matter how criminal those orders are. The hope is that these
women, upset by internal conflicts that cannot be stilled by manipulation, challenged by the clarifying drama of public confrontation and dialogue, w ill be forced to articulate the realities of their own
experiences as women subject to the w ill of men. In doing so, the
anger that necessarily arises from a true perception of how t hey
have been debased may move them beyond the fear that transfixes
them to a meaningful rebellion against the men who in fact dim inish, despise, and terrorize them. This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their male-defined ideological origins; and this
struggle alone has the power to transform women who are enemies
against one another into allies fighting for individual and collective
survival that is not based on self-loathing, fear, and humiliation,
but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic integrity.
2
The Politics of Intelligence
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.. . . It’s a
feeling of impotence: of cutting no ice.
Virginia Woolf, her diary,
October 25, 1920
Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it
cannot burn out and end up in ashes, having been consumed in
adventure. It cannot be cold, rational, ice; no warm womb would
tolerate a cold, icy, splendid mind. It cannot be ebullient and it
cannot be morbid; it cannot be anything that does not end in reproduction or whoring. It cannot be what intelligence is: a vitality of mind that acts directly in and on the world, without mediation.
“Indeed, ” wrote Norman M ailer, “I doubt if there w ill be a really
exciting woman w riter until the first whore becomes a call girl and
tells her tale. ” 1 And M ailer was being generous, because he endowed the whore with a capacity to know, if not to telclass="underline" she knows something firsthand, something worth knowing. “G enius, ” wrote
Edith Wharton more realistically, “is of small use to a woman who
does not know how to do her hair. ” 2
Intelligence is a form of energy, a force that pushes out into the
world. It makes its mark, not once but continuously. It is curious,
penetrating. Without the light of public life, discourse, and action,
it dies. It must have a field of action beyond embroidery or scrubbing toilets or wearing fine clothes. It needs response, challenge, consequences that matter. Intelligence cannot be passive and private through a lifetime. Kept secret, kept inside, it withers and dies. The outside can be brought to it; it can live on bread and
water locked up in a cell—but barely. Florence Nightingale, in her
feminist tract Cassandra, said that intellect died last in women; desire, dreams, activity, and love all died before it. Intelligence does hang on, because it can live on almost nothing: fragments of the
world brought to it by husbands or sons or strangers or, in our
time, television or the occasional film. Imprisoned, intelligence
turns into self-haunting and dread. Isolated, intelligence becomes a
burden and a curse. Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the
bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the
body can use. It swells, like the starved stomach, as the skeleton
shrivels and the bones collapse; it will pick up anything to fill the
hunger, stick anything in, chew anything, swallow anything. “Jose
Carlos came home with a bag of crackers he found in the garbage, ”
wrote Carolina Maria de Jesus, a woman of the Brazilian underclass, in her diary. “When I saw him eating things out of the trash I thought: and if it’s been poisoned? Children can’t stand hunger.
The crackers were delicious. I ate them thinking of that proverb:
He who enters the dance must dance. And as I also was hungry, I
ate. ” 3 The intelligence of women is traditionally starved, isolated,
imprisoned.
Traditionally and practically, the world is brought to women by
men; they are the outside on which female intelligence must feed.
The food is poor, orphan’s gruel. This is because men bring home
half-truths, ego-laden lies, and use them to demand solace or sex or
housekeeping. The intelligence of women is not out in the world,
acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on
behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women’s work, and
her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of
her ass.
Men are the world and women use intelligence to survive men:
their tricks, desires, demands, moods, hatreds, disappointments,
rages, greed, lust, authority, power, weaknesses. The ideas that
come to women come through men, in a field of cultural values
controlled by men, in a political and social system controlled by
men, in a sexual system in which women are used as things. (As
Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in the one sentence that every
woman should risk her life to understand: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object. ”4) Men are the field of action in which female intelligence moves. But the world, the real world, is more than
men, certainly more than what men show of themselves and the
world to women; and women are deprived of that real world. The
male always intervenes between her and it.
Some w ill grant that women might have a particular kind of intelligence—essentially small, picky, good with details, bad with ideas. Some w ill grant— in fact, insist— that women know more of
“the Good, ” that women are more cognizant of decency or kindness: this keeps intelligence small and tamed. Some will grant that there have been women of genius: after the woman of genius is
dead. The greatest writers in the English language have been
women: George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. T hey were
sublime; and they were, all of them, shadows of what they might
have been. But the fact that they existed does not change the categorical perception that women are basically stupid: not capable of intelligence without the exercise of which the world as a whole is
impoverished. Women are stupid and men are smart; men have a
right to the world and women do not. A lost man is a lost intelligence; a lost woman is a lost (name the function) mother, housekeeper, sexual thing. Classes of men have been lost, have been thrown aw ay; there have always been mourners and fighters who
refused to accept the loss. There is no mourning for the lost intel