¶ 1986: This sentence seems facile to me in placing too much weight on the “self-acceptance” of the lesbian daughter and denying the mother’s responsibility for her homophobia.
** A woman of my mother’s generation told me that her husband had effectively dampened her intimate friendship with another woman by telling her he was sure the woman was a lesbian. A hundred years before, their friendship would have been taken for granted, even to the husband’s leaving the conjugal bed when a wife’s woman friend came to visit, so that the two women could share as many hours, day and night, as possible.
†† 1986: Here is an obvious example of unstated class generalization. For large numbers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century freedwomen and immigrant women, no such withdrawal was mandated or possible.
‡‡ The above rendering is from C. Kerenyi’s book Eleusis. For a verse translation of the entire hymn to Demeter, see Thelma Sargent, The Homeric Hymns (New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 2–14.
§§ Simone de Beauvoir says of her mother that: “Generally speaking, I thought of her with no particular feeling. Yet in my sleep (although my father only made very rare and then insignificant appearances) she often played a most important part: she blended with Sartre, and we were happy together. And then the dream would turn into a nightmare: why was I living with her once more? How had I come to be in her power again? So our former relationship lived on in me in its double aspect—a subjection that I loved and hated” (A Very Easy Death [New York: Warner Paperback, 1973], pp. 119–20).
¶¶ Nancy Chodorow cites examples of communities—among the Rajput and Brahmins in India—where, although sons are considered more desirable, mothers show a special attachment to their daughters, and she comments that “people in both groups say that this is out of sympathy for the future plight of their daughters, who will have to leave their natal family for a strange and usually oppressive postmarital household” (“Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphère, eds., Woman, Culture and Society [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974], p. 47). But this kind of female bonding, though far preferable to rejection or indifference, arises from identification with the daughter’s future victimization. There is no attempt on the mothers’ part to change the cycle of repetitions into which the daughters’ lives are being woven.
*** A woman recently described in my hearing how her friend’s daughter had been on the verge of dropping out of architecture school because of the harassment she encountered there as a woman. It was her mother who urged her to stay, to fight a political battle against sexism, and get the training she wanted.
††† There are enough single women now adopting children, enough unmarried mothers keeping their children, to suggest that if mothering were not an enterprise which so increases a woman’s social vulnerability, many more “childless” women would choose to have children of their own.
‡‡‡ She was later to bear a child, in Italy, to a man ten years younger than herself, and to die in the wreck of the ship on which she, the child, and the father were returning to America.
§§§ See, for example, Albert Memmi’s criticism of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: she is suspect because she did not exercise what Memmi glibly describes as her “woman’s right” to bear children (Dominated Man [Boston: Beacon, 1968], pp. 150–51).
¶¶¶ Mary Daly has suggested to me that the “nonbiological mother” is really a “spirit-sister” (a phrase which affirms her in terms of what she is rather than what she isn’t).
**** 1986: The above passage overpersonalizes and does not, it seems to me now, give enough concrete sense of the actual position of the Black domestic worker caring for white children. Whatever the white child has received both in care and caring, the Black woman has given under enormous constraints. As Trudier Harris sums it up, “Control of time, wages and work was solely in the hands of the white woman.” Black women domestic workers were often statistically invisible in the labor market and were expected to behave invisibly in the white home, existing as a role and not a person: “She must maneuver . . . in order to salvage what portion of dignity she can, to resist depersonalization and dehumanization. . . . The mistress expects the maid to be a good mammy simply because, she believes, it’s in her blood.” (Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982], pp. 10, 13, 20. See also Alice Childress, Like One of the Family . . . Conversations from a Domestic’s Life [New York: Independence, 1956].)
Blood, Bread, and Poetry
Selected Prose 1979–1985
WHAT DOES A WOMAN NEED TO KNOW? (1979)
I have been very much moved that you, the class of 1979, chose me for your commencement speaker. It is important to me to be here, in part because Smith is one of the original colleges for women, but also because she has chosen to continue identifying herself as a women’s college. We are at a point in history where this fact has enormous potential, even if that potential is as yet unrealized. The possibilities for the future education of women that haunt these buildings and grounds are enormous, when we think of what an independent women’s college might be: a college dedicated both to teaching women what women need to know and, by the same token, to changing the landscape of knowledge itself. The germ of those possibilities lies symbolically in The Sophia Smith Collection, an archive much in need of expansion and increase, but which by its very existence makes the statement that women’s lives and work are valued here and that our foresisters, buried and diminished in male-centered scholarship, are a living presence, necessary and precious to us.
Suppose we were to ask ourselves simply: What does a woman need to know to become a self-conscious, self-defining human being? Doesn’t she need a knowledge of her own history, of her much-politicized female body, of the creative genius of women of the past—the skills and crafts and techniques and visions possessed by women in other times and cultures, and how they have been rendered anonymous, censored, interrupted, devalued? Doesn’t she, as one of that majority who are still denied equal rights as citizens, enslaved as sexual prey, unpaid or underpaid as workers, withheld from her own power—doesn’t she need an analysis of her condition, a knowledge of the women thinkers of the past who have reflected on it, a knowledge, too, of women’s world-wide individual rebellions and organized movements against economic and social injustice, and how these have been fragmented and silenced?
Doesn’t she need to know how seemingly natural states of being, like heterosexuality, like motherhood, have been enforced and institutionalized to deprive her of power? Without such education, women have lived and continue to live in ignorance of our collective context, vulnerable to the projections of men’s fantasies about us as they appear in art, in literature, in the sciences, in the media in the so-called humanistic studies. I suggest that not anatomy, but enforced ignorance, has been a crucial key to our powerlessness.
There is—and I say this with sorrow—there is no women’s college today which is providing young women with the education they need for survival as whole persons in a world which denies women wholeness—that knowledge which, in the words of Coleridge, “returns again as power.” The existence of Women’s Studies courses offers at least some kind of life line. But even Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom. The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture. And the ideology of the education you have just spent four years acquiring in a women’s college has been largely, if not entirely, the ideology of white male supremacy, a construct of m
ale subjectivity. The silences, the empty spaces, the language itself, with its excision of the female, the methods of discourse tell us as much as the content, once we learn to watch for what is left out, to listen for the unspoken, to study the patterns of established science and scholarship with an outsider’s eye. One of the dangers of a privileged education for women is that we may lose the eye of the outsider and come to believe that those patterns hold for humanity, for the universal, and that they include us.
And so I want to talk today about privilege and about tokenism and about power. Everything I can say to you on this subject comes hard-won, from the lips of a woman privileged by class and skin color, a father’s favorite daughter, educated at Radcliffe, which was then casually referred to as the Harvard “Annex.” Much of the first four decades of my life was spent in a continuous tension between the world the Fathers taught me to see, and had rewarded me for seeing, and the flashes of insight that came through the eye of the outsider. Gradually those flashes of insight, which at times could seem like brushes with madness, began to demand that I struggle to connect them with each other, to insist that I take them seriously. It was only when I could finally affirm the outsider’s eye as the source of a legitimate and coherent vision, that I began to be able to do the work I truly wanted to do, live the kind of life I truly wanted to live, instead of carrying out the assignments I had been given as a privileged woman and a token.
For women, all privilege is relative. Some of you were not born with class or skin-color privilege; but you all have the privilege of education, even if it is an education which has largely denied you knowledge of yourselves as women. You have, to begin with, the privilege of literacy; and it is well for us to remember that, in an age of increasing illiteracy, 60 percent of the world’s illiterates are women. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of illiterate men in the world rose by 8 million, while the number of illiterate women rose by 40 million.1 And the number of illiterate women is increasing. Beyond literacy, you have the privilege of training and tools which can allow you to go beyond the content of your education and re-educate yourselves—to debrief yourselves, we might call it, of the false messages of your education in this culture, the messages telling you that women have not really cared about power or learning or creative opportunities because of a psychobiological need to serve men and produce children; that only a few atypical women have been exceptions to this rule; the messages telling you that woman’s experience is neither normative nor central to human experience. You have the training and the tools to do independent research, to evaluate data, to criticize, and to express in language and visual forms what you discover. This is a privilege, yes, but only if you do not give up in exchange for it the deep knowledge of the unprivileged, the knowledge that, as a woman, you have historically been viewed and still are viewed as existing, not in your own right, but in the service of men. And only if you refuse to give up your capacity to think as a woman, even though in the graduate schools and professions to which many of you will be going you will be praised and rewarded for “thinking like a man.”
The word power is highly charged for women. It has been long associated for us with the use of force, with rape, with the stockpiling of weapons, with the ruthless accrual of wealth and the hoarding of resources, with the power that acts only in its own interest, despising and exploiting the powerless—including women and children. The effects of this kind of power are all around us, even literally in the water we drink and the air we breathe, in the form of carcinogens and radioactive wastes. But for a long time now, feminists have been talking about redefining power, about that meaning of power which returns to the root—posse, potere, pouvoir: to be able, to have the potential, to possess and use one’s energy of creation—transforming power. An early objection to feminism—in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—was that it would make women behave like men—ruthlessly, exploitatively, oppressively. In fact, radical feminism looks to a transformation of human relationships and structures in which power, instead of a thing to be hoarded by a few, would be released to and from within the many, shared in the form of knowledge, expertise, decision making, access to tools, as well as in the basic forms of food and shelter and health care and literacy. Feminists—and many nonfeminists—are, and rightly so, still concerned with what power would mean in such a society, and with the relative differences in power among and between women here and now.
Which brings me to a third meaning of power where women are concerned: the false power which masculine society offers to a few women, on condition that they use it to maintain things as they are, and that they essentially “think like men.” This is the meaning of female tokenism: that power withheld from the vast majority of women is offered to a few, so that it appears that any “truly qualified” woman can gain access to leadership, recognition, and reward; hence, that justice based on merit actually prevails. The token woman is encouraged to see herself as different from most other women, as exceptionally talented and deserving, and to separate herself from the wider female condition; and she is perceived by “ordinary” women as separate also, perhaps even as stronger than themselves.
Because you are, within the limits of all women’s ultimate outsiderhood, a privileged group of women, it is extremely important for your future sanity that you understand the way tokenism functions. Its most immediate contradiction is that, while it seems to offer the individual token woman a means to realize her creativity, to influence the course of events, it also, by exacting of her certain kinds of behavior and style, acts to blur her outsider’s eye, which could be her real source of power and vision. Losing her outsider’s vision, she loses the insight which both binds her to other women and affirms her in herself. Tokenism essentially demands that the token deny her identification with women as a group, especially with women less privileged than she: if she is a lesbian, that she deny her relationships with individual women; that she perpetuate rules and structures and criteria and methodologies which have functioned to exclude women; that she renounce or leave undeveloped the critical perspective of her female consciousness. Women unlike herself—poor women, women of color, waitresses, secretaries, housewives in the supermarket, prostitutes, old women—become invisible to her; they may represent too acutely what she has escaped or wished to flee.
President Conway tells me that ever-increasing numbers of you are going on from Smith to medical and law schools. The news, on the face of it, is good: that, thanks to the feminist struggle of the past decade, more doors into these two powerful professions are open to women. I would like to believe that any profession would be better for having more women practicing it, and that any woman practicing law or medicine would use her knowledge and skill to work to transform the realm of health care and the interpretations of the law, to make them responsive to the needs of all those—women, people of color, children, the aged, the dispossessed—for whom they function today as repressive controls. I would like to believe this, but it will not happen even if 50 percent of the members of these professions are women, unless those women refuse to be made into token insiders, unless they zealously preserve the outsider’s view and the outsider’s consciousness.
For no woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the shamanesses, the fierce marketwomen of the Ibo Women’s War, the marriage-resisting women silkworkers of prerevolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe, the Beguines of the twelfth century, who formed independent women’s orders outside the domination of the Church, the women of the Paris Commune who marched on Versailles, the uneducated housewives of the Women’s Cooperative Guild in England who memorized poetry over the washtub and organized against their oppression as mothers, the women thinkers discr
edited as “strident,” “shrill,” “crazy,” or “deviant” whose courage to be heretical, to speak their truths, we so badly need to draw upon in our own lives. I believe that every woman’s soul is haunted by the spirits of earlier women who fought for their unmet needs and those of their children and their tribes and their peoples, who refused to accept the prescriptions of a male church and state, who took risks and resisted, as women today—like Inez Garcia, Yvonne Wanrow, Joan Little, Cassandra Peten—are fighting their rapists and batterers. Those spirits dwell in us, trying to speak to us. But we can choose to be deaf; and tokenism, the myth of the “special” woman, the unmothered Athena sprung from her father’s brow, can deafen us to their voices.
In this decade now ending, as more women are entering the professions (though still suffering sexual harassment in the workplace, though still, if they have children, carrying two full-time jobs, though still vastly outnumbered by men in upper-level and decision-making jobs), we need most profoundly to remember that early insight of the feminist movement as it evolved in the late sixties: that no woman is liberated until we all are liberated. The media flood us with messages to the contrary, telling us that we live in an era when “alternate life styles” are freely accepted, when “marriage contracts” and “the new intimacy” are revolutionizing heterosexual relationships, that shared parenting and the “new fatherhood” will change the world. And we live in a society leeched upon by the “personal growth” and “human potential” industry, by the delusion that individual self-fulfillment can be found in thirteen weeks or a weekend, that the alienation and injustice experienced by women, by Black and Third World people, by the poor, in a world ruled by white males, in a society which fails to meet the most basic needs and which is slowly poisoning itself, can be mitigated or dispersed by Transcendental Meditation. Perhaps the most succinct expression of this message I have seen is the appearance of a magazine for women called Self. The insistence of the feminist movement, that each woman’s selfhood is precious, that the feminine ethic of self-denial and self-sacrifice must give way to a true woman identification, which would affirm our connectedness with all women, is perverted into a commercially profitable and politically debilitating narcissism. It is important for each of you, toward whom many of these messages are especially directed, to discriminate clearly between “liberated life style” and feminist struggle, and to make a conscious choice.
Essential Essays Page 16