by Robin Morgan
For years my essays implored, in escalating tones, the “brothers” of the “revolution” to let us women in, to take more-than-lip-service notice of what the women’s caucuses were saying, especially since “they” (women) constitute more than half the human species. Then, at a certain point, I began to stop addressing such men as “brothers,” and began (O language, thou precise Richter scale of attitudinal earthquakes!) to use the word “we” when speaking of women. And there was no turning back.
The ensuing years can seem to me a blur of joy, misery, and daily surprise: my first consciousness-raising group and the subsequent groups I was in; the guerrilla theater, the marches, meetings, demonstrations, picketings, sit-ins, conferences, workshops, plenaries; the newspaper projects, the child-care collectives, the first anti-rape squads, the earliest seminars (some women now prefer the word “ovulars”—how lovely!) on women’s health, women’s legal rights, women’s sexuality. And all the while, the profound “interior” changes: the transformation of my work—content, language, and form—released by this consciousness; the tears and shouts and laughter and despair and growth wrought in the struggle with my husband; the birth of our child (a radicalizing occasion, to say the least); the detailed examinations of life experience, of power, honesty, commitment, bravely explored through so many vulnerable hours with other women—the discovery of a shared suffering and of a shared determination to become whole.
During those years we felt a desperate urgency, arising in part from the barrage of brain-boggling “clicks” our consciousness encountered about our condition as females in a patriarchal world. We were also influenced, I must confess, by tendencies of the male movements, which were given to abstract rhetoric but ejaculatory tactics; that is, if the revolution as they defined it didn’t occur in a meretricious spurt within the next week, month, five years at the maximum—then the hell with it. Depression. Impotence. If radicals wouldn’t be alive, anyway, to see it, then we might as well die for it. This comfortably settled the necessity for any long-range planning.
Today, my just-as-ever-urgent anger is tempered by a patience born of the recognition that the process, the form of change itself, is everything: the means and the goal justifying each other.
There are no easy victories, no pat answers—and anyone who purveys such solutions alarms me now. But when I look back from my still-militantly rocking chair, or sit at my ultimate weapon, the typewriter, I see the transformations spiraling upward so rapidly and so astonishingly that I feel awe and gratitude at being a part of such change.
We were an “American phenomenon,” they said—a symptom of the untreated neurosis and stridency of spoiled American women. (“They” were the patriarchal Left, Right, and Middle, the media, most men, and some women.) They overlooked certain little facts: that women had been oppressed longer than any other group, this subjugation having stood as the model for all subsequent forms of oppression; that women were a majority of the world’s population; that specific commonalities of biology, attitude, and certainly treatment potentially united us across all the patriarchally imposed barriers of race, age, class, sexual preference, superficial politics, and life-styles. Now, as I write, this potential is vibrating throughout the globe—among Women’s Movements in Thailand and Tanzania, Japan and Australia, China and South America and all across Europe, New Zealand, Algeria, Canada, Israel, Egypt, and the Indian subcontinent.
We were “a white, middle-class, youth movement,” they said. And even as some of us wrung our hands with guilt hand lotion, we knew otherwise. Because from the beginning there were women involved who were of every class and race and age, even if the media did focus on a conveniently stereotyped “feminist image.” Today, the National Black Feminist Organization—to name only one such group—has chapters in many major cities and has had two national conventions; Native American feminist activism is blossoming in the Southwest; Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American women are publicly affirming the feminist consciousness they have known all along. Grandmothers and grammar-school feminists are organizing, in everything from OWL (Older Women’s Liberation) groups to Little League assaults. The Coalition of Labor Union Women is making waves within the male-controlled labor movement; and domestic workers, secretaries, hospital employees, welfare mothers, waitresses, and hundreds of thousands of other women—too long a list to name here—are fighting for their/our rights.
They said we were “anti-housewife,” though many of us were housewives, and it was not us, but society itself, as structured by men, which had contempt for life-sustenance tasks. Today, too many housewives are in open participation in the Women’s Movement to be ignored—and many are talking of a housewives’ union. (Not to speak of the phenomenon of “runaway wives,” as the news media call them in articles which puzzle over the motivation of women who simply have picked up one dirty sock too many from the living-room floor.)
They said we were “a lesbian plot,” and the carefully implanted and fostered bigotry of many heterosexual feminists rose eagerly to deny that, thereby driving many lesbian women out of the movement, back into the arms of their gay “brothers,” who promptly shoved mimeograph machines at them. What a choice. But the process did continue, and so the pendulum swung into its tactically tragic but expectable position, a reply-in-kind from some lesbian-feminists who created the politics of “dyke separatism,” the refusal to work with or sometimes even speak to women who could not prove lesbian credentials. This was sometimes accompanied by the proclamation that lesbians were the only true feminists, or were the feminist “vanguard,” and the accusation that all heterosexual women were forever “sold out” to men (leaving lesbian mothers, by the way, in a no-woman’s-land). In some parts of the country it was called “the lesbian-straight split”—or even the “lesbian-feminist split”—with a terrifying antagonism on both sides. Yet most serious feminists continued to work together across sexual-preference labeling, and the process endured (through many tears), and we survived.
More and more, every day, that “split” is healing, from both sides: a changing attitude on the part of so-called straight women—about our own sexuality, about the necessity and joyousness of loving other women and ourselves, whether emotionally or physically, about the commitment and support our lesbian sisters require and deserve of us. And a changing attitude on the part of lesbian feminists—about our own sexuality, about the self- and sister-destructive compartmentalizing of women in roles or vanguards or self-affirmed ghettos. During that struggle, many an anti-lesbian woman conquered feelings of threat, of terror, and “came out” in fact, learning proudly to love another woman. Many lesbian women came to a more earnest feminism: a realization that we each need all women to survive—and that no woman’s life-style, whether apparently chosen or seemingly forced upon her, could be held in contempt for the sake of some abstract “correct line.” Because the Women’s Movement is a plot of women who are lesbians—and a plot of women who are virgins, heterosexuals, celibates, and bisexuals. And we conspirators are all unlearning the absurd prefixes to the word “sexual” and beginning to discover, create, define ourselves as women.
They said we were “anti-motherhood”—and in the growing pains of certain periods, some of us were. There were times when I was made to feel guilty for having wanted and borne a child—let alone a male one, forgodsake. There were other times when we “collectivized” around children, and I found myself miffed at the temporary loss of that relationship unique to the specific mother and specific child. So much of the transition is understandable now. Since the patriarchy commanded women to be mothers (the thesis), we had to rebel with our own polarity and declare motherhood a reactionary cabal (antithesis). Today a new synthesis has emerged; the concept of mother-right, the affirmation of child-bearing and/or child-rearing when it is a woman’s choice. And while that synthesis itself will in turn become a new thesis (a dialectic, a process, a development), it is refreshing at last to be able to come out of my mother-closet and yell to the w
orld that I love my dear wonderful delicious child—and am not one damned whit less the radical feminist for that.
None of the above-mentioned issues is simple. None is “solved.” Struggle, experimentation, and examination of each of these differences (and new ones yet to come) will continue, must continue, for years. And we can expect these divisions to be exploited as diversions by those who would love to see us fail. But that no longer scares or depresses me, despite the enormity of the job ahead. The only thing that does frighten me is the superficial treatment of any such issue, the simplifying of complexities out of intellectual laziness, fear of the unknown, or rigidified thinking. Yet despite the temptation to fall into such traps of “nonthought,” the growth does continue and the motion cannot be stopped.
They said we were “going too far.” Perhaps this has been their most frequent and basic accusation, phrased in a thousand different ways. Never mind that we are forced to act, or react, by the pain of our status itself (even as the young woman responding to relentless pressure in the back seat of the car nevertheless gets blamed for the result, enduring a cliché situation only to acquire a reputation for “going too far”). No, it’s our fault, always. The vote? “This time the ladies are going too far.” An end to foot-binding? “That goes too far.” Abolishing slavery, wife-buying and -selling and -beating, rape, clitoridectomies, butcher-abortions, suttee—attacks on such issues were all radical, “extremist” notions in their time (in some parts of the world, radical and extreme to this day). A woman working outside the home? In other than volunteer jobs? You mean for pay? Surely that takes things too far, undermines the very foundations of family and therefore state (unless of course she is a “lower-class” woman who has always been permitted menial jobs—in which case her demand for a decent living would be seen comparably as, naturally, going too far). More recently, perhaps: “Well, equal pay for equal work, yes, but a woman learning karate, a woman raising a child with her lesbian lover, a woman brain surgeon or priest or astronaut or architect or President—now that’s going too far.”
At last. At last we seem to be understanding that there is no “too far,” that as we grow and change we expand the categories themselves, that we create new space, that our just expectations and visionary demands for ourselves and our children bear us forward on an inexorable tide past all the fears and clucking tongues (even our own)—much too wonderfully far for even our own senses to realize, in this, our historical present. And there is never any turning back.
I call myself a radical feminist, and that means specific things to me. The etymology of the word “radical” refers to “one who goes to the root.” I believe that sexism is the root oppression, the one which, until and unless we uproot it, will continue to put forth the branches of racism, class hatred, ageism, competition, ecological disaster, and economic exploitation. This means, to me, that the so-called revolutions to date have been coups d’états between men, in a half-hearted attempt to prune the branches but leave the root embedded—for the sake of preserving their own male privileges. This also means that I’m not out for us as women to settle for a “piece of the pie,” equality in an unjust society, or for mere “top-down” change which can be corrupted into leaving the basic system unaltered. I think our feminist revolution gains momentum from a “ripple effect”—from each individual woman gaining self-respect and yes, power, over her own body and soul first, then within her family, on her block, in her town, state, and so on out from the center, overlapping with similar changes other women are experiencing, the circles rippling more widely and inclusively as they go. This is a revolution in consciousness, rising expectations, and the actions which reflect that organic process.
In the past decade I have seen just such methods give birth to hundreds of alternate feminist institutions, created and sustained by women’s energy—all concrete moves toward self-determination and power.
There are the Feminist Women’s Health Centers proliferating in cities and towns around the country, proving that the speculum may well be mightier than the scalpel; the Rape Crisis Centers and the Centers for Battered Women; the Women’s Law Centers; the expanding feminist media—books and newspapers and newsletters and magazines and pamphlets, literary and scholarly and how-to practical journals, as well as film groups, videotape collectives, radio and television and cable TV programs; the record companies; the Feminist Federal Credit Unions, begun only a few years ago (Detroit was the first) and now spreading to other cities—with assets approaching one and a half million dollars in women’s control. There are the child-care centers which differ radically in tone, function, and cost from the “Kentucky-fried children” chains. There are the women’s-studies programs which range all the way from that first “token” course to full-fledged departments, some of them allowing a minor, a major, or complete graduate work. There are the small feminist businesses—trusting enterprises in the face of a national depression—somehow managing to stay afloat while serving the women’s community and at the same time providing salaries for the women who work there. Restaurants, craft shops, self-defense schools, employment agencies, bookstores, publishing houses and small presses—the list goes on and on.
Whenever I hear certain men sonorously announce that the Women’s Movement is dead (a prediction they have been promoting hopefully since 1968), I am moved to an awkwardly unmilitant hilarity. I know, of course, that they mean we seem less sensational: “Where are all those bra-burnings?” (none of which ever took place anyway, to my knowledge). Such death-knell articulations are not only (deliberately?) unaware of multiform alternate institutions that are mushrooming, but unconscious of the more profound and threatening-to-the-status-quo political attitudes which underlie that surface. It is, for example, a grave error to see feminists as “retrenching” when the reality is that we have been maturing beyond those aforementioned “ejaculatory tactics” into a long-term, committed attitude toward winning. We are digging in, since we know that patriarchy won’t be unbuilt in a day, and the revolution we are making is one on every front: economic, social, political, cultural, personal, public, sexual, biological, and even metaphysical.
The early ultra-egalitarianism and guilt-ridden “downward mobility” motifs of certain radical feminist groups, for instance, have modulated into a realization that women deserve to have credit for what we accomplish, whether that be the author’s name signed to her article (after centuries of being “Anonymous”), or the right to be paid a living wage for her work at a feminist business (instead of falling prey to a new volunteerism—this one “for the revolution’s sake”). The early antipathy toward any and all structure has given way to a recognition that we must evolve totally new ways of organizing ourselves, something other than chaotic spontaneity or masculinist hierarchy. The early excesses of collective tyranny have shifted into an understanding that there is a difference between individualism and individuality—and that the latter is admirable and to be cherished. The emphasis on women’s studies reflects the welcome end of anti-intellectual trends (again picked up from male movements—a “line” created by privileged men who already had their college educations along with their charisma points in SDS or the counter-culture). We are daring to demand and explore the delights of hard intellectual work, both as personal challenge and shared necessity. All the jargon exhorting us to “seize power” won’t help if we “seize” the labs, for instance, and stand ignorantly gaping at the test tubes. We are daring to research our own cleverly buried herstorical past, even to develop new and radical teaching methods as joint odysseys between teachers and students, without deification—or degadation—of either. Beneath the expansion of presses and magazines is an explosion of women’s culture so energetic and widespread that it has not only given voice to women as a people but shows signs of rescuing art itself from the necrophiliac modernism of the Establishment, making poetry and music and drama and visual art and dance once again relevant, passionate, accessible, something to be integrated into all of our daily liv
es.
Underlying the visible activity of the women’s health movement are political implications which could shake society’s assumptions to the core: the reviving profession of midwifery; the research into menstrual extraction done by the Feminist Women’s Health Centers (a technique allowing a woman to reduce her five-day period into one of five minutes’ duration); abortion and contraceptive research done by women; new and humane means of giving birth with the mother in control of the choice and procedure of method; and feminist research into orgasm and women-run therapy sessions, with a 90 percent success rate, for “pre-orgasmic” women (who were formerly labeled “frigid” by male therapists). There are also the beginnings of feminist research into fetology and genetics, cloning and extra-uterine birth techniques—which could be tools of liberation if women controlled the means of such reproduction, but which would be agents of a science-fiction nightmare if the present medical establishment maintains its hegemony over this research. All these “ripple effects” circle out from the reclaiming of our most basic right, our own bodies, for our own purposes.
But the developments have not been limited to the physical and material sphere. A spiritual hunger is being expressed by women. I do not mean the hunger for an “opiate of the people” or escapism or a fad like the one which gooses frantic followers into chasing after a plump, rich, teenage boy for the truth and the light. On the contrary, this new spirituality transcends all such simplicities. It is the birth of a genuine feminist metaphysics. It is as if women were realizing that, to paraphrase Mary Daly, the ultimate degradation foisted on any oppressed people is a thievery of the right “to name”—to name ourselves, and our relation to the universe. And so, while some sisters continue to batter away at the discrimination from within patriarchal religions (those dear uppity nuns, those intrepid women ministers and rabbis and priests), many other women are researching the original matriarchal faiths and philosophies which most anthropologists now agree predated patriarchal ones—and there is an accompanying revival of interest in Wicce, or the Craft of the Wise: witchcraft (as the highly sophisticated and lyrical nature philosophy it is—not the satanic weirdo fringe that the patriarchy would have us believe it is).