[A.R., 1986: I am glad to update the first annotation in this footnote. “The New” Our Bodies, Ourselves (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) contains an expanded chapter on “Loving Women: Lesbian Life and Relationships” and furthermore emphasizes choices for women throughout—in terms of sexuality, health care, family, politics, etc.]
6Jonathan Katz, ed., Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976).
7Nancy Sahli, “Smashing Women’s Relationships before the Fall,” Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture 8 (1979): 17–27.
8This is a book which I have publicly endorsed. I would still do so, though with the above caveat. It is only since beginning to write this article that I fully appreciated how enormous is the unasked question in Ehrenreich and English’s book.
9See, for example, Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, N.J Prentice-Hall, 1979); Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Diana Russell and Nicole van de Ven, eds., Proceedings of the International Tribunal of Crimes against Women (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes, 1976); and Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975); Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence against Women (Feminist Alliance against Rape, P.O. Box 21033, Washington, D.C. 20009).
[A.R., 1986: Work on both incest and on woman battering has appeared in the 1980s which I did not cite in the essay. See Florence Rush, The Best-kept Secret (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980); Louise Armstrong, Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speakout on Incest (New York: Pocket Books, 1979); Sandra Butler, Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest (San Francisco: New Glide, 1978); F. Delacoste and F. Newman, eds., Fight Back!: Feminist Resistance to Male Violence (Minneapolis: Cleis Press, 1981); Judy Freespirit, Daddy’s Girl: An Incest Survivor’s Story (Langlois, Ore.: Diaspora Distribution, 1982); Judith Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Toni McNaron and Yarrow Morgan, eds., Voices in the Night: Women Speaking about Incest (Minneapolis: Cleis Press, 1982); and Betsy Warrior’s richly informative, multipurpose compilation of essays, statistics, listings, and facts, the Battered Women’s Directory (formerly entitled Working on Wife Abuse), 8th ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: 1982).]
10Dinnerstein, p. 272.
11Chodorow, pp. 197–98.
12Ibid., pp. 198–99.
13Ibid., p. 200.
14Kathleen Gough, “The Origin of the Family,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna [Rapp] Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 60–70.
15Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 216–19.
16Anna Demeter, Legal Kidnapping (Boston: Beacon, 1977), pp. xx, 126–28.
17Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978) pp. 139–41, pp. 163–65.
18Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973); Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Dutton, 1974), pp. 118–54; Daly, pp. 178–222.
19See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929), and id., Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace, [1938] 1966); Tillie Olsen, Silences (Boston: Delacorte, 1978); Michelle Cliff, “The Resonance of Interruption,” Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture 8 (1979): 29–37.
20Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), pp. 347–51; Olsen, pp. 22–46.
21Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 93.
22Fran P. Hosken, “The Violence of Power: Genital Mutilation of Females,” Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics 6 (1979): 28–35; Diana Russell and Nicole van de Ven, eds., Proceedings of the Informational Tribunal of Crimes Against Women (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes, 1976) pp. 194–195.
[A.R., 1986: See especially “Circumcision of Girls,” in Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (Boston: Beacon, 1982), pp. 33–43.]
23Barry, pp. 163–64.
24The issue of “lesbian sadomasochism” needs to be examined in terms of dominant cultures teachings about the relation of sex and violence. I believe this to be another example of the “double life” of women.
25Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 15–16.
26Ibid., p. 174.
27Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
28MacKinnon, p. 219. Susan Schecter writes: “The push for heterosexual union at whatever cost is so intense that . . . it has become a cultural force of its own that creates battering. The ideology of romantic love and its jealous possession of the partner as property provide the masquerade for what can become severe abuse” (Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence against Women [July–August 1979]: 50–51).
29MacKinnon, p. 298.
30Ibid., p. 220.
31Ibid., p. 221.
32Barry, op. cit.
[A.R., 1986: See also Kathleen Barry, Charlotte Bunch, and Shirley Castley, eds., International Feminism: Networking against Female Sexual Slavery (New York: International Women’s Tribune Center, 1984).]
33Barry, p. 33.
34Ibid., p. 103.
35Ibid., p. 5.
36Ibid., p. 100.
[A.R. 1986: This statement has been taken as claiming that “all women are victims” purely and simply, or that “all heterosexuality equals sexual slavery.” I would say, rather, that all women are affected, though differently, by dehumanizing attitudes and practices directed at women as a group.]
37Ibid., p. 218.
38Ibid., p. 140.
39Ibid., p. 172.
40Elsewhere I have suggested that male identification has been a powerful source of white women’s racism and that it has often been women already seen as “disloyal” to male codes and systems who have actively battled against it (Adrienne Rich, “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 [New York: Norton, 1979]).
41Barry, p. 220.
42Susan Cavin, “Lesbian Origins” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1978), unpublished, ch. 6.
[A.R., 1986: This dissertation was recently published as Lesbian Origins (San Francisco: Ism Press, 1986).]
43For my perception of heterosexuality as an economic institution I am indebted to Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker, who allowed me to read the unpublished manuscript of their book Woman’s Worth: Sexual Economics and the World of Women (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
44I would suggest that lesbian existence has been most recognized and tolerated where it has resembled a “deviant” version of heterosexuality—e.g., where lesbians have, like Stein and Toklas, played heterosexual roles (or seemed to in public) and have been chiefly identified with male culture. See also Claude E. Schaeffer, “The Kuterai Female Berdache: Courier, Guide, Prophetess and Warrior,” Ethnohistory 12, no. 3 (Summer 1965): 193–236. (Berdache: “an individual of a definite physiological sex [m. or f.] who assumes the role and status of the opposite sex and who is viewed by the community as being of one sex physiologically but as having assumed the role and status of the opposite sex” [Schaeffer, p. 231].) Lesbian existence has also been relegated to an upper-class phenomenon, an elite decadence (as in the fascination with Paris salon lesbians such as Renée Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney), to the obscuring of such “common women” as Judy Grahn depicts in her The Work of a Common Woman (Oakland, Calif: Diana Press, 1978) and True to Life Adventure Stories (Oakland, Calif.: Diana Press, 1978).
45Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 15.
46“In a hostile world in which women are-not supposed to survive except in relation with and in service to men, entire communities of women are simply erased. History tends to bury what it seeks to reject” (Blanche W. Co
ok, “ ‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination’: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 4 [Summer 1979]: 719–20). The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City is one attempt to preserve contemporary documents on lesbian existence—a project of enormous value and meaning, working against the continuing censorship and obliteration of relationships, networks, communities in other archives and elsewhere in the culture.
47[A.R., 1986: The shared historical and spiritual “crossover” functions of lesbians and gay men in cultures past and present are traced by Judy Grahn in Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon, 1984). I now think we have much to learn both from the uniquely female aspects of lesbian existence and from the complex “gay” identity we share with gay men.]
48Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984).
49Adrienne Rich, “Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, p. 209; H.D., Tribute to Freud (Oxford: Carcanet, 1971), pp. 50–54.
50Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 126.
51Gracia Clark, “The Beguines: A Mediaeval Women’s Community,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1975): 73–80.
52See Denise Paulmé, ed., Women of Tropical Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 7, 266–67. Some of these sororities are described as “a kind of defensive syndicate against the male element,” their aims being “to offer concerted resistance to an oppressive patriarchate,” “independence in relation to one’s husband and with regard to motherhood, mutual aid, satisfaction of personal revenge.” See also Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” in Sister Outsider, pp. 45–52; Marjorie Topley, “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung,” in Women in Chinese Society, ed. M. Wolf and R. Witke (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978), pp. 67–89; Agnes Smedley, Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution, ed. J. MacKinnon and S. MacKinnon (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 103–10.
53See Rosalind Petchesky, “Dissolving the Hyphen: A Report on Marxist-Feminist Groups 1–5,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p. 387.
54[A.R., 1986: See Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 102; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 133.]
55Russell and van de Ven, pp. 42–43, 56–57.
56I am indebted to Jonathan Katz’s Gay American History (op. cit.) for bringing to my attention Hansberry’s letters to The Ladder and to Barbara Grier for supplying me with copies of relevant pages from The Ladder, quoted here by permission of Barbara Grier. See also the reprinted series of The Ladder, ed. Jonathan Katz et al. (New York: Arno, 1975), and Deirdre Carmody, “Letters by Eleanor Roosevelt Detail Friendship with Lorena Hickok,” New York Times (October 21, 1979).
57Meridel LeSueur, The Girl (Cambridge, Mass.: West End Press, 1978), pp. 10–11. LeSueur describes, in an afterword, how this book was drawn from the writings and oral narrations of women in the Workers Alliance who met as a writers’ group during the Depression.
58Ibid., p. 20.
59Ibid., pp. 53–54.
60Ibid., p. 55.
61Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam, 1973), pp. 103–4, 149. I am indebted to Lorraine Bethel’s essay “ ‘This Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982).
62See Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel, “Lesbians in the Mainstream: The Image of Lesbians in Recent Commercial Fiction,” Conditions 6 (1979): 82–105.
63See Russell and van de Ven, p. 40: “Few heterosexual women realize their lack of free choice about their sexuality, and few realize how and why compulsory heterosexuality is also a crime against them.”
64Lorraine Bethel, “This Infinity of Conscious Pain: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Literary Female Tradition,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, eds. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982) 176–88.
65Dorothy Dinnerstein, the most recent writer to quote this passage, adds ominously: “But what has to be added to her account is that these ‘women enlaced’ are sheltering each other not just from what men want to do to them, but also from what they want to do to each other” (Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise [New York: Harper & Row, 1976], p. 103). The fact is, however, that woman-to-woman violence is a minute grain in the universe of male-against-female violence perpetuated and rationalized in every social institution.
66Conversation with Blanche W. Cook, New York City, March 1979.
67See note 9, above, pp. 375–76.
“Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982)
1Adrienne Rich, “Readings of History,” in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 36–40.
2In a similar way the phrase “That’s white of you” implied that you were behaving with the superior decency and morality expected of white but not of Black people.
3James Baldwin, “The Harlem Ghetto,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955).
4Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Lucy S. Davidowicz, The War against the Jews 1933–1945 (1975) (New York: Bantam, 1979).
“The Eye of the Outsider: Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems,
1927–1979” (1983)
1It’s worth noting that Bishop, clearly selective toward her own work, chose not to include the poem “A Norther—Key West” in her canon. In this poem, dated 1962, the observer is distanced and her perceptions distorted by an artificial and brittle tone, betraying an attempted and impossible objectivity. Nor did she include “House Guest” (pre-1969), in which the depressed live-in seamstress is surveyed much as Manuelzinho is—from a “liberal” middle-class perspective. Here, though the poet has evoked a certain tone in which domestic employers have forever discussed employees—frustrated, half-guilty, uncomprehending—she has not found a way to critique the tone and break through the inevitable stereotyping of the seamstress. I am, however, grateful to be able to read these poems and see something of the process of Bishop’s own self-criticism and explorations into difficult territory.
“Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet” (1984)
1Edward Said, “Literature As Values,” New York Times Book Review (September 4, 1983), p. 9.
2Nancy Morejón, “Elogia de la Dialéctica,” in Breaking the Silences: Twentieth Century Poetry by Cuban Women, ed. Margaret Randall (1982, Pulp Press, Box 3868 MPO, Vancouver, Canada V6B 3Z3).
3[Editor’s note] The author of “I Am Listening: A Lyric of Roots” is today Max Wolf Valerio, a transsexual man. See Credits, page 393.
4Anita Valerio, “I Am Listening: A Lyric of Roots,” in A Gathering of Spirit, Sinister Wisdom 22/23 (1983, ed. Beth Brant): 212–13.
5See p. 373, “What Does a Woman Need to Know,” note 1.
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993, 2003)
“Woman and Bird”
1Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1979) is the North American poet who most intuited, explored, and, in her work, embodied this triangulation.
2Beth Brant, Mohawk Trail (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1985), p. 96.
“Voices from the Air”
1John Webster, Tragedies (London: Vision Press, 1946), p. 149.
2Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), p. 358.
“The Distance Between Language and Violence”
1John Keats, “Endymion,” in The Poetical Wor
ks of John Keats, 2 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1899), I, p. 85.
2All passages from William Blake are from The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1970).
3Allen Tate, “Sonnets at Christmas,” in The Voice That Is Great within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, ed. Hayden Carruth (New York: Bantam, 1970), p. 221.
4Allen Tate, “Remarks on the Southern Religion,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), pp. 174–75.
Essential Essays Page 39