by Robin Morgan
This condition had been brought about by the appearance of Sisterhood is Powerful, which had been published in the fall of 1970. Soon afterward I faced a pile of requests from women for me to lecture, organize, advise, and agitate around the country. I recalled with a sense of irony how desperate we had been both in WITCH and at Rat to reach “those women out there”—and now the book actually had done it. However much willful dullards might accuse literature of being hopelessly elitist, even plain old-fashioned by McLuhan’s standards, those first books from the new feminist wave certainly did have their effect. (If this relevation aroused the temporarily imprisoned persona of myself as an artist, though, I dismissed the yearning—and the lesson.) The Movement needed money, the colleges were willing to pay it, groups needed benefit speakers. Women needed help, advice, support, and sometimes just classic outside agitation in the best Susan B. Anthony tradition. I packed my bag.
The montage gets positively blurry at that point. The years 1971 through 1975 shift and merge and then freeze in a series of stills: The spontaneous circle-dance of hundreds of women in a gymnasium in Michigan after a speech; The physical eviction of a particularly obnoxious heckler from a seminar in New Mexico—all six-feet-football of him hefted daintily out the door by five petite women; Forty-degree-below-zero dawn in Saskatchewan, Canada—sitting up and talking with women all night (as usual) before my 7.00 A.M. plane on to another town, another college, another feminist community; The closing circle of jocks on the Pennsylvania campus, drunk and in a hazing mood, each one of about twenty men carrying lit torches, each one crying, “Burn the witch!”; The growing presence of minority women in audiences and at women’s centers and feminist gatherings; The growing presence of working-class women, of housewives and community women; The face of the sixty-year-old woman who stood up at the rap session after a speech and, crying softly, said she realized that she’d been raped every night for thirty-five years; The bomb threats in auditoriums before or during lectures; The menacing letters and phone calls; The radical feminist nuns in a far-west state who were doing secret abortion referrals; The nascent rage everywhere budding into energy and organization and determination, the faces the voices the meetings and partings and indelible encounters where consciousness meets consciousness and the connections are electric …
In time I would come to grouse about the traveling, which indeed was exhausting, and which wreaked havoc with my personal life and my writing. Yet I know that I would trade those years for nothing—for I might have become an embittered organizer twitching at her laurels, had I not been forced out into the world where women were fighting to stay alive and love and live and give birth to themselves and each other.
That discovered vision—and the personal cost—rang out clearly from the poems in Monster, my first collection, which was published in 1972. Kenneth’s third book of poems, Color Photos of the Atrocities,1 published the next spring, contained poems from his side of the struggle—the two volumes argued and quoted and reflected one another like facing pages of the same document: the record of a woman and a man who loved each other, trying to change their lives. Which we were in fact doing: both of us trying to survive by free-lance editing, me gone for approximately one week out of every month and whirling in harried political activity when I was in town—what with the sudden emergency actions like seizures of buildings, demonstrations, rallies—and the protracted projects as well, like the New York Women’s Center, or the Women’s Law Center. Our child, cared for at this point well more than half the time by his father, was growing golden and toddly and of necessity (in such a household) precociously and loudly verbal. Meanwhile, words like patriarchy, gynarchy, and matriarchy entered my vocabulary together with the realization of how vast the implications of feminism were. And this realization, strangely enough, seemed to bring me even closer to my beloved, exasperating, guilt-provoking family. I remember reading somewhere, in one of the mythographic analyses of the ancient gynocratic societies, that the model for all relationships was originally the love between mother and child—not as we know it today in its patriarchally corrupted form, where women sometimes misuse power over children because child-rearing is the one area in which we are allowed power at all. The model, rather, of that relationship in a pristine state of mutual love and sensuality, interdependence (the swollen breast needing the infant’s relieving hunger); vigilance and sensitivity to unspoken need; true nurturance. I remember realizing with a shock that to live in such a culture would mean that I could feel about every single thing—male and female, child and adult, human and animal and plant—the way I feel about Blake. And I was suddenly cramped with the pain of an intense longing I knew was realer than all our rhetoric, for this represented the loss and the desire that lay beneath that loss.
This was authentic, and other women felt it, too. Of such stuff are made changes in world consciousness—sometimes called revolutions.
1 Color Photos of the Atrocities: Poems by Kenneth Pitchford, Atlantic-Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1973.
ON WOMEN AS A COLONIZED PEOPLE
This short essay was written at the request of sisters in the Women’s Health Movement as the introduction to a self-health handbook, Circle One, published by Colorado women.1 Although the piece was written in 1974, I had been making the analogy between women and other colonized peoples for a number of years in lectures, as it was borne in upon me that the oppression of women was more pervasive (and evasive) than I had thought. One could compare sexism with the issues of class and race and even caste, and still be left with an alienation more fundamental. Such comparisons are invidious in terms of human suffering—no scale dare weigh that, and no analysis, political or otherwise, had better “compare and contrast” that—although precisely such more-oppressed-than-thou approaches are attempted all the time by patriarchal politicians of the Left and Right. I was among those feminists who were, rather, searching for a means of articulating sexism—a handle, a lever, a way of translating into generally understood and accepted terms of political philosophy “what it was we people wanted.” Hence the analogies—which were always dangerous, since the terms themselves had been coined and analyzed, the conditions themselves had been formed and at times even reformed by men and by patriarchy.
The search continues. We not only define and redefine but create entirely new terms to interpret—and change—our condition as women. When I first proposed that we view women as a colonized people, the suggestion was met with incredulity, even from other feminists. But what was “going too far” yesterday inevitably becomes something already assumed, even taken for granted, tomorrow. So has the theory of women’s colonization been assimilated into feminist thought. And so we go on further, from there.
AS RADICAL FEMINIST, I make an analogy between women and colonized peoples, a parallel which works well—inevitably, even—if one dares to examine it carefully, overcoming a sense of shock or our women’s curse of guilt.
Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, as sexist as other men but considerable authorities on the process of colonization and its effects, wrote of certain basic characteristics by which that process could always be identified. Primary among these were the following: The oppressed are robbed of their culture, history, pride, and roots—all most concretely expressed in the conquest of their land itself. They are forced (by a system of punishment and reward) to adopt the oppressor’s standards, values, and identification. In due course, they become alienated from their own values, their own land—which is of course being mined by the oppressor for its natural resources. They are euphemistically permitted (forced) to work the land, but since they do not benefit from or have power over what it produces, they come to feel oppressed by it. Thus, the alienation from their own territory serves to mystify that territory, and the enforced identification with their colonizing masters provokes eventual contempt both for themselves and their land. It follows, of course, that the first goal of a colonized people is to reclaim their own land.
Women are a co
lonized people. Our history, values, and cross-cultural culture have been taken from us—a gynocidal attempt manifest most arrestingly in the patriarchy’s seizure of our basic and precious “land”: our own bodies.
Our bodies have been taken from us, mined for their natural resources (sex and children), and deliberately mystified. Five thousand years of Judeo-Christian tradition, virulent in its misogyny, have helped enforce the attitude that women are “unclean.” Androcentric medical science, like other professional industries in the service of the patriarchal colonizer, has researched better and more efficient means of mining our natural resources, with (literally) bloody little concern for the true health, comfort, nurturance, or even survival of those resources.2 This should hardly surprise us; our ignorance about our own primary terrain—our bodies—is in the self-interest of the patriarchy.
We must begin, as women, to reclaim our land, and the most concrete place to begin is with our own flesh. Self-and-sister-education is a first step, since all that fostered ignorance and self-contempt dissolve before the intellectual and emotional knowledge that our women’s bodies are constructed with great beauty, craft, cleanliness, yes, holiness. Identification with the colonizer’s standards melts before the revelations dawning on a woman who clasps a speculum in one hand and a mirror in the other. She is demystifying her own body for herself, and she will never again be quite so alienated from it.
From education we gain higher expectations, and from there we move through anger and into the will for self-determination, to seizing power over our own lives, to reclaiming the products of our labor (our own sexual definition, and our own children), and, ultimately, to transforming the quality of life itself in society, as a whole—into something new, compassionate, and truly sane.
This is why, as radical feminists, we believe that the Women’s Revolution is potentially the most sensible hope for change in history. And this is why the speculum may well be mightier than the sword.
Spring 1974
1 Circle One—A Woman’s Beginning Guide to Self Health and Sexuality, Campbell and Ziegler, eds., P.O. Box 7211, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80933.
2 Adrienne Rich has assembled chilling documentation about this subject, with particular emphasis on medical industrialization of childbirth, in her important work Of Woman Born, Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Norton, New York, 1976.
THEORY AND PRACTICE: PORNOGRAPHY AND RAPE
The following article is based on what to my horror got termed in hard-boiled organizer’s jargon “The Rape Rap.” I must have communicated some version of it hundreds of times, with a ripening anger as women came forward with their own experiences of rape and I realized how far-reaching and quintessentially patriarchal the crime was. There was a time when rape and pornography were embarrassing issues even in the Women’s Movement: such things were deplorable, to be sure, but they had to be deplored with a sophisticated snicker—not with outspoken fury. Today, there are Rape Crisis Centers in major cities all over the nation, and feminist Rape Prevention Brigades. Many metropolitan police departments have special anti-rape squads run by women officers and new rape-reporting procedures devised by women; and self-defense classes for women are no longer seen as passing strange. When Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller’s comprehensive book on the subject from a feminist perspective, was published, it immediately became a best-seller, which it well deserved, and which also indicated that the general public’s awareness of rape as a political issue has been greatly heightened. Feminist sorties against the attendant issue—pornography—are still somewhat more awkwardly conducted, but women are every day becoming less concerned with being graceful and more bent on being free.
THERE IS PERHAPS no subject relevant to women so deliberately ditorted as that of rape. This is because rape is the perfected act of male sexuality in a patriarchal culture—it is the ultimate metaphor for domination, violence, subjugation, and possession.1
But the most insidious aspect of rape is the psychological fiction that accompanies it—with which all women are besieged until, for survival’s sake, we even pretend to believe that what we know is a lie. The fiction has many versions. We can look at a few representative examples.
There is the Pity the Poor Rapist approach. This version tells us that we must be sorry for our attacker. He is sick, he cannot help himself, he needs help.
He decidely does need help (if he can be apprehended), but his victim needs it more—and first. She is not even supposed to defend herself, for fear of being unwomanly. I find it educative that a woman who, for instance, notices her child being molested by a dirty old (or young) man on the playground, and who shampoos the man with a brick—she is considered a proper mother, “the tigress defending her cubs.” Yet should the same man molest her, she ought to, in society’s view, welcome him and admit that she relishes being pawed, or if she must, plead winningly with him to stop. It is acceptable to defend one’s child but not oneself because it is considered the epitome of selfishness for the female to place her own concerns first. We are supposed to wipe the noses of all humanity before we dare think about ourselves. Well, we must learn to mother those selves, and defend them at least as valiantly as we do our children.
The Spontaneity Lie is an offshoot of Pity the Poor Rapist. It informs us that he was just an average guy walking along the street (the lamb), who was positively seized with the urge to attack a woman. Sudden lust. In combating the spontaneity approach, one should remember that more than half of all rapes occur in breaking-and-entering situations—which do require, one would think, a modicum of premeditation.
There is always the basic Every Woman Loves a Rapist / All Women Want to Be Raped / Good Girls Never Get Raped / It’s Always the Woman’s Fault cliché. This is frequently carried to ludicrous extremes. Thus, if she wears slacks, that’s obviously meant as a challenge; if a skirt, it’s an incitement. If she glowers as she strides down the street it’s meant as an attention-getter; if she looks pleasant it’s a come-on. Et cetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And besides, what was she doing out walking all alone by herself anyway at eleven o’clock in broad daylight? Doesn’t she know her place?
Knowing our place is the message of rape—as it was for blacks the message of lynchings. Neither is an act of spontaneity or sexuality—they are both acts of political terrorism, designed consciously and unconsciously to keep an entire people in its place by continual reminders. For that matter, the attitudes of racism and sexism are twined together in the knot of rape in such a way as to constitute the symbolic expression of the worst in our culture.2 These “reminders” are perpetrated on victims selected sometimes at random, sometimes with particular reason. So we have the senseless rape murders of children and of seventy-year-old women—whom no one can salaciously claim were enticing the rapist—and we also have the deliberate “lesson-rapes” that feminist students have been prey to on their campuses for the past four years—acts based on the theory that all these frustrated feminists need is a good rape to show ’em the light.
Thus the woman is rarely unknown to her attacker, nor need the rapist be a stranger to his victim—although goddess help her deal with the more-than-usual scorn of the police if she reports rape by a former jealous boyfriend, or an ex-husband, or her faculty advisor or boss or psychiatrist. Many policemen already delight in asking the victim sadistic and illegal questions such as, Did you enjoy it? Consequently, any admission on her part, whether elicited or volunteered, that the rapist was actually an acquaintance seems to invite open season on her morals.
But radical feminists see the issue of rape as even more pervasive than these examples. For instance, I would define rape not only as the violation taking place in the dark alley or after breaking into and entering a woman’s home. I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire. This last qualifier is important, because we are familiar with the cigarette commercial of the “Liberated Woman,
” she who is the nonexistent product of the so-called sexual revolution: a Madison Avenue-spawned male fantasy of what the liberated woman should be—a glamorous lady slavering with lust for his paunchy body. We also know that many women, in responding to this new pressure to be “liberated initiators” have done so not out of their own desire but for the same old reasons—fear of losing the guy, fear of being a prude, fear of hurting his fragile feelings, fear. So it is vital to emphasize that when we say she must be the initiator (in tone if not in actuality) we mean because she wants to be. Anything short of that is, in a radical feminist definition, rape. Because the pressure is there and it need not be a knife-blade against the throat; it’s in his body language, his threat of sulking, his clenched or trembling hands, his self-deprecating humor or angry put-down or silent self-pity at being rejected. How many millions of times have women had sex “willingly” with men they didn’t want to have sex with? Even men they loved? How many times have women wished just to sleep instead or read or watch the Late Show? It must be clear that, under this definition, most of the decently married bedrooms across America are settings for nightly rape.
This normal, corn-fed kind of rape is less shocking if it can be realized and admitted that the act of rape is merely the expression of the standard, “healthy,” even encouraged male fantasy in patriarchal culture—that of aggressive sex. And the articulation of that fantasy into a billion-dollar industry is pornography.
Civil libertarians recoil from linking the issues of rape and pornography, dredging out their yellowing statistics from the Scandinavian countries which appear to show that acts of rape decline where pornography is more easily procured. This actually ought to prove the connection. I am not suggesting that censorship should rule the day here—I abhor censorship in any form (although there was a time when I felt it was a justifiable means to an end—which is always the devil’s argument behind thought control, isn’t it?). I’m aware, too, that a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or books containing lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Spillanesque titles. Nor do I place much trust in a male-run judiciary, and I am less than reassured by the character of those who would pretend to judge what is fit for the public to read or view. On the contrary, I feel that censorship often boils down to some male judges sitting up on their benches, getting to read a lot of dirty books with one hand. This hardly appears to me to be the solution. Some feminists have suggested that a Cabinet-level woman in charge of Women’s Affairs (in itself a controversial idea) might take pornography regulation in her portfolio. Others hearken back to the idea of community control. Both approaches give me unease, the first because of the unlikeliness that a Cabinet-level woman appointee these days would have genuine feminist consciousness, or, if she did, have the power and autonomy from the administration to act upon it; the second because communities can be as ignorant and totalitarian in censorship as individual tyrants. A lot of education would have to precede community-controlled regulation to win that proposal my paranoid support. Certainly this is one problem to which simple solutions are just nonexistent, rhetoric to the contrary.