home from school or in their offices working or in factories
or in stockrooms, young women, girls, old women, thin
women, fat women, housewives, secretaries, hookers,
teachers, students. I simply could not bear it. So I stopped
giving the speech. I thought I would die from it. I learned
what I had to know, and more than I could stand to know.
My life on the road was an exhausting mixture of good
and bad, the ridiculous and the sublime. One fairly typical
example: I gave the last lecture in Our Blood (“The Root
Cause, ” my favorite) on my twenty-ninth birthday. I had
written it as a birthday present to myself. The lecture was
sponsored by a Boston-based political collective. They were
supposed to provide transportation and housing for me and,
because it was my birthday and I wanted my family with me,
my friend and our dog. I had offered to come another time
but they wanted me then— en famille. One collective
member drove to New York in the most horrible thunderstorm I have ever seen to pick us up and drive us back to Boston. The other cars on the road were blurs of red light
here and there. The driver was exhausted, it was impossible
to see; and the driver did not like my political views. He
kept asking me about various psychoanalytic theories, none
of which I had the good sense to appreciate. I kept trying to
change the subject—he kept insisting that I tell him what I
thought of so-and-so—every time I got so cornered that I
had to answer, he slammed his foot down on the gas pedal.
I thought that we would probably die from the driver’s
fatigue and fury and God’s rain. We were an hour late, and
the jam-packed audience had waited. The acoustics in the
room were superb, which enhanced not only my own voice
but the endless howling of my dog, who finally bounded
through the audience to sit on stage during the question-
and-answer period. The audience was fabulous: involved,
serious, challenging. Many of the ideas in the lecture were
new and, because they directly confronted the political
nature of male sexuality, enraging. The woman with whom
we were supposed to stay and who was responsible for our
trip home was so enraged that she ran out, never to return.
We were stranded, without money, not knowing where to
turn. A person can be stranded and get by, even though she
will be imperiled; two people with a German shepherd and
no money are in a mess. Finally, a woman whom I knew
slightly took us all in and loaned us the money to get home.
Working (and it is demanding, intense, difficult work) and
traveling in such endlessly improvised circumstances require
that one develop an affection for low comedy and gross
melodrama. I never did. Instead I became tired and
demoralized. And I got even poorer, because no one could
ever afford to pay me for the time it took to do the writing.
I did not begin demanding realistic fees, secure accommodations, and safe travel in exchange for my work until after the publication of Our Blood. I had tried intermittently and mostly failed. But now I had to be paid and safe.
I felt I had really entered middle age. This presented new
problems for feminist organizers who had little access to the
material resources in their communities. It also presented
me with new problems. For a long time I got no work at all,
so I just got poorer and poorer. It made no sense to anyone
but me: if you have nothing, and someone offers you
something, how can you turn it down? But I did, because I
knew that I would never make a living unless I took a stand.
I had a fine and growing reputation as a speaker and writer;
but still, there was no money for me. When I first began to
ask for fees, I got angry responses from women: how could
the author of Woman Hating be such a scummy capitalist
pig, one woman asked in a nearly obscene letter. The letter
writer was going to live on a farm and have nothing to do
with rat-shit capitalists and bourgeois feminist creeps. Well,
I wrote back, I didn’t live on a farm and didn’t want to. I
bought food in a supermarket and paid rent to a landlord
and I wanted to write books. I answered all the angry
letters. I tried to explain the politics of getting the money,
especially from colleges and universities: the money was
there; it was hard to get; why should it go to Phyllis Schlafly
or William F. Buckley, Jr.? I had to live and I had to write.
Surely my writing m attered, it mattered to them or why did
they want me: and did they want me to stop writing? I
needed money to write. I had done the rotten jobs and I
was living in real, not romantic, poverty. I found that the
effort to explain really helped—not always, and resentments still surfaced, but enough to make me see that explaining even without finally convincing was worthwhile.
Even if I didn’t get paid, somebody else might. After a long
fallow period I began to lecture again. I lectured erratically
and never made enough to live on, even in what I think of
as stable poverty, even when my fees were high. Many
feminist activists did fight for the money and sometimes got
it. So I managed—friends loaned me money, sometimes
anonymous donations came in the mail, women handed me
checks at lectures and refused to let me refuse them,
feminist writers gave me gifts of money and loaned me
money, and women fought incredible and bitter battles with
college administrators and committees and faculties to get
me hired and paid. The women’s movement kept me alive. I
did not live well or safely or easily, but I did not stop writing
either. I remain extremely grateful to those who went the
distance for me.
I decided to publish the talks in Our Blood because I was
desperate for money, the magazines were still closed to me,
and I was living hand-to-mouth on the road. A book was my
only chance.
The editor who decided to publish Our Blood did not
particularly like my politics, but she did like my prose. I was
happy to be appreciated as a writer. The company was the
only unionized publishing house in New York and it also
had an active women’s group. The women employees were
universally wonderful to me—vitally interested in feminism,
moved by my work, conscious and kind. They invited me to
address the employees of the company on their biennial
women’s day, shortly before the publication of Our Blood. I
discussed the systematic presumption of male ownership of
women’s bodies and labor, the material reality of that
ownership, the economic degrading of women’s work. (The
talk was subsequently published in abridged form under the