Woman as Persephone-Psyche-Cinderella cannot accomplish certain things. It is absurd to expect that women, qua women, can any more easily or quickly than men achieve goals such as international peace or universal personal happiness. On the contrary, women, as powerless human beings, may have an even harder time than men—especially since men, who are relatively more powerful as a caste, are opposed both to absorbing “feminine” traits into the public sphere and to encouraging women to develop “masculine” traits for participation in the public sphere. Certainly, women’s first successful organized accomplishments did concern issues such as child care, abortion, and birth control—“female”-sphere issues. Women, as a group, as an interest group, or as individuals, are only now beginning to address the “larger” issues of the economy, religion, war and peace.
What would an ideal group be? As a feminist and anarchist, I can only answer for myself and, unfortunately, in somewhat vague generalities. To me, the only acceptable groups are those that, unlike the patriarchal family, can function as places and ways of supporting our deepest cravings for individual liberty, security, achievement, and love. Groups (ideologies, religions, programmatic “solutions”) which in any way kill the individual spirit; which despise and crucify that which it longs for; which enforce conformity, mediocrity, and conservatism—for any reason; which seek to diminish each person to “manageable” and familiar levels rather than to enhance each person to “unmanageable” and unique levels which the group supports—such “groupings” are depressingly well known, and are doomed to spin out old patterns of martyrdom and oppression.
Men are martyred or sacrificed when they preach or practice peace and love; women (and powerless men) when they preach or practice war. Even the evil laws of martyrdom obey the laws of sex-role stereotyping.
Such groups cannot provide women with the strength to gain power and to redefine power, love, and work. I honestly don’t know exactly how such ideal groups would solve the problems of inequality and injustice.
As a feminist and psychologist, I can discuss this question of ideal groups in quite another way. If women have been rendered culturally impotent because of their biology, it might be useful to discuss those societies in which women reigned culturally supreme because of their biology; that is Amazon societies.
AMAZON SOCIETIES: VISIONS AND POSSIBILITIES
Were there actually such things as the fabulous nations of maidens, the mounted demons, galloping from the edges of the world to make ice and golden sand splash to all sides? Was there ever a “man-hating army” with clanging tresses and awesome customs? … In time and reality the Amazon kingdoms not only comprise an extremist end of matriarchy but also are a beginning and a purpose in themselves. Roaming daughter realms … they markedly differ from the serenely tolerant mother clan as old as mankind, which pacifically exiled a young upstart manhood by exogamy. The Amazon does not mime the male principle but denies it in order to unite the two fundamental forms of life in paradisaical harmony which had been divided by the great mother…. In the mother clan, there was a constant progression of great mothers begetting more great mothers. Amazons however, reproduced the daughter type, which practically skips a generation and is something altogether different. They were conquerers, horse tamers, and huntresses who gave birth to children but did not nurse or rear them. They were an extreme, feminist wing of a young human race, whose other extreme wing consisted of the stringent patriarchies.
Helen Diner12
The whole idea of the Amazon is the cancellation of the first, partheno-genetic female action, the separation and formation of the active principle and its shaping into a male. Amazons concede no separate existence to the active principle, reabsorb it, and develop it themselves in androgynous fashion: female on the left, male on the right. Their dematernalization begins with the shrinking or the removal of the right breast as a symbolic action of bold style…. All varieties of Amazon society share the characteristic that they reared only the girls into fullfledged specimens of mankind….
Helen Diner13
Amazon society, as mythology, history, and universal male nightmare, represents a culture in which women reign culturally supreme because of their gender. Amazon societies are also important because women were trained to be warriors—militarily and, presumably, in other ways as well. Amazons also owned their own land and lived on it together. This is very different from our only examples of women living together: in jails, in ghettos, in Islamic purdah, or in schools while still “growing up.” Women live together only in states of shameful default or absolute necessity, (just as men have reigned culturally supreme because of their gender). Female sacrifice or self-sacrifice, as we know it, could not have existed in Amazon societies. For example, to be an Amazon mother does not imply cultural behavior in which constant interaction between a woman and her biological child is necessary. Despite many odes to child rearing, the fact remains that the child-rearing assignment (with whatever tediousness or immobility a particular class or technological level imposes) has traditionally been drawn by the relatively powerless sex.
In Amazon societies, women were mothers and their society’s only warriors; mothers and their society’s only hunters; mothers and their society’s only political and religious leaders. No division of labor based on sex seems to have existed in such societies. Although Amazon leaders existed and queens were elected, the societies seem to have been classless ones, or at least ones in which any woman could aspire to and achieve full human expression.
In Amazon society, only men, when they were allowed to remain, were, in widely differing degrees, powerless and oppressed. Diner notes that “the tyranny of woman over man (in the sexual realm) is never as complete as the converse sometimes is: there are only a few instances of anything like male prostitution, if for no other reason than because the male organ limits this possibility, for women.” According to Diner,
The mildest form of Amazon aversion [to men] caused them to engage in a quick assignation with their male neighbors, totally indiscriminate as a matter of principle, every spring. Female offspring was retained, the male was sent to its distant fathers. The more radical kind of administration did not send any babies away but crippled the newly born boys and rendered them innocuous for life through the twisting of one hand and one hip out of their sockets. Despised slave cripples, never touched erotically by the Amazons, they were used by them for the rearing of children, the spinning of wool, and domestic service. In the most extreme anti-male society, the male offspring was always killed, and sometimes the fathers were too.
Of all the African Amazons, only the Gorgons seem to have maintained a pure Amazon state; the others, though keeping the army purely feminine, maintained some men in their camps. The Libyan Amazons, who removed their right breasts, had compulsory military service for all girls for a number of years, during which they had to refrain from marriage. After that, they became a part of the reserves and were allowed to take a mate and reproduce their kind. The women monopolized government and other influential positions. In contrast to the later Thermodontines, however, they lived in a permanent relationship with their sex partners, even though the men led a retiring life, could not hold public office, and had no right to interfere in the government of the state or society. Children, who were brought up on mare’s milk, were given to the men to rear, just as among the Egyptians, Kamtchatkans, and some of the North American Indians.14
Amazon society was probably better for the development of women’s bodies and emotions than any male-dominated patriarchal society has ever been. It may have been better for the development of women’s intellect and art—although this remains a totally conjectural matter. Amazon society probably did not value modern or western types of competitive art and intellect, any more than did other early or “primitive” societies. (I really wonder what a group of Amazon women would make of my writing about them. And I wonder how much or how long I’d be able to accept a disinterested, indulgent, or negative response. However
, Diner notes that the entire Ionian tradition refers to the Thermodon Amazons as the founders of cities and sanctuaries.
Though bestial until victory, they later like the Romans, became conciliatory. Gentleness and foresight earned them the adoration of the vanquished … their tradition was maintained uninterruptedly by temples, graves, cities, and whole countries. A large number of important cities boasted an Amazon as founder and godmother; Smyrna, Sinope, Cyme, Gryne, Pitania, Magnesia, Clete, Mytilene, and Amastris.15
Earlier, the Libyan (Moroccan and African) Amazons rode through Egypt “peacefully,” but conquered.
Syria, Phrygia, and all the lands along the seacoast to the Caicus River…. The islands of Samos, Lesbos, Pathmos and Samothrace [were conquered and inhabited] by “Myrine,” a Libyan Amazon Queen.16
If women take their bodies seriously—and ideally we should—then its full expression, in terms of pleasure, maternity, and physical strength, seems to fare better when women control the means of production and reproduction. From this point of view, it is simply not in women’s interest to support patriarchy or even a fabled “equality” with men. That women do so is more a sign of powerlessness than of any biologically based “superior” wisdom.
Female sacrifice—either self-sacrifice, ritual virgin sacrifice, prostitution, or the sacrifice of self that women make in order to be mothers—is perhaps not unalterably rooted in our biological condition.
I am not saying that a female-dominated or Amazon society based on the oppression of men is any more “just” than is a male-dominated society based on the oppression of women. I am merely pointing out in what ways it is better for women.
Perhaps someday a choice between forms of injustice will not be necessary. Also, I don’t know whether it is in women’s interest to forgo the act of childbirth—simply because men have enforced such an unfair price on it. I don’t know whether birth control technology in a male-dominated society is particularly good for women. Being freed from enforced maternity or pregnancy fears does not necessarily lead to the abolition of female sexual “frigidity,” or to the abolition of female prostitution. Birth control technology, by itself, will not necessarily lead to the abolition of sexism, any more than it will usher in an era of non-alienated labor or alternative family forms. It may, in fact, lead to male-dominated totalitarian decisions regarding sexual activity and maternity—decisions over which the individual woman has as little to say as she did about her enforced maternity.
To the extent to which American, Western, or modern women desire a more harmonious, tribal, collective, spiritual, and ritual existence, and are willing to forgo certain modern values and technologies to achieve it, then Amazon societies are probably better psychological models for women than are male-initiated models of “primitive” societies. (We must not forget that many primitive cultures feared the female body and exercised strong taboos against menstruation, puberty, and defloration—and practiced female genital mutilation.17)
Dropping out is not the answer; … Most women are already dropped out; they were never in…. Dropping out, however, is an excellent policy for men, and SCUM will enthusiastically encourage it….
Valerie Solanas
I sat through three hours of the film ‘Woodstock’ alternating between feelings of enchantment and repulsion…. For one thing, with the exception of a pregnant Joan Baez who couldn’t seem to stop talking about her husband, all the musicians were men. Sweaty, bearded men were busy building the stage, directing traffic, shooting the film, and running the festival. Brotherhood was repeatedly proclaimed, both on stage and off…. The clearest indication of how rock music views womankind is in its lyrics. Women certainly can’t complain that the image presented there is one-dimensional. On the contrary, the put-downs are remarkably multifaceted, ranging from open contempt to sugar-coated condescension. Above all, however, women are always available sexual objects whose chief function is to happily accommodate any man that comes along.
Marion Meade
Hip-hop and rap-era music has not improved on the portrayal of girls and women.
Amazon societies compose an early and little-explored culture, one in which women dominated all areas of conceivable or necessary life—i.e., what was necessary included more than just the enforced bearing and rearing of a single man’s children.18 An image of women fully engaged in the task of humanity—at any technological level—is practically visionary. It produces fear and disbelief—together with an overwhelming sense of excitement.
Of course, it is unrealistic and perhaps dangerous to take visions too seriously. Perhaps we must respect them as difficult truths with which to inform our lives—in some way. Perhaps we cannot go backward too longingly in time. (We can, of course, realize how little or badly forward we’ve come.) Despite the importance of knowing about goddesses and Amazons, I certainly believe that mass female liberation lies more in the technological future than in the biological past. The earth’s female population is no longer small nor is the habit of warfare a desirable one.
In general, hand-to-hand combat is anachronistic and militarily ineffective—for women as well as for men. Men in advanced countries possess the nuclear and chemical power to destroy the planet and/or redefine our ways of life. However, total nuclear power has not been used since Nagasaki. Weaponry and military skills will ultimately prevail over any biologically muscled battle just as science will ultimately lead to more revolutionary victories than will apocalyptic military heroism. And yet I don’t think that physical prowess and discipline are totally anachronistic for women.
Women are raped because we cannot defend ourselves. Much of our submissive, conciliatory, compassionate, and seductive behaviors have been cultivated in order to avoid either the fact or the onus of rape. Rape existed long before modern industrial capitalism, yet it seems an appropriate metaphor for that behavior (or social system) in which one man’s pleasure or profit occurs only when someone else directly experiences physical pain and psychological humiliation. I believe that the biological fact and significance of heterosexual rape and pregnancy were primary factors in the formation of the patriarchal family. Also, a primary factor was man’s need for proof of his genetic immortality; this need was so great that men felt entitled to colonize a woman’s body and savagely limit her freedom in order to ensure that her children were created by his sperm.
For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life.
I may note that men are often allowed more “warriorship” than women, and without having to renounce the comforts of companionship, progeny, domesticity, and sexual affection. Still it is hard for men to develop selves or perform political service while they must economically support families. What would it mean for a woman to be a warrior today? How could modern women control the means of production and reproduction?
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL: POWER AND VIOLENCE
A time came when some of the people allowed doubt to enter their minds, and they began to wonder whether it was really possible, quantitatively and qualitatively, to resist the occupant’s offensives. Was freedom worth the consequences of penetrating into that enormous circuit of terrorism and counter-terrorism? Did this disproportion not express the impossibility of escaping oppression?
Frantz Fanon
A Dying Colonialism19
Miracles of consciousness aside, I see no way for women to defeat or transfer patriarchy without achieving power. Unlike male groups, women have little power with which to either avoid or commit violence. Women traditionally are physically weak and politically powerless in a culture that values physical strength and its extended representation in the form of weaponry and money. Women, like men, must be capable of violence or self-defense before their refusal to use violence co
nstitutes a free and moral choice, rather than “making the best of a bad bargain.”
Survival is the characteristic property of power. Idealism may or may not, but often does, exist as a luxury for the powerful and as a necessity for the (female) powerless. Powerless or relatively powerless men are not necessarily idealistic, nor are they physically helpless or pacifists. On the contrary. But they are forced to perform the male rites of violence against each other, against their will, or at least to their detriment, by more powerful men. They do not survive. Old, wealthy, white American men did not die in Vietnam, in the Gulf War, in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. They sent younger and poorer men to do the job. When powerless male groups begin to use violence to gain power, since they are still powerless, most do not survive the early battle stages.
However, their violence is often viewed as heroic and courageous by other men and, of course, by many women. Twentieth-century women have personally nurtured, approved of, and impersonally obeyed male nationalist and/or Communist leaders: the reverse has been minimally if ever true. Just as the Catholic Pope, the Islamic mullah, the Jewish rabbi, and the European dictator cannot be women, so it would seem neither can a woman achieve the power and success of a Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, or Ahmed Ben Bella.
In Soviet Russia, women comprised less than one percent of the executive Communist leadership from 1958 to 1962. Specifically, of the 306 top Soviet party executives, all but two were women.20 Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, was the Minister of Education, and the novelist Alexandra Kollantai was allowed no more than the ambassadorship to Sweden. Stalin’s wife was allowed to kill herself. In China, it was Mrs. Mao and Mrs. Chou who occupied relatively powerful positions: Mrs. Chou, or Ting-Ying Chao, was the vice president of the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation. Despite Mrs. Allende’s talents, it was her husband who was elected President of Chile. I wonder what position Leila Khaled or Hanan Ashrawi will occupy after the successful Palestinians finally accept Israel’s longstanding offer of a state? Will she and other women like her suffer the fate of the Algerian women revolutionaries?
Women and Madness Page 37