Going Too Far (33 page)

It's odd how feminism changes you—I no longer believe in coeducation, at least not for the present. I do believe, obviously, that there should be no schools which are closed to women. But I do think that there should be schools which are closed to
men
.
²
I confess that my
own anti-coeducational position discomfits me: it's as if I found myself in agreement with John Birchers, and it's unnerving. But I came to this position at New College and so must digress for a moment and explain.

It was the first time I ever “taught.” I was asked by the women students at New College, a small experimental college in Sarasota, Florida, to come down and start a feminist-studies program. New College prided itself on being more radical and hip than Antioch or Goddard. I was to be the Student Chair, which was pleasant, because although I had faculty status, I was answerable only to the students.

It was at New College I discovered the sexist hypocrisy of academia first-hand. Orientation week was jovially nicknamed Rape Week. The school expressed Marcuse's theory of repressive tolerance with the most exquisite clarity. Everybody was completely cooled out on grass in their coeducational dorms. There was no
backup
for the women, of course. When the women got pregnant, there was no abortion referral. There wasn't even contraception counseling available on campus, only “sexual liberation” and a lot of fake freedom. And of course this had so effectively defused the students that they sat glassy-eyed and passive through courses with titles like “An Analysis of Radical Action.”

The first thing the college did was to renege on our agreement that I was to teach only women. After much growling on both sides, a compromise was worked out: the radical-feminism course would be for women only, but I would permit male students into the women's-history course. This did annoy me for all the obvious reasons but especially because I had wanted to use an experimental form. I hadn't wanted to stand up there and lecture, I had wanted my classes to be collective explorations. In the all-women's class we
were
able to do that. In the mixed group, however, I had to control the situation more tightly.

I decided that there had to be some way at least to selectively lower male participation. It was a large class, about fifty people, and approximately half men. I announced in the first meeting with students that I would not grade women in either class, because I didn't see how women could fail in the subject of themselves. I also said I hadn't yet made up my mind whether to fail all the men automatically or to grade them on individual merit. This had the dramatic effect of driving fifteen men out of the mixed class that day. They had thought it was
going to be an easy credit, poor dears. Then I announced that there were no formal course requirements for any women, and no required papers. I said I thought it would be helpful to the whole Women's Movement if people
wanted
to do papers, because we needed research, theory, personal testimony, whatever the women students wanted to write. (To my delight, every woman in both courses voluntarily wrote a paper.) On the other hand, I announced that a sixty-page paper was required from each man. In addition, it was required that the men set up and run, under women's leadership, a child-care center. This further winnowing left us with four men. That rather surprised all of us; I thought they must be insane or actually serious, and we knew we'd soon see. In fact, three of the four did turn out to be serious, which is a pretty high ratio out of twenty-six men.

The real test, however, came a few weeks later. The administration had been harassing us all along: no department would Xerox anything we needed copied, the bookstore happened not to carry any of the books I had requested three months earlier. Finally, the administration announced that the feminist-studies program was over and that there would be no budget allotment to bring in other feminist speakers from around the country, as we had agreed. The women students and I had a long talk about this, and to shorten the saga, we seized the president's office for five days and nights. And won a number of points—not all, but some.
³

This experience gave me a small insight into what women face in an academic community. Previously, I'm afraid that I'd thought of academia as relatively safe. But the infighting alone, the politics
between
departments, was frightening. We started a faculty wives' consciousness-raising group, for example, and that was the most difficult experience of all because the women were terrified about talking. It might get back to John, who was Mary's husband over here, that Phil, who was Grace's husband, was really going for his job. I suddenly understood about fear in an “intellectual community.” Nor were things helped by the administration, which was not overly fond of me, since following the seizure nobody related to them any longer as warm-hearted papas. So they called me an outside agitator (which I definitely was and which role I affirm, I might add). They threatened to have me up on charges of what I refer to as “moral turpentine,” since evidently I was corrupting the minds of youth. All this taught me a new-found respect for feminists who are trying to survive, let alone function, in an academic community.

Cannon to the Left of Us

Of course not all the obstacles are thrown up by administrations, i.e., the Right. There
is
also the Left. This is rather a problem to me because I get bored talking about the Left. I spent seven years in it. I spent two or three years trying to get out of it. Since then I have been healthy and happy in the Feminist Movement, but certain ugly heads keep getting reared. We endure recurring waves, tiring and irrelevant as they are, of Marxism or of Trotskyism—or of the holy class analysis. Since many people talk
around
this and it's always accusation and counter-accusation, I am going to try and talk some theory. About why I feel that the class analysis is inapplicable at best and destructive at worst to the developing of a revolutionary feminist movement.

I will give only one of many examples. Capitalism is based on a marketplace economy; that is, wages paid for labor (exploited). Most women in this country work as housewives, on the average of a 99.6 hour work-week. For this there is no pay, no remuneration, no honor, no dignity, no respect, nothing. Neither the capitalist society
nor
the Marxist analysis considers housewives workers. What in fact the work of housewifery
is
in a “class analysis” is
invisible labor
. It is labor at the bottom of the pyramid, on which the total edifice rests. Invisible labor that exists without any pay has another name: feudalism, or slave labor. We know that were every housewife in this country paid a wage commensurate to her work, we would have a bloodless revolution overnight—the economy could not support it, the economy would fall. I find it alarming that a class analysis overlooks or ignores that area where the great mass of women (of
people
, numerically) work, just as I find it unfortunate when our own language picks up on it as in references to “working women.” I think that we really ought to try to refer to women who work
at home
and/or women who work
outside the home
. Of course, many women do both. But housewives
are
working women.
⁴

Our Own Approach

I agree with Joan Hoff Wilson's position that we must not look to other revolutions as models. Because we are not Cuba, we are not
Algeria, we are not China, and we are not
men
, which should suffice.
The point is that we as feminists must search for ourselves, and for the connectives between women. It is the Man who looks for the differences
. Until and unless each oppressed group begins to have as its priority looking for the things it has in common, the strong points, the similarities, it is lost.

We must be careful not to contract contagious patriarchal thought. Sometimes it wears the face of pedantry; sometimes it masquerades as anti-intellectualism. The “anti-articulate line,” for example: you should not be able to phrase anything in words over one syllable. My response is that a serious revolutionary would no more wield ineffective language than she would carry a clogged gun. Because language is a weapon like anything else, and I for one want us to use it as best and movingly and efficiently as we can. I want us to seize that tool like any other. I want to have everything, in fact: feminist colleges, feminist universities, a feminist world.

In the meantime, though, I must admit that mere survival is a priority. So let's examine the temporary solution—the women's-studies program. I shall share with you my fantasy of the ideal program, if we all keep in mind that settling for less than everything is absurd—and eventually unnecessary.

I know, as I'm sure you do, most of the arguments for and against a program's being interdisciplinary or autonomous; obviously the approach taken would depend largely on the school, the support for such a program, and other local “tactical” elements. Personally, I favor the autonomous program, where the university gets to write the funding check and thereafter is permitted to maintain a respectful silence. My ideal program would be run collectively by that aforementioned coalition of women: student/faculty/staff/faculty wife. Other features would include:

—a “floating credit”: I don't think that's an official academic phrase, but by it I mean that any woman could take a course for credit and then apply it anywhere she wished, to another school or program.

—a minor, a major,
and
a graduate-studies program.

—courses in every discipline, all taught by women.

—an emphasis on history because, politically, if we do not know our own past we are, cliché or not, doomed to repeat it. (History not only to cover the suffrage struggles, of course, but also to explore the ancient gynocratic societies, tying in with anthropological and archeological studies in these areas.)

—self-defense
for credit;
this is
not
an extracurricular activity, as most schools today regard it. For women, it is a basic survival need.

—classes in legal rights and consumer rights.

—paramedical and midwifery training, in addition to pre-med courses.

—free child-care facilities controlled by the people (adults
and
children) who use them, but funded by the university.

—a generous athletic budget, emphasizing noncompetitive sports.

—a strong emphasis on outreach—to grammar schools, high schools, adult education, and community women—to keep the program from becoming an incestuous campus-based clique.

—new and exploratory disciplines: mythography, medical ethics, etc.

—new approaches to old disciplines: I, for one, want to know less who won which battle as the boys played war games, and more about women's history; not only about which remarkable women entered the male history as exceptions but about the women who were never permitted entrance at all or only invisibly. And what about the
trends
made invisible? For example, when was the tampon invented and what effect, socially, did it have on women? When did the pressure begin, in modern times, for women to start shaving legs and armpits? Was it with the invention of the modern razor blade; was it with the marketing of silk stockings? What did that
mean
in a socioeconomic context? I think this is part of history. I think we must transform the subjects we study as well as be willing to be transformed by them. There must be an emphasis on the hard
and
soft sciences. We need to know about inovulation, or as men call it, cloning. We need to know about the technology. You cannot rant about seizing power and then turn around and say all education is bourgeois.

There are people at this conference who came with the admitted purpose of “turning women off” to women's studies. Why? Why are women the only oppressed group who should be ashamed of going to school? You don't hear the black community saying that it's bourgeois to go to school. On the contrary. The black community wants
open admission
to get those educational tools. Yes, it's odious to have to go to the Man for them, but we must take them and use them in a new way. Not to move up the ladder: to destroy the ladder.
That
is the revolutionary approach.

Meanwhile, back to the harsh realities of ivory-tower academia. Survival measures for women currently struggling day by day in a coeducational institution might include some of the following demands:

—a grievance board to deal with complaints about the sexist comments made in class by male instructors, the emotional and/or physical rape of women students, the offensive material on the reading list, the contempt with which feminist papers are met by so many male professors.

—a lesbian counselor chosen by the lesbian feminists on the campus; this, in addition to a heterosexual feminist counselor. No male counselor should presume to counsel women, whatever their sexual proclivities.

—an emphasis on the issues of rape and abortion; abortion referral and contraception available
on
the campus, as well as childbirth and post-partum care and advice;

—maternity
and
paternity leave—he should be home dealing with the baby, too, if he's around. And he should
be
around if she wants him around and
not
if she doesn't.

The demands could go on and on. Women's work is truly never done. But there are many ways and means. Study the curricula, organizing suggestions, and advice in the literature from the Feminist Press and KNOW, Inc., in Pittsburgh. The work they have done in creating the Clearing House for Women's Studies and the
Women's Studies Newsletter
is invaluable. Read the journals coming out on this whole new area. In addition, read the
Penn Women's Studies Planners Pamphlet
.
⁵
(This began as a summer project required of Penn women by the university. The women felt that as long as it was an obligatory task they would do a really comprehensive study to be of service to other women elsewhere. I highly recommend it for its wit as well as its expert counsel.) Investigate the plans for a National Women's Studies Association.
⁶