book that had moved me profoundly. From that beginning I
looked at other pornography, fairy tales, one thousand years
of Chinese footbinding, and the slaughter of nine million
witches. I learned something about the nature of the world
which had been hidden from me before— I saw a systematic
despisal of women that permeated every institution of society,
every cultural organ, every expression of human being. And I
saw that I was a woman, a person who met that systematic
despisal on every street comer, in every living room, in every
human interchange. Because I became a woman who knew
that she was a woman, that is, because I became a feminist, I
began to speak with women for the first time in my life, and
one of the women I began to speak with was my mother. I
came to her life through the long dark tunnel of my own. I
began to see who she was as I began to see the world that had
formed her. I came to her no longer pitying the poverty of her
intellect, but astounded by the quality of her intelligence. I
came to her no longer convinced of her stupidity and triviality, but astonished by the quality of her strength. I came to her, no longer self-righteous and superior, but as a sister, another woman whose life, but for the grace of a feminist father and the new common struggle of my feminist sisters, would
have repeated hers— and when I say “repeated hers” I mean,
been predetermined as hers was predetermined. I came to her,
no longer ashamed of what she lacked, but deeply proud of
what she had achieved— indeed, I came to recognize that my
mother was proud, strong, and honest. By the time I was
twenty-six I had seen enough of the world and its troubles to
know that pride, strength, and integrity were virtues to honor.
And because I addressed her in a new way she came to meet
me, and now, whatever our difficulties, and they are not so
many, she is my mother, and I am her daughter, and we are
sisters.
You asked me to talk about feminism and art, is there a
feminist art, and if so, what is it. For however long writers
have written, until today, there has been masculinist art— art
that serves men in a world made by men. That art has degraded women. It has, almost without exception, characterized us as maimed beings, impoverished sensibilities, trivial people with trivial concerns. It has, almost without exception,
been saturated with a misogyny so profound, a misogyny that
was in fact its world view, that almost all of us, until today,
have thought, that is what the world is, that is how women
are.
I ask myself, what did I learn from all those books I read as
I was growing up? Did I learn anything real or true about
women? Did I learn anything real or true about centuries of
women and what they lived? Did those books illuminate my
life, or life itself, in any useful, or profound, or generous, or
rich, or textured, or real way? I do not think so. I think that
that art, those books, would have robbed me of my life as the
world they served robbed my mother of hers.
Theodore Roethke, a great poet we are told, a poet of the
male condition I would insist, wrote:
Two of the charges most frequently levelled against poetry by
women are lack of range—in subject matter, in emotional tone—
and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning-out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life—that special province of the feminine talent in prose—hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is;
lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the
altar, stamping a tiny foot against God; or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lamenting the lot of woman. . . and so on. 2
What characterizes masculinist art, and the men who make it,
is misogyny— and in the face of that misogyny, someone had
better reinvent integrity.
They, the masculinists, have told us that they write about
the human condition, that their themes are the great themes—
love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself. They have told
us that our themes—love, death, heroism, suffering, history
itself— are trivial because we are, by our very nature, trivial.
I renounce masculinist art. It is not art which illuminates
the human condition— it illuminates only, and to men’s final
and everlasting shame, the masculinist world— and as we look
around us, that world is not one to be proud of. Masculinist
art, the art of centuries of men, is not universal, or the final
explication of what being in the world is. It is, in the end,
descriptive only of a world in which women are subjugated,
submissive, enslaved, robbed of full becoming, distinguished
only by carnality, demeaned. I say, my life is not trivial; my
sensibility is not trivial; my struggle is not trivial. Nor was my
mother’s, or her mother’s before her. I renounce those who
hate women, who have contempt for women, who ridicule and
demean women, and when I do, I renounce most of the art,
masculinist art, ever made.
As feminists, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the
world in a new way. We threaten to turn it upside down and
inside out. We intend to change it so totally that someday the
texts of masculinist writers will be anthropological curiosities.
What was that Mailer talking about, our descendants will ask,
should they come upon his work in some obscure archive.
And they will wonder—bewildered, sad— at the masculinist
glorification of war; the masculinist mystifications around killing, maiming, violence, and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the vain arrogance of phallic supremacy; the
impoverished renderings of mothers and daughters, and so of
life itself. They will ask, did those people really believe in
those gods?
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great
river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless
stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based
on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which
will take the great human themes— love, death, heroism,
suffering, history itself— and render them fully human. It may
also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now
that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new
theme, one as great and as rich as those others— should we
call it “joy”?
We cannot imagine a world in which women are not experienced as trivial and contemptible, in which women are not demeaned, abused, exploited, raped, diminished before we are