all.
Pericles Korovessis, in an interview
in Liberation, June 1973
I N T R O D U C T I O N
This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose. It is not cerebral wisdom, or academic horseshit, or ideas carved
in granite or destined for immortality. It is part o f a
process and its context is change. It is part o f a planetary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over
their own lives, participate fully in community, live in
dignity and freedom.
T h e commitment to ending male dominance as the
fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality o f earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation o f
the self and transformation o f the social reality on every
level. T h e core o f this book is an analysis o f sexism (that
system o f male dominance), what it is, how it operates
on us and in us. However, I do want to discuss briefly
two problems, tangential to that analysis, but still crucial
to the development o f revolutionary program and consciousness. T h e first is the nature o f the women’s movement as such, and the second has to do with the work o f the writer.
17
10
Woman Hating
Until the appearance of the brilliant anthology
Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett’s extraordinary
book Sexual Politics, women did not think o f themselves
as oppressed people. Most women, it must be admitted,
still do not. But the women’s movement as a radical
liberation movement in Amerika can be dated from the
appearance of those two books. We learn as we reclaim
our herstory that there was a feminist movement which
organized around the attainment of the vote for
women. We learn that those feminists were also ardent
abolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists —out
of the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into public
meetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activist
heroes o f the abolitionist movement were Black women,
Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they stand
as prototypal revolutionary models.
Those early Amerikan feminists thought that suffrage was the key to participation in Amerikan democracy and that, free and enfranchised, the former slaves would in fact be free and enfranchised. Those women
did not imagine that the vote would be effectively denied Blacks through literacy tests, property qualifications, and vigilante police action by white racists. Nor did they imagine the “separate but equal” doctrine and
the uses to which it would be put.
Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were
parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called,
ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights.
The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot
be denied. Once women experienced themselves as activists and began to understand the reality and meaning of oppression, they began to articulate a politically
Introduction
19
conscious feminism. T h eir focus, their concrete objective, was to attain suffrage for women.
T h e women’s movement formalized itself in 1848 at
Seneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia
Mott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention.
T hat convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration of
Rights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstanding
feminist declaration.
In struggling for the vote, women developed many
o f the tactics which were used, almost a century later,
in the Civil Rights Movement. In order to change laws,
women had to violate them. In order to change convention, women had to violate it. T h e feminists (suffragettes) were militant political activists who used the tactics o f civil disobedience to achieve their goals.
T h e struggle for the vote began officially with the
Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not until
August 26, 1920, that women were given the vote by the
kindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that the
vote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, their
own oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine that
the “separate but equal” doctrine would develop as
a tool o f male dominance. Nor did they imagine the
uses to which it would be put.
T here have also been, always, individual feminists —
women who violated the strictures o f the female role,
who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the
right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the
bondage o f the marriage contract. Those individuals
were often eloquent when they spoke o f the oppression
they suffered as women in their own lives, but other
women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen.
20
Woman Haling
Feminists, most often as individuals but sometimes in
small militant groups, fought the system which oppressed them, analyzed it, were jailed, were ostracized, but there was no general recognition among women
that they were oppressed.
In the last 5 or 6 years, that recognition has become
more widespread among women. We have begun to understand the extraordinary violence that has been done to us, that is being done to us: how our minds are
aborted in their development by sexist education; how
our bodies are violated by oppressive grooming imperatives; how the police function against us in cases of rape and assault; how the media, schools, and
churches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; how
the nuclear family and ritualized sexual behavior imprison us in roles and forms which are degrading to us.
We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try to
fathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to try
to search out the depth and boundaries of our internalized anger, to try to find strategies for freeing ourselves from oppressive relationships, from masochism and passivity, from our own lack of self-respect. There
was both pain and ecstasy in this process. Women
discovered each other, for truly no oppressed group
had ever been so divided and conquered. Women began to deal with concrete oppressions: to become part of the economic process, to erase discriminatory laws,
to gain control over our own lives and over our own
bodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on our
own terms. Women also began to articulate structural
analyses o f sexist society — Millett did that with Sexual
Politics; in Vaginal Politics Ellen Frankfort demonstrated