PERSPECTIVE ON WOMEN : Patience Is No Longer Prudent : The battle on abortion is a battle over the ideology of male power, a rejection of passivity in favor of action.

A few weeks ago, on my way to Washington for the pro-choice march, I stopped in a nearby city to see an allergy specialist who’d been highly recommended. I waited, as is the case in most doctors’ offices, to be called to the examining room, waited for the doctor to come, waited for the nurse to perform the allergy tests he ordered. Then, after six hours of waiting and testing, I was asked to wait for the doctor.

When I finally did see him, an hour later, the main reason turned out to be a requirement that, although I was scheduled for three days of testing, I had to pay at the end of each day. To this end, the doctor had to make a note of what had been done. To this end, I’d been made to wait another hour and a half.

I was furious. Furious beyond measure. Furious beyond the actual provocation. Perhaps it was an allergic reaction. More likely, my fury was provoked by the degree to which I was expected to be passive.

In the doctor/patient relationship, the patient is not assumed to have autonomy. One’s power of choice extends only up to the moment of choosing to visit this doctor. Surely, men react as strongly as women to this assumption of passivity. Or do they? Does the fact that the society in which I live makes the same assumption about women solidify and amplify my rage?

In her book, “The Bonds of Love,” Jessica Benjamin cites signs appearing over the cribs of newborns in a hospital nursery. Over the little boys’ cribs, the signs read: “I’m a boy.” Over the little girls’, the signs read: “It’s a girl.” From a purely grammatical point of view, the boy is the active subject of his sentence, the girl the passive object of hers. The subject is dominant; he motivates the action; he acts upon the submissive subject. The sentence becomes the grammatical equivalent of the missionary position. It assumes a natural hierarchy of male over female. It sentences women to passivity for life.

To me, the real battle underlying the issue of reproductive rights is whether or not the ideology of masculinity, in which men are active and women are passive, will continue to be dominant. The ferocity of the attack against women’s right to choose--meaning autonomy--is also a fight against women being sexually active; women must either abstain from sex or bear the punishment. In no way are the excesses of the dominant male--rape, wife-beating, sexual harassment--recognized or addressed.

That this ideology is cloaked in a rhetoric of morality is nothing new; the Puritans burned women as witches in the name of God. So, too, did they name their daughters Patience, in honor of that most “feminine” of virtues. And if the neo-Puritans have their way, women will be “patients,” expected to go through life as if it were in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, waiting to be told when to undress, when to dress, when to lie down, when to get up.

Three years ago, I also went to Washington to march. In the hotel where I then stayed, along with hundreds of other women, the main lobby was connected to the street above it by escalators.

On the morning of the march, the women, most of them dressed in white as had been suggested by the organizers, began riding up the escalator to the street. At the same time, the next group to convene at the hotel began arriving, the graduates of Gonzaga High School, the Catholic boys’ school attended by Pat Buchanan and other avatars of the far right.

For an extraordinary moment, the women, swathed in white, like angels, were riding upward as the men, clothed in dark suits and pin-stripes, were riding downward. I wasn’t sure what symbolism to attach to this extraordinary image. It was tempting to think that women and their cause were gaining ascendancy. More likely, the men were coming down to reclaim what was theirs, to restore order, to take back the ground floor.

The official estimate of the numbers at the march three years ago was 250,000 to 500,000. This year our numbers were doubled. As Barbara Cartland would say, “an innumerable number.” But, though again dressed in white, we were not the romantic ingenues that Cartland might invent. And although many of us had to wait, for up to two hours, jammed together, immobile, before the sheer mass of the crowd allowed us to move forward, we did so by choice, for our freedom to choose. We were not and will not be “patient.”