street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get
her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for
literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know.
Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have
dreams of being in the world, not m erely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. "Women dream , ” Florence N ightingale wrote in Cassandra, “till they have no longer the
strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so
honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet
which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those
dreams go at last.. . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream,
neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. ”6
V irginia Woolf, the most splendid modern writer, told us over
and over how awful it was to be a woman of creative intelligence.
She told us when she loaded a large stone into her pocket and
walked into the river; and she told us each time a book was published and she went mad—don’t hurt me for what I have done, I will hurt m yself first, I w ill be incapacitated and I w ill suffer and I
will be punished and then perhaps you need not destroy me, perhaps you w ill pity me, there is such contempt in pity and I am so proud, won’t that be enough? She told us over and over in her
prose too: in her fiction she showed us, ever so delicately so that
we would not take offense; and in her essays she piled on the
charm, being polite to keep us polite. But she did write it straight
out too, though it was not published in her lifetime, and she
was right:
A certain attitude is required—what I call the pouring-out-
tea attitude— the clubwoman, Sunday afternoon attitude. I
don’t know. I think that the angle is almost as important as the
thing. W hat I value is the naked contact of a mind. Often one
cannot say anything valuable about a w riter—except what one
thinks. Now I found my angle incessantly obscured, quite unconsciously no doubt, by the desire of the editor and of the public that a woman should see things from the chary feminine
angle. M y article, written from that oblique point of view, alw ays went dow n. 7
To value “the naked contact of a mind” is to have a virile intelligence, one not shrouded in dresses and pretty gestures. Her work did always go down, with the weight of what being female demanded. She became a master of exquisite indirection. She hid her meanings and her messages in a feminine style. She labored under
that style and hid behind that mask: and she was less than she
could have been. She died not only from what she did dare, but
also from what she did not dare.
These three things are indissolubly linked: literacy, intellect, and
creative intelligence. They distinguish, as the cliche goes, man from
the animals. He who is denied these three is denied a fully human
life and has been robbed of a right to human dignity. Now change
the gender. Literacy, intellect, and creative intelligence distinguish
woman from the animals: no. Woman is not distinguishable from the
animals because she has been condemned by virtue of her sex class to
a life of animal functions: being fucked, reproducing. For her, the
animal functions are her meaning, her so-called humanity, as human
as she gets, the highest human capacities in her because she is
female. To the orthodox of male culture, she is animal, the antithesis
of soul; to the liberals of male culture, she is nature. In discussing
the so-called biological origins of male dominance, the boys can
afford to compare themselves to baboons and insects: they are writing books or teaching in universities when they do it. A Harvard professor does not refuse tenure because a baboon has never been
granted it. The biology of power is a game boys play. It is the male
way of saying: she is more like the female baboon than she is like me;
she cannot be an eminence grise at Harvard because she bleeds, we
fuck her, she bears our young, we beat her up, we rape her; she is an
animal, her function is to breed. I want to see the baboon, the ant,
the wasp, the goose, the cichlid, that has written War and Peace.
Even more I want to see the animal or insect or fish or fowl that has
written Middlemarch.
Literacy is a tool, like fire. It is a more advanced tool than fire,
and it has done as much or more to change the complexion of the
natural and social worlds. Literacy, like fire, is a tool that must be
used by intelligence. Literacy is also a capacity: the capacity to be
literate is a human capacity; the capacity exists and it can be used
or it can be denied, refuted, made to atrophy. In persons socially
despised, it is denied. But denial is not enough, because people
insist on meaning. Humankind finds meaning in experiences,
events, objects, communications, relationships, feelings. Literacy
functions as part of the search for meaning; it helps to make that
search possible. Men can deny that women have the capacity to
learn ancient Greek, but some women w ill learn it nevertheless.
Men can deny that poor women or working-class women or prostituted women have the capacity to read or write their own language, but some of those women will read or write their own language anyw ay; they will risk everything to learn it. In the
slaveholding South in the United States, it was forbidden by law
to teach slaves to read or write; but some slaveowners taught, some
slaves learned, some slaves taught themselves, and some slaves
taught other slaves. In Jew ish law, it is forbidden to teach women
Talm ud, but some women learned Talmud anyw ay. People know
that literacy brings dignity and a wider world. People are strongly
motivated to experience the world they live in through language:
spoken, sung, chanted, and written. One must punish people terribly to stop them from wanting to know what reading and writing bring, because people are curious and driven toward both experience and the conceptualization of it. The denial of literacy to any class or category of people is a denial of fundamental humanity.
Humans viewed as animal, not human, are classically denied literacy: slaves in slave-owning societies; women in woman-owning societies; racially degraded groups in racist societies. The male slave is treated as a beast of burden; he cannot be allowed to read or