him. My father valued books and intellectual dialogue. He was
the son of Russian immigrants, and they had wanted him to be
a doctor. That was their dream. He was a devoted son and so,
even though he wanted to study history, he took a pre-medical
course in college. He was too squeamish to go through with it
all. Blood made him ill. So after pre-med, he found himself,
for almost twenty years, teaching science, which he didn’t like,
instead of history, which he loved. During the years of doing
work he disliked, he made a vow that his children would be
educated as fully as possible and, no matter what it took from
him, no matter what kind of commitment or work or money,
his children would become whatever they wanted. My father
made his children his art, and he devoted himself to nurturing
those children so that they would become whatever they could
become. I don’t know why he didn’t make a distinction between his girl child and his boy child, but he didn’t. I don’t know why, from the beginning, he gave me books to read, and
talked about all of his ideas with me, and watered every ambi
tion that I had so that those ambitions would live and be
nourished and grow—but he did. *
So in our household, my mother was out of the running as
an influence. My father, whose great love was history, whose
commitment was to education and intellectual dialogue, set
the tone and taught both my brother and me that our proper
engagement was with the world. He had a whole set of ideas
and principles that he taught us, in words, by example. He
believed, for instance, in racial equality and integration when
those beliefs were seen as absolutely aberrational by all of his
neighbors, family, and peers. When I, at the age of fifteen,
declared to a family gathering that if I wanted to marry I
would marry whomever I wanted, regardless of color, my
father’s answer before that enraged assembly was that he expected no less. He was a civil libertarian. He believed in unions, and fought hard to unionize teachers— an unpopular
notion in those days since teachers wanted to see themselves as
professionals. He taught us those principles in the Bill of
Rights which are now not thought of very highly by most
Amerikans— an absolute commitment to free speech in all its
forms, equality before just law, and racial equality.
I adored my father, but I had no sympathy for my mother. I
knew that she was physically brave— my father told me so
over and over—but I didn’t see her as any Herculean hero. No
woman ever had been, as far as I knew. Her mind was uninteresting. She seemed small and provincial. I remember that once, in the middle of a terrible argument, she said to me in a
stony tone of voice: You think I’m stupid. I denied it then, but
I know today that she was right. And indeed, what else could
one think of a person whose only concern was that I clean up
*
My mother has reminded me that she introduced me to libraries and that
she also always encouraged me to read. I had forgotten this early shared experience because, as I grew older, she and I had some conflicts over the particular books which I insisted on reading, though she never stopped me
from reading them. Sometime during my adolescence, books came to connote
for me, in part, my intellectual superiority over my mother, who did not
read, and my peership with my father, who did read.
my room, or wear certain clothes, or comb my hair another
way. I had, certainly, great reason to think that she was stupid,
and horrible, and petty, and contemptible even: Edward
Albee, Philip Wylie, and that great male artist Sigmund Freud
told me so. Mothers, it seemed to me, were the most expendable of people— no one had a good opinion of them, certainly not the great writers of the past, certainly not the exciting
writers of the present. And so, though this woman, my mother,
whether present or absent, was the center of my life in so
many inexplicable, powerful, unchartable ways, I experienced
her only as an ignorant irritant, someone without grace or
passion or wisdom. When I married in 1969 I felt free— free
of my mother, her prejudices, her ignorant demands.
I tell you all of this because this story has, possibly for the
first time in history, a rather happier resolution than one might
expect.
Do you remember that in Hemingway’s For Whom the
Bell Tolls Maria is asked about her lovemaking with Robert,
did the earth move? For me, too, in my life, the earth has
sometimes moved. The first time it moved I was ten. I was
going to Hebrew school, but it was closed, a day of mourning
for the six million slaughtered by the Nazis. So I went to see my
cousin who lived nearby. She was shaking, crying, screaming,
vomiting. She told me that it was April, and in April her
youngest sister had been killed in front of her, another sister’s
infant had died a terrible death, their heads had been shaved
— let me just say that she told me what had happened to her in
a Nazi concentration camp. She said that every April she remembered in nightmare and terror what had happened to her that month so many years before, and that every April she
shook, cried, screamed, and vomited. The earth moved for me
then.
The second time the earth moved for me was when I was
eighteen and spent four days in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City. I had been arrested in a demonstration
against the Indochina genocide. I spent four days and four
nights in the filth and terror of that jail. While there two doctors gave me a brutal internal examination. I hemorrhaged for fifteen days after that. The earth moved for me then.
The third time the earth moved for me was when I became
a feminist. It wasn’t on a particular day, or through one experience. It had to do with that afternoon when I was ten and my cousin put the grief of her life into my hands; it had to do
with that women’s jail, and three years of marriage that began
in friendship and ended in despair. It happened sometime after
I left my husband, when I was living in poverty and great
emotional distress. It happened slowly, little by little. A week
after I left my ex-husband I started my book, the book which is
now called Woman Hating. I wanted to find out what had
happened to me in my marriage and in the thousand and one
instances of daily life where it seemed I was being treated like
a subhuman. I felt that I was deeply masochistic, but that my
masochism was not personal— each woman I knew lived out
deep masochism. I wanted to find out why. I knew that I
hadn’t been taught that masochism by my father, and that my
mother had not been my immediate teacher. So I began in
what seemed the only apparent place—with Story of O, a