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Ain't I A Woman? newspapers, June 1970-July 1971

1970-10-30 "Ain't I a Woman?" Page 13

[line of figures]

must we be hassled by WL? If separatism hasn't become an end in itself - there should be room in WL for groups (Lesbians, older women) to caucus about their oppression by their sisters in WL and also for groups who wish to work with men to do so.
   I would like to say something about the "end in itself" attitude I seem to have toward day care and how this relates to working with men. I am beginning to feel that at this time, it is only the privileged who have the time, energy and lack of personal responsibility to question the established order and become revolutionaries. This is one reason why the Left has been largely middle class white males. I think we have to critically look at Women's Liberation and figure out what privilege means within the female caste. We can no longer just define privilage according to class and race, although the correlations will be high. For instance I must realize that living as I do with 7 women in a Women's Liberation collective without children is one of the most privileged positions a revolutionary woman can be in. I believe that married women with children are low on the scale of privileges within the female caste. Women have certain defenses that make their lives livable: they love to serve their husbands, they love to take care of their children 24 hours a day, they think their bosses are smarter, etc. As a privileged woman in my position I have been telling them that their husbands are oppressors that they shouldn't have to have 24 hour a day responsibility for the total physical and emotional support of children, that they should be able to use their minds and their creativity. I then expect them to be able to look at the reality of their lives, drop their defenses and work for Women's Liberation, with a hope for an end to their oppression "come the revolution." I expect this even though they may have no free time to work for Women's Liberation because they must continue their responsibility to their children and they see no alternative to daily existance with husbands or bosses on whom they are completely dependent for money to survive. My point is that unless we can offer some alternatives now, we can't expect most women to drop their defenses that validate their lives. And unless we offer some alternatives now some women will never have the time or energy to work in Women's Liberation. I therefore don't see the function of day care centers primarily to organize women but rather as a necessary prerequisite for the organization of women. 
   Because it is not after the revolution, this means compromise, it means working with liberals, it means working with men. We have to establish day care centers where we can: In churches although we don't like what religion does to women, through universities although we don't like what they do to women, etc. It means involving men who will spend time caring for children and will fight for the establishment of new day care facilities. Day care could be spread out so that all women shared equal responsibility for children, thus taking the privileges away from some women and freeing others. However, I feel it's more desireable to have as many men as are willing, working at day care centers and working to establish new day care centers. Timewise this frees women to a greater extent to question their lives and work politically. If we maintain a purist view toward day care (for instance a totally female controlled and established day care center in a non-sexist location) there will be very few day care centers. We privileged women will continue to theorize about the revolution, we will refuse to be co-opted, but our revolution will be based on the theories of privileged women not on the mass of women we didn't involve because it required from us reformist services.
   Sisters - I hope I want the same revolution you want - I can't leave the support I get from you - but I believe no one, not even WL, knows how to pull this revolution off right. If my new (old?) way won't work, I'll find out - my feminist conciousness won't leave me. But please, don't have an unquestionable dogma - that when broken or questioned makes a sister not quite the sister she used to be.
  Love to the sisters and power to the people. 

To Be a Revolutionary Woman
tive strength will ever make women a part of the people. Slogans, education, or what now would be an unequal confrontation won't do it. Confrontation implies a clash of at least two sides each with relatively equal power. If women were to face men with their sexism now, there could be no confrontation -- just a squish.
   To take men into women's liberation, as some women would do, is to give up the right of women to define their own needs and to discover the ways of meeting those needs. It is profoundly anti-woman that men should want that power. We should not have fears of making alliances with other groups when we share common goals: the end to that primary contradiction as well as the contradictions of being poor in a rich land or black in a white land, but we must not cut off our most basic belief by denying our right to define our own needs. We should set up no standards for politically aware men which ignore that primary contradiction of being female in a patriarchal world. 
   Consider that if the gay cell had proposed to take men into their cell because they share with gay men the experience of homosexuality in a world with a heterosexual norm, the issue would have been treated quite differently.  We would have demanded that lesbians see a primary contradiction, that they identify as women. Should we ask any less of mothers, wives, and all sisters?
   Really identifying with other women is perhaps the most important and also the most difficult task we have. To achieve it we must deny the heterosexual norm -- the standard from which we are accused of deviating.
   Women working, living, or loving without men are viewed as separate from a group of people, against the people and the "people's revolution." Men and women alike often see that as a negative reaction to men. Such a view sees working with women only as a stage that must be transcended because working with men, being a heterosexual grouping is seen as natural. But no woman should be obligated to work with men for a year, a month, or a lifetime. We must support those women who choose to positively identify with other women. In a society based on the heterosexual norm they will receive little support, something women who work with men will not have to worry about. Society will consider them normal, just as it considers their secondary status natural.
   Wanting to build a strong movement of women, for women, says little of what we think of men, or ecology, or going to the moon. It says something about how we feel toward other women. It is an act of revolutionary love. 
   Consider how basic and deep our conceptions of heterosexuality are. Many people think that men loving other men must do so out of a negative reaction to women. Not sharing the oppression of gay men, they deny gay men their humanity and their positive feelings toward the men they love. Gay men may oppress, dominate, ridicule and hurt women because they are men and society values men more than women -- but gay men do not love men because they hate women.
   We are committed to fighting male supremacy and dominance, but that is not the basis for our identification with and love for women. To think it is would imply that when women and men share equally in some sensible society we will no longer identify with, love, or work with women. These positive feelings would be unquestioned in a sensible society that had no sexual dogma.
   Women's Liberation is separatist in origin -- like Weatherman or the Republican Party, we started somewhere else. But separatist means nothing about how the group functions, it refers to the act which took place -- the withdrawal from an original organization. Many women left old/new left organizations when we realized our own oppression within them, and we realized the lie we were living to deny our oppression for some greater good (that is, the male defined goals) of a "people's revolution." We realized that we were functioning to women's needs as the NAACP functions to blacks -- token leaders, women to keep other women cool, conforming to the image of the good revolutionary. But the "woman question" is too important for us to function that way.
   Men who may help us meet out needs will be willing to let us define those needs. Men never began the idea of day care because it was not men who benefitted from it. No men would sustain a day care project, because they still view child-care as the responsibility of women, or some half-and-half, so long as they define the terms.
   Men are very much involved in day care because our society is still based on a nuclear family and children have fathers, mothers often have husbands. Working to establish day care centers, women face problems of how to work with men that many other projects never have to face. The direction this issue will take and its importance are unclear. We don't even know if it is possible to work on day care with a strong feminist perspective. Despite our uncertainty and our criticism we do not want to deny the love and commitment the women in day care have displayed. We have been critical of what we consider failures on their part but we don't want that to negate what we recognize as their accomplishments.
   Because men are involved in day care is no reason they should be members of women's liberation groups. Women will have to do the analysis of day care as it concerns women, whether men ignore, share equally or completely run the day care centers. But the experiences women have working on one issue cannot determine the tactics or goals of the women's movement.

a Woman?   October 30, 1970   13

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[line of figures] must we be hassled by WL? If separatism hasn't become an end in itself - there should be room in WL for groups (Lesbians, older women) to caucus about their oppression by their sisters in WL and also for groups who wish to work with men to do so. I would like to say something about the "end in itself" attitude I seem to have toward day care and how this relates to working with men. I am beginning to feel that at this time, it is only the privileged who have the time, energy and lack of personal responsibility to question the established order and become revolutionaries. This is one reason why the Left has been largely middle class white males. I think we have to critically look at Women's Liberation and figure out what privilege means within the female caste. We can no longer just define privilage according to class and race, although the correlations will be high. For instance I must realize that living as I do with 7 women in a Women's Liberation collective without children is one of the most privileged positions a revolutionary woman can be in. I believe that married women with children are low on the scale of privileges within the female caste. Women have certain defenses that make their lives livable: they love to serve their husbands, they love to take care of their children 24 hours a day, they think their bosses are smarter, etc. As a privileged woman in my position I have been telling them that their husbands are oppressors that they shouldn't have to have 24 hour a day responsibility for the total physical and emotional support of children, that they should be able to use their minds and their creativity. I then expect them to be able to look at the reality of their lives, drop their defenses and work for Women's Liberation, with a hope for an end to their oppression "come the revolution." I expect this even though they may have no free time to work for Women's Liberation because they must continue their responsibility to their children and they see no alternative to daily existance with husbands or bosses on whom they are completely dependent for money to survive. My point is that unless we can offer some alternatives now, we can't expect most women to drop their defenses that validate their lives. And unless we offer some alternatives now some women will never have the time or energy to work in Women's Liberation. I therefore don't see the function of day care centers primarily to organize women but rather as a necessary prerequisite for the organization of women. Because it is not after the revolution, this means compromise, it means working with liberals, it means working with men. We have to establish day care centers where we can: In churches although we don't like what religion does to women, through universities although we don't like what they do to women, etc. It means involving men who will spend time caring for children and will fight for the establishment of new day care facilities. Day care could be spread out so that all women shared equal responsibility for children, thus taking the privileges away from some women and freeing others. However, I feel it's more desireable to have as many men as are willing, working at day care centers and working to establish new day care centers. Timewise this frees women to a greater extent to question their lives and work politically. If we maintain a purist view toward day care (for instance a totally female controlled and established day care center in a non-sexist location) there will be very few day care centers. We privileged women will continue to theorize about the revolution, we will refuse to be co-opted, but our revolution will be based on the theories of privileged women not on the mass of women we didn't involve because it required from us reformist services. Sisters - I hope I want the same revolution you want - I can't leave the support I get from you - but I believe no one, not even WL, knows how to pull this revolution off right. If my new (old?) way won't work, I'll find out - my feminist conciousness won't leave me. But please, don't have an unquestionable dogma - that when broken or questioned makes a sister not quite the sister she used to be. Love to the sisters and power to the people. To Be a Revolutionary Woman tive strength will ever make women a part of the people. Slogans, education, or what now would be an unequal confrontation won't do it. Confrontation implies a clash of at least two sides each with relatively equal power. If women were to face men with their sexism now, there could be no confrontation -- just a squish. To take men into women's liberation, as some women would do, is to give up the right of women to define their own needs and to discover the ways of meeting those needs. It is profoundly anti-woman that men should want that power. We should not have fears of making alliances with other groups when we share common goals: the end to that primary contradiction as well as the contradictions of being poor in a rich land or black in a white land, but we must not cut off our most basic belief by denying our right to define our own needs. We should set up no standards for politically aware men which ignore that primary contradiction of being female in a patriarchal world. Consider that if the gay cell had proposed to take men into their cell because they share with gay men the experience of homosexuality in a world with a heterosexual norm, the issue would have been treated quite differently. We would have demanded that lesbians see a primary contradiction, that they identify as women. Should we ask any less of mothers, wives, and all sisters? Really identifying with other women is perhaps the most important and also the most difficult task we have. To achieve it we must deny the heterosexual norm -- the standard from which we are accused of deviating. Women working, living, or loving without men are viewed as separate from a group of people, against the people and the "people's revolution." Men and women alike often see that as a negative reaction to men. Such a view sees working with women only as a stage that must be transcended because working with men, being a heterosexual grouping is seen as natural. But no woman should be obligated to work with men for a year, a month, or a lifetime. We must support those women who choose to positively identify with other women. In a society based on the heterosexual norm they will receive little support, something women who work with men will not have to worry about. Society will consider them normal, just as it considers their secondary status natural. Wanting to build a strong movement of women, for women, says little of what we think of men, or ecology, or going to the moon. It says something about how we feel toward other women. It is an act of revolutionary love. Consider how basic and deep our conceptions of heterosexuality are. Many people think that men loving other men must do so out of a negative reaction to women. Not sharing the oppression of gay men, they deny gay men their humanity and their positive feelings toward the men they love. Gay men may oppress, dominate, ridicule and hurt women because they are men and society values men more than women -- but gay men do not love men because they hate women. We are committed to fighting male supremacy and dominance, but that is not the basis for our identification with and love for women. To think it is would imply that when women and men share equally in some sensible society we will no longer identify with, love, or work with women. These positive feelings would be unquestioned in a sensible society that had no sexual dogma. Women's Liberation is separatist in origin -- like Weatherman or the Republican Party, we started somewhere else. But separatist means nothing about how the group functions, it refers to the act which took place -- the withdrawal from an original organization. Many women left old/new left organizations when we realized our own oppression within them, and we realized the lie we were living to deny our oppression for some greater good (that is, the male defined goals) of a "people's revolution." We realized that we were functioning to women's needs as the NAACP functions to blacks -- token leaders, women to keep other women cool, conforming to the image of the good revolutionary. But the "woman question" is too important for us to function that way. Men who may help us meet out needs will be willing to let us define those needs. Men never began the idea of day care because it was not men who benefitted from it. No men would sustain a day care project, because they still view child-care as the responsibility of women, or some half-and-half, so long as they define the terms. Men are very much involved in day care because our society is still based on a nuclear family and children have fathers, mothers often have husbands. Working to establish day care centers, women face problems of how to work with men that many other projects never have to face. The direction this issue will take and its importance are unclear. We don't even know if it is possible to work on day care with a strong feminist perspective. Despite our uncertainty and our criticism we do not want to deny the love and commitment the women in day care have displayed. We have been critical of what we consider failures on their part but we don't want that to negate what we recognize as their accomplishments. Because men are involved in day care is no reason they should be members of women's liberation groups. Women will have to do the analysis of day care as it concerns women, whether men ignore, share equally or completely run the day care centers. But the experiences women have working on one issue cannot determine the tactics or goals of the women's movement. a Woman? October 30, 1970 13