Dworkin Andrea

Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

In this fierce and beautiful book, the author of Pornography: Men

Possessing Women confronts our most profound social disgrace:

the sexual, cultural, and political subjugation of women to men,

and with rare eloquence examines the systematic crimes of our

male-dominated society against women.

“Our Blood is long overdue—all women must welcome the vigor

and the incisive perception o f this young feminist. ”

—Flo Kennedy

“Andrea Dworkin’s writing has the power of young genius

—Leah Fritz

“Andrea Dworkin has dedicated the title chapter of her book to the

Grimke sisters, and it would have pleased them, I think—since it

contains material which can serve at once as source and inspiration

for women. ”

—Robin Morgan

“Women, looking into the mirror of Out Blood, will feel anguish

for our past suffering and enslavement—and outrage at our present

condition. Men, if they dare to look into this mirror, will turn away

in shame and horror at what they have done. ”

—Karla Jay

“It is great—scary and innovative and great. ”

—Karen DeCrow

“Our Blood takes a hard, unflinching look at the nature of sexual

politics. Each essay reveals us to ourselves, exposing always the

dynamics which have kept women oppressed throughout the ages.

Our Blood compels us to confront the truth of our lives in the hope

that we will then be able to transform them. ”

—Susan Yankowitz

WOMAN B

o

k

s b

y

A

n

d

reaD

w

i

HATING

THE NEW WOMANS BROKEN H EART

p o r n o g r a p h y : m e n p o s s e s s i n g w o m e n

Perigee Books

are published by

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

200 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 1976 by Andrea Dworkin

New preface copyright © 1981 by Andrea Dworkin

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Academic Press

Canada Limited, Toronto.

“Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia. *' Copyright Q 1974 by Andrea

Dworkin. First published in Social Policy, May/June 1975. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality. ’” Copyright © 1974 by Andrea Dworkin.

First published in WIN, October 1 7 , 1974. Reprinted by permission of the

author.

“Remembering the Witches. ” Copyright © 1975 by Andrea Dworkin. First

published in WIN, February 20, 1975. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door. ” Copyright © 1975 by Andrea Dworkin. First delivered as a lecture.

“The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage. ” Copyright © 1975 by Andrea

Dworkin. First delivered as a lecture.

“Redefining Nonviolence. ” Copyright © 1975 by Andrea Dworkin. Published in WIN, July 17, 1975. Delivered as a lecture under the tide “A Call to Separatism. ” Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Lesbian Pride. ” Copyright © 1975 by Andrea Dworkin. First published

under the title “What Is Lesbian Pride? ” in The Second Wave, Vol. 4, No. 2,

1975. Delivered as a lecture under the title “What Is Lesbian Pride? ” Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Our Blood: The Slavery of Women in Amerika. ” Copyright © 1975 by

Andrea Dworkin. First delivered as a lecture under the title “Our Blood. ”

“The Root Cause. ” Copyright © 1975 by Andrea Dworkin. First delivered

as a lecture under the title “Androgyny. ”

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., for permission

to reprint from The Random House Dictionary o f the English Language.

Copyright © 1966, 1967 by Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dworkin, Andrea.

Our blood.

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Harper &

Row, cl976.

Bibliography: p.

1. Women—Social conditions. 2. Feminism. I. Title.

HQ1154. D85 1981

305. 4'2

81-7308

ISBN 0-399-50575-X

AACR2

First Perigee printing, 1981

Printed in the United States of America

C ontents

Preface

xi

1. Feminism, A rt, and My M other Sylvia

1

2. Renouncing Sexual “Equality”

10

3. Remembering the Witches

15

4. The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door

22

5. The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage

50

6. Redefining Nonviolence

66

7. Lesbian Pride

73

8. Our Blood: The Slavery of Women in Amerika

76

9. The Root Cause

96

Notes

113

FOR BARBARA DEMING

I suggest that if we are willing to confront our own

most seemingly personal angers, in their raw state,

and take upon ourselves the task of translating this

raw anger into the disciplined anger of the search

for change, we will find ourselves in a position to

speak much more persuasively to comrades about

the need to root out from all anger the spirit of

murder.

Barbara Deming, “On Anger”

We Cannot Live Without Our Lives

Now, women do not ask half of a kingdom but

their rights, and they don’t get them. When she

comes to demand them, don’t you hear how sons

hiss their mothers like snakes, because they ask

for their rights; and can they ask for anything

less?. . . But we’ll have our rights; see if we don’t;

and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can.

You can hiss as much as you like, but it is coming.

Sojourner Truth, 1853

I thank Kitty Benedict, A

C

K

N

O

W

L

E

D

G

M

T

S

Phyllis Chesler, Barbara

Deming, Jane Gapen, Beatrice Johnson, Eleanor

Johnson, Liz Kanegson, Judah Kataloni, Jeanette

Koszuth, Elaine Markson, and Joslyn Pine for

their help and faith.

I thank John Stoltenberg, who has been my

closest intellectual and creative collaborator.

I thank my parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin,

for their continued trust and respect.

I thank all of the women who organized the

conferences, programs, and classes at which I

spoke.

I thank those feminist philosophers, writers,

organizers, and prophets whose work sustains and

strengthens me.

PREFA CE

Our Blood is a book that grew out of a situation. The

situation was that I could not get my work published. So I

took to public speaking—not the extemporaneous exposition of thoughts or the outpouring of feelings, but crafted prose that would inform, persuade, disturb, cause recognition, sanction rage. I told myself that if publishers would not publish my work, I would bypass them altogether. I

decided to write directly to people and for my own voice. I

started writing this way because I had no other choice: I saw

no other way to survive as a writer. I was convinced that it

was the publishing establishment—timid and powerless

women editors, the superstructure of men who make the

real decisions, misogynistic reviewers—that stood between

me and a public particularly of women that I knew was

there. The publishing establishment was a formidable

blockade, and my plan was to swim around it.

In April 1974 my first book-length work of feminist

theory, Woman Hating, was published. Before its publication I had had trouble. I had been offered magazine assignments that were disgusting. I had been offered a great

deal of money to write articles that an editor had already

outlined to me in detail. They were to be about women or

sex or drugs. They were stupid and full of lies. For instance,

I was offered $1500 to write an article on the use of

barbiturates and amphetamines by suburban women. I was

to say that this use of drugs constituted a hedonistic

rebellion against the dull conventions of sterile housewifery,

that women used these drugs to turn on and swing and have

a wonderful new life-style. I told the editor that I suspected

women used amphetamines to get through miserable days

and barbiturates to get through miserable nights. I suggested, amiably I thought, that I ask the women who use the drugs why they use them. I was told flat-out that the article

would say what fun it was. I turned down the assignment.

This sounds like great rebellious fun—telling establishment

types to go fuck themselves with their fistful of dollars—but

when one is very poor, as I was, it is not fun. It is instead

profoundly distressing. Six years later I finally made half

that amount for a magazine piece, the highest I have ever

been paid for an article. I had had my chance to play ball

and I had refused. I was too naive to know that hack writing

is the only paying game in town. I believed in “literature, ”

“principles, ” “politics, ” and “the power of fine writing to

change lives. ” When I refused to do that article and others,

I did so with considerable indignation. The indignation

marked me as a wild woman, a bitch, a reputation reinforced during editorial fights over the content of Woman Hating, a reputation that has haunted and hurt me: not hurt

my feelings, but hurt my ability to make a living. I am in

fact not a “lady, ” not a “lady writer, ” not a “sweet young

thing. ” What woman is? My ethics, my politics, and my

style merged to make me an untouchable. Girls are supposed to be invitingly touchable, on the surface or just under.

I thought that the publication of Woman Hating would

establish me as a writer of recognized talent and that then I

would be able to publish serious work in ostensibly serious

magazines. I was wrong. The publication of Woman Hating,

about which I was jubilant, was the beginning of a decline

that continued until 1981 when Pornography: Men Possessing Women was published. The publisher of Woman Hating did not like the book: I am considerably understating here.

I was not supposed to say, for example, “Women are

raped. ” I was supposed to say, “Green-eyed women with

one leg longer than the other, hair between the teeth,

French poodles, and a taste for sauteed vegetables are

raped occasionally on Fridays by persons. ” It was rough. I

believed I had a right to say what I wanted. My desires were

not particularly whimsical: my sources were history, facts,

experience. I had been brought up in an almost exclusively

male tradition of literature, and that tradition, whatever its

faults, did not teach coyness or fear: the writers I admired

were blunt and not particularly polite. I did not understand

that—even as a writer—I was supposed to be delicate,

fragile, intuitive, personal, introspective. I wanted to claim

the public world of action, not the private world of feelings.

My ambition was perceived as megalomaniacal—in the

wrong sphere, demented by prior definition. Yes, I was

naive. I had not learned my proper place. I knew what I was

rebelling against in life, but I did not know that literature

had the same sorry boundaries, the same absurd rules, the

same cruel proscriptions. * It was easy enough to deal with

me: I was a bitch. And my book was sabotaged. The

publisher simply refused to fill orders for it. Booksellers

wanted the book but could not get it. Reviewers ignored the

* I had been warned early on about what it meant to be a girl, but I hadn’t

listened. “You write like a man, ” an editor wrote me on reading a draft

of a few early chapters of Woman Hating. “When you learn to write like

a woman, we will consider publishing you. ” This admonition reminded

me of a guidance counselor in high school who asked me as graduation

approached what I planned to be when I grew up. A writer, I said. He

lowered his eyes, then looked at me soberly. He knew I wanted to go to a

superb college; he knew I was ambitious. “What you have to do, ” he

said, “is go to a state college—there is no reason for you to go

somewhere else—and become a teacher so that you’ll have something to

fall back on when your husband dies. ” This story is not apocryphal. It

happened to me and to countless others. I had thought both the guidance

counselor and the editor stupid, individually stupid. I was wrong. They

were not individually stupid.

book, consigning me to invisibility, poverty, and failure.

The first speech in Our Blood (“Feminism, Art, and My

Mother Sylvia”) was written before the publication of

Woman Hating and reflects the deep optimism I felt at that

time. By October, the time of the second speech in Our

Blood (“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’”), I knew that I was

in for a hard time, but I still did not know how hard it was

going to be.

“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’” was written for the

National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality

that took place in New York City on October 12, 1974. I

spoke at the end of a three-hour speakout on sex: women

talking about their sexual experiences, feelings, values.

There were 1100 women in the audience; no men were

present. When I was done, the 1100 women rose to their

feet. Women were crying and shaking and shouting. The

applause lasted nearly ten minutes. It was one of the most

astonishing experiences of my life. Many of the talks I gave

received standing ovations, and this was not the first, but I

had never spoken to such a big audience, and what I said

contradicted rather strongly much of what had been said

before I spoke. So the response was amazing and it

overwhelmed me. The coverage of the speech also overwhelmed me. One New York weekly published two vilifications. One was by a woman who had at least been present.

She suggested that men might die from blue-balls if I were

ever taken seriously. The other was by a man who had not

been present; he had overheard women talking in the lobby.

He was “enraged. ” He could not bear the possibility that “ a

woman might consider masochistic her consent to the means

of my release. ” That was the “danger Dworkin’s ideology

represents. ” Well, yes; but both writers viciously distorted

what I had actually said. Many women, including some

quite famous writers, sent letters deploring the lack of

fairness and honesty in the two articles. None of those

letters were published. Instead, letters from men who had

not been present were published; one of them compared my

speech to H itler’s Final Solution. I had used the words

“limp” and “penis” one after the other: “limp penis. ” Such

usage outraged; it offended so deeply that it warranted a

comparison with an accomplished genocide. Nothing I had

said about women was mentioned, not even in passing. The

speech was about women. The weekly in question has since

never published an article of mine or reviewed a book of

mine or covered a speech of mine (even though some of my

speeches were big events in New York City). * The kind of

fury in those two articles simply saturated the publishing

establishment, and my work was stonewalled. Audiences

around the country, most of them women and men,

continued to rise to their feet; but the journals that one

might expect to take note of a political writer like myself, or

a phenomenon like those speeches, refused to acknowledge

my existence. There were two noteworthy if occasional

exceptions: Ms. and Mother Jones.

In the years following the publication of Woman Hating,

it began to be regarded as a feminist classic. The honor in

this will only be apparent to those who value Mary

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication o f the Rights o f Women or

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It was a great

honor. Feminists alone were responsible for the survival of

Woman Hating. Feminists occupied the offices of Woman

* After Our Blood was published, I went to this same weekly to beg—yes,

beg—for some attention to the book, which was dying. The male writer

whose “release” had been threatened by “Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’ ” asked to meet me. He told me, over and over, how very beautiful Our Blood was. “You know—urn—um, ” I said, “that—urn, urn—That

Speech is in Our Blood—you know, the one you wrote about. ” “So

beautiful, ” he said, “so beautiful. ” The editor-in-chief of the weekly

wrote me that Our Blood was so fine, so moving. But Our Blood did not

get any help, not even a mention, in those pages.

Hating's publisher to demand that the book be published in

paper. Phyllis Chesler contacted feminist writers of reputation all over the country to ask for written statements of support for the book. Those writers responded with astonishing generosity. Feminist newspapers reported the suppression of the book. Feminists who worked in bookstores scavenged distributors’ warehouses for copies of the book and wrote over and over to the publisher to demand

the book. Women’s studies programs began using it.

Women passed the book from hand to hand, bought second

and third and fourth copies to give friends whenever they

could find it. Even though the publisher of Woman Hating

had told me it was “mediocre, ” the pressure finally resulted

in a paperback edition in 1976: 2500 leftover unbound

copies were bound in paper and distributed, sort of.

Problems with distribution continued, and bookstores,

which reported selling the book steadily when it was in

stock, had to wait months for orders to be filled. Woman

Hating is now in its fifth tiny paperback printing. The book

is not another piece of lost women’s literature only because

feminists would not give it up. In a way this story is

heartening, because it shows what activism can accomplish,

even in the Yahoo land of Amerikan publishing.

But I had nowhere to go, no way to continue as a writer.

So I went on the road—to women’s groups who passed a hat

for me at the end of my talk, to schools where feminist

students fought to get me a hundred dollars or so, to

conferences where women sold T-shirts to pay me. I spent

weeks or months writing a talk. I took long, dreary bus rides

to do what appeared to be only an evening’s work and slept

wherever there was room. Being an insomniac, I did not

sleep much. Women shared their homes, their food, their

hearts with me, and I met women in every circumstance,

nice women and mean women, brave women and terrified

women. And the women I met had suffered every crime,

every indignity: and I listened. “The Rape Atrocity and the

Boy Next D oor” (in this volume) always elicited the same

responses: I heard about rape after rape; women’s lives

passed before me, rape after rape; women who had been

raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed, tom , women who had been sleeping,

women who had been with their children, women who had

been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going

home from school or in their offices working or in factories

or in stockrooms, young women, girls, old women, thin

women, fat women, housewives, secretaries, hookers,

teachers, students. I simply could not bear it. So I stopped

giving the speech. I thought I would die from it. I learned

what I had to know, and more than I could stand to know.

My life on the road was an exhausting mixture of good

and bad, the ridiculous and the sublime. One fairly typical

example: I gave the last lecture in Our Blood (“The Root

Cause, ” my favorite) on my twenty-ninth birthday. I had

written it as a birthday present to myself. The lecture was

sponsored by a Boston-based political collective. They were

supposed to provide transportation and housing for me and,

because it was my birthday and I wanted my family with me,

my friend and our dog. I had offered to come another time

but they wanted me then— en famille. One collective

member drove to New York in the most horrible thunderstorm I have ever seen to pick us up and drive us back to Boston. The other cars on the road were blurs of red light

here and there. The driver was exhausted, it was impossible

to see; and the driver did not like my political views. He

kept asking me about various psychoanalytic theories, none

of which I had the good sense to appreciate. I kept trying to

change the subject—he kept insisting that I tell him what I

thought of so-and-so—every time I got so cornered that I

had to answer, he slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.

I thought that we would probably die from the driver’s

fatigue and fury and God’s rain. We were an hour late, and

the jam-packed audience had waited. The acoustics in the

room were superb, which enhanced not only my own voice

but the endless howling of my dog, who finally bounded

through the audience to sit on stage during the question-

and-answer period. The audience was fabulous: involved,

serious, challenging. Many of the ideas in the lecture were

new and, because they directly confronted the political

nature of male sexuality, enraging. The woman with whom

we were supposed to stay and who was responsible for our

trip home was so enraged that she ran out, never to return.

We were stranded, without money, not knowing where to

turn. A person can be stranded and get by, even though she

will be imperiled; two people with a German shepherd and

no money are in a mess. Finally, a woman whom I knew

slightly took us all in and loaned us the money to get home.

Working (and it is demanding, intense, difficult work) and

traveling in such endlessly improvised circumstances require

that one develop an affection for low comedy and gross

melodrama. I never did. Instead I became tired and

demoralized. And I got even poorer, because no one could

ever afford to pay me for the time it took to do the writing.

I did not begin demanding realistic fees, secure accommodations, and safe travel in exchange for my work until after the publication of Our Blood. I had tried intermittently and mostly failed. But now I had to be paid and safe.

I felt I had really entered middle age. This presented new

problems for feminist organizers who had little access to the

material resources in their communities. It also presented

me with new problems. For a long time I got no work at all,

so I just got poorer and poorer. It made no sense to anyone

but me: if you have nothing, and someone offers you

something, how can you turn it down? But I did, because I

knew that I would never make a living unless I took a stand.

I had a fine and growing reputation as a speaker and writer;

but still, there was no money for me. When I first began to

ask for fees, I got angry responses from women: how could

the author of Woman Hating be such a scummy capitalist

pig, one woman asked in a nearly obscene letter. The letter

writer was going to live on a farm and have nothing to do

with rat-shit capitalists and bourgeois feminist creeps. Well,

I wrote back, I didn’t live on a farm and didn’t want to. I

bought food in a supermarket and paid rent to a landlord

and I wanted to write books. I answered all the angry

letters. I tried to explain the politics of getting the money,

especially from colleges and universities: the money was

there; it was hard to get; why should it go to Phyllis Schlafly

or William F. Buckley, Jr.? I had to live and I had to write.

Surely my writing m attered, it mattered to them or why did

they want me: and did they want me to stop writing? I

needed money to write. I had done the rotten jobs and I

was living in real, not romantic, poverty. I found that the

effort to explain really helped—not always, and resentments still surfaced, but enough to make me see that explaining even without finally convincing was worthwhile.

Even if I didn’t get paid, somebody else might. After a long

fallow period I began to lecture again. I lectured erratically

and never made enough to live on, even in what I think of

as stable poverty, even when my fees were high. Many

feminist activists did fight for the money and sometimes got

it. So I managed—friends loaned me money, sometimes

anonymous donations came in the mail, women handed me

checks at lectures and refused to let me refuse them,

feminist writers gave me gifts of money and loaned me

money, and women fought incredible and bitter battles with

college administrators and committees and faculties to get

me hired and paid. The women’s movement kept me alive. I

did not live well or safely or easily, but I did not stop writing

either. I remain extremely grateful to those who went the

distance for me.

I decided to publish the talks in Our Blood because I was

desperate for money, the magazines were still closed to me,

and I was living hand-to-mouth on the road. A book was my

only chance.

The editor who decided to publish Our Blood did not

particularly like my politics, but she did like my prose. I was

happy to be appreciated as a writer. The company was the

only unionized publishing house in New York and it also

had an active women’s group. The women employees were

universally wonderful to me—vitally interested in feminism,

moved by my work, conscious and kind. They invited me to

address the employees of the company on their biennial

women’s day, shortly before the publication of Our Blood. I

discussed the systematic presumption of male ownership of

women’s bodies and labor, the material reality of that

ownership, the economic degrading of women’s work. (The

talk was subsequently published in abridged form under the

title “Phallic Imperialism” in Ms., December 1976. ) Some

men in suits sat dourly through it, taking notes. That,

needless to say, was the end of Our Blood. There was one

other telling event: a highly placed department head threw

the manuscript of Our Blood at my editor across a room. I

did not recognize male tenderness, he said. I don’t know

whether he made the observation before or after he threw

the manuscript.

Our Blood was published in cloth in 1976. The only

review of it in a major periodical was in Ms. many months

after the book was out of bookstores. It was a rave.

Otherwise, the book was ignored: but purposefully, maliciously. Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Karen DeCrow tried to review the book to no avail. I contacted

nearly a hundred feminist writers, activists, editors. A large

majority made countless efforts to have the book reviewed.

Some managed to publish reviews in feminist publications,

but even those who frequently published elsewhere were

unable to place reviews. No one was able to break the larger

silence.

Our Blood was sent to virtually every paperback publisher in the United States, sometimes more than once, over a period of years. None would publish it. Therefore, it is

with great joy, and a shaky sense of victory, that I welcome

its publication in this edition. I have a special love for this

book. Most feminists I know who have read Our Blood

have taken me aside at one time or another to tell me that

they have a special affection and respect for it. There is, I

believe, something quite beautiful and unique about it.

Perhaps that is because it was written for a human voice.

Perhaps it is because I had to fight so hard to say what is in

it. Perhaps it is because Our Blood has touched so many

women’s lives directly: it has been said over and over again

to real women and the experience of saying the words has

informed the writing of them. Woman Hating was written

by a younger writer, one more reckless and more hopeful

both. This book is more disciplined, more somber, more

rigorous, and in some ways more impassioned. I am happy

that it will now reach a larger audience, and sorry that it

took so long.

Andrea Dworkin

New York City

March 1981

1

Fem inism , A rt, and My M other S ylvia

I am very happy to be here today. It is no small thing for me

to be here. There are many other places I could be. This is not

what my mother had planned for me.

I want to tell you something about my mother. Her name is

Sylvia. Her father’s name is Spiegel. Her husband’s name is

Dworkin. She is fifty-nine years old, my mother, and just a few

months ago she had a serious heart attack. She is recovered

now and back on her job. She is a secretary in a high school.

She has been a heart patient most of her life, and all of mine.

When she was a child she had rheumatic fever. She says that

her real trouble began when she was pregnant with my brother

Mark and got pneumonia. After that, her life was a misery of

illness. After years of debilitating illness—heart failures, toxic

reactions to the drugs that kept her alive—she underwent

Delivered at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, April 16, 1974.

heart surgery, then she suffered a brain clot, a stroke, that

robbed her of speech for a long time. She recovered from the

heart surgery. She recovered from her stroke, although she

still speaks more slowly than she thinks. Then, about eight

years ago she had a heart attack. She recovered. Then, a few

months ago she had a heart attack. She recovered.

My mother was bom in Jersey City, New Jersey, the second

oldest of seven children, two boys, five girls. Her parents,

Sadie and Edward, who were cousins, came from someplace

in Hungary. Her father died before I was bom. Her mother is

now eighty. There is no way of knowing of course if my mother’s heart would have been injured so badly had she been bom into a wealthy family. I suspect not, but I do not know. There

is also of course no way of knowing if she would have received

different medical treatment had she not been a girl. But regardless, it all happened the way it happened, and so she was very ill most of her life. Since she was a girl, no one encouraged her to read books (though she tells me that she used to love to read and does not remember when or why she stopped

reading); no one encouraged her to go to college or asked her

to consider the problems of the world in which she lived. Because her family was poor, she had to work as soon as she finished high school. She worked as a secretary full-time, and

on Saturdays and some evenings she did part-time work as a

“salesgirl” in a department store. Then she married my father.

My father was a school teacher and he also worked nights

in the post office because he had medical bills to pay. He had

to keep my mother alive, and he had two children to support

as well. I say along with Joseph Chaikin in The Presence of

the Actor: “The medical-economic reality in this country is

emblematic of the System which literally chooses who is to

survive. I renounce my government for its inequitable economic system. ”*1 Others, I must point out to you, had and have less than we did. Others who were not my mother but

* Notes start on p. 113.

who were in her situation did and do die. I too renounce this

government because the poor die, and they are not only the

victims of heart disease, or kidney disease, or cancer— they

are the victims of a system which says a visit to the doctor is

$25 and an operation is $5, 000.

When I was twelve, my mother emerged from her heart

surgery and the stroke that had robbed her of speech. There

she was, a mother, standing up and giving orders. We had a

very hard time with each other. I didn’t know who she was, or

what she wanted from me. She didn’t know who I was, but she

had definite ideas about who I should be. She had, I thought, a

silly, almost stupid attitude toward the world. By the time I

was twelve I knew that I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. I

had been raised really without a mother, and so certain ideas

hadn’t reached me. I didn’t want to be a wife, and I didn’t

want to be a mother.

My father had really raised me although I didn’t see a lot of

him. My father valued books and intellectual dialogue. He was

the son of Russian immigrants, and they had wanted him to be

a doctor. That was their dream. He was a devoted son and so,

even though he wanted to study history, he took a pre-medical

course in college. He was too squeamish to go through with it

all. Blood made him ill. So after pre-med, he found himself,

for almost twenty years, teaching science, which he didn’t like,

instead of history, which he loved. During the years of doing

work he disliked, he made a vow that his children would be

educated as fully as possible and, no matter what it took from

him, no matter what kind of commitment or work or money,

his children would become whatever they wanted. My father

made his children his art, and he devoted himself to nurturing

those children so that they would become whatever they could

become. I don’t know why he didn’t make a distinction between his girl child and his boy child, but he didn’t. I don’t know why, from the beginning, he gave me books to read, and

talked about all of his ideas with me, and watered every ambi

tion that I had so that those ambitions would live and be

nourished and grow—but he did. *

So in our household, my mother was out of the running as

an influence. My father, whose great love was history, whose

commitment was to education and intellectual dialogue, set

the tone and taught both my brother and me that our proper

engagement was with the world. He had a whole set of ideas

and principles that he taught us, in words, by example. He

believed, for instance, in racial equality and integration when

those beliefs were seen as absolutely aberrational by all of his

neighbors, family, and peers. When I, at the age of fifteen,

declared to a family gathering that if I wanted to marry I

would marry whomever I wanted, regardless of color, my

father’s answer before that enraged assembly was that he expected no less. He was a civil libertarian. He believed in unions, and fought hard to unionize teachers— an unpopular

notion in those days since teachers wanted to see themselves as

professionals. He taught us those principles in the Bill of

Rights which are now not thought of very highly by most

Amerikans— an absolute commitment to free speech in all its

forms, equality before just law, and racial equality.

I adored my father, but I had no sympathy for my mother. I

knew that she was physically brave— my father told me so

over and over—but I didn’t see her as any Herculean hero. No

woman ever had been, as far as I knew. Her mind was uninteresting. She seemed small and provincial. I remember that once, in the middle of a terrible argument, she said to me in a

stony tone of voice: You think I’m stupid. I denied it then, but

I know today that she was right. And indeed, what else could

one think of a person whose only concern was that I clean up

*

My mother has reminded me that she introduced me to libraries and that

she also always encouraged me to read. I had forgotten this early shared experience because, as I grew older, she and I had some conflicts over the particular books which I insisted on reading, though she never stopped me

from reading them. Sometime during my adolescence, books came to connote

for me, in part, my intellectual superiority over my mother, who did not

read, and my peership with my father, who did read.

my room, or wear certain clothes, or comb my hair another

way. I had, certainly, great reason to think that she was stupid,

and horrible, and petty, and contemptible even: Edward

Albee, Philip Wylie, and that great male artist Sigmund Freud

told me so. Mothers, it seemed to me, were the most expendable of people— no one had a good opinion of them, certainly not the great writers of the past, certainly not the exciting

writers of the present. And so, though this woman, my mother,

whether present or absent, was the center of my life in so

many inexplicable, powerful, unchartable ways, I experienced

her only as an ignorant irritant, someone without grace or

passion or wisdom. When I married in 1969 I felt free— free

of my mother, her prejudices, her ignorant demands.

I tell you all of this because this story has, possibly for the

first time in history, a rather happier resolution than one might

expect.

Do you remember that in Hemingway’s For Whom the

Bell Tolls Maria is asked about her lovemaking with Robert,

did the earth move? For me, too, in my life, the earth has

sometimes moved. The first time it moved I was ten. I was

going to Hebrew school, but it was closed, a day of mourning

for the six million slaughtered by the Nazis. So I went to see my

cousin who lived nearby. She was shaking, crying, screaming,

vomiting. She told me that it was April, and in April her

youngest sister had been killed in front of her, another sister’s

infant had died a terrible death, their heads had been shaved

— let me just say that she told me what had happened to her in

a Nazi concentration camp. She said that every April she remembered in nightmare and terror what had happened to her that month so many years before, and that every April she

shook, cried, screamed, and vomited. The earth moved for me

then.

The second time the earth moved for me was when I was

eighteen and spent four days in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City. I had been arrested in a demonstration

against the Indochina genocide. I spent four days and four

nights in the filth and terror of that jail. While there two doctors gave me a brutal internal examination. I hemorrhaged for fifteen days after that. The earth moved for me then.

The third time the earth moved for me was when I became

a feminist. It wasn’t on a particular day, or through one experience. It had to do with that afternoon when I was ten and my cousin put the grief of her life into my hands; it had to do

with that women’s jail, and three years of marriage that began

in friendship and ended in despair. It happened sometime after

I left my husband, when I was living in poverty and great

emotional distress. It happened slowly, little by little. A week

after I left my ex-husband I started my book, the book which is

now called Woman Hating. I wanted to find out what had

happened to me in my marriage and in the thousand and one

instances of daily life where it seemed I was being treated like

a subhuman. I felt that I was deeply masochistic, but that my

masochism was not personal— each woman I knew lived out

deep masochism. I wanted to find out why. I knew that I

hadn’t been taught that masochism by my father, and that my

mother had not been my immediate teacher. So I began in

what seemed the only apparent place—with Story of O, a

book that had moved me profoundly. From that beginning I

looked at other pornography, fairy tales, one thousand years

of Chinese footbinding, and the slaughter of nine million

witches. I learned something about the nature of the world

which had been hidden from me before— I saw a systematic

despisal of women that permeated every institution of society,

every cultural organ, every expression of human being. And I

saw that I was a woman, a person who met that systematic

despisal on every street comer, in every living room, in every

human interchange. Because I became a woman who knew

that she was a woman, that is, because I became a feminist, I

began to speak with women for the first time in my life, and

one of the women I began to speak with was my mother. I

came to her life through the long dark tunnel of my own. I

began to see who she was as I began to see the world that had

formed her. I came to her no longer pitying the poverty of her

intellect, but astounded by the quality of her intelligence. I

came to her no longer convinced of her stupidity and triviality, but astonished by the quality of her strength. I came to her, no longer self-righteous and superior, but as a sister, another woman whose life, but for the grace of a feminist father and the new common struggle of my feminist sisters, would

have repeated hers— and when I say “repeated hers” I mean,

been predetermined as hers was predetermined. I came to her,

no longer ashamed of what she lacked, but deeply proud of

what she had achieved— indeed, I came to recognize that my

mother was proud, strong, and honest. By the time I was

twenty-six I had seen enough of the world and its troubles to

know that pride, strength, and integrity were virtues to honor.

And because I addressed her in a new way she came to meet

me, and now, whatever our difficulties, and they are not so

many, she is my mother, and I am her daughter, and we are

sisters.

You asked me to talk about feminism and art, is there a

feminist art, and if so, what is it. For however long writers

have written, until today, there has been masculinist art— art

that serves men in a world made by men. That art has degraded women. It has, almost without exception, characterized us as maimed beings, impoverished sensibilities, trivial people with trivial concerns. It has, almost without exception,

been saturated with a misogyny so profound, a misogyny that

was in fact its world view, that almost all of us, until today,

have thought, that is what the world is, that is how women

are.

I ask myself, what did I learn from all those books I read as

I was growing up? Did I learn anything real or true about

women? Did I learn anything real or true about centuries of

women and what they lived? Did those books illuminate my

life, or life itself, in any useful, or profound, or generous, or

rich, or textured, or real way? I do not think so. I think that

that art, those books, would have robbed me of my life as the

world they served robbed my mother of hers.

Theodore Roethke, a great poet we are told, a poet of the

male condition I would insist, wrote:

Two of the charges most frequently levelled against poetry by

women are lack of range—in subject matter, in emotional tone—

and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning-out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life—that special province of the feminine talent in prose—hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is;

lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the

altar, stamping a tiny foot against God; or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lamenting the lot of woman. . . and so on. 2

What characterizes masculinist art, and the men who make it,

is misogyny— and in the face of that misogyny, someone had

better reinvent integrity.

They, the masculinists, have told us that they write about

the human condition, that their themes are the great themes—

love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself. They have told

us that our themes—love, death, heroism, suffering, history

itself— are trivial because we are, by our very nature, trivial.

I renounce masculinist art. It is not art which illuminates

the human condition— it illuminates only, and to men’s final

and everlasting shame, the masculinist world— and as we look

around us, that world is not one to be proud of. Masculinist

art, the art of centuries of men, is not universal, or the final

explication of what being in the world is. It is, in the end,

descriptive only of a world in which women are subjugated,

submissive, enslaved, robbed of full becoming, distinguished

only by carnality, demeaned. I say, my life is not trivial; my

sensibility is not trivial; my struggle is not trivial. Nor was my

mother’s, or her mother’s before her. I renounce those who

hate women, who have contempt for women, who ridicule and

demean women, and when I do, I renounce most of the art,

masculinist art, ever made.

As feminists, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the

world in a new way. We threaten to turn it upside down and

inside out. We intend to change it so totally that someday the

texts of masculinist writers will be anthropological curiosities.

What was that Mailer talking about, our descendants will ask,

should they come upon his work in some obscure archive.

And they will wonder—bewildered, sad— at the masculinist

glorification of war; the masculinist mystifications around killing, maiming, violence, and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the vain arrogance of phallic supremacy; the

impoverished renderings of mothers and daughters, and so of

life itself. They will ask, did those people really believe in

those gods?

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great

river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless

stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based

on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which

will take the great human themes— love, death, heroism,

suffering, history itself— and render them fully human. It may

also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now

that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new

theme, one as great and as rich as those others— should we

call it “joy”?

We cannot imagine a world in which women are not experienced as trivial and contemptible, in which women are not demeaned, abused, exploited, raped, diminished before we are

even bom— and so we cannot know what kind of art will be

made in that new world. Our work, which does full honor to

those centuries of sisters who went before us, is to midwife

that new world into being. It will be left to our children and

their children to live in it.

2

Renouncing Sexual “E q u a lity ”

Equality: 1. the state of being equal; correspondence in

quantity, degree, value, rank, ability, etc. 2. uniform character, as of motion or surface.

Freedom: 1. state of being at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint. . . 2. exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc. 3.

power of determining one’s or its own action. . . 4.

Philos, the power to make one’s own choices or decisions

without constraint from within or without; autonomy,

self-determination. . . 5. civil liberty, as opposed to subjection to an arbitrary or despotic government. 6. political or national independence. . . 8. personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery. . .

— Syn. f r e e d o m , i n d e p e n d e n c e , l i b e r t y refer to an absence of undue restrictions and an opportunity to exercise one’s rights and powers, f r e e d o m emphasizes the opportunity given for the exercise of one’s rights, powers,

desires, or the like. . . i n d e p e n d e n c e implies not only

lack of restrictions but also the ability to stand alone, unsustained by anything else. . .

— Ant. 1-3. restraint. 5, 6, 8. oppression.

Justice: 1. the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness . . . 2. rightfulness or lawfulness. . . 3. the moral principle determining just conduct.

4. conformity to this principle, as manifested in conduct;

just conduct, dealing, or treatment. . .

from The Random House Dictionary

of the English Language

In 1970 Kate Millett published Sexual Politics. In that book

she proved to many of us— who would have staked our lives

Delivered at the National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality,

New York City, October 12, 1974.

on denying it— that sexual relations, the literature depicting

those relations, the psychology posturing to explain those relations, the economic systems that fix the necessities of those relations, the religious systems that seek to control those relations, are political. She showed us that everything that happens to a woman in her life, everything that touches or molds her, is political. 1

Women who are feminists, that is, women who grasped her

analysis and saw that it explained much of their real existence

in their real lives, have tried to understand, struggle against,

and transform the political system called patriarchy which

exploits our labor, predetermines the ownership of our bodies,

and diminishes our selfhood from the day we are bom. This

struggle has no dimension to it which is abstract: it has

touched us in every part of our lives. But nowhere has it

touched us more vividly or painfully than in that part of our

human lives which we call “love” and “sex. ” In the course of

our struggle to free ourselves from systematic oppression, a

serious argument has developed among us, and I want to bring

that argument into this room.

Some of us have committed ourselves in all areas, including

those called “love” and “sex, ” to the goal of equality, that is,

to the state of being equal; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, ability; uniform character, as of motion or surface. Others of us, and I stand on this side of the argument,

do not see equality as a proper, or sufficient, or moral, or

honorable final goal. We believe that to be equal where there

is not universal justice, or where there is not universal freedom is, quite simply, to be the same as the oppressor. It is to have achieved “uniform character, as of motion or surface. ”

Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of sexuality. The

male sexual model is based on a polarization of humankind

into man /woman, master/slave, aggressor/victim, active/

passive. This male sexual model is now many thousands of

years old. The very identity of men, their civil and economic

power, the forms of government that they have developed, the

wars they wage, are tied irrevocably together. All forms of

dominance and submission, whether it be man over woman,

white over black, boss over worker, rich over poor, are tied

irrevocably to the sexual identities of men and are derived

from the male sexual model. Once we grasp this, it becomes

clear that in fact men own the sex act, the language which

describes sex, the women whom they objectify. Men have written the scenario for any sexual fantasy you have ever had or any sexual act you have ever engaged in.

There is no freedom or justice in exchanging the female

role for the male role. There is, no doubt about it, equality.

There is no freedom or justice in using male language, the

language of your oppressor, to describe sexuality. There is no

freedom or justice or even common sense in developing a

male sexual sensibility— a sexual sensibility which is aggressive, competitive, objectifying, quantity oriented. There is only equality. To believe that freedom or justice for women,

or for any individual woman, can be found in mimicry of male

sexuality is to delude oneself and to contribute to the oppression of one’s sisters.

Many of us would like to think that in the last four years, or

ten years, we have reversed, or at least impeded, those habits

and customs of the thousands of years which went before— the

habits and customs of male dominance. There is no fact or

figure to bear that out. You may feel better, or you may not,

but statistics show that women are poorer than ever, that

women are raped more and murdered more. I want to suggest

to you that a commitment to sexual equality with males, that

is, to uniform character as of motion or surface, is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. I want to ask you to make a different commitment— a commitment to the abolition of poverty, rape, and murder; that is, a commitment to ending the system of oppression called patriarchy; to ending the male sexual model itself.

The real core of the feminist vision, its revolutionary kernel

if you will, has to do with the abolition of all sex roles— that

is, an absolute transformation of human sexuality and the institutions derived from it. In this work, no part of the male sexual model can possibly apply. Equality within the framework of the male sexual model, however that model is reformed or modified, can only perpetuate the model itself and the injustice and bondage which are its intrinsic consequences.

I suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual

model under which we now all labor and “love” begins where

there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest; that it begins in what we do know about female sexuality as distinct from male— clitoral touch

and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the

body (which needn’t— and shouldn’t—be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation

begins in the place they most dread— that is, in a limp penis. I

think that men will have to give up their precious erections

and begin to make love as women do together. I am saying

that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise

everything in them that they now value as distinctively “male. ”

No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.

I have been reading excerpts from the diary of Sophie Tolstoy, which I found in a beautiful book called Revelations: Diaries of Women, edited by Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter. Sophie Tolstoy wrote: And the main thing is not to love. See what I have done by loving him so deeply! It is so painful and humiliating; but he thinks that it is merely silly. “You say one thing and always do another. ”

But what is the good of arguing in this superior manner, when

I have nothing in me but this humiliating love and a bad temper;

and these two things have been the cause of all my misfortunes,

for my temper has always interfered with my love. I want nothing but his love and sympathy, and he won’t give it to me; and all my pride is trampled in the mud; I am nothing but a miser

able crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a

useless creature with morning sickness, and a big belly, two rotten teeth, and a bad temper, a battered sense of dignity, and a love which nobody wants and which nearly drives me insane. 2

Does anyone really think that things have changed so much

since Sophie Tolstoy made that entry in her diary on October

25, 1886? And what would you tell her if she came here

today, to her sisters? Would you have handed her a vibrator

and taught her how to use it? Would you have given her the

techniques of fellatio that might better please Mr. Tolstoy?

Would you have suggested to her that her salvation lay in

becoming a “sexual athlete”? Learning to cruise? Taking as

many lovers as Leo did? Would you tell her to start thinking

of herself as a “person” and not as a woman?

Or might you have found the courage, the resolve, the conviction to be her true sisters—to help her to extricate herself from the long darkness of Leo’s shadow; to join with her in

changing the very organization and texture of this world, still

constructed in 1974 to serve him, to force her to serve him?

I suggest to you that Sophie Tolstoy is here today, in the

bodies and lives of many sisters. Do not fail her.

3

R em em bering the W itches

I dedicate this talk to Elizabeth Gould Davis, author of The

First Sex, who several months ago killed herself and who toward the end of her life was a victim of rape; to Anne Sexton, poet, who killed herself on October 4, 1974; to Inez Garcia,

thirty years old, wife and mother, who was a few weeks ago

sentenced in California to five years to life imprisonment for

killing the three-hundred-pound man who held her down while

another man raped her; and to Eva Diamond, twenty-six years

old, whose child was taken from her five years ago when she

was declared an unfit mother because she was convicted of

welfare fraud and who several months ago was sentenced in

Minnesota to fifteen years in prison for killing her husband of

one year while he was attempting to beat her to death.

Delivered at New York City chapter meeting of the National Organization

for Women, October 3 1 , 1974.

We are here tonight to talk about gynocide. Gynocide is the

systematic crippling, raping, and/or killing of women by men.

Gynocide is the word that designates the relentless violence

perpetrated by the gender class men against the gender class

women.

For instance, Chinese footbinding is an example of gynocide. For one thousand years in China all women were systematically crippled so that they would be passive, erotic objects for men; so that they were carnal property; so that they were entirely dependent on men for food, water, shelter, and

clothing; so that they could not walk, or walk away, or unite

against the sadism of their male oppressors.

Another example of gynocide is the systematic rape of the

women of Bangladesh. There, the rape of women was part of

the military strategy of the male invading armies. As many of

you know, it is estimated that between 200, 000 and 400, 000

women were raped by the invading soldiers and when the war

was over, those women were considered unclean by their husbands, brothers, and fathers, and were left to whore, starve, and die. The Bangladesh gynocide was perpetrated first by the

men who invaded Bangladesh, and then by those who lived

there— the husbands, brothers, and fathers: it was perpetrated

by the gender class men against the gender class women.

Tonight, on Halloween, we are here to remember another

gynocide, the mass slaughter of the nine million women who

were called witches. These women, our sisters, were killed

over a period of three hundred years in Germany, Spain, Italy,

France, Holland, Switzerland, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Amerika. They were killed in the name of God the Father and His only Son, Jesus Christ.

The organized persecution of the witches began officially on

December 9, 1484. Pope Innocent VIII named two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, as Inquisitors and asked the good fathers to define witchcraft, to isolate the modus operandi of the witches, and to standardize trial

procedures and sentencing. Kramer and Sprenger wrote a text

called the Malleus Maleficarum. The Malleus Maleficarum

was high Catholic theology and working Catholic jurisprudence. It might be compared to the Amerikan Constitution. It was the law. Anyone who challenged it was guilty of heresy, a

capital crime. Anyone who refuted its authority or questioned

its credibility on any level was guilty of heresy, a capital crime.

Before I discuss the content of the Malleus Maleficarum, I

want to be clear about the statistical information that we do

have on the witches. The total figure of nine million is a moderate one. It is the figure most often used by scholars in the field. The ratio of women to men burned is variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1.

Witchcraft was a woman’s crime, and much of the text of

the Malleus explains why. First, Jesus Christ was bom, suffered, and died to save men, not women; therefore, women were more vulnerable to Satan’s enticements. Second, a woman

is “more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal

abominations. ”1 This excess of carnality originated in Eve’s

very creation: she was formed from a bent rib. Because of this

defect, women always deceive. Third, women are, by definition, wicked, malicious, vain, stupid, and irredeemably evil: “I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house

with a wicked woman.. . . All wickedness is but little to the

wickedness of a woman. . . When a woman thinks alone, she

thinks evil. ”2 Fourth, women are weaker than men in both

mind and body and are intellectually like children. Fifth,

women are “more bitter than death” because all sin originates

in and on account of women, and because women are “wheedling and secret” enemies. 3 Finally, witchcraft was a woman’s crime because “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is

in women insatiable. ”4

I want you to remember that these are not the polemics of

aberrants; these are the convictions of scholars, lawmakers,

judges. I want you to remember that nine million women were

burned alive.

Witches were accused of flying, having carnal relations with

Satan, injuring cattle, causing hailstorms and tempests, causing illnesses and epidemics, bewitching men, changing men and themselves into animals, changing animals into people,

committing acts of cannibalism and murder, stealing male

genitals, causing male genitals to disappear. In fact, this last—

causing male genitals to disappear—was grounds under Catholic law for divorce. If a man’s genitals were invisible for more than three years, his spouse was entitled to a divorce.

It would be hard to locate in Sprenger and Kramer’s gargantuan mass of woman-hating the most odious charge, the most incredible charge, the most ridiculous charge, but I do

think that I have done it. Sprenger and Kramer wrote:

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who. . . collect

male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat

oats and com, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? 5

What indeed? What are we to think? What are those of us

who grew up Catholics, for instance, to think? When we see

that priests are performing exorcisms in Amerikan suburbs,

that the belief in witchcraft is still a fundament of Catholic

theology, what are we to think? When we discover that Luther

energized this gynocide through his many confrontations with

Satan, what are we to think? When we discover that Calvin

himself burned witches, and that he personally supervised the

witch hunts in Zurich, what are we to think? When we discover that the fear and loathing of female carnality are codified in Jewish law, what are we to think?

Some of us have a very personal view of the world. We say

that what happens to us in our lives as women happens to us

as individuals. We even say that any violence we have experienced in our lives as women— for instance, rape or assault by a husband, lover, or stranger—happened between two individuals. Some of us even apologize for the aggressor—we feel

sorry for him; we say that he is personally disturbed, or that he

was provoked in a particular way, at a particular time, by a

particular woman.

Men tell us that they too are “oppressed. ” They tell us that

they are often in their individual lives victimized by women—

by mothers, wives, and “girlfriends. ” They tell us that women

provoke acts of violence through our carnality, or malice, or

avarice, or vanity, or stupidity. They tell us that their violence

originates in us and that we are responsible for it. They tell us

that their lives are full of pain, and that we are its source.

They tell us that as mothers we injure them irreparably, as

wives we castrate them, as lovers we steal from them semen,

youth, and manhood— and never, never, as mothers, wives, or

lovers do we ever give them enough.

And what are we to think? Because if we begin to piece

together all of the instances of violence— the rapes, the assaults, the cripplings, the killings, the mass slaughters; if we read their novels, poems, political and philosophical tracts and

see that they think of us today what the Inquisitors thought of

us yesterday; if we realize that historically gynocide is not

some mistake, some accidental excess, some dreadful fluke,

but is instead the logical consequence of what they believe to

be our god-given or biological natures; then we must finally

understand that under patriarchy gynocide is the ongoing

reality of life lived by women. And then we must look to each

other— for the courage to bear it and for the courage to

change it.

The struggle of women, the feminist struggle, is not a struggle for more money per hour, or for equal rights under male law, or for more women legislators who will operate within

the confines of male law. These are all emergency measures,

designed to save women’s lives, as many as possible, now,

today. But these reforms will not stem the tide of gynocide;

these reforms will not end the relentless violence perpetrated

by the gender class men against the gender class women. These

reforms will not stop the increasing rape epidemic in this

country, or the wife-beating epidemic in England. They will

not stop the sterilizations of black and poor white women who

are the victims of male doctors who hate female carnality.

These reforms will not empty mental institutions of women

put into them by male relatives who hate them for rebelling

against the limits of the female role, or against the conditions

of female servitude. They will not empty prisons filled with

women who, in order to survive, whored; or who, after being

raped, killed the rapist; or who, while being beaten, killed the

man who was killing them. These reforms will not stop men

from living off exploited female domestic labor, nor will these

reforms stop men from reinforcing male identity by psychologically victimizing women in so-called “love” relationships.

And no personal accommodation within the system of

patriarchy will stop this relentless gynocide. Under patriarchy,

no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother

children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past,

present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

Before we can live and love, we will have to hone ourselves

into a revolutionary sisterhood. That means that we must stop

supporting the men who oppress us; that we must refuse to

feed and clothe and clean up after them; that we must refuse

to let them take their sustenance from our lives. That means

that we will have to divest ourselves of the identity we have

been trained to as females—that we will have to divest ourselves of all traces of the masochism we have been told is synonymous with being female. That means that we will have

to attack and destroy every institution, law, philosophy, religion, custom, and habit of this patriarchy—this patriarchy that feeds on our “dirty” blood, that is built on our “trivial”

labor.

Halloween is the appropriate time to commit ourselves to

this revolutionary sisterhood. On this night we remember our

dead. On this night we remember together that nine million

women were killed because men said that they were carnal,

malicious, and wicked. On this night we know that they live

now through us.

Let us together rename this night Witches’ Eve. Let us together make it a time of mourning: for all women who are victims of gynocide, dead, in jail, in mental institutions, raped,

sterilized against their wills, brutalized. And let us on this

night consecrate our lives to developing the revolutionary

sisterhood— the political strategies, the feminist actions—

which will stop for all time the devastating violence against

us.

4

The Rape A tro city

and the Boy N ext Door

I want to talk to you about rape— rape—what it is, who does

it, to whom it is done, how it is done, why it is done, and what

to do about it so that it will not be done any more.

First, though, I want to make a few introductory remarks. *

From 1964 to 1965 and from 1966 to 1968, I went to Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington at that time was still a women’s school, or, as people said then, a girls’ school. It

was a very insular place—entirely isolated from the Vermont

Delivered at State University of New York at Stony Brook, March 1, 1975;

University of Pennsylvania, April 25, 1975; State University of New York

College at Old Westbury, May 10, 1975; Womanbooks, New York City,

July 1, 1975; Woodstock Women's Center, Woodstock, New York, July 3,

1975; Suffolk County Community College, October 9, 1975; Queens College,

City University of New York, April 2 6 , 1976.

*

These introductory remarks were delivered only at schools where there

was no women’s studies program.

community in which it was situated, exclusive, expensive.

There was a small student body highly concentrated in the

arts, a low student-faculty ratio, and an apocryphal tradition

of intellectual and sexual “freedom. ” In general, Bennington

was a very distressing kind of playpen where wealthy young

women were educated to various accomplishments which

would insure good marriages for the respectable and good

affairs for the bohemians. At that time, there was more actual

freedom for women at Bennington than at most schools— in

general, we could come and go as we liked, whereas most

other schools had rigid curfews and controls; and in general

we could wear what we wanted, whereas in most other schools

women still had to conform to rigid dress codes. We were

encouraged to read and write and make pots, and in general

to take ourselves seriously, even though the faculty did not

take us seriously at all. Being better educated to reality than

we were, they, the faculty, knew what we did not imagine—

that most of us would take our highfalutin ideas about James

and Joyce and Homer and invest them in marriages and volunteer work. Most of us, as the mostly male faculty knew, would fall by the wayside into silence and all our good intentions and vast enthusiasms had nothing to do with what would happen to us once we left that insulated playpen. At the time I

went to Bennington, there was no feminist consciousness there

or anywhere else at all. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique concerned housewives— we thought that it had nothing to do with us. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was not yet published. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was not yet published. We were in the process of becoming very well-educated women— we were already very privileged women—

and yet not many of us had ever heard the story of the movement for women’s suffrage in this country or Europe. In the Amerikan history courses I took, women’s suffrage was not

mentioned. The names of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, or

Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were never

mentioned. Our ignorance was so complete that we did not

know that we had been consigned from birth to that living

legal and social death called marriage. We imagined, in our

ignorance, that we might be novelists and philosophers. A rare

few among us even aspired to be mathematicians and biologists. We did not know that our professors had a system of beliefs and convictions that designated us as an inferior gender

class, and that that system of beliefs and convictions was virtually universal—the cherished assumption of most of the writers, philosophers, and historians we were so ardently

studying. We did not know, for instance, to pick an obvious

example, that our Freudian psychology professor believed

along with Freud that “the effect of penis-envy has a share. . .

in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value

their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority. ”1 In each field of study, such convictions were central, underlying, crucial. And yet we did not know that they meant us. This was true everywhere where

women were being educated.

As a result, women of my age left colleges and universities

completely ignorant of what one might call “real life. ” We did

not know that we would meet everywhere a systematic de-

spisal of our intelligence, creativity, and strength. We did not

know our herstory as a gender class. We did not know that we

were a gender class, inferior by law and custom to men who

were defined, by themselves and all the organs of their culture,

as supreme. We did not know that we had been trained all our

lives to be victims—inferior, submissive, passive objects who

could lay no claim to a discrete individual identity. We did not

know that because we were women our labor would be exploited wherever we worked—in jobs, in political movements

—by men for their own self-aggrandizement. We did not

know that all our hard work in whatever jobs or political

movements would never advance our responsibilities or our

rewards. We did not know that we were there, wherever, to

cook, to do menial labor, to be fucked.

I tell you this now because this is what I remembered

when I knew I would come here to speak tonight. I imagine

that in some ways it is different for you. There is an astounding feminist literature to educate you even if your professors will not. There are feminist philosophers, poets, comedians,

herstorians, and politicians who are creating feminist culture.

There is your own feminist consciousness, which you must

nurture, expand, and deepen at every opportunity.

As of now, however, there is no women’s study program

here. The development of such a program is essential to you as

women. Systematic and rigorous study of woman’s place in

this culture will make it possible for you to understand the

world as it acts on and affects you. Without that study, you

will leave here as I left Bennington— ignorant of what it

means to be a woman in a patriarchal society— that is, in a

society where women are systematically defined as inferior,

where women are systematically despised.

I am here tonight to try to tell you as much as I can about

what you are up against as women in your efforts to live decent, worthwhile, and productive human lives. And that is why I chose tonight to speak about rape which is, though no

contemporary Amerikan male writer will tell you so, the dirtiest four-letter word in the English language. Once you understand what rape is, you will understand the forces that systematically oppress you as women. Once you understand what rape is, you will be able to begin the work of changing the

values and institutions of this patriarchal society so that you

will not be oppressed anymore. Once you understand what

rape is, you will be able to resist all attempts to mystify and

mislead you into believing that the crimes committed against

you as women are trivial, comic, irrelevant. Once you understand what rape is, you will find the resources to take your lives as women seriously and to organize as women against the

persons and institutions which demean and violate you.

The word rape comes from the Latin word rapere, which

means “to steal, seize, or carry away. ”

The first definition of rape in The Random House Dictionary is still “the act of seizing and carrying off by force. ”

The second definition, with which you are probably familiar,

defines rape as “the act of physically forcing a woman to

have sexual intercourse. ”

For the moment, I will refer exclusively to the first definition of rape, that is, “the act of seizing and carrying off by force. ”

Rape precedes marriage, engagement, betrothal, and courtship as sanctioned social behavior. In the bad old days, when a man wanted a woman he simply took her—that is, he abducted and fucked her. The abduction, which was always for sexual purposes, was the rape. If the raped woman pleased the

rapist, he kept her. If not, he discarded her.

Women, in those bad old days, were chattel. That is,

women were property, owned objects, to be bought, sold,

used, and stolen—that is, raped. A woman belonged first to

her father who was her patriarch, her master, her lord. The

very derivation of the word patriarchy is instructive. Pater

means owner, possessor, or master. The basic social unit of

patriarchy is the family. The word family comes from the

Oscan famel, which means servant, slave, or possession. Paterfamilias means owner of slaves. The rapist who abducted a woman took the place of her father as her owner, possessor, or

master.

The Old Testament is eloquent and precise in delineating

the right of a man to rape. Here, for instance, is Old Testament law on the rape of enemy women. Deuteronomy, Chapter 21, verses 10 to 15—

When you go to war against your enemies and Yahweh your God

delivers them into your power and you take prisoners, if you see

a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable,

you may make her your wife and bring her to your home. She

is to shave her head and cut her nails and take off her prisoner’s

garb; she is to stay inside your house and must mourn her father

and mother for a full month. Then you may go to her and be a

husband to her, and she shall be your wife. Should she cease to

please you, you will let her go where she wishes, not selling her

for money; you are not to make any profit out of her, since you

have had the use of her. 2

A discarded woman, of course, was a pariah or a whore.

Rape, then, is the first model for marriage. Marriage laws

sanctified rape by reiterating the right of the rapist to ownership of the raped. Marriage laws protected the property rights of the first rapist by designating a second rapist as an adulterer,

that is, a thief. Marriage laws also protected the father’s

ownership of the daughter. Marriage laws guaranteed the father’s right to sell a daughter into marriage, to sell her to another man. Any early strictures against rape were strictures

against robbery— against the theft of property. It is in this

context, and in this context only, that we can understand rape

as a capital crime. This is the Old Testament text on the theft

of women as a capital offense. Deuteronomy 22: 22 to 23: 1—

If a man is caught sleeping with another man’s wife, both must

die, the man who has slept with her and the woman herself. You

must banish this evil from Israel.

If a virgin is betrothed and a man meets her in the city and

sleeps with her, you shall take them both out to the gate of the

town and stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry

for help in the town; the man, because he has violated the wife

of his fellow. You must banish this evil from your midst. But if

the man has met the betrothed girl in the open country and has

taken her by force and lain with her, only the man who lay with

her shall die; you must do nothing to the girl, for hers is no

capital offence. The case is like that of a man who attacks and

kills his fellow; for he came across her in the open country and

the betrothed girl could have cried out without anyone coming to

her rescue.

If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her

and lies with her and is caught in the act, the man who has lain

with her must give the girl’s father fifty silver shekels; she shall

be his wife since he has violated her, and as long as he lives he

may not repudiate her.

A man must not take his father’s wife, and must not withdraw

the skirt of his father’s cloak from her. 3

Women belonged to men; the laws of marriage sanctified that

ownership; rape was the theft of a woman from her owner.

These biblical laws are the basis of the social order as we

know it. They have not to this day been repudiated.

As history advanced, men escalated their acts of aggression

against women and invented many myths about us to insure

both ownership and easy sexual access. In 500 B. C. Herodotus, the so-called Father of History, wrote: “Abducting young women is not, indeed, a lawful act; but it is stupid after the

event to make a fuss about it. The only sensible thing is to take

no notice; for it is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be. ”4 Ovid in the Ars amatoria wrote: “Women often wish to give unwillingly

what they really like to give. ”5 And so, it became official:

women want to be raped.

Early English law on rape was a testament to the English

class system. A woman who was not married belonged legally

to the king. Her rapist had to pay the king fifty shillings as a

fine, but if she was a “grinding slave, ” then the fine was reduced to twenty-five shillings. The rape of a nobleman’s serving maid cost twelve shillings. The rape of a commoner’s serving maid cost five shillings. But if a slave raped a commoner’s serving maid, he was castrated. And if he raped any woman of

higher rank, he was killed. ®

Here, too, rape was a crime

against the man who owned the woman.

Even though rape is sanctioned in the Bible, even though

the Greeks had glorified rape— remember Zeus’ interminable

adventures— and even though Ovid had waxed euphoric over

rape, it was left to Sir Thomas Malory to popularize rape for

us English-speaking folk. Le Morte d’Arthur is the classic

work on courtly love. It is a powerful romanticization of rape.

Malory is the direct literary ancestor of those modem male

Amerikan writers who postulate rape as mythic lovemaking.

A good woman is to be taken, possessed by a gallant knight,

sexually forced into a submissive passion which would, by

male definition, become her delight. Here rape is transformed, or mystified, into romantic love. Here rape becomes the signet of romantic love. Here we find the first really modern rendering of rape: sometimes a woman is seized and carried off; sometimes she is sexually forced and left, madly, passionately in love with the rapist who is, by virtue of an excellent rape, her owner, her love. (Malory, by the way, was

arrested and charged with raping, on two separate occasions,

a married woman, Joan Smyth. ) 7 In his work, rape is no

longer synonymous with abduction— it has now become

synonymous with love. At issue, of course, is still male ownership— the rapist owns the woman; but now, she loves him as well.

This motif of sexual relating— that is, rape— remains our

primary model for heterosexual relating. The dictionary defines rape as “the act of physically forcing a woman to have sexual intercourse. ” But in fact, rape, in our system of masculinist law, remains a right of marriage. A man cannot be convicted of raping his own wife. In all fifty states, rape is defined legally as forced penetration by a man of a woman “not his

wife. ”8 When a man forcibly penetrates his own wife, he has

not committed a crime of theft against another man. Therefore, according to masculinist law, he has not raped. And, of course, a man cannot abduct his own wife since she is required

by law to inhabit his domicile and submit to him sexually.

Marriage remains, in our time, carnal ownership of women. A

man cannot be prosecuted for using his own property as he

sees fit.

In addition, rape is our primary emblem of romantic love.

Our modem writers, from D. H. Lawrence to Henry Miller to

Norman Mailer to Ayn Rand, consistently present rape as the

means of introducing a woman to her own carnality. A

woman is taken, possessed, conquered by brute force— and it

is the rape itself that transforms her into a carnal creature. It is

the rape itself which defines both her identity and her function: she is a woman, and as a woman she exists to be fucked.

In masculinist terms, a woman can never be raped against her

will since the notion is that if she does not want to be raped,

she does not know her will.

Rape, in our society, is still not viewed as a crime against

women. In “Forcible and Statutory Rape: An Exploration of

the Operation and Objectives of the Consent Standard, ” The

Yale Law Journal, 1952, an article which is a relentless compendium of misogynistic slander, the intent of modern male jurisprudence in the area of criminal rape is articulated clearly:

the laws exist to protect men (1) from the false accusation

of rape (which is taken to be the most likely type of accusation) and (2) from the theft of female property, or its defilement, by another man. 9 The notion of consent to sexual intercourse as the inalienable human right of a woman does not exist in male jurisprudence; a woman’s withholding of consent

is seen only as a socially appropriate form of barter and the

notion of consent is honored only insofar as it protects the

male’s proprietary rights to her body:

The consent standard in our society does more than protect a

significant item of social currency for women; it fosters, and is

in turn bolstered by, a masculine pride in the exclusive possession

of a sexual object. The consent of a woman to sexual intercourse

awards the man a privilege of bodily access, a personal “prize”

whose value is enhanced by sole ownership.. . . An additional

reason for the man’s condemnation of rape may be found in the

threat to his status from a decrease in the “value” of his sexual

“possession” which would result from forcible violation. 10

This remains the basic articulation of rape as a social crime: it

is a crime against men, a violation of the male right to personal and exclusive possession of a woman as a sexual object.

Is it any wonder, then, that when Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, the authors of Against Rape, did a study of women and rape, large numbers of women, when asked,

“Have you ever been raped? ” answered, “I don’t know. ”11

What is rape?

Rape is the first model for marriage. As such, it is sanctioned by the Bible and by thousands of years of law, custom, and habit.

Rape is an act of theft— a man takes the sexual property of

another man.

Rape is, by law and custom, a crime against men, against

the particular owner of a particular woman.

Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating.

Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love.

Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her

womanhood as it is defined by men.

Rape is the right of any man who desires any woman, as

long as she is not explicitly owned by another man. This explains clearly why defense lawyers are allowed to ask rape victims personal and intimate questions about their sexual lives.

If a woman is a virgin, then she still belongs to her father and

a crime has been committed. If a woman is not married and is

not a virgin, then she belongs to no particular man and a

crime has not been committed.

These are the fundamental cultural, legal, and social assumptions about rape: (1) women want to be raped, in fact, women need to be raped; (2) women provoke rape; (3) no

woman can be sexually forced against her will; (4) women

love their rapists; (5) in the act of rape, men affirm their own

manhood and they also affirm the identity and function of

women— that is, women exist to be fucked by men and so, in

the act of rape, men actually affirm the very womanhood of

women. Is it any wonder, then, that there is an epidemic of

forcible rape in this country and that most convicted rapists do

not know what it is they have done wrong?

In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly says that as women

we have been deprived of the power of naming. 12 Men, as

engineers of this culture, have defined all the words we use.

Men, as the makers of law, have defined what is legal and

what is not. Men, as the creators of systems of philosophy and

morality, have defined what is right and what is wrong. Men,

as writers, artists, movie makers, psychologists and psychiatrists, politicians, religious leaders, prophets, and so-called revolutionaries have defined for us who we are, what our values are, how we perceive what happens to us, how we understand what happens to us. At the root of all the definitions they have made is one resolute conviction: that women were

put on this earth for the use, pleasure, and sexual gratification

of men.

In the case of rape, men have defined for us our function,

our value, and the uses to which we may be put.

For women, as Mary Daly says, one fundamental revolutionary act is to reclaim the power of naming, to define for ourselves what our experience is and has been. This is very

hard to do. We use a language which is sexist to its core:

developed by men in their own interests; formed specifically to

exclude us; used specifically to oppress us. The work, then, of

naming is crucial to the struggle of women; the work of naming is, in fact, the first revolutionary work we must do. How, then, do we define rape?

Rape is a crime against women.

Rape is an act of aggression against women.

Rape is a contemptuous and hostile act against women.

Rape is a violation of a woman’s right to self-determination.

Rape is a violation of a woman’s right to absolute control of

her own body.

Rape is an act of sadistic domination.

Rape is a colonializing act.

Rape is a function of male imperialism over and against

women.

The crime of rape against one woman is a crime committed

against all women.

Generally, we recognize that rape can be divided into two

distinct categories: forcible rape and presumptive rape. In a

forcible rape, a man physically assaults a woman and forces

her, through physical violence, threat of physical violence, or

threat of death, to perform any sexual act. Any forced sexual

act must be considered rape— “contact between the mouth

and the anus, the mouth and the penis, the mouth and the

vulva, [contact] between the penis and the vulva, [between

the] penis and anus, or contact between the anus or vulva”

and any phallic substitute like a bottle, stick, or dildo. 13

In a presumptive rape, we are warranted in presuming that

a man has had carnal access to a woman without her consent,

because we define consent as “meaningful and knowledgeable

assent; not mere acquiescence. ”14 In a presumptive rape, the

constraint on the victim’s will is in the circumstance itself;

there has been no mutuality of choice and understanding and

therefore the basic human rights of the victim have been violated and a crime has been committed against her. This is one instance of presumptive rape, reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape:

The woman is seventeen, a high school student. It is about four

o’clock in the afternoon. Her boy friend’s father has picked her

up in his car after school to take her to meet his son. He stops by

his house and says she should wait for him in the car. When he

has pulled the car into the garage, this thirty-seven-year-old

father of six rapes her. 15

This sort of rape is common, it is contemptible, and needless

to say, it is never reported to the police.

Who, then, commits rape?

The fact is that rape is not committed by psychopaths. Rape

is committed by normal men. There is nothing, except a conviction for rape which is very hard to obtain, to distinguish the rapist from the nonrapist.

The Institute for Sex Research did a study of rapists in the

1940’s and 1950’s. In part, the researchers concluded that

“. . . there are no outstandingly ominous signs in [the rapists’]

presex-offense histories; indeed, their heterosexual adjustment

is quantitatively well above average. ”16

Dr. Menachim Amir, an Israeli criminologist, did an intensive survey of 646 rape cases handled by the Philadelphia Police Department from January to December 1958 and from

January to December 1960. In his study, Patterns of Forcible

Rape, he criticizes psychoanalytic interpretations of rapists’

behavior by pointing out that studies “indicate that sex offenders do not constitute a unique clinical or psychopathological type; nor are they as a group invariably more disturbed than

the control groups to which they are compared. ”17

Or, as Allan Taylor, a parole officer in California, said:

“Those men [convicted rapists] were the most normal men

[in prison]. They had a lot of hang-ups, but they were the

same hang-ups as men walking out on the street. ”18

In Amir’s study, most rapists were between fifteen and nineteen years old. Men twenty to twenty-four constituted the second largest group. 19 In 63. 8 percent of the cases, the

offender and the victim were in the same age group ( ± 5

years); in 18. 6 percent, the victim was at least ten years

younger than the offender; in 17. 6 percent, the victim was at

least ten years older. 20

The FBI, in its Uniform Crime Reports, reported that in

1974, 55, 210 women were raped in this country. This was

an 8 percent increase over 1973, and a 49 percent increase

over 1969. The FBI notes that rape is “probably one of the

most under-reported crimes due primarily to fear and/or embarrassment on the part of its victims. ”21 Carol V. Horos, in her book Rape, estimates that for every rape reported to the

police, ten are not. 22 Applying Horos’ estimate to the number

of rapes reported in 1974 brings the total estimate of rapes

committed in that year to 607, 310. It is important to remember that FBI statistics are based on the male definition of rape, and on the numbers of men arrested and convicted for rape

under that definition. According to the FBI, of all those rapes

reported to the police in 1974, only 51 percent resulted in

arrest, and in only one case out of ten was the rapist finally

convicted. 23

According to Medea and Thompson who studied rape victims, 47 percent of all rapes occurred either in the victim’s or the rapist’s home; 10 percent occurred in other buildings; 18

percent occurred in cars; 25 percent occurred in streets, alleys, parks, and in the country. 24 Both Amir, who studied rapists, and Medea and Thompson, who studied rape victims,

agree that the chances are better than 50 percent that the

rapist will be someone the victim knows— someone known by

sight, or a neighbor, a fellow worker, a friend, an ex-lover, a

date. 25 Medea and Thompson also ascertained that 42 percent of rapists behaved calmly, and that 73 percent used force. 26 In other words, many rapists are calm and use force

at the same time.

For us as women, this information is devastating. Over half

a million women were raped in this country in 1974, and rape

is on the rise. Rapists are normal heterosexual men. At least

50 percent of rape victims will be raped by men they know. In

addition, according to Amir, 71 percent of all rapes were fully

planned; 11 percent were partially planned; and only 16 percent were unplanned. 27

Rape has the lowest conviction rate for any violent crime.

According to Horos, in 1972 only 133 of every 1, 000 men

tried for rape were convicted. 28 Medea and Thompson report

that juries will acquit nine times out of ten. 29 The reason for

this is obvious: the woman is presumed to have provoked the

rape and she is held responsible for it. In particular, when the

woman knows the rapist, 50 percent of the time, there is virtually no possibility of a conviction.

Who are the victims of rape? Women— of all classes, races,

from all walks of life, of all ages. Most rapes are intraracial—

that is, white men rape white women and black men rape

black women. The youngest rape victim on record is a two-

week-old female infant. 30 The oldest rape victim on record is

a ninety-three-year-old woman. 31 This is the testimony of a

woman who was raped late in life.

Rape is not an academic question with the present writer, for

not long ago (June 4, 1971) she, then in her late fifties, joined

the growing army of rape victims. It was a case of forcing a window and entering, forcible assault with the huge bruising hands of the rapist tight around her neck, and was accompanied by

burglary.

All these circumstances convinced the police immediately that

a crime had been committed. (It helps to be elderly and no

longer sexually attractive, too. ) . . .

It was 2 or 3 days before the shock wore off and the full impact of the experience hit her. She became very ill, and now, nearly 3 years later, she has not recovered. The police told her

she was lucky not to have been murdered. But that remains an

unanswered question in her mind. Simple murder would not have

involved the horror, the insulting violation of personhood, the

degradation, the devastating affront to the dignity, and the sensation of bodily filth that time has not washed off. Nor would it have led to years of startled awakenings from sound sleep, the

cold sweats at noises in the dark, the palpitations of the heart

at the sound of a deep male voice, the horribly repeated image

of two large muscular hands approaching her throat, the rumbling voice that promised to kill her if she struggled or tried to scream, the unbearable vision of being found on the floor of her

own home, lying half naked and dead with her legs ridiculously

spread.

What was lucky about it was that it happened nearer the end

of her life than the beginning. What torture it must be to young

women who have to live with such memories for fifty years! This

older woman’s heart goes out to them. 32

This was the testimony of the great Elizabeth Gould Davis,

author of The First Sex, who died on July 30, 1974, of a self-

inflicted gunshot wound. She had cancer, and she planned her

death with great dignity, but I believe that it was the rape, not

the cancer, that distressed her unto death.

Now, I could read you testimony after testimony, tell you

story after story— after all, in 1974 there were 607, 310 such

stories to tell— but I don’t think I have to prove to you that

rape is a crime of such violence and that it is so rampant that

we must view it as an ongoing atrocity against women. All

women live in constant jeopardy, in a virtual state of siege.

That is, simply, the truth. I do however want to talk to you

explicitly about one particularly vicious form of rape which is

increasing rapidly in frequency. This is multiple rape— that is,

the rape of one woman by two or more men.

In Amir’s study of 646 rape cases in Philadelphia in 1958

and 1960, a full 43 percent of all rapes were multiple rapes

(16 percent pair rapes, 27 percent group rapes). 33 I want to

tell you about two multiple rapes in some detail. The first is

reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape. A twenty-

five-year-old woman, mentally retarded, with a mental age of

eleven years, lived alone in an apartment in a university town.

She was befriended by some men from a campus fraternity.

These men took her to the fraternity house, whereupon she

was raped by approximately forty men. These men also tried

to force intercourse between her and a dog. These men also

put bottles and other objects up her vagina. Then, they took

her to a police station and charged her with prostitution.

Then, they offered to drop the charges against her if she was

institutionalized. She was institutionalized; she discovered that

she was pregnant; then, she had a complete emotional breakdown.

One man who had been a participant in the rape bragged

about it to another man. That man, who was horrified, told a

professor. A campus group confronted the fraternity. At first,

the accused men admitted that they had committed all the acts

charged, but they denied that it was rape since, they claimed,

the woman had consented to all of the sexual acts committed.

Subsequently, when the story was made public, these same

men denied the story completely.

A women’s group on campus demanded that the fraternity

be thrown off campus to demonstrate that the university did

not condone gang rape. No action was taken against the fraternity by university officials or by the police. 34

The second story that I want to tell was reported by Robert

Sam Anson in an article called “That Championship Season”

in New Times magazine. 35 According to Anson, on July 25,

1974, Notre Dame University suspended for at least one year

six black football players for what the university called “a

serious violation of university regulations. ” An eighteen-year-

old white high school student, it turned out, had charged the

football players with gang rape.

The victim’s attorney, the county prosecutor, the local reporter assigned to cover the story, a trustee of the local newspaper—all were Notre Dame alumni, and all helped to cover up the rape charge.

Notre Dame University, according to Anson, has insisted

that no crime was committed. It was the consensus of university officials that the football players were just sowing their wild oats in an old-fashioned gang bang, and that the victim

was a willing participant. The football players were suspended

for having sex in their dormitory. The President of Notre

Dame, Theodore Hesburgh, a noted liberal and scholar, a

Catholic priest, insisted that no rape took place and said that

the university would produce, if necessary, “dozens of eyewitnesses. ” I quote Anson:

Hesburgh’s conclusions are based on an hour-long personal

interview with the six football players, along with an investigation conducted by his Dean of Students, John Macheca, a. . .

former university public relations man. . . Macheca himself will

say nothing about his investigation. . . Various campus sources

close to the case say that, throughout his investigation, no university official spoke either to the girl [j/c] or her parents. Hesburgh himself professes neither to know or to care. He says testily, “It’s irrelevant.. . . I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ”36

According to Anson, had Dr. Hesburgh talked to “the girl” he

would have heard this story: after work late on July 3, she

went to Notre Dame to see the football player she had been

dating; they made love twice on his dormitory bunk; he left

the room; she was alone and undressed, wrapped in a sheet;

another football player entered the room; she had a history of

hostility and confrontation with this second football player

(he had made a friend of hers pregnant, he had refused to pay

for an abortion, she had confronted him on this, finally he did

pay part of the money); this second football player and the

woman began to quarrel and he threatened that, unless she

submit to him sexually, he would throw her out the third-story

window; then he raped her; four other football players also

raped her; during the gang rape, several other football players

were in and out of the room; when the woman finally was able

to leave the dormitory she drove immediately to a hospital.

Both the police investigator on the case and a source in the

prosecutor’s office believe the victim’s story— that there was a

gang rape perpetrated on her by the six Notre Dame football

players.

All of the male university authorities who investigated the

alleged gang rape determined that the victim was a slut. This

they did, all of them, by interviewing the accused rapists. In

fact, the prosecutor’s character investigation indicated that the

woman was a fine person. The coach of the Notre Dame football team placed responsibility for the alleged gang rape on the worsening morals of women who watch soap operas.

Hesburgh, moral exemplar that he is, concluded: “I didn’t

need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ” The Dean of

Students, John Macheca, expelled the students as a result of

his secret investigation. Hesburgh overruled the expulsion out

of what he called “compassion”— he reduced the expulsion to

one year’s suspension. The rape victim now attends a university in the Midwest. Her life, according to Anson, has been threatened.

The fact is, as these two stories demonstrate conclusively,

that any woman can be raped by any group of men. Her word

will not be credible against their collective testimony. A

proper investigation will not be done. Remember the good

Father Hesburgh’s words as long as you live: “I didn’t need to

talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ” Even when a prosecutor is convinced that rape as defined by male law did take place, the rapists will not be prosecuted. Male university officials will protect those sacrosanct male institutions—the football team and the fraternity— no matter what the cost to women.

The reasons for this are terrible and cruel, but you must

know them. Men are a privileged gender class over and

against women. One of their privileges is the right of rape—

that is, the right of carnal access to any woman. Men agree, by

law, custom, and habit, that women are sluts and liars. Men

will form alliances, or bonds, to protect their gender class

interests. Even in a racist society, male bonding takes precedence over racial bonding.

It is very difficult whenever racist and sexist pathologies

coincide to delineate in a political way what has actually happened. In 1838, Angelina Grimke, abolitionist and feminist, described Amerikan institutions as “a system of complicated

crimes, built up upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies

of my countrymen in chains, and cemented by the blood,

sweat, and tears of my sisters in bonds. ”37 Racism and sexism

are the warp and woof of this Amerikan society, the very

fabric of our institutions, laws, customs, and habits— and we

are the inheritors of that complicated system of crimes. In the

Notre Dame case, for instance, we can postulate that the

prosecutor took the woman’s charges of rape seriously at all

because her accused rapists were black. That is racism and

that is sexism. There is no doubt at all that white male law is

more amenable to the prosecution of blacks for the raping of

white women than the other way around. We can also postulate that, had the Notre Dame case been taken to court, the rape victim’s character would have been impugned irrevocably because her lover was a black. That is racism and that is sexism. We also know that had a black woman been raped,

either by blacks or whites, her rape would go unprosecuted,

unremarked. That is racism and that is sexism.

In general, we can observe that the lives of rapists are worth

more than the lives of women who are raped. Rapists are

protected by male law and rape victims are punished by male

law. An intricate system of male bonding supports the right of

the rapist to rape, while diminishing the worth of the victim’s

life to absolute zero. In the Notre Dame case, the woman’s

lover allowed his fellows to rape her. This was a male bond. In

the course of the rape, at one point when the woman was left

alone— there is no indication that she was even conscious at

this point— a white football player entered the room and

asked her if she wanted to leave. When she did not answer, he

left her there without reporting the incident. This was a male

bond. The cover-up and lack of substantive investigation by

white authorities was male bonding. All women of all races

should recognize that male bonding takes precedence over

racial bonding except in one particular kind of rape: that is,

where the woman is viewed as the property of one race, class,

or nationality, and her rape is viewed as an act of aggression

against the males of that race, class, or nationality. Eldridge

Cleaver in Soul on Ice has described this sort of rape:

I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi I

started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto. . . and

when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks

and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately,

willfully, methodically. >.

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was

defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. 38

In this sort of rape, women are viewed as the property of men

who are, by virtue of race or class or nationality, enemies.

Women are viewed as the chattel of enemy men. In this situa

tion, and in this situation only, bonds of race or class or nationality will take priority over male bonding. As Cleaver’s testimony makes clear, the women of one’s own group are also viewed as chattel, property, to be used at will for one’s own

purposes. When a black man rapes a black woman, no act of

aggression against a white male has been committed, and so

the man’s right to rape will be defended. It is very important

to remember that most rape is intraracial—that is, black men

rape black women and white men rape white women—because

rape is a sexist crime. Men rape the women they have access

to as a function of their masculinity and as a signet of their

ownership. Cleaver’s outrage “at the historical fact of how the

white man has used the black woman” is wrath over the theft

of property which is rightly his. Similarly, classic Southern

rage at blacks who sleep with white women is wrath over the

theft of property which rightly belongs to the white male. In

the Notre Dame case, we can say that the gender class interests of men were served by determining that the value of the black football players to masculine pride— that is, to the

championship Notre Dame football team—took priority over

the white father’s very compromised claim to ownership of his

daughter. The issue was never whether a crime had been

committed against a particular woman.

Now, I have laid out the dimensions of the rape atrocity. As

women, we live in the midst of a society that regards us as

contemptible. We are despised, as a gender class, as sluts and

liars. We are the victims of continuous, malevolent, and sanctioned violence against us— against our bodies and our whole lives. Our characters are defamed, as a gender class, so that no

individual woman has any credibility before the law or in society at large. Our enemies—rapists and their defenders—not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists, and teachers.

What can we, who are powerless by definition and in fact,

do about it?

First, we must effectively organize to treat the symptoms of

this dread and epidemic disease. Rape crisis centers are crucial. Training in self-defense is crucial. Squads of women police formed to handle all rape cases are crucial. Women prosecutors on rape cases are crucial.

New rape laws are needed. These new laws must: (1) eliminate corroboration as a requirement for conviction; (2) eliminate the need for a rape victim to be physically injured to prove rape; (3) eliminate the need to prove lack of consent;

(4) redefine consent to denote “meaningful and knowledgeable assent, not mere acquiescence”; (5) lower the unrealistic age of consent; (6) eliminate as admissible evidence the victim’s prior sexual activity or previous consensual sex with the defendant; (7) assure that marital relationship between parties is no defense or bar to prosecution; (8) define rape in terms of degrees of serious injury. 39 These changes in the

rape law were proposed by the New York University Law

Clinical Program in Women’s Legal Rights, and you can find

their whole proposed model rape law in a book called Rape:

The First Sourcebook for Women, by the New York Radical

Feminists. I recommend to you that you investigate this proposal and then work for its implementation.

Also, we must, in order to protect ourselves, refuse to participate in the dating system which sets up every woman as a potential rape victim. In the dating system, women are defined

as the passive pleasers of any and every man. The worth of

any woman is measured by her ability to attract and please

men. The object of the dating game for the man is “to score. ”

In playing this game, as women we put ourselves and our wellbeing in the hands of virtual or actual strangers. As women, we must analyze this dating system to determine its explicit

and implicit definitions and values. In analyzing it, we will see

how we are coerced into becoming sex-commodities.

Also, we must actively seek to publicize unprosecuted cases

of rape, and we must make the identities of rapists known to

other women.

There is also work here for men who do not endorse the

right of men to rape. In Philadelphia, men have formed a

group called Men Organized Against Rape. They deal with

male relatives and friends of rape victims in order to dispel

belief in the myth of female culpability. Sometimes rapists who

are troubled by their continued aggression against women will

call and ask for help. There are vast educative and counseling

possibilities here. Also, in Lorton, Virginia, convicted sex

offenders have organized a group called Prisoners Against

Rape. They work with feminist task forces and individuals to

delineate rape as a political crime against women and to find

strategies for combating it. It is very important that men who

want to work against rape do not, through ignorance, carelessness, or malice, reinforce sexist attitudes. Statements such as “Rape is a crime against men too” or “Men are also victims

of rape” do more harm than good. It is a bitter truth that rape

becomes a visible crime only when a man is forcibly sodomized. It is a bitter truth that men’s sympathy can be roused when rape is viewed as “a crime against men too. ” These

truths are too bitter for us to bear. Men who want to work

against rape will have to cultivate a rigorous antisexist consciousness and discipline so that they will not, in fact, make us invisible victims once again.

It is the belief of many men that their sexism is manifested

only in relation to women—that is, that if they refrain from

blatantly chauvinistic behavior in the presence of women, then

they are not implicated in crimes against women. That is not

so. It is in male bonding that men most often jeopardize the

lives of women. It is among men that men do the most to

contribute to crimes against women. For instance, it is the

habit and custom of men to discuss with each other their sexual intimacies with particular women in vivid and graphic terms. This kind of bonding sets up a particular woman as the

rightful and inevitable sexual conquest of a man’s male friends

and leads to innumerable cases of rape. Women are raped

often by the male friends of their male friends. Men should

understand that they jeopardize women’s lives by participating

in the rituals of privileged boyhood. Rape is also effectively

sanctioned by men who harass women on the streets and in

other public places; who describe or refer to women in objectifying, demeaning ways; who act aggressively or contemptuously toward women; who tell or laugh at misogynistic jokes; who write stories or make movies where women are raped and

love it; who consume or endorse pornography; who insult

specific women or women as a group; who impede or ridicule

women in our struggle for dignity. Men who do or who endorse these behaviors are the enemies of women and are implicated in the crime of rape. Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence

against us.

I have been describing, of course, emergency measures, designed to help women survive as atrocity is being waged against us. How can we end the atrocity itself? Clearly, we

must determine the root causes of rape and we must work to

excise from our social fabric all definitions, values, and behaviors which energize and sanction rape.

What, then, are the root causes of rape?

Rape is the direct consequence of our polar definitions of

men and women. Rape is congruent with these definitions;

rape inheres in these definitions. Remember, rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms—

rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms. In this

male-supremacist society, men are defined as one order of

being over and against women who are defined as another,

opposite, entirely different order of being. Men are defined as

aggressive, dominant, powerful. Women are defined as passive, submissive, powerless. Given these polar gender defini

tions, it is the very nature of men to aggress sexually against

women. Rape occurs when a man, who is dominant by definition, takes a woman who, according to men and all the organs of their culture, was put on this earth for his use and gratification. Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these definitions remain intact—

that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and

women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity—

men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.

In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man’s identity is located in his conception of himself

as the possessor of a phallus; a man’s worth is located in his

pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic

identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession

of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no

other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are

not recognized as fully human.

In thinking about this, you must realize that this is not a

question of heterosexual or homosexual. Male homosexuality

is not a renunciation of phallic identity. Heterosexual and

homosexual men are equally invested in phallic identity. They

manifest this investment differently in one area—the choice of

what men call a “sexual object”—but their common valuation

of women consistently reinforces their own sense of phallic

worth.

It is this phallocentric identity of men that makes it possible

— indeed, necessary—for men to view women as a lower

order of creation. Men genuinely do not know that women are

individual persons of worth, volition, and sensibility because

masculinity is the signet of all worth, and masculinity is a

function of phallic identity. Women, then, by definition, have

no claim to the rights and responsibilities of personhood.

Wonderful George Gilder, who can always be counted on to

tell us the dismal truth about masculinity, has put it this way:

. . unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom

empty, a limp nullity.. . . Manhood at the most basic level can

be validated and expressed only in action. ”40 And so, what

are the actions that validate and express this masculinity:

rape, first and foremost rape; murder, war, plunder, fighting,

imperializing and colonializing — aggression in any and every

form, and to any and every degree. All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.

As women, of course, we do not have phallic identities, and

so we are defined as opposite from and inferior to men. Men

consider physical strength, for instance, to be implicit in and

derived from phallic identity, and so for thousands of years we

have been systematically robbed of our physical strength. Men

consider intellectual accomplishment to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are intellectually incompetent by their definition. Men consider moral acuity to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are consistently characterized as vain, malicious, and immoral creatures. Even the notion that

women need to be fucked— which is the a priori assumption of

the rapist— is directly derived from the specious conviction

that the only worth is phallic worth: men are willing, or able,

to recognize us only when we have attached to us a cock in the

course of sexual intercourse. Then, and only then, we are for

them real women.

As nonphallic beings, women are defined as submissive,

passive, virtually inert. For all of patriarchal history, we have

been defined by law, custom, and habit as inferior because of

our nonphallic bodies. Our sexual definition is one of “masochistic passivity” : “masochistic” because even men recognize their systematic sadism against us; “passivity” not because we

are naturally passive, but because our chains are very heavy

and as a result, we cannot move.

The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other

systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very defi

nitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We

must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female. ” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy

any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial,

useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we

know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from

consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and

structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition

and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will

remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by

men.

As women, we must begin this revolutionary work. When

we change, those who define themselves over and against us

will have to kill us all, change, or die. In order to change, we

must renounce every male definition we have ever learned; we

must renounce male definitions and descriptions of our lives,

our bodies, our needs, our wants, our worth—we must take

for ourselves the power of naming. We must refuse to be com-

plicit in a sexual-social system that is built on our labor as an

inferior slave class. We must unlearn the passivity we have

been trained to over thousands of years. We must unlearn the

masochism we have been trained to over thousands of years.

And, most importantly, in freeing ourselves, we must refuse to

imitate the phallic identities of men. We must not internalize

their values and we must not replicate their crimes.

In 1870, Susan B. Anthony wrote to a friend:

So while I do not pray for anybody or any party to commit outrages, still I do pray, and that earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women of this nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the abject degradation of

their present position; which will force them to break their yoke

of bondage, and give them faith in themselves; which will make

them proclaim their allegiance to woman first; which will enable

them to see that man can no more feel, speak, or act for woman

than could the old slaveholder for his slave. The fact is, women

are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. 0, to compel them to see and feel, and to give them the courage and conscience to speak and act for

their own freedom, though they face the scorn and contempt of

all the world for doing it. 41

Isn’t rape the outrage that will do this, sisters, and isn’t it

time?

5

The Sexual P o litics of Fear and Courage

(For my mother)

( i )

I want to talk to you about fear and courage—what each is,

how they are related to each other, and what place each has in

a woman’s life.

When I was trying to think through what to say here today,

I thought that I might just tell stories—stories of the lives of

very brave women. There are many such stories to tell, and I

am always inspired by these stories, and I thought that you

might be too. But, while these stories always enable us to feel

a kind of collective pride, they also allow us to mystify particular acts of courage and to deify those who have committed them— we say, oh, yes, she was like that, but I am not; we say,

she was such an extraordinary woman, but I am not. So I

Delivered at Queens College, City University of New York, March 12, 1975;

Fordham University, New York City, December 16, 1975.

decided to try to think through fear and courage in another

way— in a more analytical, political way.

I am going to try to delineate for you the sexual politics of

fear and courage— that is, how fear is learned as a function of

femininity; and how courage is the red badge of masculinity.

I believe that we are all products of the culture in which we

live; and that in order to understand what we think of as our

personal experiences, we must understand first how the culture informs what we see and how we understand. In other words, the culture in which we live determines for us to an

astonishing degree how we perceive, what we perceive, how

we name and value our experiences, how and why we act at

all.

The first fact of this culture is that it is male supremacist:

that is, men are, by birthright, law, custom, and habit, systematically and consistently defined as superior to women.

This definition, which postulates that men are a gender class

over and against women, inheres in every organ and institution of this culture. There are no exceptions to this particular rule.

In a male supremacist culture, the male condition is taken

to be the human condition, so that, when any man speaks—

for instance, as an artist, historian, or philosopher— he speaks

objectively— that is, as someone who has, by definition, no

special bone to pick, no special investment which would slant

his view; he is somehow an embodiment of the norm. Women,

on the other hand, are not men. Therefore women are, by

virtue of male logic, not the norm, a different, lower order of

being, subjective rather than objective, a confused amalgam of

special bones to pick which make our perceptions, judgments,

and decisions untrustworthy, not credible, whimsical. Simone

de Beauvoir in the preface to The Second Sex described it this

way:

In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not. . . like that of

two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the

neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate

human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the

negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.. . .

“The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ”

said Aristotle; “we should regard the female nature as afflicted

with a natural defectiveness. ” And St. Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an “imperfect man, ” an “incidental”

being. . .

Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself

but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous

being. 1

We can locate easily the precise way in which we are

“afflicted with a natural defectiveness. ” As Freud so eloquently put it two millennia after Aristotle:

[Women] notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly

visible and of large proportions, [and] at once recognize it as the

superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ-----

. . . After a woman has become aware of the wound to her

narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When

she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of

a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that that sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so

important a respect. . . 2

Now, the terrible truth is that in a patriarchy, possession of

a phallus is the sole signet of worth, the touchstone of human

identity. All positive human attributes are seen as inherent in

and consequences of that single biological accident. Intellect,

moral discernment, creativity, imagination— all are male, or

phallic, faculties. When any woman develops any one of these

faculties, we are told either that she is striving to behave “like

a man” or that she is “masculine. ”

One particularly important attribute of phallic identity is

courage. Manhood can be functionally described as the capacity for courageous action. A man is born with that capacity—

that is, with a phallus. Each tiny male infant is a potential

hero. His mother is supposed to raise and nurture him so that

he can develop that inherent capacity. His father is supposed

to embody in the world that capacity fully realized.

Any work or activity that a male does, or any nascent talent

that a male might have, has a mythic dimension: it can be

recognized by male culture as heroic and the manhood of any

male who embodies it is thereby affirmed.

The kinds and categories of mythic male heroes are numerous. A man can be a hero if he climbs a mountain, or plays football, or pilots an airplane. A man can be a hero if he

writes a book, or composes a piece of music, or directs a play.

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug

addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A

man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because

he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is “sensitive”; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a

man’s life will make him a hero to some group of people and

has a mythic rendering in the culture— in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

It is precisely this mythic dimension of all male activity

which reifies the gender class system so that male supremacy is

unchallengeable and unchangeable. Women are never confirmed as heroic or courageous agents because the capacity for courageous action inheres in maleness itself—it is identifiable

and affirmable only as a male capacity. Women, remember,

are “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. ” One of the

qualities we must lack in order to pass as female is the capacity for courageous action.

This goes right to the core of female invisibility in this culture. No matter what we do, we are not seen. Our acts are not witnessed, not observed, not experienced, not recorded, not

affirmed. Our acts have no mythic dimension in male terms

simply because we are not men, we do not have phalluses.

When men do not see a cock, they do not in fact see anything;

they perceive a lack of qualities, an absence. They see nothing

of value since they only recognize phallic value; and they cannot value what they do not see. They may fill in the empty spaces, the absence, with all sorts of monstrous imaginings—

for instance, they may imagine that the vagina is a hole filled

with teeth— but they cannot recognize a woman for who she is

as a discrete, actual being; nor can they grasp what a woman’s

body is to her, that is, that she experiences herself as actual,

and not as the negative of a man; nor can they understand that

women are not “empty” inside. This last male illusion, or hallucination, is as interesting as it is shocking. I have often heard men describe the vagina as “empty space”—the notion being

that the defining characteristic of women from the top of the

legs to the waist is internal emptiness. Somehow, the illusion is

that women contain an internal space which is an absence and

which must be filled—either by a phallus or by a child, which

is viewed as an extension of the phallus. Erik Erikson’s rendition of this male fantasy sanctified it for psychologists. Erikson wrote:

No doubt also, the very existence of the inner productive space

exposes women early to a specific sense of loneliness, to a fear of

being left empty or deprived of treasures, of remaining unfulfilled

and of drying up. . . in female experience an “inner space” is

at the center of despair even as it is the very center of potential

fulfillment. Emptiness is the female form of perdition. . . [it is]

standard experience for all women. To be left, for her, means to

be left empty. . . Such hurt can be re-experienced in each

menstruation; it is a crying to heaven in the mourning over a

child; and it becomes a permanent scar in the menopause. 8

It is no wonder, then, that men recognize us only when we

have a phallus attached to us in the course of sexual intercourse or when we are pregnant. Then we are for them real women; then we have, in their eyes, an identity, a function, a

verifiable existence; then, and only then, we are not “empty. ”

The isolation of this male pathology, by the way, sheds some

light on the abortion struggle. In a society in which the only

recognizable worth is phallic worth, it is unconscionable for a

woman to choose to “be empty inside, ” to choose to be “deprived of treasures. ” The womb is dignified only when it is the repository of holy goods—the phallus or, since men want

sons, the fetal son. To abort a fetus, in masculinist terms, is to

commit an act of violence against the phallus itself. It is akin

to chopping off a cock. Because a fetus is perceived of as

having a phallic character, its so-called life is valued very

highly, while the woman’s actual life is worthless and invisible

since she can make no claim to phallic potentiality.

It may sound peculiar, at first, to speak of fear as the absence of courage. We know, all of us, that fear is vivid, actual, physiologically verifiable— but then, so is the vagina. We live

in a male-imagined world, and our lives are circumscribed by

the limits of male imagination. Those limits are very severe.

As women, we learn fear as a function of our so-called

femininity. We are taught systematically to be afraid, and we

are taught that to be afraid not only is congruent with femininity, but also inheres in it. We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we

will be women— so that we will be, as Aristotle put it so

charmingly, “afflicted with a natural defectiveness. ”

In Woman Hating, I described how this process is embodied

in the fairy tales we all learn as children:

The lessons are simple, and we learn them well.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or

Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he

does at all, let alone better.. . .

Where he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake, she is

asleep. Where he is active, she is passive. Where she is erect, or

awake, or active, she is evil and must be destroyed.. . .

There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman.

She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed.

The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be

killed, or punished. Both must be nullified.

. . . There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture

of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.

Women strive for passivity, because women want to be good.

The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces women that they

are bad.. . .

Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity convinces her that she is bad.. . .

The moral of the story should, one would think, preclude a

happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy

ending. It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive,

victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for

the woman who is good—inert, passive, victimized—and that a

good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending

is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at

all. 4

Every organ of this male supremacist culture embodies the

complex and odious system of rewards and punishments which

will teach a woman her proper place, her allowable sphere.

Family, school, church; books, movies, television; games,

songs, toys— all teach a girl to submit and conform long before she becomes a woman.

The fact is that a girl is forced, through an effective and

pervasive system of rewards and punishments, to develop precisely the lack of qualities which will certify her as a woman.

In developing this lack of qualities, she is forced to learn to

punish herself for any violation of the rules of behavior that

apply to her gender class. Her arguments with the very definitions of womanhood are internalized so that, in the end, she argues against herself— against the validity of any impulse

toward action or assertion; against the validity of any claim to

self-respect and dignity; against the validity of any ambition to

accomplishment or excellence outside her allowable sphere.

She polices and punishes herself; but should this internal value

system break down for any reason, there is always a psychiatrist, professor, minister, lover, father, or son around to force her back into the feminine flock.

Now, you all know that other women will also act as agents

of this mammoth repression. It is the first duty of mothers

under patriarchy to cultivate heroic sons and to make their

daughters willing to accommodate themselves to what has

been accurately described as a “half-life. ” All women are supposed to vilify any peer who deviates from the accepted norm of femininity, and most do. What is remarkable is not that

most do, but that some do not.

The position of the mother, in particular, in a male

supremacist society, is absolutely untenable. Freud, in yet

another astonishing insight, asserted, “A mother is only

brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is

altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of

all human relationships. ”5 The fact is that it is easier for a

woman to raise a son than a daughter. First, she is rewarded

for bearing a son—this is the pinnacle of possible accomplishment for her in her life, as viewed by male culture. We might say that in bearing a son, she has had a phallus inside her

empty space for nine months, and that that assures her of

approval which she could not earn in any other way. She is

then expected to invest the rest of her life in maintaining,

nourishing, nurturing, and hallowing that son. But the fact is

that that son has a birthright to identity which she is denied.

He has a right to embody actual qualities, to develop talents,

to act, to become— to become who or what she could not

become. It is impossible to imagine that this relationship is

not saturated with ambivalence for the mother, with ambivalence and with downright bitterness. This ambivalence, this bitterness, is intrinsic to the mother-son relationship because

the son will inevitably betray the mother by becoming a man

— that is, by accepting his birthright to power over and against

her and her kind. 6 But for a mother the project of raising a boy

is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch

him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play;

she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and

values— or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her

son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by

her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the

project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads

inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a

woman to be— to be through her son, to live through her

son.

The project of raising a girl, on the other hand, is torturous.

The mother must succeed in teaching her daughter not to be\

she must force her daughter into developing the lack of qualities that will enable her to pass as female. The mother is the primary agent of male culture in the family, and she must

force her daughter to acquiesce to the demands of that culture. 7 She must do to her daughter what was done to her. The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on

means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men,

whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to

force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which

characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.

Fear cements this system together. Fear is the adhesive that

holds each part in its place. We learn to be afraid of the

punishment which is inevitable when we violate the code of

enforced femininity.

We learn that certain fears are in and of themselves feminine— for instance, girls are supposed to be afraid of bugs and mice. As children, we are rewarded for learning these fears.

Girls are taught to be afraid of all activities which are expressly designated as male terrain— running, climbing, playing ball; mathematics and science; composing music, earning money, providing leadership. Any list could go on and on—

because the fact is that girls are taught to be afraid of everything except domestic work and childrearing. By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element.

We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time

we do not even notice it. Instead of “I am afraid, ” we say, “I

don’t want to, ” or “I don’t know how, ” or “I can’t. ”

Fear, then, is a learned response. It is not a human instinct

which manifests itself differently in women and in men. The

whole question of instinct versus learned response in human

beings is a specious one. As Evelyn Reed says in her book,

Woman’s Evolution:

The essence of socializing the animal is to break the absolute

dictation of nature and replace purely animal instincts with conditioned responses and learned behavior. Humans today have shed their original animal instincts to such a degree that most

have vanished. A child, for example, must be taught the dangers

of fire, which animals flee instinctively. 8

We are separated from our instincts, whatever they were, by

thousands of years of patriarchal culture. What we know and

what we act on is what we have been taught. Women have

been taught fear as a function of femininity, just as men have

been taught courage as a function of masculinity.

What is fear then? What are its characteristics? What is it

about fear that is so effective in compelling women to be good

soldiers on the side of the enemy?

Fear, as women experience it, has three main characteristics: it is isolating; it is confusing; and it is debilitating.

When a woman violates a rule which spells out her proper

behavior as a female, she is singled out by men, their agents,

and their culture as a troublemaker. The rebel’s isolation is

real in that she is avoided, or ignored, or chastised, or denounced. Acceptance back into the community of men, which is the only viable and sanctioned community, is contingent on

her renunciation and repudiation of her deviant behavior.

Every girl as she is growing up experiences this form and

fact of isolation. She learns that it is an inevitable consequence of any rebellion, however small. By the time she is a woman, fear and isolation are tangled into a hard, internal

knot so that she cannot experience one without the other. The

terror which plagues women at even the thought of being

“alone” in life is directly derived from this conditioning. If

there is a form of “female perdition” under patriarchy, surely

it is this dread of isolation—a dread which develops from the

facts of the case.

Confusion, too, is an integral part of fear. It is confusing to

be punished for succeeding—for climbing a tree, or excelling

in mathematics. It is impossible to answer the question, “What

did I do wrong? ” As a result of the punishment which is inevitable when she succeeds, a girl learns to identify fear with confusion and confusion with fear. By the time she is a

woman, fear and confusion are triggered simultaneously by

the same stimuli and they cannot be separated from each other.

Fear, for women, is isolating and confusing. It is also consistently and progressively debilitating. Each act outside a woman’s allowable sphere provokes punishment— and this

punishment is as inevitable as nightfall. Each punishment inculcates fear. Like a rat, a woman will try to avoid those high-voltage electric shocks which seem to mine the maze. She too

wants the legendary Big Cheese at the end. But for her, the

maze never ends.

The debility which is intrinsic to fear as women experience

it is progressive. It increases not arithmetically as she gets

older, but geometrically. The first time a girl breaks a gender

class rule and is punished, she has only the actual consequences of her act with which to contend. That is, she is isolated, confused, and afraid. But the second time, she must coa-tend with her act, its consequences, and also with her memory

of a prior act and its prior consequences. This interplay of the

memory of pain, the anticipation of pain, and the reality of

pain in a given circumstance makes it virtually impossible for

a woman to perceive the daily indignities to which she is subjected, much less to assert herself against them or to develop and stand for values which undermine or oppose male supremacy. The effects of this cumulative, progressive, debilitating aspect of fear are mutilating, and male culture provides only one possible resolution: complete and abject submission.

This dynamic of fear, as I have described it, is the source of

what men so glibly, and happily, call “female masochism. ”

And, of course, when one’s identity is defined as a lack of

identity; when one’s survival is contingent on learning to destroy or restrain every impulse toward self-definition; when one is consistently and exclusively rewarded for hurting oneself by conforming to demeaning or degrading rules of behavior; when one is consistently and inevitably punished for accomplishing, or succeeding, or asserting; when one is battered and rammed, physically and/or emotionally, for any act or thought of rebellion, and then applauded and approved of

for giving in, recanting, apologizing; then masochism does

indeed become the cornerstone of one’s personality. And, as

you might already know, it is very hard for masochists to find

the pride, the strength, the inner freedom, the courage to organize against their oppressors.

The truth is that this masochism, which does become the

core of the female personality, is the mechanism which assures

that the system of male supremacy will continue to operate as

a whole even if parts of the system itself break down or are

reformed. For example, if the male supremacist system is reformed, so that the law requires that there be no discrimination in employment on the basis of gender and that there be equal pay for equal work, the masochistic conditioning of

women will cause us to continue, despite the change in law, to

replicate the patterns of female inferiority which consign us to

menial jobs appropriate to our gender class. This dynamic

insures that no series of economic or legal reforms will end

male domination. The internal mechanism of female masochism must be rooted out from the inside before women will ever know what it is to be free.

(2 )

Now, the feminist project is to end male domination— to obliterate it from the face of this earth. We also want to end those forms of social injustice which derive from the patriarchal model of male dominance— that is, imperialism, colonialism, racism, war, poverty, violence in every form.

In order to do this, we will have to destroy the structure of

culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; its nuclear

families based on father-right and nation-states; all of the

images, institutions, customs, and habits which define women

as worthless and invisible victims.

In order to destroy the structure of patriarchal culture, we

will have to destroy male and female sexual identities as we

now know them— in other words, we will have to abandon

phallic worth and female masochism altogether as normative,

sanctioned identities, as modes of erotic behavior, as basic

indicators of “male” and “female. ”

As we are destroying the structure of culture, we will have

to build a new culture— nonhierarchical, nonsexist, noncoer-

cive, nonexploitative—in other words, a culture which is not

based on dominance and submission in any way.

As we are destroying the phallic identities of men and the

masochistic identities of women, we will have to create, out of

our own ashes, new erotic identities. These new erotic identities will have to repudiate at their core the male sexual model: that is, they will have to repudiate the personality structures

dominant-active (“male”) and submissive-passive (“female”);

they will have to repudiate genital sexuality as the primary

focus and value of erotic identity; they will have to repudiate

and obviate all of the forms of erotic objectification and alienation which inhere in the male sexual model. 9

How can we, women, who have been taught to be afraid of

every little noise in the night, dare to imagine that we might

destroy the world that men defend with their armies and their

lives? How can we, women, who have no vivid memory of

ourselves as heroes, imagine that we might succeed in building

a revolutionary community? Where can we find the revolutionary courage to overcome our slave fear?

Sadly, we are as invisible to ourselves as we are to men. We

learn to see with their eyes— and they are near blind. Our first

task, as feminists, is to learn to see with our own eyes.

If we could see with our own eyes, I believe that we would

see that we already have, in embryonic form, the qualities

required to overturn the male supremacist system which oppresses us and which threatens to destroy all life on this planet.

We would see that we already have, in embryonic form, values

on which to build a new world. We would see that female

strength and courage have developed out of the very circumstances of our oppression, out of our lives as breeders and domestic chattel. Until now, we have used those qualities to

endure under devastating and terrifying conditions. Now we

must use those qualities of female strength and courage which

developed in us as mothers and wives to repudiate the very

slave conditions from which they are derived.

If we were not invisible to ourselves, we would see that

since the beginning of time, we have been the exemplars of

physical courage. Squatting in fields, isolated in bedrooms, in

slums, in shacks, or in hospitals, women endure the ordeal of

giving birth. This physical act of giving birth requires physical

courage of the highest order. It is the prototypical act of authentic physical courage. One’s life is each time on the line.

One faces death each time. One endures, withstands, or is

consumed by pain. Survival demands stamina, strength, concentration, and will power. No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever

matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who

gives birth.

We need not continue to have children in order to claim the

dignity of realizing our own capacity for physical courage. This

capacity is ours; it belongs to us, and it has belonged to us

since the beginning of time. What we must do now is to reclaim this capacity— take it out of the service of men; make it visible to ourselves; and determine how to use it in the service

of feminist revolution.

If we were not invisible to ourselves, we would also see that

we have always had a resolute commitment to and faith in

human life which have made us heroic in our nurturance and

sustenance of lives other than our own. Under all circum

stances—in war, sickness, famine, drought, poverty, in times

of incalculable misery and despair—women have done the

work required for the survival of the species. We have not

pushed a button, or organized a military unit, to do the work

of emotionally and physically sustaining life. We have done it

one by one, and one to one. For thousands of years, in my

view, women have been the only exemplars of moral and spiritual courage—we have sustained life, while men have taken it. This capacity for sustaining life belongs to us. We must

reclaim it—take it out of the service of men, so that it will

never again be used by them in their own criminal interests.

Also, if we were not invisible to ourselves, we would see

that most women can bear, and have for centuries borne, any

anguish—physical or mental—for the sake of those they love.

It is time to reclaim this kind of courage too, and to use it for

ourselves and each other.

For us, historically, courage has always been a function of

our resolute commitment to life. Courage as we know it has

developed from that commitment. We have always faced

death for the sake of life; and even in the bitterness of our

domestic slavery, we were sustained by the knowledge that we

were ourselves sustaining life.

We are faced, then, with two facts of female existence

under patriarchy: (1) that we are taught fear as a function of

femininity; and (2) that under the very slave conditions which

we must repudiate, we have developed a heroic commitment

to sustaining and nurturing life.

In our lifetimes, we will not be able to eradicate that first

fact of female existence under patriarchy: we will continue to

be afraid of the punishments which are inevitable as we challenge male supremacy; we will find it hard to root out the masochism which is so deeply embedded within us; we will

suffer ambivalence and conflict, most of us, throughout our

lives as we advance our revolutionary feminist presence.

But, if we are resolute, we will also deepen and expand that

heroic commitment to sustaining and nurturing life. We will

deepen it by creating visionary new forms of human community; we will expand it by including ourselves in it— by learning to value and cherish each other as sisters. We will

renounce all forms of male control and male domination; we

will destroy the institutions and cultural valuations which imprison us in invisibility and victimization; but we will take with us, out of our bitter, bitter past, our passionate identification with the worth of other human lives.

I want to end by saying that we must never betray the

heroic commitment to the worth of human life which is the

source of our courage as women. If we do betray that commitment, we will find ourselves, hands dripping with blood, equal heroes to men at last.

6

R ed efin in g N onviolence

. . . and finally I twist my heart round again, so that the

bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and

keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would

so like to be, and I could be, if. . . there weren’t any other

people living in the world.

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl,

August 1, 1944, three days before her arrest

( i )

Feminism, according to The Random House Dictionary, is

defined as “the doctrine advocating social and political rights

of women equal to those of men. ” This is one tenet of feminism, and I urge you not to sneer at it, not to deride it as reformist, not to dismiss it with what you might consider left-wing radical purity.

Some of you fought with all your heart and soul for civil

rights for blacks. You understood that to sit at a dirty lunch

counter and eat a rotten hamburger had no revolutionary validity at all— and yet you also understood the indignity, the demeaning indignity, of not being able to do so. And so you, and others like you, laid your lives on the line so that blacks would

not be forced to suffer systematic daily indignities of exclusion

from institutions which, in fact, you did not endorse. In all the

Delivered at Boston College, at a conference on Alternatives to the Military-

Corporate System, in a panel on “Defending Values Without Violence, ”

April 5, 1975.

years of the civil rights movement, I never heard a white male

radical say to a black man— “Why do you want to eat there, it’s

so much nicer eating grits at home. ” It was understood that

racism was a festering pathology, and that that pathology had

to be challenged wherever its dread symptoms appeared: to

check the growth of the pathology itself; to diminish its debilitating effects on its victims; to try to save black lives, one by one if necessary, from the ravages of a racist system which

condemned those lives to a bitter misery.

And yet, when it comes to your own lives, you do not make

the same claim. Sexism, which is properly defined as the systematic cultural, political, social, sexual, psychological, and economic servitude of women to men and to patriarchal institutions, is a festering pathology too. It festers in every house, on every street, in every law court, in every job situation, on

every television show, in every movie. It festers in virtually

every transaction between a man and a woman. It festers

in every encounter between a woman and the institutions of this

male-dominated society. Sexism festers when we are raped, or

when we are married. It festers when we are denied absolute

control over our own bodies— whenever the state or any man

decides in our stead the uses to which our bodies will be put.

Sexism festers when we are taught to submit to men, sexually

and/or intellectually. It festers when we are taught and forced

to serve men in their kitchens, in their beds, as domestics, as

shit workers in their multifarious causes, as devoted disciples

of their work, whatever that work may be. It festers when we

are taught and forced to nourish them as wives, mothers, lovers, or daughters. Sexism festers when we are forced to study male culture but are allowed no recognition of or pride in our

own. It festers when we are taught to venerate and respect

male voices, so that we have no voices of our own. Sexism

festers when, from infancy on, we are forced to restrain every

impulse toward adventure, every ambition toward achievement or greatness, every bold or original act or idea. Sexism festers day and night, day after day, night after night. Sexism

is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social

form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female

domination.

I have never heard a white male radical ridicule or denigrate a black man for demanding that the Civil Rights Act be passed, or for recognizing the racist values behind any refusal

to vote for that act. Yet, many left-wing women have said to

me, “I can’t quite figure out the politics of the Equal Rights

Amendment. ” Further discussion always reveals that these

women have been denigrated by left-wing men for being distressed that the Equal Rights Amendment might not pass this year or in the near future. Let me tell you about “the politics

of the Equal Rights Amendment”— a refusal to pass it is a

refusal to recognize women as being sound enough in mind

and body to exercise the rights of citizenship; a refusal to pass

it condemns women to lives as nonentities before the law; a

refusal to pass it is an affirmation of the view that women are

inferior to men by virtue of biology, as a condition of birth.

Among political people, it is shameful to be a racist or an anti-

Semite. No shame attaches to a resolute disregard for the civil

rights of women.

In my view, any man who truly recognizes your right to

dignity and to freedom will recognize that the dread symptoms

of sexism must be challenged wherever they appear: to check

the growth of the pathology itself; to diminish its debilitating

effects on its victims; to try to save women’s lives, one by one

if necessary, from the ravages of a sexist system which condemns those lives to a bitter misery. Any man who is your comrade will know in his gut the indignity, the demeaning

indignity, of systematic exclusion from the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Any man who is your true comrade will be committed to laying his body, his life, on the line so

that you will be subjected to that indignity no longer. I ask

you to look to your male comrades on the left, and to determine whether they have made that commitment to you. If they have not, then they do not take your lives seriously, and as

long as you work for and with them, you do not take your

lives seriously either.

(2 )

Feminism is an exploration, one that has just begun. Women

have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we

venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.

Our exploration has three parts. First, we must discover our

past. The road back is obscure, hard to find. We look for signs

that tell us: women have lived here. And then we try to see

what life was like for those women. It is a bitter exploration.

We find that for centuries, all through recorded time, women

have been violated, exploited, demeaned, systematically and

unconscionably. We find that millions upon millions of

women have died as the victims of organized gynocide. We

find atrocity after atrocity, executed on such a vast scale that

other atrocities pale by comparison. We find that gynocide

takes many forms— slaughter, crippling, mutilation, slavery,

rape. It is not easy for us to bear what we see.

Second, we must examine the present: how is society presently organized; how do women live now; how does it work—

this global system of oppression based on gender which takes

so many invisible lives; what are the sources of male dominance; how does male dominance perpetuate itself in organized violence and totalitarian institutions? This too is a bitter exploration. We see that all over the world our people,

women, are in chains. These chains are psychological, social,

sexual, legal, economic. These chains are heavy. These

chains are locked by a systematic violence perpetrated against

us by the gender class men. It is not easy for us to bear what

we see. It is not easy for us to shed these chains, to find the

resources to withdraw our consent from oppression. It is not

easy for us to determine what forms our resistance must take.

Third, we must imagine a future in which we would be free.

Only the imagining of this future can energize us so that we do

not remain victims of our past and our present. Only the imagining of this future can give us the strength to repudiate our slave behavior—to identify it whenever we manifest it, and to

root it out of our lives. This exploration is not bitter, but it is

insanely difficult—because each time a woman does renounce

slave behavior, she meets the full force and cruelty of her

oppressor head on.

Politically committed women often ask the question, “How

can we as women support the struggles of other people? ” This

question as a basis for political analysis and action replicates

the very form of our oppression—it keeps us a gender class of

helpmates. If we were not women— if we were male workers,

or male blacks, or male anybodies—it would be enough for

us to delineate the facts of our own oppression; that alone

would give our struggle credibility in radical male eyes.

But we are women, and the first fact of our oppression is

that we are invisible to our oppressors. The second fact of our

oppression is that we have been trained— for centuries and

from infancy on— to see through their eyes, and so we are

invisible to ourselves. The third fact of our oppression is that

our oppressors are not only male heads of state, male capitalists, male militarists—but also our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, and lovers. No other people is so entirely captured,

so entirely conquered, so destitute of any memory of freedom,

so dreadfully robbed of identity and culture, so absolutely

slandered as a group, so demeaned and humiliated as a function of daily life. And yet, we go on, blind, and we ask over and over again, “What can we do for them? ” It is time to ask,

“What must they do now for us? ” That question must be the

first question in any political dialogue with men.

(3)

Women, for all these patriarchal centuries, have been adamant in the defense of lives other than our own. We died in

childbirth so that others might live. We sustained the lives of

children, husbands, fathers, and brothers in war, in famine, in

every sort of devastation. We have done this in the bitterness

of global servitude. Whatever can be known under patriarchy

about commitment to life, we know it. Whatever it takes to

make that commitment under patriarchy, we have it.

It is time now to repudiate patriarchy by valuing our own

lives as fully, as seriously, as resolutely, as we have valued

other lives. It is time now to commit ourselves to the nurtur-

ance and protection of each other.

We must establish values which originate in sisterhood. We

must establish values which repudiate phallic supremacy,

which repudiate phallic aggression, which repudiate all relationships and institutions based on male dominance and female submission.

It will not be easy for us to establish values which originate

in sisterhood. For centuries, we have had male values

slammed down our throats and slammed up our cunts. We are

the victims of a violence so pervasive, so constant, so relentless

and unending, that we cannot point to it and say, “There it

begins and there it ends. ” All of the values which we might

defend as a consequence of our allegiances to men and their

ideas are saturated with the fact or memory of that violence.

We know more about violence than any other people on the

face of this earth. We have absorbed such quantities of it— as

women, and as Jews, blacks, Vietnamese, native Americans,

etc. — that our bodies and souls are seared through with the

effects of it.

I suggest to you that any commitment to nonviolence which

is real, which is authentic, must begin in the recognition of the

forms and degrees of violence perpetrated against women by

the gender class men. I suggest to you that any analysis of

violence, or any commitment to act against it, which does not

begin there is hollow, meaningless— a sham which will have,

as its direct consequence, the perpetuation of your servitude. I

suggest to you that any male apostle of so-called nonviolence

who is not committed, body and soul, to ending the violence

against you is not trustworthy. He is not your comrade, not

your brother, not your friend. He is someone to whom your

life is invisible.

As women, nonviolence must begin for us in the refusal to

be violated, in the refusal to be victimized. We must find alternatives to submission, because our submission—to rape, to assault, to domestic servitude, to abuse and victimization of

every sort—perpetuates violence.

The refusal to be a victim does not originate in any act of

resistance as male-derived as killing. The refusal of which I

speak is a revolutionary refusal to be a victim, any time, any

place, for friend or foe. This refusal requires the conscientious

unlearning of all the forms of masochistic submission which

are taught to us as the very content of womanhood. Male

aggression feeds on female masochism as vultures feed on carrion. Our nonviolent project is to find the social, sexual, political, and cultural forms which repudiate our programmed submissive behaviors, so that male aggression can find no dead

flesh on which to feast.

When I say that we must establish values which originate in

sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a

moment, male notions of what nonviolence is. Those notions

have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The

men who hold those notions have never renounced the male

behaviors, privileges, values, and conceits which are in and of

themselves acts of violence against us.

We will diminish violence by refusing to be violated. We

will repudiate the whole patriarchal system, with its sadomasochistic institutions, with its social scenarios of dominance and submission all based on the male-over-female model,

when we refuse conscientiously, rigorously, and absolutely to

be the soil in which male aggression, pride, and arrogance can

grow like wild weeds.

7

L esb ian P rid e

For me, being a lesbian means three things—

First, it means that I love, cherish, and respect women in

my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is

the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common

life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I

would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because

of the power and passion of this nurturant love.

Second, being a lesbian means to me that there is an erotic

passion and intimacy which comes of touch and taste, a wild,

salty tenderness, a wet sweet sweat, our breasts, our mouths,

our cunts, our intertangled hairs, our hands. I am speaking

here of a sensual passion as deep and mysterious as the sea, as

strong and still as the mountain, as insistent and changing as

the wind.

Delivered at a rally for Lesbian Pride Week, Central Park, New York City,

June 28, 1975.

Third, being a lesbian means to me the memory of the

mother, remembered in my own body, sought for, desired,

found, and truly honored. It means the memory of the womb,

when we were one with our mothers, until birth when we were

torn asunder. It means a return to that place inside, inside her,

inside ourselves, to the tissues and membranes, to the moisture and blood.

There is a pride in the nurturant love which is our common

ground, and in the sensual love, and in the memory of the

mother— and that pride shines as bright as the summer sun at

noon. That pride cannot be degraded. Those who would degrade it are in the position of throwing handfuls of mud at the sun. Still it shines, and those who sling mud only dirty their

own hands.

Sometimes the sun is covered by dense layers of dark clouds.

A person looking up would swear that there is no sun. But

still the sun shines. At night, when there is no light, still the

sun shines. During rain or hail or hurricane or tornado, still

the sun shines.

Does the sun ask itself, “Am I good? Am I worthwhile? Is

there enough of me? ” No, it bums and it shines. Does the sun

ask itself, “What does the moon think of me? How does Mars

feel about me today? ” No, it bums, it shines. Does the sun ask

itself, “Am I as big as other suns in other galaxies? ” No, it

bums, it shines.

In this country in the coming years, I think that there will

be a terrible storm. I think that the skies will darken beyond

all recognition. Those who walk the streets will walk them in

darkness. Those who are in prisons and mental institutions

will not see the sky at all, only the dark out of barred windows. Those who are hungry and in despair may not look up at all. They will see the darkness as it lies on the ground in

front of their feet. Those who are raped will see the darkness

as they look up into the face of the rapist. Those who are

assaulted and brutalized by madmen will stare intently into

the darkness to discern who is moving toward them at every

moment. It will be hard to remember, as the storm is raging,

that still, even though we cannot see it, the sun shines. It will

be hard to remember that still, even though we cannot see it,

the sun burns. We will try to see it and we will try to feel it,

and we will forget that it warms us still, that if it were not

there, burning, shining, this earth would be a cold and desolate and barren place.

As long as we have life and breath, no matter how dark the

earth around us, that sun still bums, still shines. There is no

today without it. There is no tomorrow without it. There was

no yesterday without it. That light is within us— constant,

warm, and healing. Remember it, sisters, in the dark times to

come.

8

Our Blood:

The Slavery of Women ia A m erika

(In memory of Sarah Grimke, 1792-1873,

and Angelina Grimke, 1805-1879)

( 1 )

In her introduction to Felix Holt (1866), George Eliot wrote:

. . . there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that

make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of

hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and

raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for

ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—

committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night,

seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow

months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many

an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed

into no human ear. 1

I want to speak to you tonight about the “inherited sorrows” of women on this Amerikan soil, sorrows which have Delivered for the National Organization for Women, Washington, D. C., on

August 23, 1975, to commemorate the fifty-fifth anniversary of women's

suffrage; The Community Church of Boston, November 9, 1975.

marred millions upon millions of human lives, sorrows which

have “been breathed into no human ear, ” or sorrows which

were breathed and then forgotten.

This nation’s history is one of spilled blood. Everything that

has grown here has grown in fields irrigated by the blood of

whole peoples. This is a nation built on the human carrion of

the Indian nations. This is a nation built on slave labor,

slaughter, and grief. This is a racist nation, a sexist nation, a

murderous nation. This is a nation pathologically seized by the

will to domination.

Fifty-five years ago, we women became citizens of this nation. After seventy years of fierce struggle for suffrage, our kindly lords saw fit to give us the vote. Since that time, we

have been, at least in a ceremonial way, participants in the

blood-letting of our government; we have been implicated

formally and officially in its crimes. The hope of our foremothers was this: that when women had the vote, we would use it to stop the crimes of men against men and of men

against women. Our foremothers believed that they had given

us the tool which would enable us to transform a corrupt

nation into a nation of righteousness. It is a bitter thing to say

that they were deluded. It is a bitter thing to say that the vote

became the tombstone over their obscure graves.

We women do not have many victories to celebrate. Everywhere, our people are in chains— designated as biologically inferior to men; our very bodies controlled by men and male

law; the victims of violent, savage crimes; bound by law, custom, and habit to sexual and domestic servitude; exploited mercilessly in any paid labor; robbed of identity and ambition

as a condition of birth. We want to claim the vote as a victory.

We want to celebrate. We want to rejoice. But the fact is that

the vote was only a cosmetic change in our condition. Suffrage

has been for us the illusion of participation without the reality

of self-determination. We are still a colonialized people, subject to the will of men. And, in fact, behind the vote there is the story of a movement that betrayed itself by abandoning its

own visionary insights and compromising its deepest principles. August 26, 1920, signifies, most bitterly, the death of the first feminist movement in Amerika.

How do we celebrate that death? How do we rejoice in the

demise of a movement that set out to salvage our lives from

the wreck and ruin of patriarchal domination? What victory is

there in the dead ash of a feminist movement burned out?

The meaning of the vote is this: that we had better flesh out

our invisible past, so that we can understand how and why so

much ended in so little; that we had better resurrect our dead,

to study how they lived and why they died; that we had better

find a cure for whatever disease wiped them out, so that it will

not decimate us.

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an

agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which

permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. It is

as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago and now it is

granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone.

Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women

say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me.

Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from

rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is

this stone, what is there without it?

For some women, being buried in the stone is unbearable.

They want to move freely. They exert all their strength to claw

away at the hard rock that encases them. They rip their fingernails, bruise their fists, tear the skin on their hands until it is raw and bleeding. They rip their lips open on the rock, and

break their teeth, and choke on the granite as it crumbles into

their mouths. Many women die in this desperate, solitary battle against the stone.

But what if the impulse to freedom were to be bom in all of

the women buried in the stone? What if the material of the

rock itself had become so saturated with the stinking smell of

women’s rotting bodies, the accumulated stench of thousands

of years of decay and death, that no woman could contain her

repulsion? What would those women do if, finally, they did

want to be free?

I think that they would study the stone. I think that they

would use every mental and physical faculty available to them

to analyze the stone, its structure, its qualities, its nature, its

chemical composition, its density, the physical laws which determine its properties. They would try to discover where it was eroded, what substances could decompose it, what kind of

pressure was required to shatter it.

This investigation would require absolute rigor and honesty. Any lie that they told themselves about the nature of the stone would impede their liberation. Any lie that they told

themselves about their own condition inside the stone would

perpetuate the very situation that had become intolerable to

them.

I think that we do not want to be buried inside the stone

anymore. I think that the stench of decaying female carcasses

has at last become so vile to us that we are ready to face the

truth— about the stone, and about ourselves inside it.

(2 )

The slavery of women originates thousands of years ago, in a

prehistory of civilization which remains inaccessible to us.

How women came to be slaves, owned by men, we do not

know. We do know that the slavery of women to men is the

oldest known form of slavery in the history of the world.

The first slaves brought to this country by Anglo-Saxon

imperialists were women— white women. Their slavery was

sanctified by religious and civil law, reified by custom and

tradition, and enforced by the systematic sadism of men as a

slave-owning class.

The rights of women under English law during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are described in the following paragraph:

In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together.

It is true, that man and wife are one person; but understand in

what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth

with. . . the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name; it is

carried and recarried with the new associate; it beareth no sway;

it possesseth nothing. . . A woman as soon as she is married, is

called covert [covered]; in Latine nupta, that is, “veiled”; as it

were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her streame.. . .

Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master. . . Eve,

because she helped to seduce her husband, had inflicted upon her

a special bane. See here the reason. . . that women have no voice

in Parliament. They make no laws, they consent to none, they

abrogate none. All of them are understood either married, or to

be married, and their desires are to their husbands.. . . The common laws here shaketh hand with divinitye. 2

English law obtained in the colonies. There was no new world

here for women.

Women were sold into marriage in the colonies, first for the

price of passage from England; then, as men began to accrue

wealth, for larger sums, paid to merchants who sold women as

if they were potatoes.

Women were imported into the colonies to breed. Just as a

man bought land so that he could grow food, he bought a wife

so that he could grow sons.

A man owned his wife and all that she produced. Her crop

came from her womb, and this crop was harvested year after

year until she died.

According to law, a man even owned a woman’s unborn

children. He also owned any personal property she might have

— her clothing, hairbrushes, all personal effects however insignificant. He also, of course, had the right to her labor as a domestic, and owned all that she made with her hands— food,

clothing, textiles, etc.

A man had the right of corporal punishment, or “chastisement” as it was then called. Wives were whipped and beaten for disobedience, or on whim, with the full sanction of law and

custom.

A wife who ran away was a fugitive slave. She could be

hunted down, returned to her owner, and brutally punished by

being jailed or whipped. Anyone who aided her in her escape,

or who gave her food or shelter, could be prosecuted for robbery.

Marriage was a tomb. Once inside it, a woman was civilly

dead. She had no political rights, no private rights, no personal rights. She was owned, body and soul, by her husband.

Even when he died, she could not inherit the children she had

birthed; a husband was required to bequeath his children to

another male who would then have the full rights of custody

and guardianship.

Most white women, of course, were brought to the colonies

as married chattel. A smaller group of white women, however,

were brought over as indentured servants. Theoretically, indentured servants were contracted into servitude for a specified amount of time, usually in exchange for the price of passage. But, in fact, the time of servitude could be easily extended by the master as a punishment for infraction of rules

or laws. For example, it often happened that an indentured

servant, who had no legal or economic means of protection by

definition, would be used sexually by her master, impregnated,

then accused of having borne a bastard, which was a crime.

The punishment for this crime would be an additional sentence of service to her master. One argument used to justify this abuse was that pregnancy had lessened the woman’s usefulness, so that the master had been cheated of labor. The woman was compelled to make good on his loss.

Female slavery in England, then in Amerika, was not structurally different from female slavery anywhere else in the world. The institutional oppression of women is not the

product of a discrete historical time, nor is it derived from a

particular national circumstance, nor is it limited to Western

culture, nor is it the consequence of a particular economic

system. Female slavery in Amerika was congruent with the

universal character of abject female subjugation: women were

carnal chattel; their bodies and all their biological issue were

owned by men; the domination of men over them was systematic, sadistic, and sexual in its origins; their slavery was the base on which all social life was built and the model from

which all other forms of social domination were derived.

The atrocity of male domination over women poisoned the

social body, in Amerika as elsewhere. The first to die from this

poison, of course, were women—their genius destroyed; every

human potential diminished; their strength ravaged; their bodies plundered; their will trampled by their male masters.

But the will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are

never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger.

Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life

around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.

Every married man, no matter how poor, owned one slave

— his wife. Every married man, no matter how powerless

compared to other men, had absolute power over one slave—

his wife. Every married man, no matter what his rank in the

world of men, was tyrant and master over one woman— his

wife.

And every man, married or not, had a gender class consciousness of his right to domination over women, to brutal and absolute authority over the bodies of women, to ruthless

and malicious tyranny over the hearts, minds, and destinies of

women. This right to sexual domination was a birthright,

predicated on the will of God, fixed by the known laws of

biology, not subject to modification or to the restraint of law

or reason. Every man, married or not, knew that he was not a

woman, not carnal chattel, not an animal put on earth to be

fucked and to breed. This knowledge was the center of his

identity, the source of his pride, the germ of his power.

It was, then, no contradiction or moral agony to begin to

buy black slaves. The will to domination had battened on

female flesh; its muscles had grown strong and firm in subju

gating women; its lust for power had become frenzied in the

sadistic pleasure of absolute supremacy. Whatever dimension

of human conscience must atrophy before men can turn other

humans into chattel had become shriveled and useless long

before the first black slaves were imported into the English

colonies. Once female slavery is established as the diseased

groundwork of a society, racist and other hierarchical pathologies inevitably develop from it.

There was a slave trade in blacks which pre-dated the English colonialization of what is now the eastern United States.

During the Middle Ages, there were black slaves in Europe in

comparatively small numbers. It was the Portuguese who first

really devoted themselves to the abduction and sale of blacks.

They developed the Atlantic slave trade. Black slaves were

imported in massive quantities into Portuguese, Spanish,

French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish colonies.

In the English colonies, as I have said, every married man

had one slave, his wife. As men accrued wealth, they bought

more slaves, black slaves, who were already being brought

across the Atlantic to be sold into servitude. A man’s wealth

has always been measured by how much he owns. A man buys

property both to increase his wealth and to demonstrate his

wealth. Black slaves were bought for both these purposes.

The laws which fixed the chattel status of white women

were now extended to apply to the black slave. The divine

right which had sanctioned the slavery of women to men was

now interpreted to make the slavery of blacks to white men a

function of God’s will. The malicious notion of biological inferiority, which originated to justify the abject subjugation of women to men, was now expanded to justify the abject subjugation of blacks to whites. The whip, used to cut the backs of white women to ribbons, was now wielded against black flesh

as well.

Black men and black women were both kidnapped from

their African homes and sold into slavery, but their condition

in slavery differed in kind. The white man perpetuated his

view of female inferiority in the institution of black slavery.

The value of the black male slave in the marketplace was

double the value of the black female slave; his labor in the

field or in the house was calculated to be worth twice hers.

The condition of the black woman in slavery was determined first by her sex, then by her race. The nature of her servitude differed from that of the black male because she was

carnal chattel, a sexual commodity, subject to the sexual will

of her white master. In the field or in the house, she endured

the same conditions as the male slave. She worked as hard; she

worked as long; her food and clothing were as inadequate; her

superiors wielded the whip against her as often. But the black

woman was bred like a beast of burden, whether the stud who

mounted her was her white master or a black slave of his

choosing. Her economic worth, always less than that of a

black male, was measured first by her capacity as a breeder to

produce more wealth in the form of more slaves for the master; then by her capacities as a field or house slave.

As black slaves were imported into the English colonies, the

character of white female slavery was altered in a very bizarre

way. Wives remained chattel. Their purpose was still to produce sons year after year until they died. But their male masters, in an ecstasy of domination, put their bodies to a new use: they were to be ornaments, utterly useless, utterly passive, decorative objects kept to demonstrate the surplus wealth of the master.

This creation of woman-as-ornament can be observed in all

societies predicated on female slavery where men have accumulated wealth. In China, for instance, where for a thousand years women’s feet were bound, the poor woman’s feet were bound loosely— she still had to work; her feet were

bound, her husband’s were not; that made him superior to her

because he could walk faster than she could; but still, she had

to produce the children and raise them, do the domestic labor,

and often work in the fields as well; he could not afford to

cripple her completely because he needed her labor. But the

woman who was wife to the rich man was immobilized; her

feet were reduced to stumps so that she was utterly useless,

except as a fuck and a breeder. The degree of her uselessness

signified the degree of his wealth. Absolute physical crippling

was the height of female fashion, the ideal of feminine beauty,

the erotic touchstone of female identity.

In Amerika as elsewhere, physical bondage was the real

purpose of high feminine fashion. The lady’s costume was a

sadistic invention designed to abuse her body. Her ribs were

pushed up and in; her waist was squeezed to its tiniest possible

size so that she would resemble an hourglass; her skirts were

wide and very heavy. The movements that she could make in

this constraining and often painful attire were regarded as the

essence of feminine grace. Ladies fainted so often because

they could not breathe. Ladies were so passive because they

could not move.

Also, of course, ladies were trained to mental and moral

idiocy. Any display of intelligence compromised a lady’s value

as an ornament. Any assertion of principled will contradicted

her master’s definition of her as a decorative object. Any rebellion against the mindless passivity which the slave-owning class had articulated as her true nature could incur the wrath

of her powerful owner and bring on her censure and ruin.

The expensive gowns which adorned the lady, her leisure,

and her vacuity have obscured for many the cold, hard reality

of her status as carnal chattel. Since her function was to signify male wealth, it is often assumed that she possessed that wealth. In fact, she was a breeder and an ornament, with no

private or political rights, with no claim either to dignity or

freedom.

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics

which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a

common condition, and make united rebellion against the

oppressor inconceivable. The power of the master is absolute

and incontrovertible. His authority is protected by civil law,

armed force, custom, and divine and/or biological sanction.

Slaves characteristically internalize the oppressor’s view of

them, and this internalized view congeals into a pathological

self-hatred. Slaves typically learn to hate the qualities and

behaviors which characterize their own group and to identify

their own self-interest with the self-interest of their oppressor.

The master’s position at the top is invulnerable; one aspires to

become the master, or to become close to the master, or to be

recognized by virtue of one’s good service to the master. Resentment, rage, and bitterness at one’s own powerlessness cannot be directed upward against him, so it is all directed

against other slaves who are the living embodiment of one’s

own degradation.

Among women, this dynamic works itself out in what Phyllis Chesler has called “harem politics. ”3 The first wife is tyrant over the second wife who is tyrant over the third wife, etc.

The authority of the first wife, or any other woman in the

harem who has prerogatives over other women, is a function

of her powerlessness in relation to the master. The labor that

she does as a fuck and as a breeder can be done by any other

woman of her gender class. She, in common with all other

women of her abused class, is instantly replaceable. This

means that whatever acts of cruelty she commits against other

women are done as the agent of the master. Her behavior

inside the harem over and against other women is in the interest of her master, whose dominance is fixed by the hatred of women for each other.

Inside the harem, removed from all access to real power,

robbed of any possibility of self-determination, all women

typically act out on other women their repressed rage against

the master; and they also act out their internalized hatred of

their own kind. Again, this effectively secures the master’s

dominance, since women divided against each other will not

unite against him.

In the domain of the owner of black slaves, the white

woman was the first wife, but the master had many other concubines, actually or potentially—black women slaves. The

white wife became her husband’s agent against these other

carnal chattel. Her rage against her owner could only be taken

out on them, which it was, often ruthlessly and brutally. Her

hatred of her own kind was acted out on those who, like her,

were carnal chattel, but who, unlike her, were black. She also,

of course, aggressed against her own white daughters by binding and shackling them as ladies, forcing them to develop the passivity of ornaments, and endorsing the institution of marriage.

Black women slaves, on whose bodies the carnage of white

male dominance was visited most savagely, had lives of unrelieved bitterness. They did backbreaking labor; their children were taken from them and sold; they were the sexual servants

of their masters; and they often bore the wrath of white

women humiliated into cruelty by the conditions of their own

servitude.

Harem politics, the self-hatred of the oppressed which

wreaks vengeance on its own kind, and the tendency of the

slave to identify her own self-interest with the self-interest of

the master— all conspired to make it impossible for white

women, black women, and black men to understand the astonishing similarities in their conditions and to unite against their common oppressor.

Now, there are many who believe that changes occur in

society because of disembodied processes: they describe

change in terms of technological advances; or they paint giant

pictures of abstract forces clashing in thin air. But I think that

we as women know that there are no disembodied processes;

that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is

inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that

all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of

the flesh and blood, of human creators.

Two such creators were the Grimke sisters of Charleston,

South Carolina. Sarah, bom in 1792, was the sixth of fourteen

children; Angelina, bom in 1805, was the last. Their father

was a rich lawyer who owned numerous black slaves.

Early in her childhood, Sarah rebelled against her own

condition as a lady and against the ever-present horror of

black slavery. Her earliest ambition was to become a lawyer,

but education was denied her by her outraged father who

wanted her only to dance, flirt, and marry. “With me learning

was a passion, ” she wrote later. “My nature [was] denied her

appropriate nutriment, her course counteracted, her aspirations crushed. ”4 In her adolescence, Sarah conscientiously defled the Southern law that prohibited teaching slaves to

read. She gave reading lessons in the slave Sunday school until

she was discovered by her father; and even after that, she

continued to tutor her own maid. “The light was put out, ” she

wrote, “the keyhole screened, and flat on our stomachs, before

the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the

laws of South Carolina. ”5 Eventually, this too was discovered,

and understanding that the maid would be whipped for further

infractions, Sarah ended the reading lessons.

In 1821, Sarah left the South and went to Philadelphia. She

renounced her family’s Episcopal religion and became a

Quaker.

Angelina, too, could not tolerate black slavery. In 1829, at

the age of twenty-four, she wrote in her diary: “That system

must be radically wrong which can only be supported by

transgressing the laws of God. ”6 In 1828, she too moved to

Philadelphia.

In 1835, Angelina wrote a personal letter to William Lloyd

Garrison, the militant abolitionist. She wrote: “The ground

upon which you stand is holy ground: never—never surrender

it. If you surrender it, the hope of the slave is extinguished.. . .

[I]t is my deep, solemn deliberate conviction, that this is a

cause worth dying for. ”7 Garrison published the letter in his

abolitionist paper, The Liberator, with a foreword identifying

Angelina as the member of a prominent slaveholding family.

She was widely condemned by friends and acquaintances for

disgracing her family, and Sarah, too, condemned her.

In 1836, she sealed her fate as a traitor to her race and to

her family by publishing an abolitionist tract called “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. ” For the first time, maybe in the history of the world, a woman addressed other

women and demanded that they unite as a revolutionary force

to overthrow a system of tyranny. And for the first time on

Amerikan soil, a woman demanded that white women identify

themselves with the welfare, freedom, and dignity of black

women:

Let [women] embody themselves in societies, and send petitions

up to their different legislatures, entreating their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, to abolish the institution of slavery; no longer to subject woman to the scourge and the chain, to mental

darkness and moral degradation; no longer to tear husbands from

their wives, and children from their parents; no longer to make

men, women, and children, work without wages; no longer to

make their lives bitter in hard bondage; no longer to reduce

American citizens to the abject condition of slaves, of “chattels

personal; ” no longer to barter the image of God in human shambles for corruptible things such as silver and gold. 8

Angelina exhorted white Southern women, for the sake of all

women, to form antislavery societies; to petition legislatures;

to educate themselves to the harsh realities of black slavery; to

speak out against black slavery to family, friends, and acquaintances; to demand that slaves be freed in their own families; to pay wages to any slaves who are not freed; to act against the law by freeing slaves wherever possible; and to act

against the law by teaching slaves to read and to write. In the

first political articulation of civil disobedience as a principle of

action, she wrote:

But some of you will say, we can neither free our slaves nor

teach them to read, for the laws of our state forbid it. Be not

surprised when I say such wicked laws ought to be no barrier in

the way of your duty. . . If a law commands me to sin I will

break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly. The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified sub

mission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is

the doctrine of despotism... 9

This tract was burned by Southern postmasters; Angelina was

warned in newspaper editorials never to return to the South;

and she was repudiated by her family. After the publication of

her “Appeal, ” she became a full-time abolitionist organizer.

Also in 1836, in a series of letters to Catherine Beecher,

Angelina articulated the first fully conceived feminist argument against the oppression of women: Now, I believe it is woman’s right to have a choice in all the laws

and regulations by which she is to be governed, whether in

Church or State; and that the present arrangements of society. . .

are a violation of human rights, a rank usurpation of power, a

violent seizure and confiscation of what is sacredly and inalienably hers—thus inflicting upon woman outrageous wrongs, working mischief incalculable in the social circle, and in its influence on the world producing only evil, and that continually. 10

Her feminist consciousness had grown out of her abolitionist

commitment: “The investigation of the rights of the slave has

led me to a better understanding of my own. ”11

Also in 1836, Sarah Grimke published a pamphlet called

“Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States. ” In it, she refutes

the claims by Southern clergy that biblical slavery provided a

justification for Amerikan slavery. From this time on, Sarah

and Angelina were united publicly and privately in their political work.

In 1837, the Grimke sisters attended an antislavery convention in New York City. There they asserted that white and black women were a sisterhood; that the institution of black

slavery was nourished by Northern race prejudice; and that

white women and black men also shared a common condition:

[The female slaves] are our countrywomen— they are our sisters;

and to us as women, they have a right to look for sympathy with

their sorrows, and effort and prayer for their rescue. . . Our people have erected a false standard by which to judge man’s char

acter. Because in the slave-holding States colored men are

plundered and kept in abject ignorance, are treated with disdain

and scorn, so here, too in profound deference to the South, we

refuse to eat, or ride, or walk, or associate, or open our institutions of learning, or even our zoological institutions to people of color, unless they visit them in the capacity of servants, of menials

in humble attendance upon the Anglo-American. Who ever heard

of a more wicked absurdity in a Republican country?

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man’s

wrongs, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education. 12

In 1837, public reaction against the Grimke sisters became

fierce. The Massachusetts clergy published a pastoral letter

denouncing female activism:

We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem

to threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent

injury.

. . . We cannot. . . but regret the mistaken conduct of those

who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part

in measures of reform, and [we cannot] countenance any of that

sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character

of public lecturers and teachers. We especially deplore the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regard to things which ought not to be named; by which

that modesty and delicacy which is the charm of domestic life,

and which constitutes the true influence of woman in society, is

consumed, and the way opened, as we apprehend, for degeneracy

and ruin. 13

Replying to the pastoral letter, Angelina wrote: “We are

placed very unexpectedly in a very trying situation, in the forefront of an entirely new contest— a contest for the rights of woman as a moral, intelligent and responsible being. ”14 Sarah’s reply, which was later published as part of a systematic analysis of women’s oppression called Letters on the Equality

of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, read in part as

follows:

[The pastoral letter] says, “We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem to threaten the f e m a l e c h a r a c t e r with wide-spread and permanent injury. ” I rejoice that they have

called the attention of my sex to this subject, because I believe if

woman investigates it, she will soon discover that danger is impending, though from a totally different source. . . danger from those who, having long held the reins of usurped authority,

are unwilling to permit us to fill that sphere which God created

us to move in, and who have entered into league to crush the

immortal mind of woman. I rejoice, because I am persuaded that

the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted, even by some of those who are now endeavoring to smother the irrepressible desire for

mental and spiritual freedom which glows in the breast of many,

who hardly dare to speak their sentiments. 15

In this confrontation with the Massachusetts clergy, the

women’s rights movement was bom in the United States. Two

women, speaking for all the oppressed of their kind, resolved

to transform society in the name of, and for the sake of,

women. The work of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, so profound in its political analysis of tyranny, so visionary in its revolutionary urgency, so unyielding in its hatred of human

bondage, so radical in its perception of the common oppression of all women and black men, was the fiber from which the cloth of the first feminist movement was woven. Elizabeth

Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone

— these were the daughters of the Grimke sisters, birthed

through their miraculous labor.

It is often said that all those who advocated women’s rights

were abolitionists, but that not all abolitionists advocated

women’s rights. The bitter truth is that most male abolitionists

opposed women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, a former black

slave who strongly supported women’s rights, described this

opposition in 1848, right after the Seneca Falls Convention:

A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far

more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the

good of our land, than would be a discussion of the rights of

women. It is, in their estimation, to be guilty of evil thoughts, to

think that woman is entitled to equal rights with man. Many who

have at last made the discovery that the negroes have some rights

as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be

convinced that women are entitled to any.. . . [A] number of

persons of this description actually abandoned the anti-slavery

cause, lest by giving their influence in that direction they might

possibly be giving countenance to the dangerous heresy that

woman, in respect to her rights, stands on an equal footing with

man. In the judgment of such persons, the American slave system, with all its concomitant horrors, is less to be deplored than this wicked idea. 16

In the abolition movement as in most movements for social

change, then and now, women were the committed; women

did the work that had to be done; women were the backbone

and muscle that supported the whole body. But when women

made claims for their own rights, they were dismissed contemptuously, ridiculed, or told that their own struggle was self-indulgent, secondary to the real struggle. As Elizabeth Cady

Stanton wrote in her reminiscences:

During the six years [of the Civil War, when women] held their

own claims in abeyance to those of the slaves. . . and labored to

inspire the people with enthusiasm for [emancipation] they were

highly honored as “wise, loyal, and clearsighted. ” But when the

slaves were emancipated, and these women asked that they

should be recognized in the reconstruction as citizens of the Republic, equal before the law, all these transcendent virtues vanished like dew before the morning sun. And thus it ever is: so long as woman labors to second man’s endeavors and exalt his

sex above her own her virtues pass unquestioned; but when she

dares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives,

manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects

for ridicule and detraction. 17

Women had, as Stanton pointed out, “stood with the negro,

thus far, on equal ground as ostracized classes, outside the

political paradise”; 18 but most male abolitionists, and the

Republican party which came to represent them, had no

commitment to the civil rights of women, let alone to the

radical social transformation demanded by feminists. These

male abolitionists had, instead, a commitment to male dominance, an investment in male privilege, and a sustaining belief in male supremacy.

In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment which enfranchised

black men was ratified. In this very amendment, the word

“male” was introduced into the United States Constitution for

the first time—this to insure that the Fourteenth Amendment

would not, even accidentally, license suffrage or other legal

rights for women.

This betrayal was contemptible. Abolitionist men had betrayed the very women whose organizing, lecturing, and pamphleteering had effected abolition. Abolitionist men had

betrayed one half the population of former black slaves—

black women who had no civil existence under the Fourteenth

Amendment. Black men joined with white men to deny black

women civil rights. Abolitionists joined with former slaveholders; former male slaves joined with former slaveholders; white and black men joined together to close male ranks

against white and black women. The consequences for the

black woman were as Sojourner Truth prophesied in 1867,

one year after the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed:

I come from. . . the country of the slave. They have got their liberty—so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be

free indeed.. . . There is a great stir about colored men getting

their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if

colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you

see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will

be just as bad as it was before. 19

If slavery is ever to be destroyed “root and branch, ” women

will have to destroy it. Men, as their history attests, will only

pluck its buds and pick its flowers.

I want to ask you to commit yourselves to your own free

dom; I want to ask you not to settle for anything less, not to

compromise, not to barter, not to be deceived by empty promises and cruel lies. I want to remind you that slavery must be destroyed “root and branch, ” or it has not been destroyed at

all. I want to ask you to remember that we have been slaves

for so long that sometimes we forget that we are not free. I

want to remind you that we are not free. I want to ask you to

commit yourselves to a women’s revolution— a revolution of

all women, by all women, and for all women; a revolution

aimed at digging out the roots of tyranny so that it cannot

grow anymore.

9

The Root C ause

And the things best to know are first principles and causes.

For through them and from them all other things may be

known. . .

—Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I

I want to talk to you tonight about some realities and some

possibilities. The realities are brutal and savage; the possibilities may seem to you, quite frankly, impossible. I want to remind you that there was a time when everyone believed that

the earth was flat. All navigation was based on this belief. All

maps were drawn to the specifications of this belief. I call it a

belief, but then it was a reality, the only imaginable reality. It

was a reality because everyone believed it to be true. Everyone believed it to be true because it appeared to be true. The earth looked flat; there was no circumstance in which it did

not have, in the distances, edges off which one might fall;

people assumed that, somewhere, there was the final edge beyond which there was nothing. Imagination was circumscribed, as it most often is, by inherently limited and culturally conditioned physical senses, and those senses determined that the earth was flat. This principle of reality was not only theoretical; it was acted on. Ships never sailed too far in any direction because no one wanted to sail off the edge of the earth; no one

wanted to die the dreadful death that would result from such a

Delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, September 26, 1975.

reckless, stupid act. In societies in which navigation was a

major activity, the fear of such a fate was vivid and terrifying.

Now, as the story goes, somehow a man named Christopher

Columbus imagined that the earth was round. He imagined

that one could reach the Far East by sailing west. How he

conceived of this idea, we do not know; but he did imagine it,

and once he had imagined it, he could not forget it. For a long

time, until he met Queen Isabella, no one would listen to him

or consider his idea because, clearly, he was a lunatic. If anything was certain, it was that the earth was flat. Now we look at pictures of the earth taken from outer space, and we do not

remember that once there was a universal belief that the earth

was flat.

This story has been repeated many times. Marie Curie got

the peculiar idea that there was an undiscovered element

which was active, ever-changing, alive. All scientific thought

was based on the notion that all the elements were inactive,

inert, stable. Ridiculed, denied a proper laboratory by the

scientific establishment, condemned to poverty and obscurity,

Marie Curie, with her husband, Pierre, worked relentlessly to

isolate radium which was, in the first instance, a figment of her

imagination. The discovery of radium entirely destroyed the

basic premise on which both physics and chemistry were built.

What had been real until its discovery was real no longer.

The known tried-and-true principles of reality, then, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, are often shaped out of profound ignorance. We do not know what or

how much we do not know. Ignoring our ignorance, even

though it has been revealed to us time and time again, we

believe that reality is whatever we do know.

One basic principle of reality, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, is that there are two sexes, man and woman, and that these sexes are not only distinct from

each other, but are opposite. The model often used to describe

the nature of these two sexes is that of magnetic poles. The

male sex is likened to the positive pole, and the female sex is

likened to the negative pole. Brought into proximity with each

other, the magnetic fields of these two sexes are supposed to

interact, locking the two poles together into a perfect whole.

Needless to say, two like poles brought into proximity are

supposed to repel each other.

The male sex, in keeping with its positive designation, has

positive qualities; and the female sex, in keeping with its negative designation, does not have any of the positive qualities attributed to the male sex. For instance, according to this

model, men are active, strong, and courageous; and women

are passive, weak, and fearful. In other words, whatever men

are, women are not; whatever men can do, women cannot do;

whatever capacities men have, women do not have. Man is the

positive and woman is his negative.

Apologists for this model claim that it is moral because it is

inherently egalitarian. Each pole is supposed to have the dignity of its own separate identity; each pole is necessary to a harmonious whole. This notion, of course, is rooted in the

conviction that the claims made as to the character of each sex

are true, that the essence of each sex is accurately described.

In other words, to say that man is the positive and woman is

the negative is like saying that sand is dry and water is wet—

the characteristic which most describes the thing itself is

named in a true way and no judgment on the worth of these

differing characteristics is implied. Simone de Beauvoir exposes the fallacy of this “separate but equal” doctrine in the preface to The Second Sex:

In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not. . . like that of

two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the

neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate

human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the

negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.. . .

“The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ”

said Aristotle; “we should regard the female nature as afflicted

with a natural defectiveness. ” And St. Thomas for his part pro

nounced woman to be “an imperfect man, ” an “incidental”

being. . .

Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. 1

This diseased view of woman as the negative of man, “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities, ” infects the whole of culture. It is the cancer in the gut of every political and

economic system, of every social institution. It is the rot which

spoils all human relationships, infests all human psychological

reality, and destroys the very fiber of human identity.

This pathological view of female negativity has been enforced on our flesh for thousands of years. The savage mutilation of the female body, undertaken to distinguish us absolutely from men, has occurred on a massive scale. For instance, in China, for one thousand years, women’s feet were

reduced to stumps through footbinding. When a girl was seven

or eight years old, her feet were washed in alum, a chemical

that causes shrinkage. Then, all toes but the big toes were bent

into the soles of her feet and bandaged as tightly as possible.

This procedure was repeated over and over again for approximately three years. The girl, in agony, was forced to walk on her feet. Hard calluses formed; toenails grew into the skin;

the feet were pus-filled and bloody; circulation was virtually

stopped; often the big toes fell off. The ideal foot was three

inches of smelly, rotting flesh. Men were positive and women

were negative because men could walk and women could not.

Men were strong and women were weak because men could

walk and women could not. Men were independent and

women were dependent because men could walk and women

could not. Men were virile because women were crippled.

This atrocity committed against Chinese women is only one

example of the systematic sadism acted out on the bodies of

women to render us opposite to, and the negatives of, men.

We have been, and are, whipped, beaten, and assaulted; we

have been, and are, encased in clothing designed to distort our

bodies, to make movement and breathing painful and difficult;

we have been, and are, turned into ornaments, so deprived of

physical presence that we cannot run or jump or climb or even

walk with a natural posture; we have been, and are, veiled, our

faces covered by layers of suffocating cloth or by layers of

make-up, so that even possession of our own faces is denied us;

we have been, and are, forced to remove the hair from our

armpits, legs, eyebrows, and often even from our pubic areas,

so that men can assert, without contradiction, the positivity of

their own hairy virility. We have been, and are, sterilized

against our will; our wombs are removed for no medical reason; our clitorises are cut off; our breasts and the whole musculature of our chests are removed with enthusiastic abandon.

This last procedure, radical mastectomy, is eighty years old. I

ask you to consider the development of weaponry in the last

eighty years, nuclear bombs, poisonous gases, laser beams,

noise bombs, and the like, and to question the development of

technology in relation to women. Why are women still being

mutilated so promiscuously in breast surgery; why has this

savage form of mutilation, radical mastectomy, thrived if not

to enhance the negativity of women in relation to men? These

forms of physical mutilation are brands which designate us as

female by negating our very bodies, by destroying them.

In the bizarre world made by men, the primary physical

emblem of female negativity is pregnancy. Women have the

capacity to bear children; men do not. But since men are

positive and women are negative, the inability to bear children

is designated as a positive characteristic, and the ability to

bear children is designated as a negative characteristic. Since

women are most easily distinguished from men by virtue of

this single capacity, and since the negativity of women is always established in opposition to the positivity of men, the childbearing capacity of the female is used first to fix, then to

confirm, her negative or inferior status. Pregnancy becomes a

physical brand, a sign designating the pregnant one as authentically female. Childbearing, peculiarly, becomes the form and substance of female negativity.

Again, consider technology in relation to women. As men

walk on the moon and a man-made satellite approaches Mars

for a landing, the technology of contraception remains criminally inadequate. The two most effective means of contraception are the pill and the I. U. D. The pill is poisonous and the I. U. D. is sadistic. Should a woman want to prevent conception, she must either fail eventually because she uses an ineffective method of contraception, in which case she risks death through childbearing; or she must risk dreadful disease

with the pill, or suffer agonizing pain with the I. U. D. — and, of

course, with either of these methods, the risk of death is also

very real. Now that abortion techniques have been developed

which are safe and easy, women are resolutely denied free

access to them. Men require that women continue to become

pregnant so as to embody female negativity, thus confirming

male positivity.

While the physical assaults against female life are staggering, the outrages committed against our intellectual and creative faculties have been no less sadistic. Consigned to a negative intellectual and creative life, so as to affirm these capacities in men, women are considered to be mindless; femininity is

roughly synonymous with stupidity. We are feminine to the

degree that our mental faculties are annihilated or repudiated.

To enforce this dimension of female negativity, we are systematically denied access to formal education, and every assertion of natural intelligence is punished until we do not dare to trust our perceptions, until we do not dare to honor our

creative impulses, until we do not dare to exercise our critical

faculties, until we do not dare to cultivate our imaginations,

until we do not dare to respect our own mental or moral

acuity. Whatever creative or intellectual work we do manage

to do is trivialized, ignored, or ridiculed, so that even those

few whose minds could not be degraded are driven to suicide

or insanity, or back into marriage and childbearing. There are

very few exceptions to this inexorable rule.

The most vivid literary manifestation of this pathology of

female negation is found in pornography. Literature is always

the most eloquent expression of cultural values; and pornography articulates the purest distillation of those values. In literary pornography, where female blood can flow without the real restraint of biological endurance, the ethos of this murderous male-positive culture is revealed in its skeletal form: male sadism feeds on female masochism; male dominance is

nourished by female submission.

In pornography, sadism is the means by which men establish their dominance. Sadism is the authentic exercise of power which confirms manhood; and the first characteristic of manhood is that its existence is based on the negation of the female

— manhood can only be certified by abject female degradation, a degradation never abject enough until the victim’s body and will have both been destroyed.

In literary pornography, the pulsating heart of darkness at

the center of the male-positive system is exposed in all of its

terrifying nakedness. That heart of darkness is this— that sexual sadism actualizes male identity. Women are tortured, whipped, and chained; women are bound and gagged, branded

and burned, cut with knives and wires; women are pissed on

and shit on; red-hot needles are driven into breasts, bones are

broken, rectums are tom, mouths are ravaged, cunts are savagely bludgeoned by penis after penis, dildo after dildo— and all of this to establish in the male a viable sense of his own

worth.

Typically in pornography, some of this gruesome cruelty

takes place in a public context. A man has not thoroughly

mastered a woman— he is not thoroughly a man— until her

degradation is publicly witnessed and enjoyed. In other words,

a-’ a man establishes dominance he must also publicly establish

ownership. Ownership is proven when a man can humiliate a

woman in front of, and for the pleasure of, his fellows, and

still she remains loyal to him. Ownership is further established

when a man can loan a woman out as a carnal object, or give

her as a gift to another man or to other men. These transactions make his ownership a matter of public record and in

crease his esteem in the eyes of other men. These transactions

prove that he has not only claimed absolute authority over her

body, but that he has also entirely mastered her will. What

might have begun for the woman as submission to a particular

man out of “love” for him— and what was in that sense congruent with her own integrity as she could recognize it— must end in the annihilation of even that claim to individuality. The

individuality of ownership— “I am the one who owns”— is

claimed by the man; but nothing must be left to the woman or

in the woman on which she could base any claim to personal

dignity, even the shabby dignity of believing, “I am the exclusive property of the man who degrades me. ” In the same way, and for the same reasons, she is forced to watch the man who

possesses her exercising his sexual sadism against other women.

This robs her of that internal grain of dignity that comes

from believing, “I am the only one, ” or “I am perceived and

my singular identity is verified when he degrades me, ” or “I

am distinguished from other women because this man has

chosen me. ”

The pornography of male sadism almost always contains an

idealized, or unreal, view of male fellowship. The utopian

male concept which is the premise of male pornography is

this—since manhood is established and confirmed over and

against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress

against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it. Each man, knowing his own deep-rooted impulse to savagery, presupposes this same impulse in other men and seeks to protect himself from it. The rituals of male sadism over and against the bodies of women

are the means by which male aggression is socialized so that a

man can associate with other men without the imminent danger of male aggression against his own person. The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men

to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and

trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all

male bonding is based on it.

This idealized view of male fellowship exposes the essentially homosexual character of male society. Men use women’s bodies to form alliances or bonds with each other. Men use

women’s bodies to achieve recognizable power which will certify male identity in the eyes of other men. Men use women’s bodies to enable them to engage in civil and peaceable social

transactions with each other. We think that we live in a heterosexual society because most men are fixated on women as sexual objects; but, in fact, we live in a homosexual society

because all credible transactions of power, authority, and authenticity take place among men; all transactions based on equity and individuality take place among men. Men are real;

therefore, all real relationship is between men; all real communication is between men; all real reciprocity is between men; all real mutuality is between men. Heterosexuality,

which can be defined as the sexual dominance of men over

women, is like an acorn—from it grows the mighty oak of the

male homosexual society, a society of men, by men, and for

men, a society in which the positivity of male community is

realized through the negation of the female, through the annihilation of women’s flesh and will.

In literary pornography, which is a distillation of life as we

know it, women are gaping holes, hot slits, fuck tubes, and the

like. The female body is supposed to consist of three empty

holes, all of which were expressly designed to be filled with

erect male positivity.

The female life-force itself is characterized as a negative

one: we are defined as inherently masochistic; that is, we are

driven toward pain and abuse, toward self-destruction, toward

annihilation— and this drive toward our own negation is precisely what identifies us as women. In other words, we are bom so that we may be destroyed. Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity. A woman’s erotic femininity is measured by the

degree to which she needs to be hurt, needs to be possessed,

needs to be abused, needs to submit, needs to be beaten, needs

to be humiliated, needs to be degraded. Any woman who resists acting out these so-called needs, or any woman who rebels against the values inherent in these needs, or any

woman who refuses to sanction or participate in her own destruction is characterized as a deviant, one who denies her femininity, a shrew, a bitch, etc. Typically, such deviants are

brought back into the female flock by rape, gang rape, or

some form of bondage. The theory is that once such women

have tasted the intoxicating sweetness of submission they will,

like lemmings, rush to their own destruction.

Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation. For a woman, love is defined as her willingness to submit to her own annihilation. As the saying goes, women are made for love— that is, submission.

Love, or submission, must be both the substance and purpose

of a woman’s life. For the female, the capacity to love is exactly synonymous with the capacity to sustain abuse and the appetite for it. For the woman, the proof of love is that she is

willing to be destroyed by the one whom she loves, for his

sake. For the woman, love is always self-sacrifice, the sacrifice

of identity, will, and bodily integrity, in order to fulfill and

redeem the masculinity of her lover.

In pornography, we see female love raw, its naked erotic

skeleton; we can almost touch the bones of our dead. Love is

the erotic masochistic drive; love is the frenzied passion

which compels a woman to submit to a diminishing life in

chains; love is the consuming sexual impulse toward degradation and abuse. The woman does literally give herself to the man; he does literally take and possess her.

The primary transaction which expresses this female submission and this male possession, in pornography as in life, is the act of fucking. Fucking is the basic physical expression of

male positivity and female negativity. The relationship of sadist to masochist does not originate in the act of fucking; rather, it is expressed and renewed there.

For the male, fucking is a compulsive act, in pornography

and in real life. But in real life, and not in pornography, it is

an act fraught with danger, filled with dread. That sanctified

organ of male positivity, the phallus, penetrates into the female void. During penetration, the male’s whole being is his penis— it and his will to domination are entirely one; the erect

penis is his identity; all sensation is localized in the penis and

in effect the rest of his body is insensate, dead. During penetration, a male’s very being is at once both risked and affirmed.

Will the female void swallow him up, consume him, engulf

and destroy his penis, his whole self? Will the female void

pollute his virile positivity with its noxious negativity? Will the

female void contaminate his tenuous maleness with the overwhelming toxicity of its femaleness? Or will he emerge from the terrifying emptiness of the female’s anatomical gaping hole

intact—his positivity reified because, even when inside her, he

managed to maintain the polarity of male and female by maintaining the discreteness and integrity of his steel-like rod; his masculinity affirmed because he did not in fact merge with her

and in so doing lose himself, he did not dissolve into her, he

did not become her nor did he become like her, he was not

subsumed by her.

This dangerous journey into the female void must be undertaken again and again, compulsively, because masculinity is nothing in and of itself; in and of itself it does not exist; it has

reality only over and against, or in contrast to, female negativity. Masculinity can only be experienced, achieved, recognized, and embodied in opposition to femininity. When men posit sex, violence, and death as elemental erotic truths, they

mean this—that sex, or fucking, is the act which enables them

to experience their own reality, or identity, or masculinity

most concretely; that violence, or sadism, is the means by

which they actualize that reality, or identity, or masculinity;

and that death, or negation, or nothingness, or contamination

by the female is what they risk each time they penetrate into

what they imagine to be the emptiness of the female hole.

What then is behind the claim that fucking is pleasurable

for the male? How can an act so saturated with the dread of

loss of self, of loss of penis, be pleasurable? How can an act so

obsessive, so anxiety-ridden, be characterized as pleasurable?

First, it is necessary to understand that this is precisely the

fantasy dimension of pornography. In the rarefied environs of

male pornography, male dread is excised from the act of fucking, censored, edited out. The sexual sadism of males rendered so vividly in pornography is real; women experience it daily.

Male domination over and against female flesh is real; women

experience it daily. The brutal uses to which female bodies are

put in pornography are real; women suffer these abuses on a

global scale, day after day, year after year, generation after

generation. What is not real, what is fantasy, is the male claim

at the heart of pornography that fucking is for them an ecstatic experience, the ultimate pleasure, an unmixed blessing, a natural and easy act in which there is no terror, no dread, no

fear. Nothing in reality documents this claim. Whether we

examine the slaughter of the nine million witches in Europe

which was fueled by the male dread of female carnality, or

examine the phenomenon of rape which exposes fucking as an

act of overt hostility against the female enemy, or investigate

impotence which is the involuntary inability to enter the female void, or trace the myth of the vagina dentata (the vagina full of teeth) which is derived from a paralyzing fear of female

genitalia, or isolate menstrual taboos as an expression of male

terror, we find that in real life the male is obsessed with his

fear of the female, and that this fear is most vivid to him in the

act of fucking.

Second, it is necessary to understand that pornography is a

kind of propaganda designed to convince the male that he

need not be afraid, that he is not afraid; to shore him up so

that he can fuck; to convince him that fucking is an unalloyed

joy; to obscure for him the reality of his own terror by providing a pornographic fantasy of pleasure which he can learn as a creed and from which he can act to dominate women as a real

man must. We might say that in pornography the whips, the

chains, and the other paraphernalia of brutality are security

blankets which give the lie to the pornographic claim that fucking issues from manhood like light from the sun. But in life, even the systematized abuse of women and the global subjugation of women to men is not sufficient to stem the terror inherent for the male in the act of fucking.

Third, it is necessary to understand that what is experienced

by the male as authentic pleasure is the affirmation of his own

identity as a male. Each time he survives the peril of entering

the female void, his masculinity is reified. He has proven both

that he is not her and that he is like other hims. No pleasure

on earth matches the pleasure of having proven himself real,

positive and not negative, a man and not a woman, a bona

fide member of the group which holds dominion over all other

living things.

Fourth, it is necessary to understand that under the sexual

system of male positivity and female negativity, there is literally nothing in the act of fucking, except accidental clitoral friction, which recognizes or actualizes the real eroticism of

the female, even as it has survived under slave conditions.

Within the confines of the male-positive system, this eroticism

does not exist. After all, a negative is a negative is a negative.

Fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality

and power of the phallus, of masculinity. For women, the

pleasure in being fucked is the masochistic pleasure of experiencing self-negation. Under the male-positive system, the masochistic pleasure of self-negation is both mythicized and

mystified in order to compel women to believe that we experience fulfillment in selflessness, pleasure in pain, validation in self-sacrifice, femininity in submission to masculinity. Trained

from birth to conform to the requirements of this peculiar

world view, punished severely when we do not learn masochistic submission well enough, entirely encapsulated inside the boundaries of the male-positive system, few women ever experience themselves as real in and of themselves. Instead, women are real to themselves to the degree that they identify

with and attach themselves to the positivity of males. In being

fucked, a woman attaches herself to one who is real to himself

and vicariously experiences reality, such as it is, through him;

in being fucked, a woman experiences the masochistic pleasure of her own negation which is perversely articulated as the fulfillment of her femininity.

Now, I want to make a crucial distinction— the distinction

between truth and reality. For humans, reality is social', reality

is whatever people at a given time believe it to be. In saying

this, I do not mean to suggest that reality is either whimsical or

accidental. In my view, reality is always a function of politics

in general and sexual politics in particular— that is, it serves

the powerful by fortifying and justifying their right to domination over the powerless. Reality is whatever premises social and cultural institutions are built on. Reality is also the rape,

the whip, the fuck, the hysterectomy, the clitoridectomy, the

mastectomy, the bound foot, the high-heel shoe, the corset, the

make-up, the veil, the assault and battery, the degradation and

mutilation in their concrete manifestations. Reality is enforced

by those whom it serves so that it appears to be self-evident.

Reality is self-perpetuating, in that the cultural and social institutions built on its premises also embody and enforce those premises. Literature, religion, psychology, education, medicine, the science of biology as currently understood, the social sciences, the nuclear family, the nation-state, police, armies,

and civil law— all embody the given reality and enforce it on

us. The given reality is, of course, that there are two sexes,

male and female; that these two sexes are opposite from each

other, polar; that the male is inherently positive and the female inherently negative; and that the positive and negative poles of human existence unite naturally into a harmonious

whole.

Truth, on the other hand, is not nearly so accessible as

reality. In my view, truth is absolute in that it does exist and it

can be found. Radium, for instance, always existed; it was

always true that radium existed; but radium did not figure in

the human notion of reality until Marie and Pierre Curie isolated it. When they did, the human notion of reality had to change in fundamental ways to accommodate the truth of

radium. Similarly, the earth was always a sphere; this was

always true; but until Columbus sailed west to find the East, it

was not real. We might say that truth does exist, and that it is

the human project to find it so that reality can be based on

it.

I have made this distinction between truth and reality in

order to enable me to say something very simple: that while

the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true

that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which

are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities. ”

And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive

and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely

real; but the model itself is not true. We are living imprisoned

inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality as

we know it is predicated.

In my view, those of us who are women inside this system of

reality will never be free until the delusion of sexual polarity is

destroyed and until the system of reality based on it is eradicated entirely from human society and from human memory.

This is the notion of cultural transformation at the heart of

feminism. This is the revolutionary possibility inherent in the

feminist struggle.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic nonidentity in women—that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know

them so that this division of human flesh into two camps— one

an armed camp and the other a concentration camp— is no

longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.

The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations— for instance, law, art, religion, nationstates, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right—

these institutions are real and they must be destroyed. If they

are not, we will be consigned as women to perpetual inferiority and subjugation.

I believe that freedom for women must begin in the repudiation of our own masochism. I believe that we must destroy in ourselves the drive to masochism at its sexual roots. I believe

that we must establish our own authenticity, individually and

among ourselves— to experience it, to create from it, and also

to deprive men of occasions for reifying the lie of manhood

over and against us. I believe that ridding ourselves of our

own deeply entrenched masochism, which takes so many tortured forms, is the first priority; it is the first deadly blow that we can strike against systematized male dominance. In effect,

when we succeed in excising masochism from our own personalities and constitutions, we will be cutting the male life line to power over and against us, to male worth in contradistinction to female degradation, to male identity posited on brutally enforced female negativity— we will be cutting the

male life line to manhood itself. Only when manhood is dead

— and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it— only then will we know what it is to be free.

N otes

1. Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia

1. Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor (New York: Atheneum,

1972), p. 126.

2. Theodore Roethke, “The Poetry of Louise Bogan/’ On the Poet and

His Craft: Selected Prose o f Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1965), pp. 133-134.

2. Renouncing Sexual “Equality”

1. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970).

2. Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, eds., Revelations: Diaries of

Women (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 143-144.

3. Remembering the Witches

1. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans.

M. Summers (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), p. 44.

2. Ibid., p. 43.

3. Ibid., p. 47.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 121.

4. The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door

1. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity, ” Women and Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse

(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), p. 90.

2. The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,

1966), pp. 243-244.

3. Ibid., p. 245.

4. Cited by Carol V. Horos, Rape (New Canaan, Conn.: Tobey Publishing Co., Inc., 1974), p. 3.

5. Cited by Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, Against Rape (New

York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1974), p. 27.

6. Horos, op. cit., p. 6.

7. William Matthews, The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Inquiry into the

Identity of Sir Thomas Malory (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1966), p. 17.

8. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 13.

9. “Forcible and Statutory Rape: An Exploration of the Operation and

Objectives of the Consent Standard, '* The Yale Law Journal, LXII (December 1952), pp. 52-83.

10. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

11. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 26.

12. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 8, 9, 33, 37, 47-49, 100, 106, 167.

13. New York Radical Feminists, Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women,

eds. Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 165.

14. Ibid.

15. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 16.

16. The Institute for Sex Research, Sex Offenders (New York: Harper &

Row, 1965), p. 205.

17. Menachim Amir, Patterns of Forcible Rape (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1971), p. 314.

18. Susan Griffin, “Rape: The All-American Crime, ” Ramparts, X (September 1971), p. 27.

19. Amir, op. cit., p. 52.

20. Amir, op. cit., p. 57.

21. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, 1974 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 22.

22. Horos, op. cit., p. 24.

23. Federal Bureau of Investigation, op. cit., p. 24.

24. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 134.

25. Amir, op. cit., pp. 234-235; Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 29.

26. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 135.

27. Amir, op. c/7., p. 142.

28. Horos, loc. cit.

29. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., p. 12.

30. Sgt. Henry T. O’Reilly, New York City Police Department Sex Crimes

Analysis Unit, quoted in Joyce Wadler, “Cop, Students Talk About Rape, ”

New York Post, CLXXIV (May 10, 1975), p. 7.

31. Horos, op. cit., p. 13.

32. Elizabeth Gould Davis, “Too Terrible for Male Law, ” Majority Report, IV (June 27, 1974), p. 6.

33. Amir, op. cit., p. 200.

34. Medea and Thompson, op. cit., pp. 34-35.

35. Robert Sam Anson, “That Championship Season, ” New Times, III

(September 20, 1974), pp. 46-51.

36. Ibid., p. 48.

37. Angelina Grimke, speaking before the Massachusetts State Legislature, 1838, cited in Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman*s Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books,

1971), p. 8.

38. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc.,

1968), p. 26.

39. New York Radical Feminists, op. cit., pp. 164-169.

40. George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), p. 18.

41. Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years, 3 vols. (Indianapolis and Kansas City: The Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898), I: 366.

5. The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage

1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam Books,

1970), pp. xv-xvi.

2. Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes, ” Women and Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), pp. 20-21.

3. Erik Erikson, “Womanhood and Inner Space, ” Identity, Youth and

Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), pp. 277-278.

4. Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.,

Inc., 1974), pp. 47-49.

5. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity, ” Women and Analysis, ed. Jean Strouse

(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), p. 91.

6. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist

Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 41-71.

7. See Dworkin, op. cit., pp. 95-116.

8. Evelyn Reed, Woman's Evolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, Inc.,

1975), p. 48.

9. Dworkin, op. cit., pp. 153-154, 174-193.

8. Our Blood: The Slavery of Women in Amerika

1. George Eliot, Felix Holt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972),

p. 84.

2. The Lawes Resolutions of Women's Rights: Or, the Lawes Provision

for Women (London, 1632), cited by Julia Cherry Spruill, Women's Life

and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.,

1972), p. 340.

3. Phyllis Chesler, conversation with the author.

4. Sarah Grimke, “Education of Women, ” essay, Box 21, Weld MSS,

cited by Gerda Lemer, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers

for Woman's Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books, 1974 ) t

p. 29.

5. Sarah Grimke, diary, 1827, Weld MSS, cited by Lemer, op. cit., p. 23.

6. Angelina Grimke, diary, 1829, cited by Betty L. Fladeland, “Grimk6,

Sarah Moore and Angelina Emily, ” Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), II: 97.

7. Lemer, op. cit., pp. 123-124.

8. Angelina Grimke, “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, ”

The Oven Birds: American Women on Womanhood 1820-1920, ed. Gail

Parker (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1972), p. 137.

9. Ibid., pp. 127-129.

10. Angelina Grimke, Letters to Catherine Beecher, in The Feminist Pa-

pers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, ed. Alice S. Rossi (New York: Bantam

Books, 1974), p. 322.

11. Ibid., p. 320.

12. A. E. Grimk6, “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free

States: Issued by an Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women & Held

by Adjournment from the 9th to the 12th of May, 1837, ” cited by Lemer,

op. cit., pp. 162-163.

13. From a pastoral letter, ‘T he General Association of Massachusetts

(Orthodox) to the Churches Under Their Care, ” 1837, The Feminist Papers:

From Adams to de Beauvoir, ed. Alice S. Rossi (New York: Bantam Books,

1974), pp. 305-306.

14. Angelina Grimke, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina G rim ki

Weld and Sarah Grimke, eds. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond,

1934, cited by Fladeland, op. cit., p. 98.

15. Sarah Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition

of Women, in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, ed. Alice

S. Rossi (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 307.

16. Frederick Douglass, editorial from The North Star, in Feminism: The

Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage

Books, 1972), pp. 84-85.

17. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-

1897 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), pp. 240-241.

18. Ibid., p. 255.

19. Sojourner Truth, “Keeping the Thing Going While Things Are Stirring, ” speech, 1867, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 129.

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Content

Dworkin Andrea Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics