Going Too Far (3 page)

They said we were “anti-motherhood”—and in the growing pains of certain periods, some of us were. There were times when I was made to feel guilty for having wanted and borne a child—let alone a male one, forgodsake. There were other times when we “collectivized” around children, and I found myself miffed at the temporary loss of that
relationship unique to the specific mother and specific child. So much of the transition is understandable now. Since the patriarchy commanded women to be mothers (the thesis), we had to rebel with our own polarity and declare motherhood a reactionary cabal (antithesis). Today a new synthesis has emerged; the concept of mother-right, the affirmation of child-bearing and/or child-rearing when it is a woman's
choice
. And while that synthesis itself will in turn become a new thesis (a dialectic, a process, a development), it is refreshing at last to be able to come out of my mother-closet and yell to the world that I love my dear wonderful delicious child—and am not one damned whit less the radical feminist for that.

None of the above-mentioned issues is simple. None is “solved.” Struggle, experimentation, and examination of each of these differences (and new ones yet to come) will continue, must continue, for years. And we can expect these divisions to be exploited as
diversions
by those who would love to see us fail. But that no longer scares or depresses me, despite the enormity of the job ahead. The only thing that does frighten me is the superficial treatment of any such issue, the simplifying of complexities out of intellectual laziness, fear of the unknown, or rigidified thinking. Yet despite the temptation to fall into such traps of “nonthought,” the growth does continue and the motion cannot be stopped.

They said we were “going too far.” Perhaps this has been their most frequent and basic accusation, phrased in a thousand different ways. Never mind that we are forced to act, or react, by the pain of our status itself (even as the young woman responding to relentless pressure in the back seat of the car nevertheless gets blamed for the result, enduring a cliché situation only to acquire a reputation for “going too far”). No, it's our fault, always. The vote? “This time the ladies are going too far.” An end to foot-binding? “That goes too far.” Abolishing slavery, wife-buying and -selling and -beating, rape, clitoridectomies, butcher-abortions, suttee—attacks on such issues were all radical, “extremist” notions in their time (in some parts of the world, radical and extreme to this day). A woman working outside the home? In other than volunteer jobs? You mean for
pay?
Surely that takes things too far, undermines the very foundations of family and therefore state (unless of course she is a “lower-class” woman who has always been permitted menial jobs—in which case her demand for a
decent
living would be seen comparably as, naturally, going too far). More recently, perhaps: “Well, equal pay for equal work, yes, but a woman learning karate, a woman raising a child with her lesbian lover, a woman brain surgeon or priest or astronaut or architect or President—now
that's
going too far.”

At last. At last we seem to be understanding that there
is
no “too far,” that
as
we grow and change we expand the categories
themselves, that we create new space, that our just expectations and visionary demands for ourselves and our children bear us forward on an inexorable tide past all the fears and clucking tongues (even our own)—much too wonderfully far for even our own senses to realize, in this, our historical present. And there is never any turning back.

I call myself a radical feminist, and that means specific things to me. The etymology of the word “radical” refers to “one who goes to the root.” I believe that sexism is the root oppression, the one which, until and unless we
up
root it, will continue to put forth the branches of racism, class hatred, ageism, competition, ecological disaster, and economic exploitation. This means, to me, that the so-called revolutions to date have been coups d'états between men, in a half-hearted attempt to prune the branches but leave the root embedded—for the sake of preserving their own male privileges. This also means that I'm not out for us as women to settle for a “piece of the pie,” equality in an unjust society, or for mere “top-down” change which can be corrupted into leaving the basic system unaltered. I think our feminist revolution gains momentum from a “ripple effect”—from each individual woman gaining self-respect and yes, power, over her own body and soul first, then within her family, on her block, in her town, state, and so on out from the center, overlapping with similar changes other women are experiencing, the circles rippling more widely and inclusively as they go. This is a revolution in consciousness, rising expectations, and the actions which reflect that organic process.

In the past decade I have seen just such methods give birth to hundreds of alternate feminist institutions, created and sustained by women's energy—all concrete moves toward self-determination and power.

There are the Feminist Women's Health Centers proliferating in cities and towns around the country, proving that the speculum may well be mightier than the scalpel; the Rape Crisis Centers and the Centers for Battered Women; the Women's Law Centers; the expanding feminist media—books and newspapers and newsletters and magazines and pamphlets, literary and scholarly and how-to practical journals, as well as film groups, videotape collectives, radio and television and cable TV programs; the record companies; the Feminist Federal Credit Unions, begun only a few years ago (Detroit was the first) and now spreading to other cities—with assets approaching one and a half million dollars in women's control. There are the child-care centers which differ radically in tone, function, and cost from the “Kentucky-fried children” chains. There are the women's-studies programs which range all the way from that first “token” course to full-fledged departments, some of them allowing a minor, a major, or complete graduate work. There are the small feminist businesses—trusting enterprises in the face of a
national depression—somehow managing to stay afloat while serving the women's community and at the same time providing salaries for the women who work there. Restaurants, craft shops, self-defense schools, employment agencies, bookstores, publishing houses and small presses—the list goes on and on.

Whenever I hear certain men sonorously announce that the Women's Movement is dead (a prediction they have been promoting hopefully since 1968), I am moved to an awkwardly unmilitant hilarity. I know, of course, that they mean we seem less sensational: “Where are all those bra-burnings?” (none of which ever took place anyway, to my knowledge). Such death-knell articulations are not only (deliberately?) unaware of multiform alternate institutions that are mushrooming, but unconscious of the more profound and threatening-to-the-status-quo political
attitudes
which underlie that surface. It is, for example, a grave error to see feminists as “retrenching” when the reality is that we have been maturing beyond those aforementioned “ejaculatory tactics” into a long-term, committed attitude toward
winning
. We are digging in, since we know that patriarchy won't be unbuilt in a day, and the revolution we are making is one on
every
front: economic, social, political, cultural, personal, public, sexual, biological, and even metaphysical.

The early ultra-egalitarianism and guilt-ridden “downward mobility” motifs of certain radical feminist groups, for instance, have modulated into a realization that women deserve to have credit for what we accomplish, whether that be the author's name signed to her article (after centuries of being “Anonymous”), or the right to be paid a living wage for her work at a feminist business (instead of falling prey to a new volunteerism—this one “for the revolution's sake”). The early antipathy toward any and all structure has given way to a recognition that we must evolve totally new ways of organizing ourselves, something other than chaotic spontaneity
or
masculinist hierarchy. The early excesses of collective tyranny have shifted into an understanding that there is a difference between individualism and individuality—and that the latter is admirable and to be cherished. The emphasis on women's studies reflects the welcome end of anti-intellectual trends (again picked up from male movements—a “line” created by privileged men who already had their college educations along with their charisma points in SDS or the counter-culture). We are daring to demand and explore the delights of hard intellectual work, both as personal challenge and shared necessity. All the jargon exhorting us to “seize power” won't help if we “seize” the labs, for instance, and stand ignorantly gaping at the test tubes. We are daring to research our own cleverly buried herstorical past, even to develop new and radical teaching methods as joint odysseys between teachers and students, without deification—or
degadation—of either. Beneath the expansion of presses and magazines is an explosion of women's culture so energetic and widespread that it has not only given voice to women as a people but shows signs of rescuing art itself from the necrophiliac modernism of the Establishment, making poetry and music and drama and visual art and dance once again relevant, passionate, accessible, something to be integrated into all of our daily lives.

Underlying the visible activity of the women's health movement are political implications which could shake society's assumptions to the core: the reviving profession of midwifery; the research into menstrual extraction done by the Feminist Women's Health Centers (a technique allowing a woman to reduce her five-day period into one of five minutes' duration); abortion and contraceptive research done
by
women; new and humane means of giving birth with the mother in control of the choice and procedure of method; and feminist research into orgasm and women-run therapy sessions, with a 90 percent success rate, for “pre-orgasmic” women (who were formerly labeled “frigid” by male therapists). There are also the beginnings of feminist research into fetology and genetics, cloning and extra-uterine birth techniques—which
could
be tools of liberation if women controlled the means of such reproduction, but which would be agents of a science-fiction nightmare if the present medical establishment maintains its hegemony over this research. All these “ripple effects” circle out from the reclaiming of our most basic right, our own bodies, for our own purposes.

But the developments have not been limited to the physical and material sphere. A spiritual hunger is being expressed by women. I do not mean the hunger for an “opiate of the people” or escapism or a fad like the one which gooses frantic followers into chasing after a plump, rich, teenage boy for the truth and the light. On the contrary, this new spirituality transcends all such simplicities. It is the birth of a genuine feminist metaphysics. It is as if women were realizing that, to paraphrase Mary Daly, the ultimate degradation foisted on any oppressed people is a thievery of the right “to name”—to name ourselves, and our relation to the universe. And so, while some sisters continue to batter away at the discrimination from within patriarchal religions (those dear uppity nuns, those intrepid women ministers and rabbis and priests), many other women are researching the original matriarchal faiths and philosophies which most anthropologists now agree predated patriarchal ones—and there is an accompanying revival of interest in Wicce, or the Craft of the Wise: witchcraft (as the highly sophisticated and lyrical nature philosophy it is—not the satanic weirdo fringe that the patriarchy would have us
believe
it is).

Most important, all these psychic and religious explorations are part of a process of affirming the complexity of the universe and the
divinity in each of us. How different from dogmatic pronouncements, from the centuries-old misogyny which still blames Eve for “the fall,” and which burned millions of her daughters at the stake! How refreshing and fitting to be able to conceive of the life force as a
creatrix
, one which our own female creative bodies reflect! The possibilities opened up by such thought are tremendously exciting. Oh, I have my “mother of us all” moments when I stir the chicken soup and worry that these concepts can be too easily trivialized, reduced into excuses which might sound like, “Oh, goody, now we can pray to the Mother Goddess for freedom, and it will fall like womanna from heaven—so we don't have to organize or work to bring it about.” But I also know that the process is a tempering one, and for every woman who gets mired in
spiritualism
as an excuse, there will be many more who will be strengthened, affirmed, and energized by
spirituality
—“Praise the Goddess and pass the petition,” as it were. Which is fortunate, because I assume that the Goddess is a feminist who would not feel amusement at being expected to pick up after others' messes.

And where, my dear reader may well ask, does this Pollyanna writer see the dangers, the failures, the losses? Or is she so blind, the woman in the mirror, that she thinks we've really come a long way, baby? Hardly.

These arms have held the vomitous shudderings of a sister-prostitute undergoing forced jail-withdrawal from her heroin addiction. These eyes have wept over the suicide of a sister-poet. These shoulders have tightened at the vilifications of men—on the street, in the media, on the lecture platform. These fists have clenched at the reality of backlash against us: the well-financed “friends of the fetus” mobilizing again to retake what small ground we have gained in the area of abortion; the rise in rape statistics (not only because more women are daring to
report
rapes, but also because more rapes are occurring). This stomach has knotted at the anonymous phone calls, the unsigned death threats, the real bombs planted in real auditoriums before a poetry reading or speech, the real bullet fired from a real pistol at the real podium behind which I was standing. (Those who have power over our lives recognize the threat we pose—even when we ourselves do not.)