by Robin Morgan
INTERNATIONAL FEMINISM: A CALL FOR SUPPORT OF THE THREE MARIAS
James Baldwin once commented that to be black and conscious in America was to be in a continual state of rage. I would paraphrase him: to be female and conscious anywhere on this planet is to be in a continual state of rage. Since early 1970 I had been one of a number of American feminists who were in touch with like-minded women organizing all over the globe. Synchronicity, word-of-mouth, books smuggled into countries where the fascist, capitalist, socialist, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, or atheist male governments did not smile upon such literature—these were the ways our ideas were shared. But 1973 and 1974 saw the first truly united international feminist action, focusing on the arrest of three Portuguese feminist writers, as the accompanying article describes. It was written for and delivered as the introduction to a Broadway evening in support of the Three Marias, a presentation of their work dramatized and directed by Gilda Grillo, and produced by Lois Sasson. Women were responsible for the acting, the music, the slide projections, the total ambiance. It was a beautifully executed and moving event (and I shall never forget, as long as I live, the rehearsal encounters between that arch-conservative male supremacist, the Broadway stagehand, and our female technicians!).
Soon thereafter, a revolution toppled the Portuguese regime which had been entrenched for so many decades. In time, the Marias were found not guilty of the crimes charged, although Maria Isabel Barreño has made it clear since that the ultimate verdict was brought about not by the revolutionary coup, but by international feminist pressure on the Portuguese governments, old and new. This analysis seemed borne out when, only weeks after the glorious revolution had taken place, women marching in the first open feminist demonstration Lisbon had ever seen were set upon, stoned, beaten, and forcibly dispersed by a mob of “revolutionary” men who had fought for freedom for all, but who thought that demands for contraception, abortion, economic and emotional and legal autonomy, and spiritual freedom (in a Latin Catholic country) were—you guessed it—going too far.
I WANT TO WELCOME YOU to this evening of dramatic readings from the forbidden texts of the Three Marias of Portugal. As part of the international feminist protest action attendant on the case—which I will explain more fully in a moment—this one-time performance has been put together by women, including, of course, the three actresses who will read from the texts and the feminist musicians who will accompany that reading.
Some background on why we are here seems in order, for although the whole world appears to know about the censoring of Solzhenitsyn, shockingly but not surprisingly few people are aware of, or concerned about, the repression of the work of three women.
In April of 1972, a book entitled New Portuguese Letters was published in Portugal. Its authors were: Maria Isabel Barreño (who previously had written two novels about the problems of being female in a patriarchal world), Maria Teresa Horta (who has written nine books of poetry and one novel—and who has been persecuted by censorship before, regarding one of her books of poetry), and Maria Velho Da Costa (who also has written a book of short stories and a novel). All three women work. All three women have children. All three women are feminists. All three women are published writers. And all three women are therefore regarded as dangerous to the patriarchal state of Portugal.
Their collectively written book explores themes such as the loneliness and isolation of women, the exploitation of our sexuality and the denial of our own fulfillment as whole human beings. It speaks of the suffering caused by rape, prison, sadistic abortions; it explores our political and economic condition; it talks of religion and the cloister, of adultery and madness and suicide. It is not a timid work—it is a strong and womanly book.1
Two-thirds of all copies in the first printing sold out within a few days of the publication. By May 1 of that same year the remaining one-third had been seized by the Portuguese political police. One month later to the day, the Portuguese Committee of Censorship requested that the authors be sued. This was quite a departure, since the seizure of books is frequent in Portugal but suits are rare. Seven or eight years ago there were two government suits over literary works, but the defendants were not required to pay bail. The Three Marias, however, were arrested, and bail was subsequently set at approximately six hundred dollars for each woman. The actual charge accuses the authors of having committed “an outrage to public morals and good customs.”
Meanwhile the book is being sold—but only in a clandestine manner. The publisher himself, using the seizure as a reason for his action, paid the authors only one-third of what had been promised them in their contracts—thus each of the three has received only a little more than one hundred dollars for her work.
In May of 1973, a copy of New Portuguese Letters reached some feminists in Paris, almost by accident. These sisters took the issue to the world feminist community, with the result that there have been protest demonstrations before Portuguese embassies and consulates in major cities all over the world, including large and militant demonstrations in London, Paris, and New York. Feminists have readied a statement presenting the case to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. Portuguese intellectuals have signed petitions demanding that the charge be lifted. These and other activities germinated by the international feminist community have functioned so far as what could be called “holding actions”—the Portuguese government has responded to the pressure by delaying sentencing of the Three Marias, hoping, no doubt, that we would all go away and the case would become yesterday’s news, in which circumstance the three women could be sent to prison for a minimum of six months to two years on the charge of “outrage to the public morality” alone. One of the three, Maria Teresa Horta, is tubercular. We do not know if she has medical care. But we do know that it is vital to continue pressure on the government, by demonstrations, by information about and press coverage of the case, and by events such as this one tonight. This Thursday, January 31, 1974, is the date set for the final sentencing of the Three Marias in Lisbon.
Those are the simple facts of the case, the superficial facts, one might say. Because the issues at stake here go much deeper than a mere recitation of those facts may imply.
It would be possible, for example, to see the case merely as another in a deplorable series of repressive acts against artists by governments all over the world, each in their turn. It might be especially tempting for some to come away with an analysis that pointed an accusing finger at the reactionary politics of the Portuguese government, that same government which has on its hands the blood of Angola. Yet both such interpretations, while valid in part, stop short of the issue itself—the heart of the matter.
Because the Three Marias are not solely artists—they are women artists. And they are not solely free-speaking persons living under a reactionary political regime—they are free-speaking women living under a reactionary political regime. They are feminist artists writing passionately on the condition of women. And their persecutors, coincidentally, are all men.
So we must look at these three women in their and our historical context—which is larger and older than Portugal and 1974. Radical feminists have said for some time now that until the issue of the oppression of women is dealt with, all revolutions will continue to be coups d’état by men, that feminism with all its reverberations is, in fact, the central issue facing the human species today. One could use the metaphor of a tree—the Tree of Ignorance, if you will—and note that for a long time progressive peoples have been hacking away at various evils represented by its branches: one branch, war; one branch, racism; one, ecological disaster; one, greed; one, competition; one, repression of the young and callousness toward the old, etc. Well, the word radical does imply “going to the root” after all, and if one wishes to do that and not merely hack away at branches that continually grow back then one must eventually deal with the oldest oppression on the face of the earth, the primary contradiction which entails the subjugation of half the specie
s by the other half. One must deal with the largest oppressed group on the planet—the majority of humans not only in the United States but in the world. One must deal with women—and with sexism, male supremacy, and what de Beauvoir called the initial “alienizing act”—for once women could be viewed as “the Other” then it was a simple, inevitable, and tragic process to see more “Others”—people of a different height or weight or skin color or language or age. So the Tree of Ignorance has grown.
We as feminists have begun to un-recognize those male-defined and patriarchally imposed false barriers. National boundaries, for one. Women didn’t create them; it has been a big boys’ game to carve out the earth and claim “this country is mine, that yours”—and it is absurd. Which is why there is a growing international feminist community, from Melbourne to Montana, from Senegal to Switzerland, from mainland China to Cherbourg. And which is why we are here tonight, one part of that whole.
The Three Marias stand in a long and honorable tradition of women—women artists in this case—who have been repressed, persecuted, prosecuted, or killed, overtly or covertly, for daring to speak our truths. This process is how the history of women, like that of other oppressed peoples, has been hidden, and how we have been robbed of our culture. It isn’t new, but it is necessary—how else can the oppressor continue to ask his tedious question “But then where are your great women_____?” Fill in the blank. First the evidence must be destroyed or at least distorted; only then may the inquiry be put.
So it was with Anne Hutchinson, who dared speak out against the theology of her day in Puritan New England, who was silenced, ostracized, exiled. So it was with George Sand, who was ridiculed and reviled, and her contemporary George Eliot—both great writers forced to use male pen names to be published—both considered female aberrants, and treated accordingly by the male literary establishments of their time. Male pen names—the enforced masquerading as men in order to be taken seriously as artists at all—were also used of necessity by the genius Bronte sisters, one of whom, Emily, was in effect killed by the world’s attitude toward her work. The other, Charlotte, literally vomited to death during pregnancy. So it was with Elizabeth Barrett (let’s begin using the name she wrote under, shall we, even if it was her father’s; we needn’t compound the indignity any more by adding her husband’s for identification): Elizabeth Barrett, who was an articulate feminist and radical writer and a poet whose effect on Emily Dickinson was the one influence that later writer acknowledged; Elizabeth Barrett, who read Mary Wollstonecraft when she was fourteen—and whose work has been so trivialized by male literary historians that her image is now one of the stereotyped “poetess” reclining in lavender and lace on her sofa, writing love poems to her more famous husband. Made more famous by whom, we might ask.
So it has been all along. So it was with Akhmatova, who saw the suffering of Russian women, wrote of it, and then saw the grim prison-wall reply of Russian men. So it was with Anna Wickham, dead of despair by her own hand, a hand that had written about the female condition. So it was with Virginia Woolf, for whom the writing of these truths became too much to endure—another suicide. Or with Charlotte Mew, driven by patriarchal literary indifference to suicide. Another suicide. I call it murder, you see. As I call the deaths of great women artists such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday—poets both—murder. As I call the death of Sylvia Plath, revered and reviled and analyzed over and over in the desperate attempt to defuse that electric voice—I call it murder.
And these are only a few such examples. Most of the above wrote in English. And most even squeaked through to the extent that we know they existed. There have been other such women, singing their genius onto the page (when they were allowed to learn how to read and write, that is) or singing it onto the empty air, in every language humans are capable of. What of the lost ones—the creators who died never having been permitted to solidify their art in something lasting at all? Is that censorship? What of those who did create art but were refused publication or gallery showings or performance of their work—because they were women and to give them such credence even if (or especially if) they deserved it would be to “outrage public morals”? What of those who scribbled their insights and visions on diary leaves, letters, recipe books, in between housework and child care and husband-nurturing? What are the names of these silenced ones? Who can compute the loss to human society of their voices, their knowledge, their creative passion?
The censor has used differing means. He has quite a repertoire. The repression has ranged from blatant (death, exile, imprisonment) to subtle (male pen names, ridicule, distortion). But such categorization and comparison seem obscene when suffering is the end result. What are “public morals and good customs”? Does patriarchally defined public morality include the rationalization of everything from Vietnam to Watergate, from pollution of life-sustaining natural resources to the colonization and murder of the Angolans? And what are “good customs”? Rape? Enforced sterilization or enforced child-bearing? “Proper” sexual conduct for women—as defined by men? Economic deprivation, educational discrimination, emotional repression, psychological channeling, artistic censorship, political invisibility, spiritual suffocation? “Good customs” all—for women. Honored traditions all—originated by men.
Today, such morality and such customs are being challenged, not only by individual women of courage and genius forced to fight alone, without support, accompanied only by their despair. Today we speak in all languages. We see past the patriarchal barriers of age, race, class, economic distinction, and national boundaries. We will not be ignored. We will not be patronized. We will not accept the institutions which have tried to destroy us, whether the institution be one of a certain type of sexuality, or a certain mode of motherhood, or a certain standard of literary excellence which either corrupts us or indulges us, when it notices us at all.
Today Maria Isabel Barreño, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho Da Costa are not alone. They are three specific voices singing in a great and varied chorus which is determined, whatever its differences, to speak the unspeakable, to create our song even out of our singing, to approach the universe within and without us on terms which have never been conceived, let alone allowed.
Join us. You have fingers—write or wire or telephone the Portuguese Embassy, the Portuguese Consulate, the Portuguese Mission to the United Nations, the Portuguese Airlines and other businesses in this city. You have feet—visit these places, picket them, pressure them. You have tongues—speak of these three women, tell their/our story. Tell of their bravery, their risk. Tell of the extra punishment inherent in long prison sentences for women who must think about their children on the outside. You have minds—act.
Most of all, open yourselves to what you as women are feeling, to what you as men are being told—more clearly now than at any other time in history. The survival of sentient life on this planet depends upon it.
Nor will we be stopped this time. There are too many of us. Furthermore, if speaking out was made impossible for us before, silence is impossible now.
Listen, then, to the inexhaustible, uncontainable words of the Three Marias. Different voices speak them, but they sing for all of us.
January 1974
1 I regret to say that when the book was published in the United States, the English translation seemed to me somewhat less inspiring than the selections done by Gilda Grillo and Louise Bernikow for this evening’s performance.
A NEW FABLE OF THE BURNING TIME
As the sixties ceded to the seventies and the Vietnam War ended, what had been called the New Left in America was directionless and dying—and those who remained in it frequently blamed the demise on the Feminist Movement. How ironic—that the vision originally expressed so stirringly in the early SDS “Port Huron Statement”1 should have degenerated into the cock-rock culture celebrated at the Woodstock rapes and the Altamont murder; into the jargon and one-upman(sic)ship of a central-committee mentality. How tragic that the uniquely A
merican character-mixture of impatience and pride and violence should have put its indelible mark on a movement which was supposedly antipathetic to it. The failure was due to “the patriarchy within,” not to the Feminist Movement. It is decidedly true, though, that as women in the Left (and Right and Center, for that matter) began to see a similarity in all those groups—patriarchal structure and content, one might call it—as such women began to move out on our own and create a stronger, more independent, and more universal movement of our own, those “divorced” groups undeniably were left high and dry without their basic labor force of secretaries and cooks and speechwriters and Panther-Breakfast-program fixers (at 4:00 A.M.) and mimeograph-machine churners. The New Left, like the Old (and every other direction including north, south, up and down), ran on womanpower. And woman-power was now beginning to be recycled toward women.
But the vision died hard and bitterly, and blame was fixed unfairly wherever it could be smeared. The early 1970’s have seen a mini-McCarthyism among radicals (and I don’t mean Eugene McCarthy—I mean The Other One). Suspicion, accusation and counter-accusation seemed to feed like birds of prey on the carrion of the sixties. Watergate had made the most fantastic paranoia seemed perfectly rational, and panic, that most contagious of superficial emotions, seized many good women in its grasp.
The last article in this section, my little “New Fable,” while written in loving friendship and with a particular relationship in mind, was also an attempt to comment on that panic, to shake us into a better mood about one another, and to remind us, possibly, of the concrete and continuing danger we claimed to be fighting (instead of each other).
Humor can be a weapon of extraordinary power. For years we feminists have been accused of having lost our sense of humor because we no longer chuckle good-naturedly at dumb-blonde stories, farmer’s-daughter jokes, and other examples of boyish wit. More recently, though, our own style has been surfacing, and it has all the marks of classic “oppressed” humor; it is sharp, rich, acrid, sourly perceptive, and sometimes self-deprecating, like the humor of the black street-rap, the Yiddish curse, the Irish yarn. It is a sign of health that we are ready now to display our creation to the world. Much great humor is born of pain; not surprisingly does one speak of “laughing till we cried.” For those who would use that pain to probe their way to freedom, another skill must be learned, that of crying till we laugh.