Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

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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