism is often as bad a force, in dealing with this problem, as what they complain against. I've seen a lot of it.

The basic thing is, we have to start from the idea of the intellectual--the character of the human is not physical; it is not biological. And the first thing is to get over the biological distinctions, as being determining. Therefore, laws which pertain to biology, the biological condition or distinctions of people, except where health is a problem, should, in a sense, be put to one side. That's condition number one.

In place of that, we have to place the emphasis on the intellectual identity of the individual, which is largely a sense of the immortality of the individual, by virtue of the power of reason. And, that's the only way you're going to solve what is otherwise, a set of very real and very painful problems.

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