Going Too Far (2 page)

Some words are necessary on the structure of this book. I have collected these “documentary papers” in sections corresponding to their period and to my outlook at that time. Accordingly, I have restricted my editing of content to two areas: clarification of original intent and some unavoidable cutting to lessen redundancy. A selective process was necessary; there are articles that belong in this book which cannot be included, for legal and other reasons—their place is in a future volume. Only time can make definitive such a documentary record. Nevertheless, I have tried to be as comprehensively—and representatively—inclusive as possible of the years covered herein.

Each section, or part, has an introductory note placing the pieces that follow in their proper context. In many instances, an individual article required its own prefatory comments as well, providing background detail or explanation vital to the full comprehension of that essay. In most of these cases, I found a dialogue emerging between my voice today and my voice at the time of the piece's writing. At first this dialogue between present and past selves unsettled me, but I have come to respect and learn from it, and so have left it to be shared with my readers. If the present voice sometimes seems overly judgmental of the past one, defensive for her, amused by her, or pitying of her, I can only trust that from this public conversation across the space of my own private growth something will emerge recognizable to other women and, I hope, of use.

Robin Morgan

New York City, 1977

INTRODUCTION: RIGHTS OF PASSAGE

T
HE WOMAN
is a writer, primarily a poet. She is thirty-five years old, a wife, mother of a seven-year-old son. She is white, apostately Jewish, and of that nebulous nonclass variously referred to as “artists” or “intellectuals”: words of floating definition meant to describe those persons possessed of intense vocations, educational riches, and financial insolvency—a study in contradictory classlessness. And she is a radical feminist. In fact she is an “oldie”—one of the women who helped start this wave of feminism back in the Pleistocene Age of the middle and late 1960's—a rare species characterized by idealism, enthusiasm, and round-the-clock energy. It is a species now endangered: often burnt out, weary, cynical, embittered, and prone to seizures of matronizing advice for younger sisters. Yet this particular specimen is still active, hopeful even, and the face that looks out from beneath a few more proudly exhibited gray hairs each day, the face is almost—good grief—
mature
.

The face looks out from a mirror. It is my face, and I am that woman.

I wanted to write this Introduction as a sort of “personal retrospective” on the Women's Movement: where we've been, where we are, where we might be going—all this in a classically theoretical style, preferably obscure, yea, unintelligible, so that people would be unable to understand what in hell I was saying and would therefore label me A Brilliant Thinker. But the risk-taking, subjective voice of poetry is more honestly my style, and so, to look at the Women's Movement, I go to the mirror—and gaze at myself. Everywoman? Surely a staggering egotism, that! I hardly believe “
Le Mouvement, c'est moi
.” I
do
still believe, though, that the personal is political, and vice versa (the
politics
of sex, the
politics
of housework, the
politics
of motherhood, etc.), and that this insight into the necessary integration of exterior realities and interior imperatives is one of the themes of consciousness that makes the Women's Movement unique, less abstract, and more functionally
possible
than previous movements for social change.

So I must dare to begin with myself, my own experience.

Ten years ago I was a woman who believed in the reality of the vaginal orgasm (and had become adept at faking spiffy ones). I felt legitimized by a successful crown roast and was the fastest hand in the East at emptying ashtrays. I never condemned pornography for fear of seeming unsophisticated and prudish. My teenage rebellion against my mother had atrophied into a permanent standoff. Despite hours of priming myself to reflect acceptable beauty standards, I was convinced that my body was lumpy, that my face was possessed of a caterpillar's bone structure, and that my hair was resolutely unyielding to
any
flattering style. And ten years ago my poems quietly began muttering something about my personal pain as a woman—unconnected, of course, to anyone else, since I saw this merely as my own inadequacy, my own battle.

I've thought a lot recently, while assembling the essays in this book, about that intervening decade and the startling changes it brought about.
Going Too Far
is more than a collection of my prose writings on feminism dating back to the early 1960's; it is also a graph of slow growth, defensiveness, struggle, painful new consciousness, and gradual affirmation. My decision to leave each piece in this book unretouched—warts and all—has necessitated an editorial self-discipline as redolent with embarrassment as nostalgia, the two alternating in waves, like chills and fever.

There were the years in the New Left—the civil-rights movement, the student movement, the peace movement, and their more “militant” offspring groups—until my inescapably intensifying woman's consciousness led me, along with thousands of other women, to become a refugee from what I came to call “the male-dominated Left” and what I now refer to as “the boys' movement.” And it wasn't merely the mass epidemic of bursitis (from the continual cranking of mimeograph machines) which drove us all out, but the serious, ceaseless, degrading, and pervasive sexism we encountered there, in each man's attitude and in every group's structure and in the narrow political emphases and manhood-proving tactical styles themselves. We were used to such an approach from the Establishment, but here, too? In a context which was supposed to be different, to be fighting for all human freedom?

That was the period when I still could fake a convincing orgasm, still wouldn't be caught dead confronting an issue like pornography (for fear, this time, of being “a bad vibes, uptight, un-hip chick”). I could now afford to reject my mother for a new, radical-chic reason: the generation gap. I learned to pretend contempt for monogamy as both my husband and I careened (secretly grieving for each other) through the fake “sexual revolution” of the sixties. Meanwhile, correctly Maoist rice and vegetables filled our menus—and I
still
put in hours priming myself to reflect acceptable beauty standards, this time those
of a tough-broad street fighter: uniform jeans, combat boots, long hair, and sunglasses worn even at night (which didn't help one see better when running from rioting cops). And my poems lurched forth guiltily, unevenly, while I developed a chronic case of Leningitis and mostly churned out political essays—although Donne and Dickinson, Kafka, Woolf, and James were still read in secret at our home (dangerous intellectual tendencies), and television was surreptitiously watched (decadent bourgeois privileges).

For years my essays implored, in escalating tones, the “brothers” of the “revolution” to let us women
in
, to take more-than-lip-service notice of what the women's caucuses were saying, especially since “they” (women) constitute more than half the human species. Then, at a certain point, I began to stop addressing such men as “brothers,” and began (O language, thou precise Richter scale of attitudinal earthquakes!) to use the word “we” when speaking of women. And there was no turning back.

The ensuing years can seem to me a blur of joy, misery, and daily surprise: my first consciousness-raising group and the subsequent groups I was in; the guerrilla theater, the marches, meetings, demonstrations, picketings, sit-ins, conferences, workshops, plenaries; the newspaper projects, the child-care collectives, the first anti-rape squads, the earliest seminars (some women now prefer the word “ovulars”—how lovely!) on women's health, women's legal rights, women's sexuality. And all the while, the profound “interior” changes: the transformation of my work—content, language,
and
form—released by this consciousness; the tears and shouts and laughter and despair and growth wrought in the struggle with my husband; the birth of our child (a radicalizing occasion, to say the least); the detailed examinations of life experience, of power, honesty, commitment, bravely explored through so many vulnerable hours with other women—the discovery of a shared suffering and of a shared determination to become whole.

During those years we felt a desperate urgency, arising in part from the barrage of brain-boggling “clicks” our consciousness encountered about our condition as females in a patriarchal world. We were also influenced, I must confess, by tendencies of the male movements, which were given to abstract rhetoric but ejaculatory tactics; that is, if the revolution as they defined it didn't occur in a meretricious spurt within the next week, month, five years at the maximum—then the hell with it. Depression. Impotence. If radicals wouldn't be alive, anyway, to see it, then we might as well die for it. This comfortably settled the necessity for any long-range planning.

Today, my just-as-ever-urgent anger is tempered by a patience born of the recognition that the process, the form of change itself, is everything: the means and the goal justifying each other.

There are no easy victories, no pat answers—and anyone who purveys such solutions alarms me now. But when I look back from my still-militantly rocking chair, or sit at my ultimate weapon, the typewriter, I see the transformations spiraling upward so rapidly and so astonishingly that I feel awe and gratitude at being a part of such change.

We were an “American phenomenon,” they said—a symptom of the untreated neurosis and stridency of spoiled American women. (“They” were the patriarchal Left, Right, and Middle, the media, most men, and some women.) They overlooked certain little facts: that women had been oppressed longer than any other group, this subjugation having stood as the model for all subsequent forms of oppression; that women were a majority of the world's population; that specific commonalities of biology, attitude, and certainly treatment potentially united us across all the patriarchally imposed barriers of race, age, class, sexual preference, superficial politics, and life-styles. Now, as I write, this potential is vibrating throughout the globe—among Women's Movements in Thailand and Tanzania, Japan and Australia, China and South America and all across Europe, New Zealand, Algeria, Canada, Israel, Egypt, and the Indian subcontinent.

We were “a white, middle-class, youth movement,” they said. And even as some of us wrung our hands with guilt hand lotion, we knew otherwise. Because from the beginning there were women involved who were of every class and race and age, even if the media did focus on a conveniently stereotyped “feminist image.” Today, the National Black Feminist Organization—to name only one such group—has chapters in many major cities and has had two national conventions; Native American feminist activism is blossoming in the Southwest; Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American women are publicly affirming the feminist consciousness they have known all along. Grandmothers and grammar-school feminists are organizing, in everything from OWL (Older Women's Liberation) groups to Little League assaults. The Coalition of Labor Union Women is making waves within the male-controlled labor movement; and domestic workers, secretaries, hospital employees, welfare mothers, waitresses, and hundreds of thousands of other women—too long a list to name here—are fighting for their/our rights.

They said we were “anti-housewife,” though many of us
were
housewives, and it was not us, but society itself, as structured by men, which had contempt for life-sustenance tasks. Today, too many housewives are in open participation in the Women's Movement to be ignored—and many are talking of a housewives' union. (Not to speak of the phenomenon of “runaway wives,” as the news media call them
in articles which puzzle over the motivation of women who simply have picked up one dirty sock too many from the living-room floor.)

They said we were “a lesbian plot,” and the carefully implanted and fostered bigotry of many heterosexual feminists rose eagerly to deny that, thereby driving many lesbian women out of the movement, back into the arms of their gay “brothers,” who promptly shoved mimeograph machines at them. What a choice. But the process did continue, and so the pendulum swung into its tactically tragic but expectable position, a reply-in-kind from some lesbian-feminists who created the politics of “dyke separatism,” the refusal to work with or sometimes even speak to women who could not prove lesbian credentials. This was sometimes accompanied by the proclamation that lesbians were the only true feminists, or were the feminist “vanguard,” and the accusation that all heterosexual women were forever “sold out” to men (leaving lesbian mothers, by the way, in a no-woman's-land). In some parts of the country it was called “the lesbian-straight split”—or even the “lesbian-feminist split”—with a terrifying antagonism on both sides. Yet most serious feminists continued to work together across sexual-preference labeling, and the process endured (through many tears), and we survived.

More and more, every day, that “split” is healing, from both sides: a changing attitude on the part of so-called straight women—about our own sexuality, about the necessity and joyousness of loving other women
and
ourselves, whether emotionally or physically, about the commitment and support our lesbian sisters require and deserve of us. And a changing attitude on the part of lesbian feminists—about
our
own sexuality, about the self- and sister-destructive compartmentalizing of women in roles
or
vanguards
or
self-affirmed ghettos. During that struggle, many an anti-lesbian woman conquered feelings of threat, of terror, and “came out” in fact, learning proudly to love another woman. Many lesbian women came to a more earnest feminism: a realization that we each need all women to survive—and that no woman's life-style, whether apparently chosen or seemingly forced upon her, could be held in contempt for the sake of some abstract “correct line.” Because the Women's Movement
is
a plot of women who are lesbians—and a plot of women who are virgins, heterosexuals, celibates, and bisexuals. And we conspirators are all unlearning the absurd prefixes to the word “sexual” and beginning to discover, create, define ourselves as
women
.