Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  The ripened confusion as regards what women “ought to do with themselves” (and as distinguished from the blatant undiluted male supremacist ideology found in another sphere to be discussed later) is typified by the mixed-up if clearly well-intentioned speech given by a woman, Agnes E. Meyer, at the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Home Economics Association in June, 1956.

  After quoting Emerson’s dubious and ambitious remark to the effect that “civilization” is “the power of good women,” she spoke of the rebellion of women against “what seems” to them “the boredom of family responsibilities; others complain that not enough women have high positions in government and industry....” She then proceeded (with only indirect justification, if any) to lay blame for much of woman’s frustration at the door of the feminist movements of the past which, she declared, “taught women to see themselves as the rivals of men rather than as partners.”8 (Agnes Meyer’s emphasis.) Mrs. Meyer then summed up, unwittingly, in a single paragraph what amounts to the very essence of the confusion:It is one thing if women work because they must help support the family and other dependents or because they have a special contribution to make to society. It is quite another thing—it is socially undesirable—if society forces the mother to take a job in order that she may respect herself and gain the respect of others.

  Somewhere it has escaped the attention of the most intelligent, active sections of American women, which Mrs. Meyer certainly belongs to, that there exists in the nature of “homemaking” an indestructible contradiction to usefulness. Housework, care of the family, is but humankind’s necessity of function. They are the things requisite to existence; to allowing oneself to do something else. The human impulse, if we may believe the obvious in history is to produce, or to transform nature. Simone de Beauvoir speaks of it:The domestic labors that fell to her lot because they were reconcilable with the cares of maternity imprisoned her in repetition and immanence; they were repeated from day to day in an identical form, which was perpetuated almost without change from century to century; they produced nothing new. Man’s case was radically different; he furnished support for the group . . . by means of acts that transcended his animal nature . . . To maintain, he created; he burst out of the present, he opened the future. This is the reason why fishing and hunting expeditions had a sacred character. Their successes were celebrated with festivals and triumph, and therein man gave recognition to his human estate. Today he still manifests this pride when he has built a dam or a skyscraper or an atomic pile. He has worked not merely to conserve the world as given; he has broken through its frontiers, he has laid down the foundations of a new future.

  Then she is explicit:... in this he proved dramatically that life is not the supreme value for man, but on the contrary that it should be made to serve ends more important than itself.... It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.9

  From this we may consider the further remarks of Mrs. Meyer, “No wonder the average housewife is confused. She is no longer sure what society expects of her.” Therein hangs the fallacy. It is all too clear that “society” in this instance would be all too willing to “expect,” permit—in fact, demand—of woman that she stay quite where she was in the dark ages. It is woman herself who has wrought the changes in her condition: she has demonstrated and gone to jail; chained herself to the capitol gates of London and Washington for the right to vote, own property, and alter divorce laws. Failing that she has made the life of man miserable in pursuit of these and other goals. What, Beauvoir insists, woman desires is freedom. She is a subjective being like man and like man she must pursue her transcendence forever. This is the nature of the human race. The problem, then, is not that woman has strayed too far from “her place” but that she has not yet attained it; that her emergence into liberty is, thus far, incomplete, primitive even. She has gained the teasing expectation of selffulfillment without the realization of it, because she is herself yet chained to an ailing social ideology which seeks always to deny her autonomy and more—to delude her into the belief that that which in fact imprisons her the more is somehow her fulfillment.

  However, that woman is a creature of potentialities beyond those ordinarily prescribed for her does not today escape some of even her confused spokesmen. Mrs. Meyer in the same speech attacked the “insidious” attitude “which tempts women to . . . a preoccupation of glamor.” Says she:I shall never forget a luncheon I attended some years ago in Washington in honor of Gabrielle Mistral, the distinguished Chilean poetess [sic]10 who won the Nobel Prize in 1946, and Lisa Meitner, the famous physicist who made valuable contributions to the development of the atom bomb. The faces of these two great women, worn by the furrows of deep thought and powerful character, were a shocking contrast to the surface beauty but robotlike similarity of the American women.

  This last has been placed even more strongly than might seem necessary. But the sense of refutation of the shallow values imposed upon women is beautifully apparent. The wholesomeness of such a view is sharply contrasted with the tenor of the new (and not so new) male sex publications where the glorification of woman as sex object has reached a new and inglorious height. In these publications men are encouraged and even shown how to relegate an entire sex to the level of one long, endless, if one is to believe the fantasies (and one might add, boring), animal relationship.

  This state of affairs unquestionably being the basis for much of our national neuroses it does not seem to occur to the overwhelming sections of American males that, in maintaining woman as Sex Object and/or Child Raiser, the fraternity of social relationships other than sex must necessarily suffer to the extent of creating what is in fact an impossible social arrangement—as indeed must the sexual relationship itself.

  Woman like the Negro, the Jew, like colonial peoples, even in ignorance, is incapable of accepting the role with harmony. This is because it is an unnatural role which presupposes that she is something other than a human being possessed of the desire for transcendence. The station of woman is hardly one that she would assume by choice, any more than man would. It must necessarily be imposed on her—by force. It is therefore unnatural and unstable, not to say merely impermanent, which it most certainly is. A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition. Woman, it may be said with some understatement to make the point, is oppressed.

  Moreover, the nature of man is unique in the animal world. His sociality is such that once the hunter is at a certain stage of social organization he is incapable of hunting merely for his personal immediate hunger. He has already found in his needs the impetus, the need, to sustain others of his cave. Ultimately he must help to sustain the community because of his needs; because it is incumbent upon his needs that the community survive and even prosper, though the memory of a time without the community may yet exist in his mind. Similarly in a more sophisticated age when his ethic expands beyond his essential needs, his nature will require him by the same laws of the primitive past to satisfy the needs, the spiritual needs, of his species.

  Thus in times past, woman, ignorant, inarticulate, has often found her most effective and telling champion among men. This is to suggest that if by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved. Such we must always come to conclude is the nature of mankind, such is the glory of the human race of which the male is a magnificent half.

  The housewife says “just a housewife” for all the reasons she would perhaps try to deny
if she thought someone who was attacking housework and “homemaking” as drudgery was also attacking the cornerstone and key and bedrock foundation of her family, home, husband, nation, and world.

  The ancient effort to glorify the care of the home into something which it is not and cannot be is one of the greatest assaults against womanhood. Women are, generally speaking, ignorant. Their views, their interpretations of almost anything will largely be drawn from what men have thought and believed and promoted in the world independent of them or any serious consultation with them. This will apply even to themselves. A society dictated and organized by men prescribes that women should not work outside the home because “they take the bread out of men’s families’ mouths.” (One of the most remarkable arguments against anything I have ever heard.) And so, foremost among those shouting such an argument are always to be—women. Or, more to the immediate point, society tells woman from cradle to the grave that her husband, her home, her children will be the source of all rewards in life, the foundation of all true happiness. And women believe it and they plunge into marriages; wrap themselves in their husbands and their children—and continue to constitute one of the most neurotic sections, no doubt, of our entire population. Husband reveals himself as but a man, as men must, and they, being humans, are an inadequate, blustering, often pathetic lot, themselves struggling to keep abreast of the rigorous and pointless attitudes society has also set for them in this “man’s world.” And so beyond the second or third year, it is only the image of the myth which she married that woman can continue to lose herself in, to love.

  Well, there are her children and they require much of her and she gives much—but they are only children. They are “the future of the race”; they are lovely; they are quick and bright and full of experiences for the observing adult—but they are only children. One may spend from fourteen to eighteen hours a day with a human being of five and the occasion simply will not arrive when one may discuss the meaning of strontium with that person. This is not a proper experience for the adult mind. As long as the threat exists one really ought to be discussing strontium—or, as a matter of fact, it would not be to the benefit of anyone if our public attitudes toward nursery schools had to rely on the intellectual spirit of five-yearolds—or for that matter, ten-year-olds.

  AFTERWORD

  Hansberry’s commentary on The Second Sex, obviously unfinished, stops here. Her outline for this essay lists two additional, major subjects: “Man and Supremacy” and “Prospectus.” Under the latter, she planned to address the question of biology and whether women are “wedded to the womb” forever. The last topic listed in her outline was simply “liberation.”

  ENDNOTES

  1 This is far from a final statement on this question.

  2 There will be many Communist women to read these remarks and shudder with a premature sense of betrayal. It will seem, out of the subjective experience of sensitive women, that I have, for the sake of ideally presenting a situation, grossly misstated the experience of the American Communist woman and movement. Let it suffice for the moment to insist that we are speaking here merely in the general, which, we feel, fact bears out.

  3 Particularly in France itself where, if we may take Mlle. Beauvoir’s word for it, the Revolution seems to have done little indeed for the lot of her countrywomen.

  4 An article in the N.Y. Post, June 18, 1957, shows that the most important part of a woman’s wardrobe depends on which industry is speaking. According to famous shoe designer J. Leon Touro, “Shoes are the most important, the most arresting, most sensuous part of a woman’s outfit.” Mr. Touro is the man who first promoted what the Post properly calls “those dangerous to life and limb matchstick heels” which have become accepted style among U.S. women.

  5 The Second Sex, 683.

  6 A dispatch to the New York Times in June, 1957, tells us that the women of Paraguay expect to achieve suffrage, “very, very soon.”

  7 The Second Sex, 84.

  8 It now begins to appear that the feminists are to be held responsible for every unattractive feature of woman’s estate. In popular conversation and popular literature one can more easily conclude that women would have been better off without the feminists than with them. The tendency is to lay undue emphasis upon their wildest and most unfortunate exploits and attitudes and to remark not at all upon the meaning of the great role of historical feminism. It is idle to attack that which could not even have existed without a cause. What seems important is that if society found itself outraged by feminist fervor, it ought rather to have more speedily condemned that which gave rise to it: male supremacy. To the extent that the feminist leaders pronounced man rather than ideology as enemy they deserved correction; beyond that it is better to retain a deeply respectful and appreciative attitude of the role played by those great women and their great movement which moved humanity forward so decisively.

  9 The Second Sex, 63—64.

  10 Hansberry objected to this conceit, the feminization of professional work when performed by women, but she retained the term as part of this direct quote.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation: Racial/Sexual Politics in the Angry Decades

  Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. We need a revolutionary vision of black liberation, one that emerges from a feminist standpoint and addresses the collective plight of black people.

  —BELL HOOKS, Yearning

  From the outset black women encountered an America that denied their humanity, debased their femininity, and refused them selfpossession. The acquisition of a measure of freedom and citizenship privileges would have to await a modern Civil Rights movement that they profoundly initiated and sustained.

  —DARLENE CLARK HINE, Lure and Loathing

  INTRODUCTION

  The history of the Civil Rights and women’s rights movements during the “angry decade” of the sixties has been well-documented. The role of African American women in these historic struggles remains less well known. Similarly, the history of the development of contemporary black feminism during this period has received little attention in chronicles of modern feminism, even ones published more recently, where the focus remains middle-class white women.

  This chapter focuses on the experiences of black women activists during the sixties, their frustrations with civil rights and more radical organizations, and their embrace of feminism in the early seventies despite their experiences with racism inside the largely white women’s movement. What is apparent from our revisiting the feminist writings of African American women during this critical juncture is that the women’s movement would have attracted a broader cross-section of the female population had it taken seriously the insights of women of color. More than anything else, they were committed to societal transformations which would have enabled the poorest and most oppressed women to live better lives. After three decades of struggle this remains a dream deferred.

  Frances Beale

  Frances Beale, journalist and civil rights activist, was a founding member of SNCC’s Black Women’s Liberation Committee (New York coordinator) after returning in 1966 to the United States from Paris, where she had lived for six years. In 1970, she was director of the Black Women’s Alliance, a feminist group associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). “Double Jeopardy,” first published in Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), became the most anthologized essay in the early years of women’s liberations publications. This now classic essay addressed the double burden of race and gender that black women confronted; dealt with issues of reproductive freedom for black women in a sanguine manner; articulated early on the necessity for the white women’s liberation movement to be anti-imperialist and antiracist, a refrain that was repeated by many feminist women of color throughtout the 1970s and 1980s; and provided a revolutionary vision of a “new world” free of all oppressions, including capitalism. This essay, reminiscent of
Elise McDougald’s “The Struggle of Women for Sex and Race Emancipation” (1925), is also a manifesto for black women committed to eradicating the twin evils of racism and sexism.

  DOUBLE JEOPARDY: TO BE BLACK AND FEMALE

  In attempting to analyze the situation of the black woman in America, one crashes abruptly into a solid wall of grave misconceptions, outright distortions of fact, and defensive attitudes on the part of many. The system of capitalism (and its afterbirth—racism) under which we all live has attempted by many devious ways and means to destroy the humanity of all people, and particularly the humanity of black people. This has meant an outrageous assault on every black man, woman, and child who resides in the United States.

  In keeping with its goal of destroying the black race’s will to resist its subjugation, capitalism found it necessary to create a situation where the black man found it impossible to find meaningful or productive employment. More often than not, he couldn’t find work of any kind. And the black woman likewise was manipulated by the system, economically exploited, and physically assaulted. She could often find work in the white man’s kitchen, however, and sometimes became the sole breadwinner of the family. This predicament has led to many psychological problems on the part of both man and woman and has contributed to the turmoil that we find in the black family structure.

  Unfortunately, neither the black man nor the black woman understood the true nature of the forces working upon them. Many black women tended to accept the capitalist evaluation of manhood and womanhood and believed, in fact, that black men were shiftless and lazy, otherwise they would get a job and support their families as they ought to. Personal relationships between black men and women were thus torn asunder and one result has been the separation of man from wife, mother from child, etc.