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CONNIE GOLDMAN: Do women really like each other and trust each other?

PAT CARBINE: Some women do. Women who understand that a human being born a woman is not naturally inferior.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: It's the feeling that you have to compete with every other woman and battle the world too that makes a woman distrust other women?

PAT CARBINE: Well, no. I think part of the problem is that we have grown up as a society believing that our true identities were to be found in terms of the man that we settle down with. And so what you find yourself doing is competing with other women to land the best meal ticket. I mean, women who have grown up in the last 100 years since we came in off the farm anyway, and have become industrialized, women who have been measuring their own success as human beings in terms of how well their husbands did in business or in professions.

They define themselves in terms of what kind of a car their husband could buy, how much their house cost, how many times they went to the hairdresser in the course of a month. It had nothing to do with what kind of human beings they were. And too often, the way men regard women as their display cases.

I want you to have a mink coat, dear. Why? To keep her warm? Not bloody likely, because it makes him look successful. And women have grown up with absolutely the wrong notion of what being married is all-- I mean, many women. I don't want to be guilty of generalizing, and I have been. That's its own fallacy, of course. But too often, the condition in which we have grown up dictates that from the time you get into junior high school, your chief goal and preoccupation is to date the neatest boy by the time you get to college, to weekend at the most terrific college with the most terrific student leader, who is, please God, going to go on and become a professional man, right?

And when the phone rings in the dormitory, everybody is on edge because who is it? Who's calling?

CONNIE GOLDMAN: To get a date.

PAT CARBINE: To get a date with whom? And that's what the crazy competition has been all about. And no wonder women haven't been invited to like each other. If we ever believed that we were worth anything all by ourselves, and that being worth something, we were going to hopefully find a great relationship with another human being and probably marry him and with him, have children.

I mean, it's such a much more relaxed frame of mind to be in. And if you valued your dormitory mate because she is worth something, competition tends to fade very quickly. And the relationship between women becomes much healthier.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: Pat Carbine made some further observations on women's distorted self-image.

PAT CARBINE: If you were to describe a guy whom you thought might do very well in business, you would probably say he was ambitious. He was hard driving. He was hard working, maybe aggressive, love competition, and every one of those adjectives would add up to his being a terrifically good potential bet for any company to hire.

Now I do not happen to believe that in fact, those characteristics are exclusively valuable to a man in business. The business community has come to find those attributes to be terrific as far as men are concerned and terribly threatening as far as women are concerned.

If you use any of those words about a woman, she turns out to be a pushy bitch. Well, then you ask yourself the question, who's making the rules? And this is what I meant when I said that women have not been allowed, really, to demonstrate the same drives. We've learned to be devious.

CONNIE GOLDMAN: All nine women at lunch with Pat Carbine, editor-in-chief and publisher of Ms Magazine, nodded silently as she spoke. Just a few things that women think about but often hesitate to say. This is Connie Goldman.