Going Too Far

by Robin Morgan

  I decided that there had to be some way at least to selectively lower male participation. It was a large class, about fifty people, and approximately half men. I announced in the first meeting with students that I would not grade women in either class, because I didn’t see how women could fail in the subject of themselves. I also said I hadn’t yet made up my mind whether to fail all the men automatically or to grade them on individual merit. This had the dramatic effect of driving fifteen men out of the mixed class that day. They had thought it was going to be an easy credit, poor dears. Then I announced that there were no formal course requirements for any women, and no required papers. I said I thought it would be helpful to the whole Women’s Movement if people wanted to do papers, because we needed research, theory, personal testimony, whatever the women students wanted to write. (To my delight, every woman in both courses voluntarily wrote a paper.) On the other hand, I announced that a sixty-page paper was required from each man. In addition, it was required that the men set up and run, under women’s leadership, a child-care center. This further winnowing left us with four men. That rather surprised all of us; I thought they must be insane or actually serious, and we knew we’d soon see. In fact, three of the four did turn out to be serious, which is a pretty high ratio out of twenty-six men.

  The real test, however, came a few weeks later. The administration had been harassing us all along: no department would Xerox anything we needed copied, the bookstore happened not to carry any of the books I had requested three months earlier. Finally, the administration announced that the feminist-studies program was over and that there would be no budget allotment to bring in other feminist speakers from around the country, as we had agreed. The women students and I had a long talk about this, and to shorten the saga, we seized the president’s office for five days and nights. And won a number of points—not all, but some.3

  This experience gave me a small insight into what women face in an academic community. Previously, I’m afraid that I’d thought of academia as relatively safe. But the infighting alone, the politics between departments, was frightening. We started a faculty wives’ consciousness-raising group, for example, and that was the most difficult experience of all because the women were terrified about talking. It might get back to John, who was Mary’s husband over here, that Phil, who was Grace’s husband, was really going for his job. I suddenly understood about fear in an “intellectual community.” Nor were things helped by the administration, which was not overly fond of me, since following the seizure nobody related to them any longer as warm-hearted papas. So they called me an outside agitator (which I definitely was and which role I affirm, I might add). They threatened to have me up on charges of what I refer to as “moral turpentine,” since evidently I was corrupting the minds of youth. All this taught me a new-found respect for feminists who are trying to survive, let alone function, in an academic community.

  Cannon to the Left of Us

  Of course not all the obstacles are thrown up by administrations, i.e., the Right. There is also the Left. This is rather a problem to me because I get bored talking about the Left. I spent seven years in it. I spent two or three years trying to get out of it. Since then I have been healthy and happy in the Feminist Movement, but certain ugly heads keep getting reared. We endure recurring waves, tiring and irrelevant as they are, of Marxism or of Trotskyism—or of the holy class analysis. Since many people talk around this and it’s always accusation and counter-accusation, I am going to try and talk some theory. About why I feel that the class analysis is inapplicable at best and destructive at worst to the developing of a revolutionary feminist movement.

  I will give only one of many examples. Capitalism is based on a marketplace economy; that is, wages paid for labor (exploited). Most women in this country work as housewives, on the average of a 99.6 hour work-week. For this there is no pay, no remuneration, no honor, no dignity, no respect, nothing. Neither the capitalist society nor the Marxist analysis considers housewives workers. What in fact the work of housewifery is in a “class analysis” is invisible labor. It is labor at the bottom of the pyramid, on which the total edifice rests. Invisible labor that exists without any pay has another name: feudalism, or slave labor. We know that were every housewife in this country paid a wage commensurate to her work, we would have a bloodless revolution overnight—the economy could not support it, the economy would fall. I find it alarming that a class analysis overlooks or ignores that area where the great mass of women (of people, numerically) work, just as I find it unfortunate when our own language picks up on it as in references to “working women.” I think that we really ought to try to refer to women who work at home and/or women who work outside the home. Of course, many women do both. But housewives are working women.4

  Our Own Approach

  I agree with Joan Hoff Wilson’s position that we must not look to other revolutions as models. Because we are not Cuba, we are not Algeria, we are not China, and we are not men, which should suffice. The point is that we as feminists must search for ourselves, and for the connectives between women. It is the Man who looks for the differences. Until and unless each oppressed group begins to have as its priority looking for the things it has in common, the strong points, the similarities, it is lost.

  We must be careful not to contract contagious patriarchal thought. Sometimes it wears the face of pedantry; sometimes it masquerades as anti-intellectualism. The “anti-articulate line,” for example: you should not be able to phrase anything in words over one syllable. My response is that a serious revolutionary would no more wield ineffective language than she would carry a clogged gun. Because language is a weapon like anything else, and I for one want us to use it as best and movingly and efficiently as we can. I want us to seize that tool like any other. I want to have everything, in fact: feminist colleges, feminist universities, a feminist world.

  In the meantime, though, I must admit that mere survival is a priority. So let’s examine the temporary solution—the women’s-studies program. I shall share with you my fantasy of the ideal program, if we all keep in mind that settling for less than everything is absurd—and eventually unnecessary.

  I know, as I’m sure you do, most of the arguments for and against a program’s being interdisciplinary or autonomous; obviously the approach taken would depend largely on the school, the support for such a program, and other local “tactical” elements. Personally, I favor the autonomous program, where the university gets to write the funding check and thereafter is permitted to maintain a respectful silence. My ideal program would be run collectively by that aforementioned coalition of women: student/faculty/staff/faculty wife. Other features would include:

  —a “floating credit”: I don’t think that’s an official academic phrase, but by it I mean that any woman could take a course for credit and then apply it anywhere she wished, to another school or program.

  —a minor, a major, and a graduate-studies program.

  —courses in every discipline, all taught by women.

  —an emphasis on history because, politically, if we do not know our own past we are, cliché or not, doomed to repeat it. (History not only to cover the suffrage struggles, of course, but also to explore the ancient gynocratic societies, tying in with anthropological and archeological studies in these areas.)

  —self-defense for credit; this is not an extracurricular activity, as most schools today regard it. For women, it is a basic survival need.

  —classes in legal rights and consumer rights.

  —paramedical and midwifery training, in addition to pre-med courses.

  —free child-care facilities controlled by the people (adults and children) who use them, but funded by the university.

  —a generous athletic budget, emphasizing noncompetitive sports.

  —a strong emphasis on outreach—to grammar schools, high schools, adult education, and community women—to keep the program from becoming an incestuous campus-based clique.

  —new a
nd exploratory disciplines: mythography, medical ethics, etc.

  —new approaches to old disciplines: I, for one, want to know less who won which battle as the boys played war games, and more about women’s history; not only about which remarkable women entered the male history as exceptions but about the women who were never permitted entrance at all or only invisibly. And what about the trends made invisible? For example, when was the tampon invented and what effect, socially, did it have on women? When did the pressure begin, in modern times, for women to start shaving legs and armpits? Was it with the invention of the modern razor blade; was it with the marketing of silk stockings? What did that mean in a socioeconomic context? I think this is part of history. I think we must transform the subjects we study as well as be willing to be transformed by them. There must be an emphasis on the hard and soft sciences. We need to know about inovulation, or as men call it, cloning. We need to know about the technology. You cannot rant about seizing power and then turn around and say all education is bourgeois.

  There are people at this conference who came with the admitted purpose of “turning women off” to women’s studies. Why? Why are women the only oppressed group who should be ashamed of going to school? You don’t hear the black community saying that it’s bourgeois to go to school. On the contrary. The black community wants open admission to get those educational tools. Yes, it’s odious to have to go to the Man for them, but we must take them and use them in a new way. Not to move up the ladder: to destroy the ladder. That is the revolutionary approach.

  Meanwhile, back to the harsh realities of ivory-tower academia. Survival measures for women currently struggling day by day in a coeducational institution might include some of the following demands:

  —a grievance board to deal with complaints about the sexist comments made in class by male instructors, the emotional and/or physical rape of women students, the offensive material on the reading list, the contempt with which feminist papers are met by so many male professors.

  —a lesbian counselor chosen by the lesbian feminists on the campus; this, in addition to a heterosexual feminist counselor. No male counselor should presume to counsel women, whatever their sexual proclivities.

  —an emphasis on the issues of rape and abortion; abortion referral and contraception available on the campus, as well as childbirth and post-partum care and advice;

  —maternity and paternity leave—he should be home dealing with the baby, too, if he’s around. And he should be around if she wants him around and not if she doesn’t.

  The demands could go on and on. Women’s work is truly never done. But there are many ways and means. Study the curricula, organizing suggestions, and advice in the literature from the Feminist Press and KNOW, Inc., in Pittsburgh. The work they have done in creating the Clearing House for Women’s Studies and the Women’s Studies Newsletter is invaluable. Read the journals coming out on this whole new area. In addition, read the Penn Women’s Studies Planners Pamphlet.5 (This began as a summer project required of Penn women by the university. The women felt that as long as it was an obligatory task they would do a really comprehensive study to be of service to other women elsewhere. I highly recommend it for its wit as well as its expert counsel.) Investigate the plans for a National Women’s Studies Association.6

  One more hint about winning. There is something that all of the following have in common: New College, Florida; University of Kansas at Lawrence; Boston State College; American University; Penn at Philadelphia campus; Berkeley; University of New Mexico at Albuquerque; Harvard; Barnard College. Within the past two years feminists on these campuses, after going all the proper routes and channels, have become fed up and have seized property. And I offer this to you in case, at some point, everything else fails. I say it obliquely so as to avoid getting in trouble again for crossing another state line to incite another you-know-what.

  In this vein, the last thing that I would leave you with is a quote from Emmeline Pankhurst, who is part of our herstory. Emmeline Pankhurst, if anybody here doesn’t know, was a British suffragist. In fact, she was a militant and therefore a suffragette, as they were called in Britain. She and two of her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia (unlikely names for feminist terrorists), formed the WSPU—the Women’s Social and Political Union—after some sixty years of women having asked politely for the vote in the British Empire and having got nowhere. The WSPU moved from setting fires in all the mailboxes in London to trashing the National Gallery, to throwing bags of flour at the king when he rode in open procession, to writing “Freedom for Women” in acid on the royal golf links, to riots, to burning down two pre-Reformation cathedrals in the north of England, and finally to fire-bombing the prime minister’s summer home. Women were jailed, women died, in that struggle. Pankhurst herself invented the prison hunger strike, and I must say that she didn’t do it in the genteel way for which male radicals are now famous, taking tea and milk and other liquids. None of that for Emmeline. When she was on a strike in jail it meant that she did not eat, she did not drink, she did not sleep, she did not sit down.

  This particular quote comes from a period when she was already in her sixties and had been jailed again on charges of conspiracy; she immediately entered into her strike. For three days she had not eaten or drunk or slept or sat down. She had simply walked back and forth in her cell until finally the British Empire couldn’t stand it any longer, and they let her go. That night she came out and addressed a women’s rally saying, in part, the following, which I quote from her autobiography:7

  From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, “We disregard your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall continue this war, as we have done in the past; and what sacrifice of property, or what injury to property accrues will not be our fault. It will be the fault of that Government who admit the justice of our demands, but refuses to concede them …” I called upon the women of the meeting to join me in this new militancy, and I reminded them anew that the women who are fighting in the Suffragette army had a great mission, the greatest mission the world has ever known—the freeing of one-half the human race, and through that freedom the saving of the other half. I said to them: “Be militant each in your own way. Those of you who can express your militancy by going to the House of Commons and refusing to leave without satisfaction, as we did in the early days—do so [a classic sit-in—R.M.]. Those of you who can express militancy by facing party mobs at Cabinet Ministers’ meetings, when you remind them of their falseness to principle—do so. Those of you who can express your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government by-election policy—do so. Those of you who can break windows—break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to make the Government realise that property is as greatly endangered by women’s suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old—do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion.”

  May 1973

  1 Not that this last ceases at graduation. In fact, such typing is often broadly translated into unacknowledged coauthorship, or even into doing the entire job “for him.” One of many such examples is provided by Aurelia Plath, the mother of Sylvia and herself a fascinating woman; in Letters Home (Harper & Row, New York, 1975, p. 12), Mrs. Plath writes movingly of having done all the reading and note-taking for her husband’s book, then having written the first draft, and at last having put the manuscript into “final form” for the printer. At some point in this process Otto Plath revised a bit and inserted a few notes—including adding his name on the title page as sole author, a regrettably not uncommon practice. Yet another instance of appropriation of the wife’s writing by the husband (in this case, F. Scott Fitzgerald) was explored by Nancy Milford in her absorbing book Zelda: A Biography (Harper & Row, New York, 1970).

  2 Women students at Sarah Lawrence have been quite vocal in their regret at their own vote to make the school coed. Less than a y
ear after males were admitted (and they were a distinct minority), the women found themselves being edged out of leadership positions in the student councils and being subtly overlooked in classes by teachers who favored the men students. Old stereotypes reasserted themselves as the men (trained to compete and to rule from birth) challenged the numerical strength of the women with simple aggressiveness. Conversely trained (also since birth), the women found themselves distracted from their own intellectual climate and low-key, relatively noncompetitiye style. They speak now of missing that peace, that freedom to exchange ideas in their own atmosphere, and the easy camaraderie they had felt among themselves. There is so little space in the patriarchy for women to be friends, let alone intellectual colleagues sharing a mutual sense of adventure, that we ought at least to preserve those few female educational communities we have left.

  3 New College closed a few years later, due partly to the public-relations damage the feminist seizure wreaked on the school’s radical image. “Change or die” was one of our rallying cries. Many institutions chose the latter course.

  4 In 1898 the feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman suggested that housewives be paid salaries. Lately this proposal has been taken up and dusted off as a possible feminist demand. Among the women who have explored “home economics” in this sense are the Canadian Margaret Benston, the British sociologist Ann Oakley, feminist theorists Betsy Warrior and Lisa Leghorn, Helena Lopata, and Elizabeth Windschuttle. Recently there are even Marxist exponents of wages-for-housework, notably Juliet Mitchell, Mariarosa dalla Costa, and Selma James.

  5 Penn Women’s Studies Planners Pamphlet, 3601 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, Pa., 1974.

  6 The founding conference of this association took place on January 13–16, 1977, at the University of San Francisco.

  7 My Own Story, Emmeline Pankhurst, Eveleigh Nash, London, 1914, pp. 265–66.