women and girls. No facts could intrude on this psychosexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male sexual violence against women and children could change the focus of their fear. They admitted
that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females. The men, they acknowledged when pressed, were sinners, and they hated sin, but there was clearly something
comforting in the normalcy of heterosexual rape. To them, the
lesbian was inherently monstrous, experienced almost as a demonic sexual force hovering closer and closer. She was the dangerous intruder, encroaching, threatening by her very presence a sexual order that cannot bear scrutiny or withstand challenge.
Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilized egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its
existence. The grief of these women for fetuses is real, and their
contempt for women who become pregnant out of wedlock is awesome to behold. The fact that most illegal abortions in the bad old days were performed on married women with children, and that
thousands of those women died each year, is utterly meaningless to
them. They see abortion as a criminal act committed by godless
whores, women absolutely unlike themselves.
Right-wing women argue that passage of the Equal Rights
Amendment will legalize abortion irrevocably. No matter how
often I heard this argument (and I heard it constantly), I simply
could not understand it. Fool that I was, I had thought that the
Equal Rights Amendment was abhorrent because of toilets. Since
toilets figured prominently in the resistance to civil rights legislation that would protect blacks, the argument that centered on toilets—while irrational—was as Amerikan as apple pie. No one mentioned toilets. I brought them up, but no one cared to discuss
them. The passionate, repeated cause-and-effect arguments linking
the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion presented a new m ystery. I resigned m yself to hopeless confusion. H appily, after the conference, I read The P ow er o f the P ositive W oman, in which
Schlafly explains: “Since the mandate of ERA is for sex equality,
abortion is essential to relieve women of their unequal burden of
being forced to bear an unwanted b ab y. ” 19 Forcing women to bear
unwanted babies is crucial to the social program of women who
have been forced to bear unwanted babies and who cannot bear the
grief and bitterness of such a recognition. The Equal Rights
Amendment has now become the symbol of this devastating recognition. This largely accounts for the new wave of intransigent opposition to it.
Right-wing women, as represented in Houston, especially from
the South, white and black, also do not like Jew s. T hey live in a
Christian country. A fragile but growing coalition between white
and black women in the New South is based on a shared Christian
fundamentalism, which translates into a shared anti-Semitism. The
stubborn refusal of Jew s to embrace Christ and the barely masked
fundamentalist perception of Jew s as Christ killers, communists
and usurers both, queers, and, worst of all, urban intellectuals,
mark Jew s as foreign, sinister, and an obvious source of the many
satanic conspiracies sweeping the nation.
The most insidious expression of this rife anti-Semitism was
conveyed by a fixed stare, a self-conscious smile and the delightful
words “Ah just love tha Jew ish people. ” The slime variety of anti-
Semite, very much in evidence, was typified by a Right to Life
leader who called doctors who perform abortions “Jew ish baby killers. ” I was asked a hundred times: “Am Ah speakin with a Jewish g irl? ” Despite m y clear presence as a lesbian-feminist with press
credentials plastered all over me from the notorious Ms. magazine,
it was as a Jew that I was consistently challenged and, on several
occasions, im plicitly threatened. Conversation after conversation
stopped abruptly when I answered that yes, I was a Jew .
*
The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt
they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to
them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites,
or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no
matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to
ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other
than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder
their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom
they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief.
Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify
the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at
least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they
are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason
to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of
danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols
of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as
sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can
change over time to meet changing social circumstances—for ex
ample, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can
be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or
kept under the surface— but the existence of the dangerous outsider alw ays functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, pain-killer, and threat.
The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide. The danger is that self-sacrificing women are perfect foot soldiers who obey orders, no