Going Too Far (34 page)

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Authors: Robin Morgan

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One more hint about winning. There is something that all of the following have in common: New College, Florida; University of Kansas at Lawrence; Boston State College; American University; Penn at Philadelphia campus; Berkeley; University of New Mexico at Albuquerque; Harvard; Barnard College. Within the past two years feminists on these campuses, after going all the proper routes and channels, have become fed up and have seized property. And I offer this to you in case, at some point, everything else fails. I say it obliquely so as to avoid getting in trouble again for crossing another state line to incite another you-know-what.

In this vein, the last thing that I would leave you with is a quote from Emmeline Pankhurst, who is part of our herstory. Emmeline Pankhurst, if anybody here doesn't know, was a British suffragist. In fact, she was a militant and therefore a suffragette, as they were called in Britain. She and two of her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia (unlikely names for feminist terrorists), formed the WSPU—the Women's Social
and Political Union—after some sixty years of women having asked politely for the vote in the British Empire and having got nowhere. The WSPU moved from setting fires in all the mailboxes in London to trashing the National Gallery, to throwing bags of flour at the king when he rode in open procession, to writing “Freedom for Women” in acid on the royal golf links, to riots, to burning down two pre-Reformation cathedrals in the north of England, and finally to fire-bombing the prime minister's summer home. Women were jailed, women died, in that struggle. Pankhurst herself invented the prison hunger strike, and I must say that she didn't do it in the genteel way for which male radicals are now famous, taking tea and milk and other liquids. None of that for Emmeline. When she was on a strike in jail it meant that she did not eat, she did not drink, she did not sleep, she did not sit down.

This particular quote comes from a period when she was already in her sixties and had been jailed again on charges of conspiracy; she immediately entered into her strike. For three days she had not eaten or drunk or slept or sat down. She had simply walked back and forth in her cell until finally the British Empire couldn't stand it any longer, and they let her go. That night she came out and addressed a women's rally saying, in part, the following, which I quote from her autobiography:
7

From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, “We disregard your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall continue this war, as we have done in the past; and what sacrifice of property, or what injury to property accrues will not be our fault. It will be the fault of that Government who admit the justice of our demands, but refuses to concede them …” I called upon the women of the meeting to join me in this new militancy, and I reminded them anew that the women who are fighting in the Suffragette army had a great mission, the greatest mission the world has ever known—the freeing of one-half the human race, and through that freedom the saving of the other half. I said to them: “Be militant each in your own way. Those of you who can express your militancy by going to the House of Commons and refusing to leave without satisfaction, as we did in the early days—do so [a classic sit-in—R.M.]. Those of you who can express militancy by facing party mobs at Cabinet Ministers' meetings, when you remind them of their falseness to principle—do so. Those of you who can express your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government
by-election policy—do so. Those of you who can break windows—break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to make the Government realise that property is as greatly endangered by women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old—do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion.”

May 1973

1
Not that this last ceases at graduation. In fact, such typing is often broadly translated into unacknowledged coauthorship, or even into doing the entire job “for him.” One of many such examples is provided by Aurelia Plath, the mother of Sylvia and herself a fascinating woman; in
Letters Home
(Harper & Row, New York, 1975, p. 12), Mrs. Plath writes movingly of having done all the reading and note-taking for her husband's book, then having written the first draft, and at last having put the manuscript into “final form” for the printer. At some point in this process Otto Plath revised a bit and inserted a few notes—including adding his name on the title page as sole author, a regrettably not uncommon practice. Yet another instance of appropriation of the wife's writing by the husband (in this case, F. Scott Fitzgerald) was explored by Nancy Milford in her absorbing book
Zelda
: A
Biography
(Harper & Row, New York, 1970).

2
Women students at Sarah Lawrence have been quite vocal in their regret at their own vote to make the school coed. Less than a year after males were admitted (and they were a distinct minority), the women found themselves being edged out of leadership positions in the student councils and being subtly overlooked in classes by teachers who favored the men students. Old stereotypes reasserted themselves as the men (trained to compete and to rule from birth) challenged the numerical strength of the women with simple aggressiveness. Conversely trained (also since birth), the women found themselves distracted from their own intellectual climate and low-key, relatively noncompetitiye style. They speak now of missing that peace, that freedom to exchange ideas in their own atmosphere, and the easy camaraderie they had felt among themselves. There is so little space in the patriarchy for women to be friends, let alone intellectual colleagues sharing a mutual sense of adventure, that we ought at least to preserve those few female educational communities we have left.

3
New College closed a few years later, due partly to the public-relations damage the feminist seizure wreaked on the school's radical image. “Change or die” was one of our rallying cries. Many institutions chose the latter course.

4
In 1898 the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman suggested that housewives be paid salaries. Lately this proposal has been taken up and dusted off as a possible feminist demand. Among the women who have explored “home economics” in this sense are the Canadian Margaret Benston, the British sociologist Ann Oakley, feminist theorists Betsy Warrior and Lisa Leghorn, Helena Lopata, and Elizabeth Windschuttle. Recently there are even Marxist exponents of wages-for-housework, notably Juliet Mitchell, Mariarosa dalla Costa, and Selma James.

5
Penn Women's Studies Planners Pamphlet
, 3601 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, Pa., 1974.

6
The founding conference of this association took place on January 13–16, 1977, at the University of San Francisco.

7
My
Own Story
, Emmeline Pankhurst, Eveleigh Nash, London, 1914, pp. 265–66.

INTERNATIONAL FEMINISM: A CALL FOR SUPPORT OF THE THREE MARIAS

James Baldwin once commented that to be black and conscious in America was to be in a continual state of rage. I would paraphrase him: to be female and conscious anywhere on this planet is to be in a continual state of rage. Since early 1970 I had been one of a number of American feminists who were in touch with like-minded women organizing all over the globe. Synchronicity, word-of-mouth, books smuggled into countries where the fascist, capitalist, socialist, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, or atheist male governments did not smile upon such literature—these were the ways our ideas were shared. But 1973 and 1974 saw the first truly united international feminist action, focusing on the arrest of three Portuguese feminist writers, as the accompanying article describes. It was written for and delivered as the introduction to a Broadway evening in support of the Three Marias, a presentation of their work dramatized and directed by Gilda Grillo, and produced by Lois Sasson. Women were responsible for the acting, the music, the slide projections, the total ambiance. It was a beautifully executed and moving event (and I shall never forget, as long as I live, the rehearsal encounters between that arch-conservative male supremacist, the Broadway stagehand, and our female technicians!).

Soon thereafter, a revolution toppled the Portuguese regime which had been entrenched for so many decades. In time, the Marias were found not guilty of the crimes charged, although Maria Isabel Barreño has made it clear since that the ultimate verdict was brought about not by the revolutionary coup, but by international feminist pressure on the Portuguese governments, old
and
new. This analysis seemed borne out when, only weeks after the glorious revolution had taken place, women marching in the first open feminist demonstration Lisbon had ever seen were set upon, stoned, beaten, and forcibly
dispersed by a mob of “revolutionary” men who had fought for freedom for all, but who thought that demands for contraception, abortion, economic and emotional and legal autonomy, and spiritual freedom (in a Latin Catholic country) were—you guessed it—going
too
far.

I
WANT TO WELCOME YOU
to this evening of dramatic readings from the forbidden texts of the Three Marias of Portugal. As part of the international feminist protest action attendant on the case—which I will explain more fully in a moment—this one-time performance has been put together by women, including, of course, the three actresses who will read from the texts and the feminist musicians who will accompany that reading.

Some background on why we are here seems in order, for although the whole world appears to know about the censoring of Solzhenitsyn, shockingly but not surprisingly few people are aware of, or concerned about, the repression of the work of three
women
.

In April of 1972, a book entitled
New Portuguese Letters
was published in Portugal. Its authors were: Maria Isabel Barreño (who previously had written two novels about the problems of being female in a patriarchal world), Maria Teresa Horta (who has written nine books of poetry and one novel—and who has been persecuted by censorship before, regarding one of her books of poetry), and Maria Velho Da Costa (who also has written a book of short stories and a novel). All three women work. All three women have children. All three women are feminists. All three women are published writers. And all three women are therefore regarded as dangerous to the patriarchal state of Portugal.

Their collectively written book explores themes such as the loneliness and isolation of women, the exploitation of our sexuality and the denial of our own fulfillment as whole human beings. It speaks of the suffering caused by rape, prison, sadistic abortions; it explores our political and economic condition; it talks of religion and the cloister, of adultery and madness and suicide. It is not a timid work—it is a strong and womanly book.
1

Two-thirds of all copies in the first printing sold out within a few days of the publication. By May 1 of that same year the remaining one-third had been seized by the Portuguese political police. One month later to the day, the Portuguese Committee of Censorship requested that the authors be sued. This was quite a departure, since the seizure
of books is frequent in Portugal but suits are rare. Seven or eight years ago there were two government suits over literary works, but the defendants were not required to pay bail. The Three Marias, however, were arrested, and bail was subsequently set at approximately six hundred dollars for each woman. The actual charge accuses the authors of having committed “an outrage to public morals and good customs.”

Meanwhile the book is being sold—but only in a clandestine manner. The publisher himself, using the seizure as a reason for his action, paid the authors only one-third of what had been promised them in their contracts—thus each of the three has received only a little more than one hundred dollars for her work.

In May of 1973, a copy of
New Portuguese Letters
reached some feminists in Paris, almost by accident. These sisters took the issue to the world feminist community, with the result that there have been protest demonstrations before Portuguese embassies and consulates in major cities all over the world, including large and militant demonstrations in London, Paris, and New York. Feminists have readied a statement presenting the case to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. Portuguese intellectuals have signed petitions demanding that the charge be lifted. These and other activities germinated by the international feminist community have functioned so far as what could be called “holding actions”—the Portuguese government has responded to the pressure by delaying sentencing of the Three Marias, hoping, no doubt, that we would all go away and the case would become yesterday's news, in which circumstance the three women could be sent to prison for a minimum of six months to two years on the charge of “outrage to the public morality” alone. One of the three, Maria Teresa Horta, is tubercular. We do not know if she has medical care. But we do know that it is vital to continue pressure on the government, by demonstrations, by information about and press coverage of the case, and by events such as this one tonight. This Thursday, January 31, 1974, is the date set for the final sentencing of the Three Marias in Lisbon.

Those are the simple facts of the case, the superficial facts, one might say. Because the issues at stake here go much deeper than a mere recitation of those facts may imply.

It would be possible, for example, to see the case merely as another in a deplorable series of repressive acts against artists by governments all over the world, each in their turn. It might be especially tempting for some to come away with an analysis that pointed an accusing finger at the reactionary politics of the Portuguese government, that same government which has on its hands the blood of Angola. Yet both such interpretations, while valid in part, stop short of the issue itself—the heart of the matter.

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