Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  That there is profound peace sentiment among Negro women which can be mobilized for effective action is shown, not only in the magnificent response to the meetings of Eslande Goode Robeson, but also in the position announced last year by the oldest Negro women’s organization, under the leadership of Mrs. Christine C. Smith, in urging a national mobilization of American Negro women in support of the United Nations. In this connection, it will be very fruitful to bring to our country a consciousness of the magnificent struggles of women in North Africa, who, though lacking in the most elementary material needs, have organized a strong movement for peace and thus stand united against a Third World War, with 81 million women in 57 nations, in the Women’s International Democratic Federation.

  Our Party, based on its Marxist-Leninist principles, stands foursquare on a program of full economic, political, and social equality for the Negro people and of equal rights for women. Who, more than the Negro woman, the most exploited and oppressed, belongs in our Party? Negro women can and must make an enormous contribution to the daily life and work of the Party. Concretely, this means prime responsibility lies with white men and women comrades. Negro men comrades, however, must participate in this task. Negro Communist women must everywhere now take their rightful place in Party leadership on all levels.

  The strong capacities, militancy, and organizational talents of Negro women, can, if well utilized by our Party, be a powerful lever for bringing forward Negro workers—men and women—as the leading forces of the Negro people’s liberation movement, for cementing Negro and white unity in the struggle against Wall Street imperialism, and for rooting the Party among the most exploited and oppressed sections of the working class and its allies.

  In our Party clubs, we must conduct an intensive discussion of the role of the Negro women, so as to equip our Party membership with clear understanding for undertaking the necessary struggles in the shops and communities. We must end the practice, in which many Negro women who join our Party, and who, in their churches, communities, and fraternal groups are leaders of masses, with an invaluable mass experience to give to our Party, suddenly find themselves viewed in our clubs, not as leaders, but as people who have “to get their feet wet” organizationally. We must end this failure to create an atmosphere in our clubs in which new recruits—in this case Negro women—are confronted with the “silent treatment” or with attempts to “blueprint” them into a pattern. In addition to the white chauvinist implications in such approaches, these practices confuse the basic need for Marxist-Leninist understanding which our Party gives to all workers, and which enhances their political understanding, with chauvinist disdain for the organizational talents of new Negro members, or for the necessity to promote them into leadership.

  To win the Negro women for full participation in the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist coalition, to bring her militancy and participation to even greater heights in the current and future struggles against Wall Street imperialism, progressives must acquire political consciousness as regards her special oppressed status.

  It is this consciousness, accelerated by struggles, that will convince increasing thousands that only the Communist Party, as the vanguard of the working class, with its ultimate perspective of Socialism, can achieve for the Negro women—for the entire Negro people—the full equality and dignity of their stature in a Socialist society in which contributions to society are measured, not by national origin, or by color, but a society in which men and women contribute according to ability, and ultimately under Communism receive according to their needs.

  Lorraine Hansberry (1930—1965)

  Margaret B. Wilkerson

  Lorraine Hansberry is best known for her prize-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959, when she was only twenty-eight years old. The play, which captured the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, thrust her into the limelight as an articulate, talented writer frequently sought for interviews and commentary on theatre as well as the black struggle. When she died six years later at the age of thirty-four, she left behind a grieving public and a number of manuscripts and unfinished writing projects. During the next three decades, her literary executor and former husband, the late Robert Nemiroff, edited and released some of these works, among them: To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, a compilation of her writings which toured as a stage production, was produced as a film, and was published in book form; excerpts from All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors, a semiautobiographical novel by Hansberry; several revised editions and production of A Raisin in the Sun; three of her plays—Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers; and other essays and poems. Jewell Nemiroff, current literary executor of the Hansberry estate, has continued his practice by releasing for publication other works, such as the original screenplay of A Raisin in the Sun and this unfinished essay.

  “Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex: An American Commentary” is one of Hansberry’s most revealing works. While the roles of the female characters in many of her published plays suggest her feminist views, they are frequently limited by the social constructions of the times in which they were first written or presented. For example, the women in A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (the only plays produced during Hansberry’s lifetime) are cast in fairly traditional roles of homemaker, domestic, or prostitute—the exception being Beneatha, the college student who aspires to be a physician and who is modeled on Hansberry at age twenty. They form the conventional circle of support for the male protagonists. At the same time, these women are ill at ease with or rebel against their circumscribed roles, although their resistance is not the central focus of the works; they are ultimately instrumental in the male protagonists’ self-realization. Hansberry’s feminist views are subtly expressed in these plays, a perception that has led feminist critics to wonder why Hansberry, a strong advocate for women’s liberation, did not create a female protagonist in her major plays, and why in the case of two of her plays, she changed the protagonist from female to male.

  Margaret B. Wilkerson is the former Chair of Black Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and is completing a biography of Lorraine Hansberry.

  While this essay does not fully answer such questions, it does give significant insight into Hansberry’s views on the status of women. Hansberry read Simone de Beauvoir’s ground-breaking book, The Second Sex, in 1953 or 1954, shortly after the English translation was released in the United States. She had just married Robert Nemiroff the year before and was beginning to pursue a writing career, having spent several years as associate editor of Freedom, Paul Robeson’s newspaper. Revealing in this essay the effect of Beauvoir’s work on her thinking, she describes herself as “the twenty-three-year-old woman writer closing the book thoughtfully after months of study and placing it in the most available spot on her ‘reference’ shelf, her fingers sensitive with awe, respect on the covers; her mind afire at last with ideas from France once again in history, egalité, fraternité, liberté—pour tout le monde!” It is worth noting that Hansberry wrote this commentary in 1957, the same year that she was completing her signal work, A Raisin in the Sun. And it is a sign of her times, the 1950s, that she was apparently one of few readers of either gender who paid close attention to Beauvoir’s revolutionary analysis of “the woman question.”

  The essay was written for thinkers and readers from the Left and most likely would have been submitted to Masses and Mainstream or a similar publication. It is uncompromising in its critique of male supremacy wherever it appears, the concept of “a woman’s place,” and the failure of United States thinkers (particularly those of the Left) to take the book seriously enough to engage Beauvoir in a substantial and challenging dialogue. Women are not spared her criticism as Hansberry holds females responsible for much of the “confusion”: “They have been born into a cultural heritage which has instructed them of a role to play without question and in the main they are w
illing to do so.” Hansberry’s condemnation of housework and homemaking as “drudgery” and a negation of women’s potential to be producers rather than maintainers places her well beyond the 1950s discourse on and perception of women.

  The essay is obviously unfinished and would undoubtedly have been revised and edited had Hansberry lived longer. It is published here essentially in its extant form in order to make available the feminist ideas of this extraordinary woman. The editorial revisions are limited primarily to punctuation and an occasional shifting of phrases for clarity. At the time of his death, Robert Nemiroff was editing a book of Hansberry’s essays, which included this one; it is unclear at this time whether any of the word changes written on the manuscript are his or Hansberry’s. None, however, seems to change substantially the import of the essay. What is published here represents approximately half of her intended outline.

  The unfinished essay is published in its entirety rather than cut at some point of seeming completion, so that as much of her thought on this book and its important subject matter can be accessible. The Afterword, which is printed at the end of the essay, mentions the other topics she intended to cover as indicated by her outline.

  This essay, with its brilliant, spirited observations, is a poignant reminder of the tremendous loss that Hansberry’s death meant for intelligent, stimulating discourse on women. She had the courage and audacity to think independently and to express her views regardless of the controversy they might cause. Hers was and continues to be a persuasive voice that calls her readers to probe and examine their most sacrosanct notions. Future readings of Hansberry’s work must take into account her perspective on women as revealed in this commentary on The Second Sex.

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE SECOND SEX: An American Commentary

  An Unfinished Essay-in-Progress

  PRIMITIVE MAN: WOMAN, 1957

  Four years have passed (eight since the French editions) since Simone de Beauvoir declared in the introduction of her book, The Second Sex, “What peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she—a free and autonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.” It is four years since those 732 pages of revolutionary treatment of the “woman question” exploded upon the consciousness of a fragment of American book readers. Four years and one waits.

  We have had to endure since then the exhaustive, casual, ill-informed, and thoroughly irrelevant commentary from our acquaintances on the lady’s personal life: her “affairs” with this or that famous Frenchman or American writer; unlimited debate as regards her marriage—or lack of it —to Jean-Paul Sartre; her alleged “lesbianism.” And always from someone who “knows someone in Paris”—et al., ad nauseam.

  One may well begin by suggesting that the fact of such gossip about one who does appear to be the leading woman intellectual of our time is in itself something of a tribute to the accuracy of the thesis embodied in the title of Mlle. Beauvoir’s two volumes on the status of woman. Such is the nature of the question to which the author has addressed herself. It is impossible to conceive of any comparable volume of speculative fascination that could surround an equivalent male personality (the possible exception being that perhaps of homosexuality—which is also interesting). Tradition has accustomed us to assume that with regard to the writer, the artist, the theorist, the musician, the scientist—who is a man—that there are two aspects to his being: his work, which is important, and his personal life, which is really none of our business.

  Beyond the absurdity of gossip itself, the immensity of the paradox overwhelms when one troubles to study the thought of Beauvoir. For instance, to discuss whether such a woman has chosen to “sanctify” her relationship to a man is to ignore a substantial part of her theories. While she does not attack marriage, she does not anywhere accept the traditional views of its sacred place in the scheme of human development. Therefore to discuss and “accuse” this woman of not respecting marriage is quite like accusing a communist of not “respecting” free enterprise.

  This writer would suggest that The Second Sex may very well be the most important work of this century. And that, further, it is a victim of its own pertinence and greatness. Simone de Beauvoir has chosen to do what her subject historically demands; to treat of woman with the seriousness and dedication to complexity that any analysis of so astronomical a group as “half of humanity” would absolutely seem to warrant. However, it is in the face of her full acceptance of her self-set task that some of the most remarkable reactions appear to have developed toward the book.

  (1) Innocence and ignorance of women themselves. The primary, negative attitude of legions of apparently intelligent women who are incapable of reading, let alone digesting, the heavy fabric of the writings. Women who therefore reflect what Beauvoir has shown to be their historical experience of utter intellectual impoverishment as a class. As a group they are unprepared and unable to accommodate a serious or profound discussion of their problems because of the very nature of their oppression. They cannot, therefore, be expected to assess in the manner of men even that which might herald their ultimate emergence or transcendence into liberty any more than I should imagine a slave prior to the Civil War could have understood intellectually the nature of his bondage. (This truth is hideously compounded, of course, in our own country, where the most devastating anti-equality myth of all is in the reign of our social order: the American myth of the already liberated American woman of all classes. And myth, we shall see, is what it is.)

  (2) The overt hostility of the enemy. If women at this stage of history are incapable of appropriate assessment and use of the stuff of their delivery, the direct opposite is certainly true of their conscious foe. Within the ranks of the stalwarts of a male-dominated order there is little struggle to appreciate the ideas of The Second Sex. On the contrary, men, long adjusted to devastating argument, read it and properly attack it for its formidable solidity and undeniable brilliance.

  (3) (It is not only fair but interesting to note the reverse: that among men dedicated to equality the book seemingly achieved respect and stature that many women have been unable to accord it.)

  In connection with the first point I have seen clear thinking, crisp American types of women (women intolerant and contemptuous of the more blatant codes of a male supremacist universe) puzzling briefly and inadequately over the work and then dismissing it. There is the attractive, young unmarried scientist who is vague but feels the author talked too much about “sex” somehow; there is the married-new mother-engineer in her mid-twenties who has already contributed to the invention of breathtaking calculus machines but who was offended by the brutal and revolutionary discussions of motherhood and marriage—“All she seems to respect are career girls and lesbians.” And so on until one wonders where the author might have begun.

  These, however, are far from the sum total of feminine reaction to The Second Sex. To be sure, there was the play wright-actress who kept it open upon her backstage dressing table reading aloud between curtains to the feminine half of the cast and “indoctrinating” them, in the outraged and distressed opinion of the male director. There is the woman reviewer writing in the Daily Worker a shamefully brief and limited but nonetheless exuberant and intelligent review. There is the young, lovely blonde and vaguely literate secretary sitting in her apartment with the weighty thing propped upon her thighs, dictionary but inches away, forcing herself with passionate dedication to endure and, as far as possible, absorb seven hundred pages of what she describes as her “liberation.” And then, of course, there is the twenty-three-year-old woman writer closing the book thoughtfully after months of study and placing it in the most available spot on her “reference” shelf, her fingers sensitive with awe, respect on the covers; her mind afire at last with ideas from France once again in history, egalité, fraternité, liberté—pour tout le monde!

  Let us consider first of all the reception within the Ameri
can Left, which will take little space, sadly enough. As with the Negro question it seems American Marxists, Communists in particular, have been far in advance in the western world in their recognition of the “woman question.” (One modifies to “western” here because reports from and of China are gratifying if erratic and in some ways suspicious.) Certainly whatever foresight the American left may dare to credit itself with now might possibly include early misgivings about the realities of the experience of life for the Soviet woman. That she has been economically liberated (in Beauvoir’s view also) seems no longer to be a question of conjecture. However, we have been obliged for years now to shift uncomfortably in our seats at those endless stories about small Soviet boys who demurred on becoming doctors when they should grow up because that was something or other thought of in their country as “woman’s work.” Granting the charm of the stories in our land where the medical profession’s hostility to the female sex persists with an avidness that belongs to another century, we cannot help but wonder in which age of the socialist miracle will the concept of anything (beyond childbearing)1 not be thought of as “woman’s work.” Similarly, this writer has never been impressed with the official photos from the USSR, which continue to show a representation in the officialdom of the nation in which there is no reflection at all of the fact that in that nation also half of the population are women.

  As regards the theoretical bounty of literature on the question from the first socialist country in the world—one may search in vain for material of depth and stature. Pamphlets giving accounts of this or that experiment in child care, birth control, etc., do not miraculously supplant heavy theoretical work which would indicate a serious approach to the woman question in the Soviet Union. In fact, the dearth of such material seems but a primary indication of the state of the question within the Soviet Union. Moreover, who can be impressed by the reports of the primitive official attitude of urging women to become “seductive” again, which is paraded in our American press with what seems justifiable mirth, alongside of photographs of stoic-faced Russian women in the “new” fashions which would be assigned to memories of the corny thirties in our own over-fashion-conscious nation.