Schlafly has outwilled him. In the sorrow of having children there
is the recognition that one’s humanity is reduced to this, and on
this one’s survival depends. Being a woman is this, or it is unspeakably worse than this. Homosexuality brings up for women the barrenness of not even having this. A woman has committed
her life to bringing forth children in order to have a life of dignity
and worth; she has found the one w ay in which she is absolutely
necessary; and then, that is gone as an absolute. It must be an
absolute, because there are women who stake their lives on it as an
absolute; it is certainly what women have had to count on. Everything that women have to gain from homosexuality— and women have a great deal to gain from it: less forced penetration of themselves, for instance— is obliterated by the fear of losing what value women have, a fear conjured up by homosexuality in women
whose own right to life is in having children. Despite all the happy
talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did
not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives
would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her
womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to
her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for
her own sake. It is not rational to hate homosexuals because they
force one to experience a terror of extinction: the cold chill of being
useless, unnecessary, expendable. But passions are distinguished
by their illogic: one can describe them and find an interior logic in
them up to a point—then there is a sensational leap into hate, dazzling, crazed, obsessional. Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals—
despised because they are associated with women—is more than
self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it
does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with
women. But the perception that having children is the only edge
women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute
perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for
and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without
reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not,
bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need,
no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women
afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous
anyway.
5
The Coming Gynocide
Rich as you are
Death will finish
you: afterwards no
one will remember
or want you;. . .
Sappho
In A Room o f One's O w n, first read as a paper in 1928, the prescient
Virginia Woolf called the attention of the women in her audience
to a statement by a popular British journalist of the time who
warned “that when children cease to be altogether desirable,
women cease to be altogether necessary. ” 1 The woman who is deviant because she has no children, as Woolf was even in her avant-garde set, is often aware of how tenuous her existence is: it is a
courtesy extended to her— letting her go on—despite the fact that
she is not earning her womanly keep in the womanly w ay. She
knows how little the world at large needs her or values her for
anything else she does even when she is exceptional; and if she
understands how systematic and relentless the valuation of her
kind is, she also knows that at the heart of the male system there is
a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that
is independent of the class definition or function, that cannot finally be perceived and justified as incidental to motherhood.
Had anyone thought seriously about how women “cease to be
altogether necessary, ” they might have thought in terms of population controclass="underline" there are too many people; governments decide to feed all the people, which provides a certain incentive for finding ways
to see that there are less people; this is presented to the people as a
humanistic program to increase the quality of life for a smaller, less
burdensome, less troubled population; the women who were giving
birth to the teeming masses are not altogether necessary anymore.
There is lots of liberal hope and goodwill. The Right has reason to
be pleased too, since society operates largely according to its conception of value: poor, black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations would inevitably be the targets of state-run population-control programs; the teeming masses, so messy, so poor, so dark, would disappear, or significantly diminish in numbers, taking with them the poverty for which their color seems responsible. Get rid of those
dirty beggars in India. Get rid of the bastards those black women
on welfare keep producing. Get rid of the Jews too, the old and
sick, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the political dissidents—as the
Nazis did, often in the name of creating a better-quality population. But the Nazis did not just kill to get rid of the population garbage. They had a program of breeding. Himmler developed a
plan for a Women’s Academy of Wisdom and Culture: it would
give a degree called “Exalted Woman. ” Birth control advertising
was forbidden; birth control clinics were shut down; abortions
were forbidden and the Nazis were fierce enforcers of antiabortion
laws; all so that Aryan women would breed. In 1934, the Nazis
established the Mother Service Department. Its purpose was to educate women over eighteen to fulfill the duties of womanhood Nazi-style. “The program of our Nationalist Socialist woman’s
movement contains really only one single point, ” said Hitler in
1934. “This point is the child that must come into being and that
must thrive. ” 2 Fiancees of S . S. men had to take the training offered by the Mother Service Department. Pure German women were encouraged to bear the children of S . S. men and were sup-
ported by the Nazi state. Himmler established homes for these
women. No abortion, no birth control, no careers other than motherhood for the racially pure; imprisonment, rape, sometimes sterilization, and death for the others. The racially privileged woman is not free; the conditions of her survival are predetermined; she may