Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  Most important, all these psychic and religious explorations are part of a process of affirming the complexity of the universe and the divinity in each of us. How different from dogmatic pronouncements, from the centuries-old misogyny which still blames Eve for “the fall,” and which burned millions of her daughters at the stake! How refreshing and fitting to be able to conceive of the life force as a creatrix, one which our own female creative bodies reflect! The possibilities opened up by such thought are tremendously exciting. Oh, I have my “mother of us all” moments when I stir the chicken soup and worry that these concepts can be too easily trivialized, reduced into excuses which might sound like, “Oh, goody, now we can pray to the Mother Goddess for freedom, and it will fall like womanna from heaven—so we don’t have to organize or work to bring it about.” But I also know that the process is a tempering one, and for every woman who gets mired in spiritualism as an excuse, there will be many more who will be strengthened, affirmed, and energized by spirituality—“Praise the Goddess and pass the petition,” as it were. Which is fortunate, because I assume that the Goddess is a feminist who would not feel amusement at being expected to pick up after others’ messes.

  And where, my dear reader may well ask, does this Pollyanna writer see the dangers, the failures, the losses? Or is she so blind, the woman in the mirror, that she thinks we’ve really come a long way, baby? Hardly.

  These arms have held the vomitous shudderings of a sister-prostitute undergoing forced jail-withdrawal from her heroin addiction. These eyes have wept over the suicide of a sister-poet. These shoulders have tightened at the vilifications of men—on the street, in the media, on the lecture platform. These fists have clenched at the reality of backlash against us: the well-financed “friends of the fetus” mobilizing again to retake what small ground we have gained in the area of abortion; the rise in rape statistics (not only because more women are daring to report rapes, but also because more rapes are occurring). This stomach has knotted at the anonymous phone calls, the unsigned death threats, the real bombs planted in real auditoriums before a poetry reading or speech, the real bullet fired from a real pistol at the real podium behind which I was standing. (Those who have power over our lives recognize the threat we pose—even when we ourselves do not.)

  And yes, these fingers have knotted versions of “correct lines”—to strangle my own neck and the necks of other sisters.

  I have watched some of the best minds of my feminist generation go mad with impatience and despair. So many other “oldie” radical feminists have been lost, having themselves lost the vision in all its intricacy, having let themselves be driven into irrelevance: the analytical pioneer whose “premature” brilliance isolated her into solipsism and finally self-signed-in commitment for “mental treatment”; the theorist whose nihilistic fear of “womanly” emotion led her into an obfuscated style and a “negative charisma”—an obsessive “I accuse” acridity corrosive to herself and other women; the fine minds lost to alcohol, or to “personal solutions,” or to inertia, or to the comforting central-committeeist neat blueprint of outmoded politics, or to the equally reassuring glaze of “humanism,” a word often misused as a bludgeon to convince women that we must put our suffering back at the bottom of the priority list. Some of these women never actually worked on a tangible feminist project—storefront legal counseling or a nursery or a self-help clinic—never had or have now lost touch with women outside their own “feminist café society” circles. Such alienation from the world of women’s genuine daily needs seems to have provoked in some of my sister “oldies” a bizarre new definition of “radical feminist”; that is, one who relentlessly assails any political effectiveness on the part of other feminists, while frequently choosing to do so in terms of personalities and with scalding cruelty. After so many centuries of spending all our compassion on men, could we not spare a little for each other?

  I’ve watched the bloody internecine warfare between groups, between individuals. All that fantastic energy going to fight each other instead of our opposition! (It is, after all, safer to attack “just women.”) So much false excitement, self-righteousness, and judgmental posturing! Gossip, accusations, counter-accusations, smears—all leapt to, spread, and sometimes believed without the impediment of facts. I’ve come to think that we need a feminist code of ethics, that we need to create a new women’s morality, an antidote of honor against this contagion by male supremacist values.

  I’ve watched the rise of what I call “Failure Vanguardism”—the philosophy that if your group falls apart, your personal relationships fail, your political project dissolves, and your individual attitude is both bitter and suicidal, you are obviously a Radical. If, on the other hand, your group is solidifying itself (let alone expanding), if you are making progress in your struggle with lover/husband/friends, if you have gained some ground for women in the area of economics, health, legislation, literature, or whatever, and if, most of all, you appear optimistic—you are clearly Sold Out. To succeed in the slightest is to be Impure. Only if your entire life, political and personal, is one plummet of downward mobility and despair, may you be garlanded with the crown of feminist thorns. You will then have one-upped everybody by your competitive wretchedness, and won their guilty respect. Well, to such a transparently destructive message I say, with great dignity, “Fooey.” I want to win for a change. I want us all to win. And I love, support, and honor the courage of every feminist who dares try to succeed, whatever the realm of her attempt: the woman who sued her male psychiatrist for rape—and won; the woman who ran for governor—and won; the young girl who brought suit against her school for enforced home-economics classes (for girls only)—and won. There are a million “fronts” to this feminist revolution, and we each of us need each of us pluckily fighting away on every barricade, and connecting her victories to the needs of other women.

  I would say to those few dear “oldies” who are burned out or embittered: you have forgotten that women are not fools, not sheep. We know about the dangers of commercialism and tokenism from the male Right, and the dangers of manipulation and co-optation from the male Left (the boys’ Establishment and the boys’ movement). We are, frankly, bored by correct lines and vanguards and failurism and particularly by that chronic disease—guilt. Those of us who choose to struggle with men we love, well, we demand respect and support for that, and an end to psychological torture which claims we have made our choice only because of psychological torture. Those of us who choose to relate solely to other women demand respect and support for that, and an end to the legal persecution and attitudinal bigotry that condemns freedom of sexual choice. Those of us who choose to have or choose not to have children demand support and respect for that. We also demand respect for our feelings, and for the desire to forge them into art; we know that the emerging women’s aesthetic and women’s spirituality are lifeblood for our survival—resilient cultures have kept oppressed groups alive even when economic analyses and revolutionary strategy fizzled.

  We know that serious, lasting change does not come about overnight, or simply, or without enormous pain and diligent examination and tireless, undramatic, every-day-a-bit-more-one-step-at-a-time work. We know that such change seems to move in cycles (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—which itself in turn becomes a new thesis …), and we also know that those cycles are not merely going around in circles. They are, rather, an upward spiral, so that each time we reevaluate a position or place we’ve been before, we do so from a new perspective. We are in process, continually evolving, and we will no longer be made to feel inferior or ineffectual for knowing and being what we are at any given moment.

  Housewives across the nation stage the largest consumer boycott ever known (the meat boycott) and while it may not seem, superficially, a feminist action, women are doing this, women who ten years ago, before this feminist movement, might have regarded such an action as unthinkable. The campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment does continue to gain supporters (
like those fine closet feminists Betty Ford and Joan Kennedy) despite all the combined forces of reaction against it. Consciousness-raising proliferates, in groups, in individuals, in new forms and with new structures. The lines of communication begin to center around content instead of geography, and to stretch from coast to coast, so that women in an anti-rape project, for example, may be more in touch with other anti-rape groups nationally than with every latest development on the Women’s Movement in their own backyards. I think this is to the good; it’s a widening of vision, an exercising of muscle.

  Once I would have sneered at what I then called “the reformist wing” of our movement—groups like the National Organization for Women, Women’s Equity Action League, the National Women’s Political Caucus. But my own individual process has led me to a more pluralistic tolerance of other women’s life-styles and politics. At the same time (miracle of the spiral), there has been substantial change taking place in such groups. As a radical feminist, I still disagree with some of the politics operating there, but I’m forced to reevaluate what I now call, respectfully, the “civil-rights front” of the movement. How can I not do so when, for instance, Karen DeCrow’s acceptance speech after her election in 1974 as national president of NOW expressed authentically radical concern with those issues that had discomfited the national board in the past: rape, lesbianism, self-help health techniques, the representation and priorities of minority women? What else can I do but heartily applaud the moves toward genuine democracy in NOW, via ballot-by-mail and chapter rights? How can I not burst with pride when my “average American” sister-in-law in Seattle takes up feminist cudgels, braving ridicule at her job for doing so? How can I not chortle with glee when in one week I read the following two quotes in national newsmagazines: “I’m tired of being a martyr. When we got married Chuck expected that I’d work, but that I’d also be the chief one to have lunch money ready in the morning and take the kids to the doctor. Men need to volunteer more.… We’ve got to get some help for this job.”—Lynda Johnson Robb, speaking at a Boston symposium on “The American Woman.” And this: “Sisters, we must bury Dr. Spock and assert equal rights for women!”—Margaret Trudeau, at a Canadian women’s seminar. Well! Am I to dismiss such courageous converts as “ruling-class women”? Am I to throw a stone at the mirror in a defeatist desire for seven years of purist bad luck? No way, no more.

  I’ve changed too much for those games, and I’m in this process for good. I’ve learned that the “either/or” dichotomy is inherently, classically patriarchal. It is that puerile insistence on compartmentalization (art versus science, intelligence versus passion, etc.) that I abhor. We needn’t settle for such impoverished choices. Reason without emotion is fascistic, emotion without reason sentimental (cheap feeling which is, in turn, fertile ground for the fascistic). Science and art budded from the same stem—the alchemist poets, the Wiccean herbalists, the Minoan and Druidic astrologer-mystics and mathematician-musicians. The integration of such crafts was assumed, we now know, in the early matriarchal cultures, but a love of excellence, a devotion to skill, a thirst for wisdom, and a sense of humor are still great unifiers, capable of overcoming the current binary pigeonholing of people, ideas, vocations. The point is, we are all part of the problem and the solution—rhetoric to the contrary. And it is the inclusiveness of the feminist vision, the balance, the gestalt, the refusal to settle for parts of a completeness, that I love passionately.

  This process is metamorphic. Today, my sexuality unfolds in ever more complex and satisfying layers. Today, I can affirm my mother and identify with her beyond all my intricate ambivalence. I can confront ersatz “sexual liberation” and its pornographic manifestos for what they are—degrading sexist propaganda. And I can confess my pride at an ongoing committed relationship with the husband I love and have loved all along, whose transformation by feminism I have watched over and struggled with and marveled at. This process has given me the tools, as well, to affirm the women I love, to help raise the child I love in new and freer ways. I have now curled round another spiral, and can admit that I like good food and enjoy cooking it (when that’s not assumed to be my reason for existing). I have found my own appearance at last. No more “uniforms,” but clothes that are comfortable, pleasant, and me: hair that I cut or let grow as I choose, unconforming to fashion as dictated by Vogue or its inverse image, Rolling Stone. And this process, most of all, has given me the tools of self-respect as a woman artist, so that I am reclaiming my own shameless singing poet’s voice beyond the untenable choices of uninvolved “ivory-tower” pseudo-art or polemical “socialist-realist” imitation-art.

  This reclamation of my own art (and unapologetic affirmation, indeed, of art itself) is inseparable from what I have lovingly named “metaphysical feminism”—the insistence on “going too far,” the refusal to simplify or polarize, the insatiable demand for a passionate, intelligent, complex, visionary, and continuing process which dares to include in its patterns everything from the scientific transformation which stars express as they nova, to the metaphorical use of that expression in a poem; a process which dares to celebrate contradiction and diversity, dares to see each field-daisy as miraculous, each pebble as unique, each sentient being as holy.

  And also, more humbly, this process, this Women’s Movement, has given me the chance to travel through it, to witness the splendor of women’s faces all over America blossoming with hope, to hear women’s voices rising in an at-first fragile, then stronger chorus of anger and determination. Pocatello, Idaho, and Escanaba, Michigan, and Lawrence, Kansas, and Sarasota, Florida, and Northampton, Massachusetts, and Sacramento, California, and Portales, New Mexico—and how many others? It has exhausted me, this Women’s Movement, and sometimes made me cranky and guilty and gossipy and manipulative and self-pitying and self-righteous and sour. It has exasperated me, frustrated me, and driven me gloriously crazy.

  But it is in my blood, and I love it, do you hear? I know that women’s consciousness and our desire for freedom and for the power to create a humane world society will survive even the mistakes the Women’s Movement makes—as if feminism were a card-carrying nitsy little sect and not what it is, an inherently radical and profound vision of what can save this planet. There is no stopping the combined energy potential of Norma Kusske and her daughters and Joann Little and Jan Raymond and Morgan McFarland and Jane Alpert and Audre Lorde and Joan Nixon and Jill Johnston and Connie Carroll and Maria Del Drago and Linda Fowler and Kathleen Barry and Diane Running Deer and Mallica Vajrathon and Antonia Brico and Billie Jean King and Jean Pohoryles and Nancy Inglis. There are millions of us now, and the vision is enlarging its process to include us all.

  I trust that process with my life. I have learned to love that Women’s Movement, that face in the mirror, wearing its new, wry, patient smile; those eyes that have rained grief but can still see clearly; that body with its unashamed sags and stretch marks; that mind, with all its failings and its cowardices and its courage and its inexhaustible will to try again, to go further.

  I want to say to that woman: we’ve only just begun, and there’s no stopping us. I want to tell her that she is maturing and stretching and daring and yes, succeeding, in ways undreamt until now. She will survive the naysayers, male and female, and she will coalesce in all her wondrously various forms and diverse life-styles, ages, races, classes, and internationalities into one harmonious blessing on this agonized world. She will go splendidly “too far.” She is so very beautiful, and I love her. The face in the mirror is myself.

  And the face in the mirror is you.

  PART ONE

  Letters from a Marriage

  PART I:

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  Women are only now discovering how many great literary treasures of our history lie buried—in diaries, journals, letters sent and unsent, folk songs and lullabies never written down, poetry scribbled on the flyleaves of old pioneer-family Bibles and recipe books, aphorisms scratched on the walls of prisons and asy
lums, published volumes whose authorship was attributed to husbands and fathers and brothers and lovers, meditations written around the margins of cloister prayer books, unforgettable tales woven by the grandmother who never learned to read or write. For each woman of genius who was permitted minimally to consider herself a writer, to publish, to be acknowledged (albeit patronizingly), and to pay the enormous and at times even fatal price for this privilege—for each of those desperate and intrepid few, there were literally thousands of others who went to their graves unheard and unacknowledged. “Anonymous” herself, it would appear, was most frequently a woman, forced into secret writing when she could not be silenced altogether.

  Although I have wanted consciously to be a writer from the age of four, and although I have worked seriously at my craft from the age of fourteen and published professionally from the age of seventeen, I too have written an entire body of work “in secret”—so strong is the message of female literary history. I don’t mean that work which I wrote with an eye to publication but which simply has not been published. I mean, rather, other work, including the letters in this section of Going Too Far.

  “Letters from a Marriage” were written on the dates they bear, to myself or my child, and mostly to my husband. They were almost all written before any feminist consciousness had touched my life, although in my ongoing fight for equal treatment I had fallen into the trap of thinking I must be an “exceptional woman” to be taken seriously. When my attempts to live up to such an image still didn’t produce the desired result, I thought I was at fault, or perhaps (rarely) the individual man or situation was to blame—but I always saw the problem as unique, not universal or political. And I was in continual psychic pain about this: I had grown so used to that pain, in fact, that it seemed an integral part of myself.