In America, it is often said that poor and Third World women are physically and mentally “tougher” than middle-class white women. However, they have not assumed political leadership within the middle-class or liberation-oriented Third World communities. Neither have Third World women been able to successfully protect themselves or their daughters from the crimes committed against them by both Third World and white men.
While equality, justice, and peace are more ethical and desirable than their opposites, such concepts constitute male (or power) ideals, and not male (or power) practices. Men are generally more verbal about “justice” and “equality” when it applies to abstract or public, global issues (their reference sphere); they do not apply such concepts to their personal or family lives—woman’s reference sphere. Only feminists have begun to look for “equality” in personal relationships. As a group, many feminists are still as removed from the public reference sphere as are non-feminist women.
Traditionally, the ideal woman avoids committing direct physical violence—and does not practice self-preservation. Psychologically, self-preservation is precisely what patriarchal society forbids women. Traditionally, the ideal female is trained to “lose” and the ideal male is trained to “win.” And women are trained to mount the sacrificial altar willingly. For example, most mother-women give up whatever ghost of a unique and human self they may have when they marry and rear children. Most children in contemporary American culture invade their mothers’ privacy, life space, sanity, and selves to such an extent that she must give up these things in order not to commit violence. (Invasion of a boundary into deserted territory is perhaps less painful than one into occupied and functional territory. Of course, such invasion is practiced by mothers against children. Fathers invade children too, but not as frequently. They don’t have to: they already own the entire territory and need only make occasional forays to check on their holdings.)
Dr. Christiaan Barnard, South African heart transplant pioneer says he’s a swinger. Here on a honeymoon trip with his nineteen-year-old bride, the forty-seven-year-old Barnard described himself to reporters at Kennedy Airport last night as a “doctor who is more open, swinging, and can enjoy life, not that sad-looking professor type the public has been used to.” … “I don’t know what’s going on,” Mrs. Barnard told reporters when they questioned her.
New York Post
Once Lola Pierotti earned $24,000 a year and worked long hours as an administrative assistant on Capitol Hill. Now she works longer hours and has even more responsibility—but no pay. What happened? Was she demoted? No, she just married the boss. Her bridegroom, of four years this month, was the senior Republican Senator from Vermont—George D. Aiken. “All he expects of me is that I drive his car, cook his meals, do his laundry and run his office,” she enumerated, with a grin.
New York Times
Women have fewer and fewer sexual, “romantic,” and incestuous options as they grow older. Their “fathers” want younger and younger women. They have never had access to direct political and economic power at any age. The older a woman is, the more at a “loss” she is. Our culture does not reward enslavement to others as well as it does enslavement to self and to action. Ideally, male enslavement produces male “winners,” whose prize is survival as we define it: money, sex, and maternal-like nurturance. Ideally, female enslavement produces female “losers,” whose prize of survival is a short-lived one, based on allowance money and some limited sex, received indirectly through a husbandman—from whom maternal-like nurturance is hardly ever received.
It is not that women need men more than men need women; however, perhaps they do. I once asked a group of black and white high school students what they wanted to do when they “grew up”; all females answered in terms of “marriage”; all males answered in terms of achieving some skill, trade, or adventure. I turned to the women and asked them who they had in mind when they thought of marriage—each other? On the contrary, men need women very much, but as relatively interchangeable servants. Of course, poor American men serve in factories and in armies. They directly serve other men and indirectly the female property of those men. When poor men fight for wage increases or class revolution, their demands rarely include a doubling of their salary and a new method of payment, one that would reflect the importance of their wives’ housework and childrearing. When poor men fight for wage increases it is to equalize some more power among men, and to allow more men to protect and own “their” women and children in better ways.
Women are conditioned to need one man as “irreplaceable.” We may recall Farberow’s statistics about how many more widows than widowers commit suicide in America.21 Women are so trained to need a man that even male “losers” can find some woman to take care of them, certainly far more easily than female “winners” can find men or women to care for them. (In this respect, they are really no better off than female “losers.”) Women have learned to live without being nurtured for so long that when they experience it they are often guilty, uncomfortable, and frightened.
I suspect that wives are more willing to keep relatively non-violent “mentally ill” husbands at home with them, certainly more than husbands are willing to keep “mentally ill” wives. Wives can still serve and nurture a “lost” and unemployed husband; “lost” wives cannot or will not serve their husbands and, as such, are annoying, inconvenient, threatening, and expendable.
Ideally, men become bigger and better “winners” as they grow older. Their alternatives and choices widen—or are supposed to—as a function of the increase in wealth, wisdom, and power that male aging denotes. Male power, which is based on the oppression of some men and all women, belongs to older men in patriarchal culture. Faced with these circumstances, “good” women destroy themselves gracefully, i.e., they get depressed and stay at home, or go mad and stay in asylums. In either case, they remove themselves from the path of adult male mobility and renewal. “Bad” women aren’t good losers; they destroy, or rather attempt to destroy, others. Ophelia in Hamlet is a “good” loser; Medea in Medea is a “bad” loser.
To those who think I am suggesting that we have a war between the sexes, I say: but we’ve always had one—and women have always lost it. Women hardly notice this fact because they take “losing” for granted just as men take “winning” for granted. When women question or change what they take for granted, the vision of the sex war we are already waging will become clearer. Similarly, it is not a “generation gap” that exists today, so much as a generation war, and one that has always existed. Parents sacrifice their own growth and pleasure for their children’s sake: the parental casualties in terms of psychological and physical death are many. The children’s casualties are also great: young men are sent by their parents to die in war, young women are sent to die in marriage and motherhood. Child abuse, child molestation, the stifling of creativity and individuality are all generation war statistics. Like the sex war, it is an ancient battle. What is new, however, is the desire to either end the war or turn the “losers” into “winners.”
SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL PRESCRIPTIONS FOR THE FUTURE
The women say, truly is this not magnificent? The vessels are upright, the vessels have acquired legs. The sacred vessels are on the move…. The women say, this is a sacrilege, a violation of all the rules … must they not hold violence in abhorrence? Is not their structure fragile and will they not shatter at the first onslaught if they are not already in pieces from collision with each other?… Stamping the earth, they speed their movements.
Monique Wittig22
How can women learn to survive—and learn to value survival? How can women banish self-sacrifice, guilt, naivete, helplessness, madness, and uncomprehending, self-blaming sorrow from the female condition? How—or should—women sever their ties to childbearing and rearing? Should women stop being compassionate? Should or can there be a single standard of behavior for both sexes? Is there such a thing as a biologically rooted female culture that should remain
separate from male culture, partly because it is different than or superior to male culture?
Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves. Women must be able to go as directly to the heart of physical, technological, and intellectual reality as they presumably do to the heart of emotional reality. This requires discipline, courage, confidence, anger, the ability to act, and an overwhelming sense of joy and urgency. Only resourceful women, women with resources, can either share them with other women or use them to accumulate more resources for both themselves and others. Other things being equal, a group composed of resourceful individuals who are also pledged, through self-interest, to various ideals or goals is a potentially more powerful group than one composed of less resourceful members with similar ideals. The centuries of female spiritual, political, and sexual sacrifice will be better redeemed by the female entry into humanity and public institutions than by rejecting them because they are not perfect—or because the efforts to integrate them are difficult and heartbreaking—or because they have traditionally been based on the oppression of women. For example, science, religion, language, and psychoanalysis have as often as not been used against women. This does not mean that these modes and institutions—and their “prizes”—must necessarily be sacrificed or discarded as hopelessly tainted. We do not know if women would discover a completely different and better sort of science or language. However, it is clear that women who are feminists must gradually and ultimately dominate public and social institutions—so as to ensure that they are not used against women. I say “dominate” because I don’t think that “equality” or “individuality” will be possible for women who have never experienced supremacy in public institutions as men have. Feminists may be: communists, socialists, Marxists, anarchists, capitalists, Democrats, Republicans, artists, scientists, nationalists, separatists, integrationists, violently revolutionary, non-violently revolutionary, etc. The point is to have our entire social drama played out as fully by women as by men. And it is revolutionary by definition to have women “out of the biological home,” both psychologically and actually. Whatever happens after that is then a matter for … everyone.
I am, of course, implying that child care is a public and crucial concern. I am not implying that any public state method in either capitalist or Communist countries has done very well by children; nor am I implying that specific individuals cannot, under certain conditions, be nurturant to specific children—or people.
But how to do it? What will be necessary psychologically in order for women to finally enter the mainstream of human action, to finally have social rather than, or other than, soley biological roles?
Woman’s primary ego-identity is rooted in a concern for limited and specific others, and for what pleases a few men. Woman’s ego-identity must somehow shift and be moored upon what is necessary for her own survival as a strong individual. Women must somehow free themselves to be concerned with many things and ideas, and with many people. Such a radical shift in ego-focus is extremely difficult and very frightening. It grates and screeches against the grain of all “feminine” nerves and feelings, and implies grave retribution. Some women go “mad” when they make such a shift in focus, or when it occurs within them.
Such a shift in the basic female ego (or in the interpretation of female gender identity) implies a frank passion for achieving the power necessary to define oneself—a power which is always predicated on the direct control of worldly realities. Such a passion would do away with such common female behaviors as apologizing for, or disguising to oneself and to others, the concern with one’s own survival and growth. From a psychological point of view, as I have noted, it is somewhat irrelevant whether a woman achieves this ego-shift as a “communist” or as a “capitalist”; as a liberal reformer or as a guerrilla in training; as an “individualist” or as a “collectivist”; as a lesbian, a heterosexual, or a bisexual woman; as a biological or non-biological mother or not as a mother. Any woman who successfully becomes interested in and achieves various powers directly, and not through or for a man or a family, is, within the psychological kingdom of patriarchy, committing a radical act, i.e., an act that risks “winning.”
Only such a radical psychological act will make it possible for women to tolerate and develop many individual differences, and to follow sexual models other than that of rape-incest-procreation.
Those women involved in such an ego-transformation would, by necessity, withdraw from all human interactions which are not extremely supportive of their survival and achievement of individual power. Other ways of saying this might be: the growth in women of a greater psychological investment in female rather than in male survival, power, and pleasure; women must withdraw from patriarchal hatred of women’s bodies and from our addiction to a relationship at any price.
Women whose psychological identities are forged out of concern for their own survival and self-definition, and who withdraw from or avoid any interactions which do not support this formidable endeavor, need not give up their capacity for warmth, emotionality, and nurturance. They do not have to forsake the “wisdom of the heart” and become men. They need only transfer the primary force of their supportiveness to themselves and to each other—but never to the point of self-sacrifice. Women need not stop being tender, compassionate, or concerned with the feelings of others. They must start being tender and compassionate with themselves and with other women. Women must begin to “save” themselves and their daughters before they “save” their husbands and their sons; before they “save” the whole world. Women must try to convert the single-minded ruthlessness with which they yearn for, serve, and protect a mate or biological child into the “ruthlessness” of self-preservation and self-development. Perhaps one of the effects of this transfer of affections might be an increase in the male capacity to nurture: themselves, each other, children, and hopefully women. Another effect would be the creation of a secure and revolutionary source of emotional and domestic nurturance for women, without which the courage for survival might falter.
Women need not reject their (usually unsatisfied) need for emotional comfort and affection. They must, in fact, find ways of satisfying these needs without losing their freedom or dignity. The female desire for love should be satisfied in a number of new ways, and as a counterpoint to or respite from events other than those dictated by powerlessness. Affection and sexuality among women must mingle with and mark the events of action and victory, of thought and wisdom.
It is important to realize that the kinds of changes in the female ego I am talking about are psychological changes. I am not “prescribing” or predicting any one economic or social form, or any one form of sexual behavior, to ensure such psychological changes. Perhaps the majority of women will be able to effect such psychological changes only after crucial changes in their economic and reproductive lives have already occurred. Perhaps only some young women, perhaps only a minority of all women, will be able to effect such changes through consciousness alone, through the strength of understanding, which, if transformed into wisdom, always means the performance of necessary actions.
THIRTEEN QUESTIONS
What to say to young girls who listen raptly and confidently to the most extreme feminist visions—and laugh, so happily, about them? What odes to write them? What deeds to teach them? What to learn from them? How can the creative impulse be nurtured in women—we, who have forgotten our myths, who have no rituals from which to proceed?
Who will our goddesses and heroines be? In what language shall we address them? How shall we experience divinity as also residing in the female body? When shall we rejoice in the birth of divine daughters, when shall we respect and trust older women? How can we learn to celebrate—not just tolerate—our differences? When will all foolish lies cease between mothers and daughters? How shall we celebrate that day?
Must we choose between the way of the spirit and the way of the sw
ord? Must body and soul remain divided? Are murder and childbirth necessary? How closely are they related? Do women need a women’s army? Or do we need an army of wise women? Or both? How shall we, as feminists, practice patience and collective loyalty—precisely when we must practice action and individuality?
Would intense maternal and paternal mothering in childhood lead to wisdom and strength among women? Amazons were probably not “smother-mothered”—or sexually seduced by fathers—as much as they were collectively reared, in peer groups, by many powerful adult women to face human necessity with efficiency and honor.
Are the helplessness and prolonged dependence of human children the models for all culturally oppressive relations? Can new methods of childbearing and rearing banish the human tendency to arbitrarily interpret biological differences in oppressive ways?
How can we dismiss all men as “hopeless”—when some of the byproducts of power are knowledge, generosity, and likableness? How can we come to terms with this fact? Is it possible for socialized women ever to experience sexual equality with socialized men? Isn’t this a contradiction in terms—if public power is still unequally distributed between the sexes?
Must women sever their Maiden’s marriage bonds with Eros—until all men have married with Her? Will lesbianism, bisexuality, and homosexuality occur more and more naturally among young people? What will this mean? Will men be able to become more heterosexual just as women are able to become less heterosexual? How much will adults already socialized into rigid sex roles be able to partake of such changes? What will happen to us if they can’t?
Women and Madness Page 38