justly and are free when they are treated as women—that is, as the
natural inferiors of men.
The brave new world Proudhon wanted was, for women, the
same old world women already knew.
D’Hericourt recognized what Victoria Woodhull would not:
“disdain of the producer extends to the value of the product. ”
Work for wages outside sex labor would not effectively free women
from the stigma of being female because the stigma precedes the
woman and predetermines the undervaluing of her work.
This means that right-wing women are correct when they say
that they are worth more in the home than outside it. In the home
their value is recognized and in the workplace it is not. In marriage, sex labor is rewarded: the woman is generally “given” more than she herself could earn at a job. In the marketplace, women are
exploited as cheap labor. The argument that work outside the
home makes women sexually and economically independent of
men is simply untrue. Women are paid too little. And right-wing
women know it.
Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal
work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence.
But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating
social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all
their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual
subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays
women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for
working outside marriage or prostitution, since women work hard
for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that
punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low
wages contributes significantly to women’s perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman’s life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for
equal work is a simple reform, whereas it is no reform at all; it is
revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay
for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-
wing women have refused to forget it. Devaluation of women’s
labor outside the home pushes women back into the home and encourages women to support a system in which, as she sees it, he is paid for both of them— her share of his wage being more than she
could earn herself.
In the workplace, sexual harassment fixes the low status of
women irreversibly. Women are sex; even filing or typing, women
are sex. The debilitating, insidious violence of sexual harassment
is pervasive in the workplace. It is part of nearly every working
environment. Women shuffle; women placate; women submit;
women leave; the rare, brave women fight and are tied up in the
courts, often without jobs, for years. There is also rape in the
workplace.
Where is the place for intelligence— for literacy, intellect, creativity, moral discernment? Where in this world in which women live, circumscribed by the uses to which men put women’s sexual
organs, is the cultivation of skills, the cultivation of gifts, the
cultivation of dreams, the cultivation of ambition? Of what use is
human intelligence to a woman?
“Of course, ” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the learned women were
very ugly; but then they were very poor. She would like to feed
Chuffy for a term on Lucy’s rations and see what he said then
about Henry the Eighth. ” 28
“No, it would not do the slightest good if he read my manuscript. . . , ” wrote Ellen Glasgow in her memoir. “T h e best advice I can give you, ’ he said, with charming candor, ‘is to stop writing, and go back to the South and have some babies. ’ And I
think, though I may have heard this ripe wisdom from other men,
probably from many, that he added: T h e greatest woman is not
the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who
has had the finest babies. ’ That might be true. I did not stay to
dispute it. However, it was true also that I wanted to write books,
and not ever had I felt the faintest wish to have babies. ” 29
Woodhull thought that freedom from sexual coercion would
come with work in the marketplace. She was wrong; the marketplace became, as men would have it, another place for sexual intimidation, another arena of danger to women burdened already with too many such arenas. Woolf put her faith in education and
art. She too was wrong. Men erase; misogyny distorts; the intelligence of women is still both punished and despised.
Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They
see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they
see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having
ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage
means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see
that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired,
sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not
make them independent of men and that they will still have to play
the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no
way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in
the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better
to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value
whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not
wrong. T hey fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and
promiscuity as values, w ill make them more vulnerable to male
sexual aggression, and that they w ill be despised for not liking it.
They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. T hey know that they are valued for their sex—
their sex organs and their reproductive capacity— and so they try
to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity;
through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through
submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“fem ininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” T heir desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. T hey see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence