by Robin Morgan
ONE GLANCE at the masthead on the opposite page is sufficient to reinforce the irony of a feminist writing anything in the pages of the New York Times. When C. Wright Mills included the Times in his listing of the Power Elite, he neglected to say (although it ought to be obvious) that the Times, with its brother listees, was/is dominated by rich white heterosexual males. In the United States of Amanica [sic], if you are poor, non-Caucasian, homosexual, and/or female, you are by all past definitions less than human, and by all present ones, dangerous as well. (If you happen to be all those things combined, God won’t even help you.)
The growing repression clearly shows the basic means by which white male imperialism intends to try to keep “those people” from a righteous rebellion. With women, however, we see the Man trying to use a special tactic in addition to the usual brutality: co-optation. (The Times can congratulate itself on the liberalism of permitting such dissent in its pages—and thus retain the ability to “permit” what is a human right.)
Women struggling for their liberation have always been good for a laugh. The history books snicker about those crazy old ladies in bloomers; but did you know that the news journal published by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the late 1800’s was titled The Revolution? Women have always been good for a patronizing smile and even a modicum of agreement—if we don’t “go too far,” if we ask for things like nice ladies should, and if our demands require no basic change and do not threaten the phallic imperialism that is out to destroy the entire planet. And this is where, today, the media comes in to manipulate, ridicule, and co-opt.
Like the Times, all mass newspapers and magazines, both general and “for women,” are male-controlled. So is the electronic media; you sometimes see a token female reporter these days (frequently a Third World woman—two oppressions for the convenient price of one salary), but men still own the networks, write the news, determine the coverage and emphasis and analysis, and decide the programming, no matter how strong the rumblings of anger from the women themselves who work within those institutions.
This leaves the Women’s Liberation Movement with a dilemma. Women as women do not even have the tactical advantage (from an organizing—and military—viewpoint) of a ghetto situation. We are isolated from one another by the nuclear family structure, by cultural conditioning, and by the barriers of race, class, economics, age, and sexual preference. How does a new movement cut through that isolation to raise consciousness around the fact that all women are viewed in the same basic roles (nurturer, sexual object, reproductive vessel, cheap or even free labor, etc.) across those barriers? Leafleting on New York’s Lower East Side for ten years could not reach the housewife in Escanaba, Michigan, but thirty seconds on the six o’clock news would. We were forced to use a medium which we knew was in the control of an adversary, one we knew would distort, truncate, and ridicule our issues. Even now, I am writing this in the context of the New York Times in order to reach still more women. By any means necessary means just that.
But the Women’s Liberation Movement has grown at a fantastic rate. We no longer need to get the word out that we exist. Welfare mothers, nuns, airline stewardesses, housewives, women in the military, Playboy Bunnies, professional women, prostitutes, high-school women, and grandmothers are moving against their oppression. We can afford to be more discriminating and demanding, and not only vis-à-vis the media. We can stop being grateful for crumbs of reform and tokenism being offered us (reform abortion bills instead of outright repeal of laws restricting abortion; government-run day-care centers instead of community-controlled free twenty-four-hour-available child-care centers, etc.). We can refuse to support an Equal Rights Amendment which would have (1) thrown away protective labor legislation, (2) made it more difficult for a woman to get “alimony” (i.e., reparations for unpaid labor), (3) made women eligible for the draft (when neither men nor women should be drafted to fight genocidal wars). We can, and must, build a movement that will not be based on gaining more privileges for those few women who already have some (white, upper- and middle-class and professional women—many of you, sisters, reading this) at the expense of poor white, Third World, and working-class women, but a movement which will fight for the needs of all women, the entirety of half the human population which has been subjugated and oppressed longer than any other people. It is not enough if Mrs. Sulzberger were to take over from Arthur but leave the Times structure intact, although even that admittedly might be refreshing.
And as we refuse absorption by a female Right, so we must reject manipulation by the male Left, which would create not a revolution, but a power-exchange between men. We are creating a revolutionary feminist movement, from the cooperative child-care projects in Detroit to the housewives’ unions in California; from abortion referral, legal or not, everywhere, to the free karate lessons for women in Boston, and the organizing of factory-worker women in Louisiana. We are redefining our own political theory, our own sexuality, our own non-leadership-oriented structures. We are creating our own media: sisters, forget the “newspaper of (the Man’s) record” and try reading some of these over breakfast instead: Everywoman. It Ain’t Me, Babe. Ain’t I a Woman. Off Our Backs. A Journal of Liberation. Up from Under. We are making films, books, tapes, newspapers, magazines, songs, theater—of our own. We are learning all forms of self-defense, because we know that any alternative medium and alternative institution is a stopgap survival measure until our total revolution frees not only ourselves but all people—from sexism, racism, and the hunger, war, and ecological disaster that results from the Man’s competitiveness and greed. On that day, sister Charlotte Curtis of the Times’ Women’s Bureau, with, say, sister Beulah Saunders of the National Welfare Rights Organization might well assist in the liberating of the New York Times by a revolutionary women’s collective, bent on replacing the male hierarchical form with a communal egalitarian structure, and not presuming to judge for the people what is fit (by imperialist male standards) to print.2
Emmeline Pankhurst, the English feminist, said it perfectly in 1888: “Remember the dignity of your womanhood. Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.”
December 1970
1 Even the version the Times did print was apparently feisty enough to require a rebuttal by Pete Hamill in the Post a day later; he devoted his entire column to satirizing my style, which was vulnerable, and my politics, which were not.
2 Charlotte Curtis has not yet seized the Times, but as of 1974 she became the editor of the Op-Ed Page itself, a stimulating change from being head of the Times’ Family Bureau (their euphemism for the Women’s Page). In time, bits and pieces of one’s prophecies do come true.
THE WRETCHED OF THE HEARTH
This article was originally written as the token Women’s Liberation piece for inclusion in an anthology representing all segments of the New Left. The anthology never was published because the young male radical who was compiling it couldn’t get himself together to finish the job he had taken on. The piece remains for me an interesting fossil of that period. Because I wrote it for a mass audience who might never have read anything but Time magazine’s definitions of the Women’s Movement, it contains more than a few points I had made earlier in articles for Leftist media. Yet something has changed in the tone; the author seems less driven to convince herself.
I still shrank from saying, in this piece, that women should be the priority for women. I was grovelingly grateful to SDS for having thrown a crumb of recognition to the Women’s Movement, and I refrained, like a good girl, from noting that the practice of anti-sexism in SDS was all but nonexistent. I still had a disgustingly missionary attitude toward Third World women and remained fixated with guilt that there seemed so few nonwhite women in the Women’s Movement. I looked for them in the unpromising Leftward direction of the Black Panthers—myopically unable to foresee that the National Black Feminist Organization might boast, as it does today, members who are housewi
ves, lesbians, college professors, welfare mothers, poets, legislators, editors, businesswomen, and exPanthers, among others. I referred to the “internalization” of roles, the “brainwashing” of women, as if that act took place once, like the insertion of an electrode into the skull, and as if it were our own fault that we didn’t just pluck the bug out. (This shallow analysis denies the daily reinforcement of the patriarchal message, shored up by a continual system of threat and reward. Sexism is no one-time occurrence.) I still made a rather superficial attack on the family, reflexively advocating communes as the perfect alternative—despite the fact that my own experience with even semi-communal “extended family” living had been oppressive to me as a woman and as a mother (this would not necessarily have to be the case, though it was so for me, in 1969). I still largely ignored the oppression of housewives and mothers, despite the title of the article.
But there are shifts in perception. I ventured a glimpse of the white, middle-class, educated woman as relatively powerless; I began to affirm her as a sister. I let myself glimpse her suffering and I was less guilty about saying that (even if I did solve her problems abominably by having her, in my article, drop out of college and reject the tools of power inherent in education). Most important, I had begun to read again, unashamedly: anthropology, history, the background of the suffrage movement—the stuff, in fact, of women’s studies. I acknowledged lesbian suffering and supported lesbian pride. I affirmed the clitoral orgasm. I even advanced, tentatively, the need for an autonomous Women’s Movement. I hinted that I was getting flashes about feminism being something more than even a major “front” of any male-defined or male-controlled movement.
I wish I could go back in time to where I sat writing this article. I wish I could embrace me and encourage me and tell me what a long way there was ahead.
After all, in this piece I still mostly referred to women as “they.” But I was at least experimenting with the frightening word “we.”
SHE IS WHITE, about nineteen, carefully made up with blush-on, adorned in the latest tights-and-miniskirt, her hair properly ironed for that long wild look. She wears a shy smile and a huge plastic ring on a nonengagement finger. She attends one of the Seven Sisters, the Ivy League colleges which originally were established as valid feminist institutions pledged to educate women—now dedicated to churning out the corporate wives of tomorrow’s Big Business. She curls up in the corner of a sofa in her dorm lounge, and lights a Virginia Slim. Underneath her languor, she is angry. She knows she is insulated, but she reads the New York Times:
Twelve teen-age girls are in training to climb Mount Everest. A nineteen-year-old woman jockey braves rocks hurled at her by male jockeys defending their hegemony. A thirteen-year-old girl goes to court to desegregate an all-male public high school specializing in math and science, supposedly unfeminine subjects. Sarah Lawrence and Briarcliff students have seized buildings on their campuses.
These and certain other facts have penetrated her quiet campus and dented her consciousness. Although she seems far less politically awake than her sisters at a coed college, she still feels herself part of a generation pledged to radical change. Perhaps she’s even more frustrated than her activist contemporaries, because she is so tightly leashed and because she cannot help but realize that she is undergoing a four-year packaging program especially aimed at manufacturing “a certain kind of woman.” Any recognition, let alone admission, of this, no matter how oblique, humiliates and hurts, so she must defend her situation:
“But I’m not oppressed.”
At the largest women’s college in the United States, which has never had a woman president, and where there is no course in women’s history, there is, on the other hand, a required course in “Basic Motor. Skills”—how to enter and leave an automobile gracefully, how to pour tea, which foot to shift your weight to as you stand at a cocktail party. No birth-control information is disseminated, but students who become pregnant are expelled in disgrace. (This is not a finishing school, but a college with a proudly defended “academic standing.”) At a nearby less social women’s college where the dorm rules are just as absurd (no drinking, no smoking, no men, no door keys except to seniors, and weekly housemother chit-chats required) the emphasis is more on intellectual pursuits: a crypto-analysis course is good preparation for the CIA recruiters when they appear frequently on campus. At the more demure schools, women may not wear slacks to dinner or even to class. At the “swinging” schools, there are still courses (often required) in “Preparation for Marriage.” Women are discouraged from going on to graduate school—the proportion of Ph.D. degrees awarded to women has declined in the past fifty years. The emphasis now is on glorification of Woman in the Home, the Creative Housewife, active (but not too active) in her community, focused on husband and children.
She knows all this. She finds forty such focused years yawning ahead of her unattractive. But she has been carefully conditioned, and out come the proper programmed defenses: “Woman’s place is in the home. Aggressive women are emasculating. A clever woman never shows her brains. It is glorious to be the mother of mankind. Women like to be protected and treated like little girls. It’s a woman’s duty to make herself attractive. Women aren’t really interested in sex. Women love to be dominated. Women are basically passive, intuitive, and simple. It’s inherent.”
The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women’s oppression is that we have been convinced we are not oppressed. We have been blinded so as not to see our own condition. But when a well-trained slave first encounters even the concept of injustice, let alone the notion of fighting against it, psychical sunbursts occur. How many of us have grown up with the lovingly nurtured fantasy of marrying the right guy and then helping him become great, powerful, famous, wealthy, or—the 1969 radical woman’s version—a leader of the revolution? The initial jolt of consciousness-raising comes as a profound shock: always the power behind the throne, the hand that rocks the cradle, the face that launches those bloody ships. Where is the sum of my parts? Where did I get lost as a human being? What are my plans for myself? Who am I?
She begins to think for herself. She uncurls herself from her kittenish pose and stretches her legs. She checks some books out of the library. She starts to question just what is inherent in being “womanly.” She talks with other women. She dares to disagree with men, even to argue heatedly. Perhaps her boyfriend wonders why she has become such an aggressive bitch all of a sudden. She gets depressed, fears she is becoming a “man-hater.” She begins to listen to other women, to respect some of their ideas, to even like other women. Shocking. One day she wears slacks to dinner, mortally offending her housemother; she hadn’t even thought about it, having become accustomed to the comfort of her new costume. She is less interested in make-up, but is still afraid of going too far and looking like a grind. She is also less interested in all the books available on women by men—an endless reading list of cultural assumptions by male psychologists, psychiatrists, historians. She starts turning on to anthropology, since it attempts to report cultural differences without value judgments; she notices that traits considered inherent in one culture need not even exist in another. She experiences pressure from family, friends, the man in her life, to cut out what they term identity confusion and to return to her former state of blissful ignorance. She gets angrier.
She realizes that she is being schooled in a nineteenth-century institution—what does one do with such an artifact? Get the hell out of it, or change it, or hurry the dying process along from within. She drops out of school and begins to organize other women on campus. She experiences a “freedom high.” She begins to look at her own degraded position as related to that of others—blacks, poor people, the “underprivileged” and “underdeveloped” she has been taught to pity and despise. She undergoes a mutation toward something human.
This imaginary young woman is neither a stereotypical nor an atypical college student. She shares much in common with women at coed schools—even
radical women—despite her wrapped-in-cotton-batting life. In fact, women in superficially freer atmospheres often take longer to realize their true situation.
At the time of this writing, in early 1969, when radicals all over the United States are in varying stages of depression, and when the most frequently asked and argued question is, “Where does the Left go from here?” it becomes progressively more apparent that the disheartened questioners are mostly white males. Black people are getting their thing together in a tight, organized way—they are moving, not theorizing. And now there is another group—this time not a minority (albeit treated like one). It is a potential revolutionary vanguard: women. We have seen the consciousness which arises and the results which are born out of a growing awareness that race lines cut even deeper than class lines in a capitalist society—or that the two are inseparable. If we begin to think about sex lines and how these distinctions shore up the values of our culture, and begin to wake up to what could happen if these were challenged—the concept is mind-blowing.
First some historical background. The Women’s Movement in the last century in the United States and England was originally a revolutionary movement (a little-known fact, since women’s history, like that of black people, has been neatly edited away by white men). The winning of suffrage for women was more the compromise than victory of that movement. Women had been the first abolitionists, which struggle led them to relate their own oppression to that of the slaves. These women began to look around them, to see, denounce, and fight against the structure that had conceived such abominations; some denounced the concepts of private property, bourgeois marriage, and family structures, as well as expansionist foreign policy and domestic robber-baronism. And then the heavy stuff came down. Riots. Insurrections. Civil War. And finally, an early version of what Marcuse would later call repressive tolerance: