Going Too Far (32 page)

Dear Sisters,

As We in the Craft say, Blessed Be.

April 1973

¹
Actually, the quote is from Olive Chancellor, a nineteenth-century feminist
character
in
The Bostonians
, Henry James' superb novel on the fight for women's suffrage. I was still a closet Jamesian at this point, and too cowardly to acknowledge (particularly before such an audience) that this pithily perfect riposte came from the brain of a male, even if he was one fortunate enough to have been Alice James' brother, wise enough to have comprehended the female condition, and genius enough to have conveyed it exquisitely in book after book wherein live some of the greatest female characters in all of fiction.

²
A self-descriptive term evolved by those radical homosexual men who, after helping to found the Gay Liberation Front, broke with it because of its oppression of women and effeminate men. See footnote 9, below; see also, footnote on p. 235.

³
From the title poem in
Monster
.

⁴
National Organization for Women.

⁵
A civil-rights-for-lesbians group begun in the fifties, which became a national organization loosely built of autonomous chapters.

⁶
The definition of “lesbian” itself came to depend on the strictness of one's interpretation. There were various rigid souls whose requirements were stern enough to be confused with the rules for contestants in the Miss America Pageant. For example, as the feminist newspaper
Her Self
reported in May of 1976, the pageant has added a new clause to its constitution stipulating that a contestant must not be and never have been pregnant. This was tacked onto a rule stating that she must be single and never have been married or had her marriage annulled. Nor may she ever have had an abortion. One might well assume that the pageant directors have borrowed their standards from certain lesbian-separatist purists.

⁷
A pioneer magazine on lesbian rights and culture, edited by Gene Damon.

⁸
The Lesbian Tide
is, at this writing, still publishing. All the rest are, sadly, defunct.

⁹
Winter/Spring 1973, published by Templar Press, P.O. Box 98, FDR Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10022.

¹⁰
In the process of winning the presidential nomination at the 1972 Demo cratic National Convention, candidate George McGovern jettisoned certain feminist issues, including stands on sexual and reproductive freedom, and withdrew support for women involved in the credentials challenge of the South Carolina delegation.

¹¹
Proposed “gay” legislation often emphasizes areas of great concern mainly to homosexual males: cruising, transvestitism, sado-masochistic practices, and even sodomy when defined as an act requiring the presence of a penis.

THE PROPER STUDY OF WOMANKIND: ON WOMEN'S STUDIES

One month after the Lesbian Feminist Conference took place in Los Angeles, I returned to California to speak at the Western Women's Studies Conference in Sacramento, an address on which the following article is based. This conference, too, belied its regional title, and welcomed women from all over the country. It too was beset with destructive confrontation-for-confrontation's-sake and also with authentic and fruitful struggle. An example of the former was the approach taken by a small “cadre” of women who had resolutely driven up from Southern California to announce to the conference that women should drop out of school and go organize the factories. This eminent morsel of nonlogic was offered, of course, by women who themselves held down teaching jobs in a women's-studies program started by feminists (who were later forced out by these same women); no fools they, this cadre knew but refused to admit that the “vanguard worker” on the assembly line usually wants nothing so much as to drop out of the
factory
and go to school. I have never been able to comprehend a train of thought which purports to make a revolution by urging those revolutionaries who have a modicum of education, mobility, or power not to use such tools but rather, out of guilt, to join the downtrodden masses who are themselves too damned weary and bitter and beaten to make that same revolution.

An example of constructive dialogue, on the other hand, was the serious communication that went on in small groups for the duration of the conference and continued for some time afterward, the open discussions established between black, Chicana, Asian, and white feminists, and the uncompromising intellectual integrity of women like Joan Hoff Wilson and Kathleen Barry, who refused to permit the conference to dwindle into an exchange of rhetoric but who insisted instead on an exchange of ideas.

The proliferation of women's-studies courses, programs, even entire schools is to me one of the most encouraging developments in the Feminist Movement to date. If during my years in the Left and my years as a Marxist-oriented “Women's Liberationist” I was forced to become ashamed of being an intellectual and an artist, the blame surely must be shared at least three ways: by myself, for ever being cowardly or defensive about what I knew to be important and
worth
defending; by what had passed itself off as the American intellectual and artistic “community”—in reality a hypocritical establishment which had permitted itself to become ineffectual and cynical; and by the dogmatic pressure of hard-line politicos themselves. Between those who will take no side and those who insist there
is
no side but their own there must be people of courage who persist in exploration. If a political movement is unconcerned with or suspicious of gaining knowledge, or conversely is naïve about the bias which those in power will have layered over that knowledge,
or
is lazy about stripping away those layers and seeking the truth—then such a movement ultimately condemns itself to the obscene and deliberate ignorance of, say, the Nazi scientists' position “on race,” or the propagandistic rigidity with which the Soviet Union once adopted Lamarck's theory of evolution via the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

U.N. statistics note that of the eight hundred million illiterates alive today, five hundred million are women. While there are women alive who still are not permitted to learn to read, education is for us not only a right but a rallying cry.

We are sowing the seeds of new knowledge. The renaissance which will flower from the release of such energy—the energy of focused intelligence—is only now beginning, and the fruit will ripen for decades to come.

I
WANT TO START
by our congratulating each other: the sisters all assembled here at the West Coast Women's Studies Conference, and especially the sisters who organized it. (You can't be in the Women's Movement for very long without knowing that to organize a conference of any sort is an exercise either in heroism or masochism or both.)

Yet this conference takes place not in a vacuum but in an authentic historical context. The history of women in education is, I think, important as a foundation for Women's Studies. I am afraid relatively few people know that Susan B. Anthony (about whom too little is popularly known anyway), devoted her last energies to the cause of women's education. She lived in Rochester, New York, for most of her life, and when she was quite old and ill, she took on the battle of
the admission of women to the university there. Between bouts of pneumonia and exhaustion, she lobbied and organized, even putting up her life's savings of two thousand dollars to guarantee the program. She died a matter of weeks after victory was assured. Women university students were her pallbearers.

The first women's schools and colleges were originally feminist institutions, of course, because we were not permitted into male colleges. The tragedy of these places, such as the Seven Sisters, is that what was originally a feminist concept has been turned around in some cases into a training school for corporate wives. One fine women's college, for example, had a token course not too long ago called “Women in Literature” which I naïvely had thought referred to a course on women writers. Wrong. This was a course on women
characters
in the novels of
male
writers and it was taught by a man who thought that the greatest twentieth-century literary artist was Norman Mailer.

Up Against It

The obstacles we face are basic, even to including issues such as the
hiring
of female faculty and the
admission
of female students in many places (and not only in areas of Women's Studies). Salary differentials and tenure discrimination and, in general, attitudes hostile to experimentation are still common. You rarely find women in positions of power: department heads, top administrative posts, the jobs which control content and define style. You do find administration
use
of unthreatening “good ladies” to teach their women's-studies programs or their token courses—they find a woman who can be depended on as safe or “unpolitical”; they take her out of one department and suddenly,
shazam
, she becomes the official resident feminist, even if she herself is mystified by or indifferent to the Feminist Movement. (As Gloria Steinem has perceptively—and wryly—observed, we are triumphantly galloping toward tokenism.)

Then there are the obstacles from within, at least regarding feminist consciousness. These are so often understandable if pathetic defenses against seeing a cruel truth. In a campus context, for instance, there are the professional women who sometimes have fallen into the trap of being “exceptional women” (that's the “pull yourself up by your own G-string” line, which blames others in one's own group for a mutual oppression). The student women can tend to claim, “Well,
we're
not oppressed; we're outside parental control for the first time in our lives and we're not yet up against marriage or kids or the job market. We have all this comparative freedom.” This freedom—in the middle of educational tracking and dorm rules and dress codes and
campus rape and having to type their boyfriends' term papers.
¹
The staff women at a college are not surprisingly scared of losing their jobs. Then there is the fourth part of the women's community, probably the most invisible faction on any campus, and often, for shame, ignored even by the Women's Movement: the faculty wives—the women who are just not considered or who are considered only as appendages to their husbands. And
their
obvious defense is “We are happy because if we say we are not happy, our world will fall apart.”

All these areas, it is true, have been tremoring with the feminist earthquake; professional women forming caucuses in their national academic associations, student women organizing, and staff women organizing, and faculty wives, too, forming consciousness-raising groups.

But the really important thing is that they
begin to unite
. Unfortunately this happens less often than it should. What usually does happen is: The faculty women will approach the student women and say, “Will you sign this petition on hiring and firing?” The student women will reply, “Six months ago we had a demonstration to get a child-care center on this campus, and you didn't support us in that because you said demonstrating was unladylike. So now we are not going to help you on
your
petition.” So we are divided—and conquered. And the administration relaxes while we squabble. So are wedges driven between women, usually from the two expectable sources, the male Right and the male Left.

Cannon to the Right of Us

Pressure from the Right is familiar to everybody, but I want to read from a
New York Times
clipping dated November 1972 with this headline: “Colleges Scored on Hiring of Women, U.S. Aid Sees Backlash by Male Faculty Members.” Briefly: “The federal government's program to enforce equal hiring and promotional opportunities for women and minorities on college faculties is losing ground to a growing rhetorical backlash from male faculty members and administrators, the
director of the office for civil rights said here today.” This was at a national conference on affirmative action sponsored by Syracuse University. They came right out and said it.

Pressure from the Right in more informal ways? Well, there's the whole funding argument: the same school which has limitless funding available to support the jock mentality on any campus—from a new basketball hoop to a new football field—cannot come up with even two hundred dollars for a small child-care center, let alone fund a women's-studies program. They're too poor. And there is always pressure in the form of veiled or open threats of firing (or, in the case of students, suspension or expulsion), or of outright killing the program if you already happen to have one. There is also plain old pedantry and dullness, and of course the manipulation tactic. A beautiful example of this is what happened at an Ivy League coed college which claimed to have a really stunning women's-studies program—sixteen courses. It turned out that only three of those courses were for credit. The rest of them were all volunteer-taught by women who knew there was a need for women's studies, and volunteer-
attended
by women who wanted to learn. Women got no credit for it as students, no salary for it as teachers, yet administration representatives would go to women's-studies conferences and brag that they had a program of sixteen courses!

In any list of fundamental obstacles, we daren't forget the academic-
versus
-the-political approach. You know, are we going to be academic, objective, and
scholarly
about this, or are we in some way going to relate this program to—godforbid—
feminism?
(As if these approaches were mutually exclusive.) This administration line always interests me:
who determines
whether something is academic or political? I find it ironic that the very people who have that power happen to be the men or the sons of the men who buried our history in the first place, and now will judge what we shall or shall not be permitted to learn about it. The point is that
there is no approach which is not political
. The so-called objective, apolitical, or nonpartisan stand is itself a political stand. There are no innocent bystanders any longer.