Written in 1969

Throughout the book I've got the feeling that Vonnegut is not a very politically-correct person--he is chauvinist and nationalist. I don't know if it is that I am interpreting it wrongly, but in the beginning of chapter 7, Billy refers to his wife Valencia as "the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim." This is not chauvinist because it refers to a woman as a machine but because it refers to his wife as one. Thinking that the person he should love the most is like a machine, among other examples from the book, make me assume that Billy is very chauvinist. In addition to that example, throughout the book Billy refers to Montana in a sexual way. In another side, he sort of shows Mary O'Hare, the wife of his friend Bernard, as a bossy pants. Billy's interactions with people in the novel are mostly with men, and whenever he mentions a woman it is either about money or something sexual, but overall about as an exterior matter. While she shows a better insight into his male friends, he doesn't characterize female characters as much. I know its a WWII book, so in the war parts there will be for the most only men, but some details like that "the Pole was a farm laborer who was being hanged for having sexual intercourse with German woman" (pg. 156) are unnecessary parts of the plot that simply add an old-fashioned and close-minded feeling.
As it says in the quote above, Billy always tends to note clearly where are people from. Whether its the Pole just mentioned,  the British soldiers or the Frenchman in Great Canyon, he usually stereotypes people.
Nowadays people can't publish things like this, it would be censored or people would sue the writer. Classics like Slaughterhouse-Five can help us see perspectives from the past. Even though it was only written 42 years ago, back then women were still working towards fairness and equal rights, and topics like stereotypes or xenophobia were not as a big deals as it is now. I guess it's good to have evidence form the past in this topic but it really makes me see how much the Western society has progressed in the last decades. I know that our society has decayed in some other ways we but have to be proud of things like this that we've accomplished.