matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who
gives birth.
We need not continue to have children in order to claim the
dignity of realizing our own capacity for physical courage. This
capacity is ours; it belongs to us, and it has belonged to us
since the beginning of time. What we must do now is to reclaim this capacity— take it out of the service of men; make it visible to ourselves; and determine how to use it in the service
of feminist revolution.
If we were not invisible to ourselves, we would also see that
we have always had a resolute commitment to and faith in
human life which have made us heroic in our nurturance and
sustenance of lives other than our own. Under all circum
stances—in war, sickness, famine, drought, poverty, in times
of incalculable misery and despair—women have done the
work required for the survival of the species. We have not
pushed a button, or organized a military unit, to do the work
of emotionally and physically sustaining life. We have done it
one by one, and one to one. For thousands of years, in my
view, women have been the only exemplars of moral and spiritual courage—we have sustained life, while men have taken it. This capacity for sustaining life belongs to us. We must
reclaim it—take it out of the service of men, so that it will
never again be used by them in their own criminal interests.
Also, if we were not invisible to ourselves, we would see
that most women can bear, and have for centuries borne, any
anguish—physical or mental—for the sake of those they love.
It is time to reclaim this kind of courage too, and to use it for
ourselves and each other.
For us, historically, courage has always been a function of
our resolute commitment to life. Courage as we know it has
developed from that commitment. We have always faced
death for the sake of life; and even in the bitterness of our
domestic slavery, we were sustained by the knowledge that we
were ourselves sustaining life.
We are faced, then, with two facts of female existence
under patriarchy: (1) that we are taught fear as a function of
femininity; and (2) that under the very slave conditions which
we must repudiate, we have developed a heroic commitment
to sustaining and nurturing life.
In our lifetimes, we will not be able to eradicate that first
fact of female existence under patriarchy: we will continue to
be afraid of the punishments which are inevitable as we challenge male supremacy; we will find it hard to root out the masochism which is so deeply embedded within us; we will
suffer ambivalence and conflict, most of us, throughout our
lives as we advance our revolutionary feminist presence.
But, if we are resolute, we will also deepen and expand that
heroic commitment to sustaining and nurturing life. We will
deepen it by creating visionary new forms of human community; we will expand it by including ourselves in it— by learning to value and cherish each other as sisters. We will
renounce all forms of male control and male domination; we
will destroy the institutions and cultural valuations which imprison us in invisibility and victimization; but we will take with us, out of our bitter, bitter past, our passionate identification with the worth of other human lives.
I want to end by saying that we must never betray the
heroic commitment to the worth of human life which is the
source of our courage as women. If we do betray that commitment, we will find ourselves, hands dripping with blood, equal heroes to men at last.
6
R ed efin in g N onviolence
. . . and finally I twist my heart round again, so that the
bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and
keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would
so like to be, and I could be, if. . . there weren’t any other
people living in the world.
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl,
August 1, 1944, three days before her arrest
( i )
Feminism, according to The Random House Dictionary, is
defined as “the doctrine advocating social and political rights
of women equal to those of men. ” This is one tenet of feminism, and I urge you not to sneer at it, not to deride it as reformist, not to dismiss it with what you might consider left-wing radical purity.
Some of you fought with all your heart and soul for civil
rights for blacks. You understood that to sit at a dirty lunch
counter and eat a rotten hamburger had no revolutionary validity at all— and yet you also understood the indignity, the demeaning indignity, of not being able to do so. And so you, and others like you, laid your lives on the line so that blacks would
not be forced to suffer systematic daily indignities of exclusion
from institutions which, in fact, you did not endorse. In all the
Delivered at Boston College, at a conference on Alternatives to the Military-
Corporate System, in a panel on “Defending Values Without Violence, ”
April 5, 1975.
years of the civil rights movement, I never heard a white male
radical say to a black man— “Why do you want to eat there, it’s
so much nicer eating grits at home. ” It was understood that
racism was a festering pathology, and that that pathology had
to be challenged wherever its dread symptoms appeared: to
check the growth of the pathology itself; to diminish its debilitating effects on its victims; to try to save black lives, one by one if necessary, from the ravages of a racist system which
condemned those lives to a bitter misery.
And yet, when it comes to your own lives, you do not make
the same claim. Sexism, which is properly defined as the systematic cultural, political, social, sexual, psychological, and economic servitude of women to men and to patriarchal institutions, is a festering pathology too. It festers in every house, on every street, in every law court, in every job situation, on
every television show, in every movie. It festers in virtually
every transaction between a man and a woman. It festers
in every encounter between a woman and the institutions of this
male-dominated society. Sexism festers when we are raped, or
when we are married. It festers when we are denied absolute
control over our own bodies— whenever the state or any man
decides in our stead the uses to which our bodies will be put.
Sexism festers when we are taught to submit to men, sexually
and/or intellectually. It festers when we are taught and forced
to serve men in their kitchens, in their beds, as domestics, as
shit workers in their multifarious causes, as devoted disciples