Going Too Far (17 page)

At the time of this writing, in early 1969, when radicals all over the United States are in varying stages of depression, and when the most frequently asked and argued question is, “Where does the Left go from here?” it becomes progressively more apparent that the disheartened questioners are mostly white males. Black people are getting their thing together in a tight, organized way—they are moving, not theorizing. And now there is another group—this time not a minority (albeit treated like one). It is a potential revolutionary vanguard:
women. We have seen the consciousness which arises and the results which are born out of a growing awareness that race lines cut even deeper than class lines in a capitalist society—or that the two are inseparable. If we begin to think about
sex
lines and how these distinctions shore up the values of our culture, and begin to wake up to what could happen if these were challenged—the concept is mind-blowing.

First some historical background. The Women's Movement in the last century in the United States and England was originally a revolutionary movement (a little-known fact, since women's history, like that of black people, has been neatly edited away by white men). The winning of suffrage for women was more the compromise than victory of that movement. Women had been the first abolitionists, which struggle led them to relate their own oppression to that of the slaves. These women began to look around them, to see, denounce, and fight against the structure that had conceived such abominations; some denounced the concepts of private property, bourgeois marriage, and family structures, as well as expansionist foreign policy and domestic robber-baronism. And then the heavy stuff came down. Riots. Insurrections. Civil War. And finally, an early version of what Marcuse would later call repressive tolerance:

“See, we've freed the slaves (now we create segregation).”

“Look, we'll
give
you the vote (which will be meaningless anyway).”

So radicalism gave way to reformism, and the women bound up their wounds, as well as everybody else's, and were silent for a while. The first decades of this century saw the beginnings of what has been amusingly referred to as the sexual liberation of women—culminating in the frenzy of the twenties and collapsing in the gloom of the thirties. Men began to admit that maybe all women didn't detest sex; that maybe women could smoke and drink and even carry on an intellectual conversation—although, of course, they weren't quite “nice” if they did so. But with the Depression, the rise of the labor movement and then the coming of World War II, the issue of women's status again got shunted to second (or third, or tenth) place. Radicals in the thirties were even more puritanical and culture-bound than we are today—which is saying something. But at least during the war years, with the need for labor in factories, women achieved some economic standing and glimpsed some escape from the kitchen. Then, the war over—back to the stove. A lot of women wouldn't go. Some began to make inroads into professions hitherto considered male territory: medicine, publishing, scientific research, business, and law. We're not now speaking of the already enghettoed women's professions, for which read service professions, i.e., nursing, teaching, garment-making, waiting on tables, etc.—those jobs with little prestige, low pay, and
back-breaking labor. Also, women could now be active in the arts without being marked as “fallen.” But engineering, architecture, positions of corporate or military or political power—the positions that control our lives, remained, and still largely remain, sealed to all but the white male.

Nevertheless, even throughout the death-dull fifties and McCarthy the First's heyday (Joseph, remember him?), women kept trying for some modicum of economic, if not social or sexual, freedom. And when, in the early sixties, new political consciousness began to stretch liberals' minds, women began to relate the oppression of others, at home and abroad, to that of themselves. They poured into the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the student movement. Today they constitute more than half of what has become known as
the
Movement: a fact which simply mirrors basic population statistics—women are 53 percent of the country's population.

Women As Radicals
:
New Ideas, Old Roles

So now we're part of a growing number of radicals fighting for a just society, at first nonviolently, later on with whatever tactics necessitated by the nature of the enemy. And what are we, as women, doing? We are doing, to put it delicately, shit jobs: bolstering the boys' egos and keeping the necessities of existence functioning while the men go off to change the system. We're goddamn home-fire revolutionaries.

Most of all, women still and always end up “supporting.” Good god, supporting McCarthy the Second or Bobby the Progenitor. Or moving past such expectable traps, supporting draft resisters, supporting (male-led) black groups, supporting (male-led) grape strikers, supporting (male) deserters, (male) baby doctors,
¹
(male) GI's. You'd think we were caryatids. Not that any of these actions were unimportant, ignoble, or wrong. On the contrary, they may have been valid tactics at the time, just as “Girls say yes to boys who say no” is a very clever and workable, if degrading, slogan. But each of these roles reinforce the stereotype of women as sub-citizens, even sub-radicals—defining women only as they relate to men.

Stereotypes are powerful things—as our black sisters and brothers have learned (and then unlearned).
The oppressor may, in fact, never really believe in the stereotype at all
—
what is important is that the oppressed do
. Women have internalized the image of themselves as weak, incompetent, emotional, unintellectual, dependent. Who wants to dare speak out at a meeting and risk the labels: movement harridan,
castrating bitch, frigid neurotic, shrike, unfeminine pushy bitch? That's one extreme reaction, of course. The other extreme is that she will simply be ignored: The Invisible Woman, since whatever she has to say couldn't possibly be relevant anyway, the dumb cunt. If she does grit her teeth and try to speak out, she will be so uptight by this time that she will stutter, anecdotalize, and generally reinforce the image of her inarticulacy to everyone's satisfaction and her own torment. Naturally, a few women managed to overcome this, often at high personal and emotional cost, and in fact were accepted as equals—for public view, at least. The Movement has to have its tokens, too.

The upshot of more than five years of such frustration was that radical women, borrowing a leaf from the Black Movement, began to think about their own forced servility, their own fight, indeed their own
movement
.

Feminine Radicals Become Radical Feminists

Starting in 1966, small caucuses of radical women were formed at SDS conventions, at campus meetings, at nationwide actions such as the March on the Pentagon. (Later, in the 1968 Battle of Chicago, cadres of women would be into actions all their own.) In November of 1967, thousands of women participated in the Jeannette Rankin Brigade March against the Vietnam War in Washington. There, a group of radical women split off from the march and met to discuss the possibilities of a feminist movement. And over the next few months, brought into clearer focus by Women's Liberation meetings at the Columbia Liberation School during the summer of 1968, that movement began to come together. At present, there are women's groups in every major city in the United States. The Women's Movement, at first composed largely of white women, is becoming more representative, although there are still relatively few black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Native American women involved. Our militant Third World sisters seem to feel that their place at present is mostly in the Third World Movements—a difficult position to argue with; nevertheless, there are signs that the virulent male supremacy in
those
movements, too, is not safe from challenge. Some female Black Panthers in California, tired of being referred to as Pantherettes, have been discussing setting up a separate headquarters, perhaps starting a separate women's corps in the Panthers.

Women—black and white—are beginning to
act
. As one (woman) journalist wrote: “For some time the underground has been railing against ‘plastic' or phony commercial cultural events. It took the Women's Liberation Groups to lead the way to action. They threw
stink bombs in the auditorium at the Miss America contest, called the winner ‘a military mascot, off to Vietnam'/to entertain the troops each year/… The success of the venture has opened up new horizons in the Movement. Any film or rock festival is vulnerable.”
²

This, however, was only the beginning. NOW forced the
New York Times
to desegregate its help-wanted ads, while WITCH hexed Wall Street. Films, articles, guerrilla-theater skits began to be used by groups organizing on campuses and in high schools. All-male-public-accommodations establishments were hit with a rash of challenges and, in some cases, sit-ins or even bricks. The provision on sex in the civil-rights bill was inserted as a joke by a Southern congressman; the joke has proved a valuable loophole. Individual women, taking courage from the solidarity of a burgeoning movement, are becoming politicized and reporting discriminatory practices to Human Rights Bureaus, even going to court. As of this writing, the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws has just been formed; meanwhile there are a number of abortion test cases in the docket. Actions are being planned against women's houses of detention as well as against debutante balls. Ironically, it is only now, with such furious challenge in so many areas, that one can really begin to see the extent of the oppression of women.

The Real Issues, the Real Constituency

On the surface, it seems easy enough to chronicle the process of dehumanization—even the most blatant male supremacist will agree that in the past women have been shunted aside—although
now
what do you people want? The male liberal on this issue will of course agree that birth-control and abortion laws created by men—pressured by a male celibate clergy, to boot—are horrendous, tsk tsk. The male liberal will tell you this earnestly, not even realizing that as he does so, he is interrupting “his” woman who is trying to say something from the depths of the sink where she is doing supper dishes. (“Not with
my
woman, you don't!”)

But what about the real constituency? The one based on an oppression that recognizes no class and economic lines, making the woman always lowest within each self-contained pecking order? What about the Puerto Rican girl who suffers all the indignities that the men in her family suffer, but who also bears knife scars on her body as testimony to the
machismo
in the rage those men feel for other men but direct against her? What about the laborer's wife who is brutalized by a slow procession of days in which the only relief is a television soap
opera? What about the knocked-up Italian Catholic kid who must fear for her immortal soul, feeling her screams aborted along with her child? What about the woman factory worker who does embittering, uncreative work all day, and then goes home to clean and cook, and to pamper her equally embittered husband, who can at least be a “king in his castle”? What about the young mother who spends all day with kids and housework and then is accused of being uninformed by her newspaper-leisure spouse? What about the middle-class woman whose family has died or grown up or moved away, whom society treats as a pitiable leper? What about the fourteen-year-old girl who is the victim of rape, and is then considered unmarriageable? And the single woman who is nothing, nowhere, unless she can find a man and thus her own identity? What about the few women in Congress, who are patronized despite the population proportions of their sex? And what about the female homosexual, who is even less socially acceptable than the male homosexual, although she is (reputedly) less harassed legally—because after all, whatever women do is less important than that done by men.

From Resistance to Revolution

Some radicals wonder how women can relate to the rest of the Movement, to the struggle that is taking place within America and against its tentacles of power all over the world. A few points seem obvious.

Women have been subjugated longer than any other people on earth. Empires rose and fell but one constant remained, except in a few civilized tribal pockets of the world—everyone could stomp on women. This knowledge is carried, even if only semiconsciously, by every woman, and accounts for a cumulative rage which, once released, will make demands for Black Power look by comparison not only suddenly reasonable but eminently desirable.

Blacks once told idealistic young Lord and Lady Bountiful whites back in the civil-rights movement to turn around and look at their own lives. By god, they
weren't
free, even nice middle-class college grad students—they were enslaved by the culture itself. And from this awareness was born the New Left. Now, women, who have been angels of mercy for so many other causes, have also become fully awake to their own cause. Radical women learned, from that same Black Liberation Movement, that mere empathy for the suffering of others is basically a liberal emotion—at least it never makes for revolutionary thinking or motivates a passionate desire for change.

Nevertheless, the chameleonic so-called revolutionist male in the Movement (who at first thought the Women's Movement ridiculous,
later modified that to “frivolous in the face of larger issues,” still later accepted it if only as an “organizing tool,” and now nervously finds it “valid”) has dreamed up a new hypocritical twist: isn't a drive for equality of women ultimately reformist, eminently co-optable?

Of course. So is Black Power—into Black Capitalism. So are the initial demands of any oppressed group. When slammed up against the wall, the Man will liberalize abortion and birth-control laws, and open up the professions to a few more token women, just as he once rigged up for us the already marked ballot. But we want something more—like freedom. “Equality in an unjust society is meaningless. We want equality in a
just
society.”
³