put into them by male relatives who hate them for rebelling
against the limits of the female role, or against the conditions
of female servitude. They will not empty prisons filled with
women who, in order to survive, whored; or who, after being
raped, killed the rapist; or who, while being beaten, killed the
man who was killing them. These reforms will not stop men
from living off exploited female domestic labor, nor will these
reforms stop men from reinforcing male identity by psychologically victimizing women in so-called “love” relationships.
And no personal accommodation within the system of
patriarchy will stop this relentless gynocide. Under patriarchy,
no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother
children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past,
present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
Before we can live and love, we will have to hone ourselves
into a revolutionary sisterhood. That means that we must stop
supporting the men who oppress us; that we must refuse to
feed and clothe and clean up after them; that we must refuse
to let them take their sustenance from our lives. That means
that we will have to divest ourselves of the identity we have
been trained to as females—that we will have to divest ourselves of all traces of the masochism we have been told is synonymous with being female. That means that we will have
to attack and destroy every institution, law, philosophy, religion, custom, and habit of this patriarchy—this patriarchy that feeds on our “dirty” blood, that is built on our “trivial”
labor.
Halloween is the appropriate time to commit ourselves to
this revolutionary sisterhood. On this night we remember our
dead. On this night we remember together that nine million
women were killed because men said that they were carnal,
malicious, and wicked. On this night we know that they live
now through us.
Let us together rename this night Witches’ Eve. Let us together make it a time of mourning: for all women who are victims of gynocide, dead, in jail, in mental institutions, raped,
sterilized against their wills, brutalized. And let us on this
night consecrate our lives to developing the revolutionary
sisterhood— the political strategies, the feminist actions—
which will stop for all time the devastating violence against
us.
4
The Rape A tro city
and the Boy N ext Door
I want to talk to you about rape— rape—what it is, who does
it, to whom it is done, how it is done, why it is done, and what
to do about it so that it will not be done any more.
First, though, I want to make a few introductory remarks. *
From 1964 to 1965 and from 1966 to 1968, I went to Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington at that time was still a women’s school, or, as people said then, a girls’ school. It
was a very insular place—entirely isolated from the Vermont
Delivered at State University of New York at Stony Brook, March 1, 1975;
University of Pennsylvania, April 25, 1975; State University of New York
College at Old Westbury, May 10, 1975; Womanbooks, New York City,
July 1, 1975; Woodstock Women's Center, Woodstock, New York, July 3,
1975; Suffolk County Community College, October 9, 1975; Queens College,
City University of New York, April 2 6 , 1976.
*
These introductory remarks were delivered only at schools where there
was no women’s studies program.
community in which it was situated, exclusive, expensive.
There was a small student body highly concentrated in the
arts, a low student-faculty ratio, and an apocryphal tradition
of intellectual and sexual “freedom. ” In general, Bennington
was a very distressing kind of playpen where wealthy young
women were educated to various accomplishments which
would insure good marriages for the respectable and good
affairs for the bohemians. At that time, there was more actual
freedom for women at Bennington than at most schools— in
general, we could come and go as we liked, whereas most
other schools had rigid curfews and controls; and in general
we could wear what we wanted, whereas in most other schools
women still had to conform to rigid dress codes. We were
encouraged to read and write and make pots, and in general
to take ourselves seriously, even though the faculty did not
take us seriously at all. Being better educated to reality than
we were, they, the faculty, knew what we did not imagine—
that most of us would take our highfalutin ideas about James
and Joyce and Homer and invest them in marriages and volunteer work. Most of us, as the mostly male faculty knew, would fall by the wayside into silence and all our good intentions and vast enthusiasms had nothing to do with what would happen to us once we left that insulated playpen. At the time I
went to Bennington, there was no feminist consciousness there
or anywhere else at all. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique concerned housewives— we thought that it had nothing to do with us. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was not yet published. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was not yet published. We were in the process of becoming very well-educated women— we were already very privileged women—
and yet not many of us had ever heard the story of the movement for women’s suffrage in this country or Europe. In the Amerikan history courses I took, women’s suffrage was not
mentioned. The names of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, or
Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were never
mentioned. Our ignorance was so complete that we did not
know that we had been consigned from birth to that living
legal and social death called marriage. We imagined, in our
ignorance, that we might be novelists and philosophers. A rare
few among us even aspired to be mathematicians and biologists. We did not know that our professors had a system of beliefs and convictions that designated us as an inferior gender
class, and that that system of beliefs and convictions was virtually universal—the cherished assumption of most of the writers, philosophers, and historians we were so ardently
studying. We did not know, for instance, to pick an obvious