Going Too Far (26 page)

Being correctly aware didn't help—because the other people weren't. And how do we fight
for
ourselves without all the other oppressed assuming we are fighting
against
them? Or must we educate
them and fend off blows at the same instant? What do we do with
our
pain, so busy feeling guilty about everyone else's? Are all those other issues golden apples flung in the path of Atalanta's race, to divert her?

We
must
find a way. Because, to be honest, this day, this evening “out on the town” was one of the
better
ones, in my experience.

How long, oh sisters, how long?

October
1970

P
ART FOUR

Radical Feminism

PART IV:

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

January of
1971
saw the beginning of multiple processes of change so rapid, simultaneous, and many-dimensioned as I never could have conceived until I found myself living them
.

There were the political realizations, chief among these the glimmering comprehension of radical feminism. So it wasn't merely a way of approaching socialist revolution; it wasn't, in fact, a wing or arm or toe of the Left—or Right
—
or any other male-defined, male-controlled group. It was something quite Else, something in itself, a whole new politics, an entirely different and astoundingly radical way of perceiving society, sentient matter, life itself, the universe. It was a philosophy. It was immense. It was also most decidedly a real, autonomous Movement, this feminism, with all the strengths that implied. And with all the evils, too—the familiar internecine squabbles
.

This section of essays reflects many of the realizations of that period. We were developing our own political theory, exploring our own terms, as I do in “On Women as a Colonized People.” We were beginning to articulate anger we had not even dared acknowledge before, to fight back, to
make the connections—
as in the article on rape and pornography. We were growing up—as individuals, feminists, as a movement in fact. True, we indulged ourselves, as perhaps every political group inevitably does, in attacking each other instead of our adversaries (see the piece on lesbianism and feminism, for example); it was safer and it felt deliciously self-righteous. But most of us were also seriously committed to a Feminist Movement which could transform our culture; and this meant study and respect for intelligence
—
as in the trends expressed in this section's piece on women's studies. We were spreading—ourselves, our consciousness—all over the globe; becoming a truly international movement, as the essay on the Three Marias demonstrates. And we were at the same time doing what no other political mass movement had dared: we were continuing to explore the personal—because for us this
was
political. We were reaching out to trust each other as
women in new ways, which I try to express in “A New Fable of the Burning Time
.”

The early seventies will always seem “filmic” to me—like a montage of thought, emotion, action. In a sense, I could date my commitment to radical feminism from my attendance, in late spring of
1971,
at the Radical Feminist Conference in Detroit, organized by the same women who had written the Fourth World Manifesto (see pages
118
and
131).
It was an exciting weekend—and one in which I discovered that, even if a large room is crammed strictly with radical feminists (no Trotskyites, Weathervanes, or the like) there is still sufficient disagreement
within
the fold to boggle the mind: Is marriage “incorrect”? Is any relationship with a man impossible at this time in history? Possible, hell—is it worth it? What about children? What about
male
children? Is lesbianism (1) an alternative, (2) a political choice
, (3)
a personal proclivity; (4) a vanguard position, (5) an escapist trend, (6) none of the above, or (7) all of the above? What about our ageism and older women? How can white feminists concretely support the growing feminism among minority women? What forms of organization and structure are unsalvageably hierarchical and male—but which alternate structures are so anarchical they lead to chaos? What
about
leadership? Do we need it / can we find it / how do we use it / what in fact is it / who do we believe / do we believe anyone but ourselves / what about tactical crises and the need for experienced people / what about the follower mentality / how can we redefine responsibility and accountability?

Yet this was only the beginning. There continued to be pressures from within and without, from all sides—the women of the male Left and, on the other hand, those women active in the civil-rights front of feminism (who were sometimes termed reformists). We were in danger of repeating what had happened in the suffrage days, where there were also, so to speak, three parts to the movement: the reformists, who wanted to settle for the vote, thinking that that eventually would win freedom for women in all areas—they were feminist but not radical. There were the social crusaders, who did superb work in exposing the brutality in the asylums and hospitals and factories but who shrank from having women as their priority—they were radical but not feminist. And there were real radical feminists—like Elizabeth Cady Stanton—whose challenging thought was finally ignored, ground down in the friction between the other two groups. That friction and, ironically, its reverse, a kind of bonding of the two
across
radical feminism, goes on to this day and requires the vigilance of radical feminists. Perhaps the peculiar bonding occurs because the women's-rights-oriented feminists respond guiltily to the radical women's accusation of their being “privileged” and “reformist.” They feel they must become radical, and that being radical must mean Marx. Somewhere along the way, radical
feminism
gets missed. And it's a pity (and most irritating) to think of women sitting around in study groups reading Lenin and Mao for political direction when they might be reading Stanton, Anthony, Pankhurst, Mott, Willard, and Fuller (not to mention Eliot, Austen, Sand, Brontë, Rossetti, Barrett, and Stowe, etc. etc.!
).

There are few creatures more zealous than the convert. I, in
1971
a new refugee from male politics, seized the torch and lofted it high for my sisters still standing where I had lagged ten seconds earlier. And we learned from each other
.

This was the year of that Radical Feminist Conference. It was also the year of the founding of Sisterhood is Powerful, Inc., or, as it came to be called informally throughout the Women's Movement, “The Sisterhood Fund,” which I established to receive all the royalties from the anthology and “recycle” those monies into feminist projects. It was the first such feminist institution, and in the four years of its existence, it set a proud precedent. The year
1971
was also when I attempted initiating a Feminist Studies Program at an experimental college in Florida
—
an experience described in “The Proper Study of Womankind” on p
. 189. Most
of all
, 1971
was my first year as a feminist “outside agitator
.”

This condition had been brought about by the appearance of
Sisterhood is Powerful,
which had been published in the fall of
1970.
Soon afterward I faced a pile of requests from women for me to lecture, organize, advise, and agitate around the country. I recalled with a sense of irony how desperate we had been both in WITCH and at
Rat
to reach “those women out there”—and now the book actually had done it. However much willful dullards might accuse literature of being hopelessly elitist, even plain old-fashioned by McLuhan's standards, those first books from the new feminist wave certainly did have their effect. (If this relevation aroused the temporarily imprisoned persona of myself as an artist, though, I dismissed the yearning—and the lesson.) The Movement needed money, the colleges were willing to pay it, groups needed benefit speakers. Women needed help, advice, support, and sometimes just classic outside agitation in the best Susan
B.
Anthony tradition. I packed my bag
.

The montage gets positively blurry at that point. The years
1971
through
1975
shift and merge and then freeze in a series of stills: The spontaneous circle-dance of hundreds of women in a gymnasium in Michigan after a speech; The physical eviction of a particularly obnoxious heckler from a seminar in New Mexico—all six-feet-football of him hefted daintily out the door by five petite women; Forty-degree-below-zero dawn in Saskatchewan, Canada—sitting up and talking with women all night (as usual) before my
7.00
A.M.
plane on to another town, another college, another feminist community; The closing circle of jocks on the Pennsylvania campus, drunk and in a hazing mood, each
one of about twenty men carrying lit torches, each one crying, “Burn the witch!”; The growing presence of minority women in audiences and at women's centers and feminist gatherings; The growing presence of working-class women, of housewives and community women; The face of the sixty-year-old woman who stood up at the rap session after a speech and, crying softly, said she realized that she'd been raped every night for thirty-five years; The bomb threats in auditoriums before or during lectures; The menacing letters and phone calls; The radical feminist nuns in a far-west state who were doing secret abortion referrals; The nascent rage everywhere budding into energy and organization and determination, the faces the voices the meetings and partings and indelible encounters where consciousness meets consciousness and the connections are electric
…

In time I would come to grouse about the traveling, which indeed was exhausting, and which wreaked havoc with my personal life and my writing. Yet I know that I would trade those years for nothing—for I might have become an embittered organizer twitching at her laurels, had I not been forced out into the world where women were fighting to stay alive and love and live and give birth to themselves and each other
.

That discovered vision—and the personal cost—rang out clearly from the poems in
Monster,
my first collection, which was published in
1972.
Kenneth's third book of poems
, Color Photos of the Atrocities,
¹
published the next spring, contained poems from his side of the struggle
—
the two volumes argued and quoted and reflected one another like facing pages of the same document: the record of a woman and a man who loved each other, trying to change their lives. Which we were in fact doing: both of us trying to survive by free-lance editing, me gone for approximately one week out of every month and whirling in harried political activity when I
was
in town
—
what with the sudden emergency actions like seizures of buildings, demonstrations, rallies—and the protracted projects as well, like the New York Women's Center, or the Women's Law Center. Our child, cared for at this point well more than half the time by his father, was growing golden and toddly and of necessity (in such a household) precociously and loudly verbal. Meanwhile, words like patriarchy, gynarchy, and matriarchy entered my vocabulary together with the realization of how vast the implications of feminism were. And this realization, strangely enough, seemed to bring me even closer to my beloved, exasperating, guilt-provoking family. I remember reading somewhere, in one of the mythographic analyses of the ancient gynocratic societies, that the model for all relationships was originally the love between mother and child—not as we know it today in its
patriarchally corrupted form, where women sometimes misuse power over children because child-rearing is the one area in which we are allowed power at all. The model, rather, of that relationship in a pristine state of mutual love and sensuality
, inter
dependence (the swollen breast needing the infant's relieving hunger); vigilance and sensitivity to unspoken need; true nurturance. I remember realizing with a shock that to live in such a culture would mean that I could feel about every single thing—male and female, child and adult, human and animal and plant
—
the way I feel about Blake. And I was suddenly cramped with the pain of an intense longing I knew was realer than all our rhetoric, for this represented the loss and the desire that lay beneath that loss
.

This was authentic, and other women felt it, too. Of such stuff are made changes in world consciousness—sometimes called revolutions
.

¹
Color Photos of the Atrocities: Poems
by Kenneth Pitchford, Atlantic-Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1973.

ON WOMEN AS A COLONIZED PEOPLE

This short essay was written at the request of sisters in the Women's Health Movement as the introduction to a self-health handbook,
Circle One
, published by Colorado women.
¹
Although the piece was written in 1974, I had been making the analogy between women and other colonized peoples for a number of years in lectures, as it was borne in upon me that the oppression of women was more pervasive (and evasive) than I had thought. One could compare sexism with the issues of class and race and even caste, and still be left with an alienation more fundamental. Such comparisons are invidious in terms of human suffering—no scale dare weigh that, and no analysis, political or otherwise, had better “compare and contrast” that—although precisely such more-oppressed-than-thou approaches are attempted all the time by patriarchal politicians of the Left and Right. I was among those feminists who were, rather, searching for a means of
articulating
sexism—a handle, a lever, a way of translating into generally understood and accepted terms of political philosophy “what it was we people wanted.” Hence the analogies—which were always dangerous, since the terms themselves had been coined and analyzed, the conditions themselves had been formed and at times even reformed
by men and by patriarchy
.