Introduction
21
the complex and deadly antiwoman biases o f the medical establishment; in Women and Madness Dr. Phyllis Chesler showed that mental institutions are prisons for
women who rebel against society’s well-defined female
role.
We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we saw
was dreadful. We saw that we were, as Yoko O no wrote,
the niggers o f the world, slaves to the slave. We saw
that we were the ultimate house niggers, ass-licking,
bowing, scraping, shuffling fools. We recognized all o f
our social behavior as learned behavior that functioned
for survival in a sexist world: we painted ourselves,
smiled, exposed legs and ass, had children, kept
house, as our accommodations to the reality o f power
politics.
Most o f the women involved in articulating the oppression o f women were white and middle class. We spent, even if we did not earn or control, enormous
sums o f money. Because o f our participation in the mid-
dle-class lifestyle we were the oppressors o f other
people, our poor white sisters, our Black sisters, our
Chicana sisters —and the men who in turn oppressed
them. This closely interwoven fabric o f oppression,
which is the racist class structure o f Amerika today,
assured that wherever one stood, it was with at least one
foot heavy on the belly o f another human being.
As white, middle-class women, we lived in the house
o f the oppressor-of-us-all who supported us as he
abused us, dressed us as he exploited us, “treasured”
us in payment for the many functions we performed.
We were the best-fed, best-kept, best-dressed, most
willing concubines the world has ever known. We had
22
Woman Hating
no dignity and no real freedom, but we did have good
health and long lives.
The women’s movement has not dealt with this
bread-and-butter issue, and that is its most awful
failure. There has been little recognition that the destruction of the middle-class lifestyle is crucial to the development of decent community forms in which all
people can be free and have dignity. T here is certainly
no program to deal with the realities of the class system
in Amerika. On the contrary, most of the women’s
movement has, with appalling blindness, refused to take
that kind o f responsibility. Only the day-care movement
has in any way reflected, or acted pragmatically on, the
concrete needs of all classes of women. The anger at
the Nixon administration for cutting day-care funds is
naive at best. Given the structure o f power politics and
capital in Amerika, it is ridiculous to expect the federal
government to act in the interests o f the people. The
money available to middle-class women who identify
as feminists must be channeled into the programs we
want to develop, and we must develop them. In general,
middle-class women have absolutely refused to take any
action, make any commitment which would interfere
with, threaten, or significantly alter a lifestyle, a living
standard, which is moneyed and privileged.
The analysis of sexism in this book articulates
clearly what the oppression o f women is, how it functions, how it is rooted in psyche and culture. But that analysis is useless unless it is tied to a political consciousness and commitment which will totally redefine community. One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an
unfree world, and in the course o f redefining family,
Introduction
23
church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. T o attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.
T h e nature o f women’s oppression is unique: women
are oppressed as women, regardless o f class or race;
some women have access to significant wealth, but that
wealth does not signify power; women are to be found
everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut o f the machinery and way o f life which is ruinous to us. And perhaps most importantly, most women have little sense o f dignity or self-
respect or strength, since those qualities are directly
related to a sense o f manhood. In Revolutionary Suicide,
Huey P. Newton tells us that the Black Panthers did not
use guns because they were symbols o f manhood, but
found the courage to act as they did because they were
men. When we women find the courage to defend ourselves, to take a stand against brutality and abuse, we are violating every notion o f womanhood we have ever
been taught. T h e way to freedom for women is bound
to be torturous for that reason alone.
T h e analysis in this book applies to the life situations o f all women, but all women are not necessarily in a state o f primary emergency as women. What I mean
by this is simple. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, I would be
oppressed as a woman, but hunted, slaughtered, as a
Jew. As a Native American, I would be oppressed as
a squaw, but hunted, slaughtered, as a Native Am erican. That first identity, the one which brings with it as
24
Woman Hating
part of its definition death, is the identity of primary
emergency. This is an important recognition because it
relieves us of a serious confusion. The fact, for instance,
that many Black women (by no means all) experience
primary emergency as Blacks in no way lessens the responsibility of the Black community to assimilate this and other analyses of sexism and to apply it in their own
revolutionary work.
As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I am
particularly pained by the kinds of books writers are
writing, and the reasons why. I want writers to write
books because they are committed to the content of
those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I
want writers to write books that can make a difference
in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to
write books that are worth being jailed for, worth
fighting for, and should it come to that in this country,
worth dying for.
Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial
ventures. People write them to make money, to become
famous, to build or augment other careers. Most Amerikans do not read books—they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art,