Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  “See, we’ve freed the slaves (now we create segregation).”

  “Look, we’ll give you the vote (which will be meaningless anyway).”

  So radicalism gave way to reformism, and the women bound up their wounds, as well as everybody else’s, and were silent for a while. The first decades of this century saw the beginnings of what has been amusingly referred to as the sexual liberation of women—culminating in the frenzy of the twenties and collapsing in the gloom of the thirties. Men began to admit that maybe all women didn’t detest sex; that maybe women could smoke and drink and even carry on an intellectual conversation—although, of course, they weren’t quite “nice” if they did so. But with the Depression, the rise of the labor movement and then the coming of World War II, the issue of women’s status again got shunted to second (or third, or tenth) place. Radicals in the thirties were even more puritanical and culture-bound than we are today—which is saying something. But at least during the war years, with the need for labor in factories, women achieved some economic standing and glimpsed some escape from the kitchen. Then, the war over—back to the stove. A lot of women wouldn’t go. Some began to make inroads into professions hitherto considered male territory: medicine, publishing, scientific research, business, and law. We’re not now speaking of the already enghettoed women’s professions, for which read service professions, i.e., nursing, teaching, garment-making, waiting on tables, etc.—those jobs with little prestige, low pay, and back-breaking labor. Also, women could now be active in the arts without being marked as “fallen.” But engineering, architecture, positions of corporate or military or political power—the positions that control our lives, remained, and still largely remain, sealed to all but the white male.

  Nevertheless, even throughout the death-dull fifties and McCarthy the First’s heyday (Joseph, remember him?), women kept trying for some modicum of economic, if not social or sexual, freedom. And when, in the early sixties, new political consciousness began to stretch liberals’ minds, women began to relate the oppression of others, at home and abroad, to that of themselves. They poured into the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the student movement. Today they constitute more than half of what has become known as the Movement: a fact which simply mirrors basic population statistics—women are 53 percent of the country’s population.

  Women As Radicals: New Ideas, Old Roles

  So now we’re part of a growing number of radicals fighting for a just society, at first nonviolently, later on with whatever tactics necessitated by the nature of the enemy. And what are we, as women, doing? We are doing, to put it delicately, shit jobs: bolstering the boys’ egos and keeping the necessities of existence functioning while the men go off to change the system. We’re goddamn home-fire revolutionaries.

  Most of all, women still and always end up “supporting.” Good god, supporting McCarthy the Second or Bobby the Progenitor. Or moving past such expectable traps, supporting draft resisters, supporting (male-led) black groups, supporting (male-led) grape strikers, supporting (male) deserters, (male) baby doctors,1 (male) GI’s. You’d think we were caryatids. Not that any of these actions were unimportant, ignoble, or wrong. On the contrary, they may have been valid tactics at the time, just as “Girls say yes to boys who say no” is a very clever and workable, if degrading, slogan. But each of these roles reinforce the stereotype of women as sub-citizens, even sub-radicals—defining women only as they relate to men.

  Stereotypes are powerful things—as our black sisters and brothers have learned (and then unlearned). The oppressor may, in fact, never really believe in the stereotype at all—what is important is that the oppressed do. Women have internalized the image of themselves as weak, incompetent, emotional, unintellectual, dependent. Who wants to dare speak out at a meeting and risk the labels: movement harridan, castrating bitch, frigid neurotic, shrike, unfeminine pushy bitch? That’s one extreme reaction, of course. The other extreme is that she will simply be ignored: The Invisible Woman, since whatever she has to say couldn’t possibly be relevant anyway, the dumb cunt. If she does grit her teeth and try to speak out, she will be so uptight by this time that she will stutter, anecdotalize, and generally reinforce the image of her inarticulacy to everyone’s satisfaction and her own torment. Naturally, a few women managed to overcome this, often at high personal and emotional cost, and in fact were accepted as equals—for public view, at least. The Movement has to have its tokens, too.

  The upshot of more than five years of such frustration was that radical women, borrowing a leaf from the Black Movement, began to think about their own forced servility, their own fight, indeed their own movement.

  Feminine Radicals Become Radical Feminists

  Starting in 1966, small caucuses of radical women were formed at SDS conventions, at campus meetings, at nationwide actions such as the March on the Pentagon. (Later, in the 1968 Battle of Chicago, cadres of women would be into actions all their own.) In November of 1967, thousands of women participated in the Jeannette Rankin Brigade March against the Vietnam War in Washington. There, a group of radical women split off from the march and met to discuss the possibilities of a feminist movement. And over the next few months, brought into clearer focus by Women’s Liberation meetings at the Columbia Liberation School during the summer of 1968, that movement began to come together. At present, there are women’s groups in every major city in the United States. The Women’s Movement, at first composed largely of white women, is becoming more representative, although there are still relatively few black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Native American women involved. Our militant Third World sisters seem to feel that their place at present is mostly in the Third World Movements—a difficult position to argue with; nevertheless, there are signs that the virulent male supremacy in those movements, too, is not safe from challenge. Some female Black Panthers in California, tired of being referred to as Pantherettes, have been discussing setting up a separate headquarters, perhaps starting a separate women’s corps in the Panthers.

  Women—black and white—are beginning to act. As one (woman) journalist wrote: “For some time the underground has been railing against ‘plastic’ or phony commercial cultural events. It took the Women’s Liberation Groups to lead the way to action. They threw stink bombs in the auditorium at the Miss America contest, called the winner ‘a military mascot, off to Vietnam’/to entertain the troops each year/… The success of the venture has opened up new horizons in the Movement. Any film or rock festival is vulnerable.”2

  This, however, was only the beginning. NOW forced the New York Times to desegregate its help-wanted ads, while WITCH hexed Wall Street. Films, articles, guerrilla-theater skits began to be used by groups organizing on campuses and in high schools. All-male-public-accommodations establishments were hit with a rash of challenges and, in some cases, sit-ins or even bricks. The provision on sex in the civil-rights bill was inserted as a joke by a Southern congressman; the joke has proved a valuable loophole. Individual women, taking courage from the solidarity of a burgeoning movement, are becoming politicized and reporting discriminatory practices to Human Rights Bureaus, even going to court. As of this writing, the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws has just been formed; meanwhile there are a number of abortion test cases in the docket. Actions are being planned against women’s houses of detention as well as against debutante balls. Ironically, it is only now, with such furious challenge in so many areas, that one can really begin to see the extent of the oppression of women.

  The Real Issues, the Real Constituency

  On the surface, it seems easy enough to chronicle the process of dehumanization—even the most blatant male supremacist will agree that in the past women have been shunted aside—although now what do you people want? The male liberal on this issue will of course agree that birth-control and abortion laws created by men—pressured by a male celibate clergy, to boot—are horrendous, tsk tsk. The male liberal will tell you this earnestly, not even realizing that as he
does so, he is interrupting “his” woman who is trying to say something from the depths of the sink where she is doing supper dishes. (“Not with my woman, you don’t!”)

  But what about the real constituency? The one based on an oppression that recognizes no class and economic lines, making the woman always lowest within each self-contained pecking order? What about the Puerto Rican girl who suffers all the indignities that the men in her family suffer, but who also bears knife scars on her body as testimony to the machismo in the rage those men feel for other men but direct against her? What about the laborer’s wife who is brutalized by a slow procession of days in which the only relief is a television soap opera? What about the knocked-up Italian Catholic kid who must fear for her immortal soul, feeling her screams aborted along with her child? What about the woman factory worker who does embittering, uncreative work all day, and then goes home to clean and cook, and to pamper her equally embittered husband, who can at least be a “king in his castle”? What about the young mother who spends all day with kids and housework and then is accused of being uninformed by her newspaper-leisure spouse? What about the middle-class woman whose family has died or grown up or moved away, whom society treats as a pitiable leper? What about the fourteen-year-old girl who is the victim of rape, and is then considered unmarriageable? And the single woman who is nothing, nowhere, unless she can find a man and thus her own identity? What about the few women in Congress, who are patronized despite the population proportions of their sex? And what about the female homosexual, who is even less socially acceptable than the male homosexual, although she is (reputedly) less harassed legally—because after all, whatever women do is less important than that done by men.

  From Resistance to Revolution

  Some radicals wonder how women can relate to the rest of the Movement, to the struggle that is taking place within America and against its tentacles of power all over the world. A few points seem obvious.

  Women have been subjugated longer than any other people on earth. Empires rose and fell but one constant remained, except in a few civilized tribal pockets of the world—everyone could stomp on women. This knowledge is carried, even if only semiconsciously, by every woman, and accounts for a cumulative rage which, once released, will make demands for Black Power look by comparison not only suddenly reasonable but eminently desirable.

  Blacks once told idealistic young Lord and Lady Bountiful whites back in the civil-rights movement to turn around and look at their own lives. By god, they weren’t free, even nice middle-class college grad students—they were enslaved by the culture itself. And from this awareness was born the New Left. Now, women, who have been angels of mercy for so many other causes, have also become fully awake to their own cause. Radical women learned, from that same Black Liberation Movement, that mere empathy for the suffering of others is basically a liberal emotion—at least it never makes for revolutionary thinking or motivates a passionate desire for change.

  Nevertheless, the chameleonic so-called revolutionist male in the Movement (who at first thought the Women’s Movement ridiculous, later modified that to “frivolous in the face of larger issues,” still later accepted it if only as an “organizing tool,” and now nervously finds it “valid”) has dreamed up a new hypocritical twist: isn’t a drive for equality of women ultimately reformist, eminently co-optable?

  Of course. So is Black Power—into Black Capitalism. So are the initial demands of any oppressed group. When slammed up against the wall, the Man will liberalize abortion and birth-control laws, and open up the professions to a few more token women, just as he once rigged up for us the already marked ballot. But we want something more—like freedom. “Equality in an unjust society is meaningless. We want equality in a just society.”3

  Students for a Democratic Society, until recently male dominated in action as well as male supremacist in attitude, passed their first resolution on the Women’s Movement in December 1968, at their Ann Arbor National Conference. The statement, which takes almost no notice of the social, sexual, or emotional valences of women’s oppression, nevertheless is very cogent on the economic aspects, and how they relate, ultimately, to revolutionary commitment:

  The inability of the most advanced, technologically developed, etc. capitalist society to provide equality to [more than] half its citizens not only exposes the thorough hypocrisy of all that society’s words about “justice” and “equality.” It also shows that the struggle for equality of women is a revolutionary task.… Male supremacy in the Movement mirrors male supremacy in the capitalist society. [This fact] raises the issue that although no people’s liberation can happen without a socialist revolution in this country, a socialist revolution could take place which maintains the secondary position of women in society.… The fight for Women’s Liberation is a concretization of the struggle of all peoples from oppression.… Therefore, the liberation of women must become a conscious part of our struggle.

  We have, indeed, seen the erosion of women’s position in the Soviet Union, and heard rumors of the same development in Algeria and even in Cuba. The day comes when women who fought and died on the barricades as bravely as men are told, “That phase is over, comrade. Back to the kitchen.” Hell no, we won’t go.

  Meanwhile, back in the United States, the newly articulated demands of such a vast constituency are proving revolutionary. What we must all learn, this time, is not to repeat history, not to copy the ego-tripping of many male-movement “nonleaders,” not to gain control in order to manipulate and exploit others as they have us, but rather to seize power over our own lives by any means necessary, including force of arms, and then to begin the Revolution—in our minds, hearts, guts, culture, daily lives. That is the difficult task: to create a truly free society. Imperialism begins at home. The Revolution begins at home.

  “The Revolution Made Flesh”

  How relatively simple the economics seem when compared to the cultural, psychological, emotional, and sexual problems. Naturally no one should lack medical care or food or shelter or the pleasures of challenging work (as opposed to debilitating toil, which technology is ready to assume).

  But why are we ready to reject most values of a depraved society, while still clinging to others? How pervasive the puritanical conditioning must have been, to make us still afraid of our naked bodies, to still fear the mystery of the opposite sex, and to be even more terrified of the familiarity of our own sex in someone else’s body! Movement men who in one breath declare that the whole political structure must be torn down, in the next breath will play their male-mystique roles to the full (cuff women, talk heavy, and never embrace another man except in a locker-room parody of affection). Movement women, especially those into women’s rights, are used to having commie-dirty-punk-creep epithets thrown at them; they just chuckle. But whisper “lesbian” and they will cringe in agonized denial. And of what? Of the natural bisexuality in all of us? Intelligent people who have read their Freud and Jung and Norman O. Brown and Masters and Johnson as well as their Marx, Marcuse, Mao, and Guevara, still flinch at the thought of a revolution in sexual mores.

  Surely no one dare call oneself a revolutionary unless a continual attempt is made to create a revolution in one’s own psyche—the ongoing struggle toward the deepening of one’s humanity. Any acid trip will teach you that, as it will prove the silly absurdity of emphasis on purely genitally oriented sex, and the natural order of what could only be termed omnisexuality.

  Yet so basic a scientific revelation as that in Human Sexual Response (Masters and Johnson), talking about the one female orgasm—the clitorally based one—has hardly dented consciousness two years after the publication of the best-seller. Nor has Anne Koedt’s feminist paper, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” had any greater effect, although it makes the ramifications of this revelation even clearer. “The myths remain,” wrote Sue Lydon in Ramparts (December 14, 1968), “because a male-dominated American culture has a vested interest in this continuance. Before Masters and
Johnson, men defined female sexuality in a way as favorable to themselves as possible.” That is, a woman must receive her sexual satisfaction only as a concomitant of a man’s seeking his.

  While the myth of the vaginal orgasm managed to thoroughly frustrate generations of women up until Masters and Johnson’s liberating discovery (because one cannot achieve what is physically impossible—so what’s wrong with you), the earlier Victorians were at least honest about their sexual repression. Women weren’t supposed to have orgasms at all—and one Dr. Isaac Brown Baker, suspecting that some women were getting uppity and daring to enjoy themselves, performed numerous clitoridectomies, claiming that sexual excitement in women led to insanity, catalepsy, and epileptic seizures.

  Depraved, of course, yet no more so than modern legislators who refuse to change perverted laws about natural behavior. Food, shelter, medicine—these are inalienable rights, hardly revolutionary demands. Yet even as we require these obvious rights, we must also have truly revolutionary goals: for a whole new concept of sexuality, for a new definition of what a woman is, what a man is; for the gentle laying to rest of limiting monosexuality; for joy and fun and freedom.

  An examination of the structure of the bourgeois family and the mental price it has extracted is causing many people to think more and more in terms of the communal family, where children are raised by men as well as by women, and by more than one pair; where parenthood is perhaps a biological fact but not a property-defined relationship. Where else do we first learn the dynamics of domination but in the family triangle of our culture in which the woman is treated as a distinct inferior? Therefore, to eliminate political and economic domination, we must simultaneously uproot sexual domination from that microcosm where the developing individual’s view of human possibility is irrevocably formed. Marriage as a bourgeois institution is beginning to fade slowly but surely from the needs of the under-twenty-five-year-olds. No more need the bride be passed from her father to her husband in order to produce (let’s face it) sons. No more need the mother possess her children to death, since she will have, in fact, something of herself to call her own.