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Introduction to “I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions”

By Wendy Kaminer

From I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Addison-Wesley, 1992)

Introduction

This is not a book about my life or yours. It does not hold the secret to success or salvation. It won’t strengthen your self-esteem. I don’t think it will get me on “Oprah.”

My critique of the recovery movement and other self-help fashions does not reflect my personal experiences (although it surely reflects my temperament). I am not and never have been a convert to recovery or even an occasional consumer of popular psychology, religion, or wellness books. I have attended support groups only as an observer, not as a participant. I have read self-help books only as a critic, not as a seeker, and I was rarely engaged by the books that I read (one hundred or so), except as a critic. Whether this makes my analysis more or less worthwhile depends on whether you value the authority of experience more or less than the authority of research and reflection.

Writing on the basis of research and reflection, not experience, I’m writing counter to the Alcoholics Anonymous, twelvestep tradition currently in vogue. “Hi, I’m Wendy, and I’m a recovering alcoholic, overeater, drug abuser, shopper, or support group junkie;” I’d be required to confess if I were writing a recovery book, offering advice. Instead I have only opinions and ideas; so although I imagine myself engaging in a dialogue with my readers, I don’t imagine that we constitute a fellowship, based on shared experiences. Nor do I pretend to love my readers, any more than they love me and countless other strangers.

Perhaps because I have never trusted or desired protestations of affection or concern from strangers and mere acquaintances, I have never been attracted to support groups. It is often said that support groups offer community, and for people who attend the same group regularly and befriend other members that may well be true. But newcomers to meetings are considered part of the community too, so it is not necessarily based on friendship, if by friendship we mean bonds that build and strengthen over time. A twelve-step group seems a sad model for community. Testimony takes the place of conversation. Whether sitting in circles or lined up in rows, people take turns delivering monologues about themselves, rarely making eye contact with any of their listeners. Once, at an AA meeting I attended, a man testifying from the front row turned to look at us while he spoke, scanning our faces, seeking contact. Like everyone else I looked away; his behavior seemed inappropriate.

My own notion of intimacy does not include prurience — the exchange of secrets between strangers. My vision of community is shaped by an ideal of mutual respect between citizens and neighbors and a shared sense of courtesy and justice, but not love. “Not all men are worthy of love,” Freud wrote, debunking the religious ideal of unconditional love on which the recovery movement is based.1 God loves us in spite of our flaws, as we must love each other, today’s popular Protestant writers confirm. Or, as recovery experts might say, the love that discriminates, which Freud described, is a form of abuse. Like an Old Testament patriarch, Freud might be a model for an abusive, “shaming” parent.

Although the literature about recovery from addiction and codependency borrows heavily from family systems theory and seems, at first, an offshoot of pop psychology, it’s rooted most deeply in religion. (Codependency is the disease from which everyone — alcoholics, drug abusers, shoppers, and sex addicts — is trying to recover.) The ideology of recovery is the ideology of salvation by grace. More than they resemble group therapy, twelve-step groups are like revival meetings, carrying on the pietistic tradition.

The religiosity of the recovery movement is evident in its rhetorical appeals to a higher power and in the evangelical fervor of its disciples. When I criticize the movement I am usually accused of being “in denial;” as I might once have been accused of heresy. (There are only two states of being in the world of codependency — recovery and denial.) People who belong to twelve-step groups and identify strongly as addicts often turn on me with the self-righteous rage of religious zealots defending their gods.

Yet I have no power over them and want none. I’m not questioning their freedom to indulge in any religion or self-help movement. I’m not marketing a competing movement or exhorting them to do anything in particular with their lives. If they’re happy in recovery, why do they resent and take personally the skepticism of strangers?

In fact, I don’t intend my indictment of the recovery movement to be an indictment of every recovering person or even a comment on the movement’s role in their lives. It is impossible to know how everyone in it uses this movement, interpreting or screening its messages to suit themselves. (It is equally impossible to know how many people are helped or hurt by individual therapy.) Countless people move in and out of support groups and read self-help books with varying degrees of attentiveness, skepticism, and naiveté. Some people say they’ve been helped by twelve-step groups, some say they’ve been hurt, and many have probably been affected indifferently.

This is not to minimize the popularity of the recovery movement, which, after all, is what makes it worth reviewing. Recovery gurus, such as John Bradshaw, have large and loyal followings; although sales of recovery and codependency books may have peaked, they are still in the millions. But, in the end, the testimonials of several million satisfied consumers are not exactly relevant to my critique. I’m not commenting on the disparate effects of the recovery movement or any other self-help program on the millions of individuals who partake in it. How could I? The individual effects of any mass movement are impossible to quantify. I’m commenting on the ideology of the recovery movement and its effect on our culture.

In questioning the collective impact of self-help trends, I’m making the unfashionable assumption, bound to irritate many, that it is still possible to talk about “our” culture in a self-consciously multicultural age. I’m assuming that Americans of different races, ethnicities, religions, genders, degrees of physical ablement, and socioeconomic classes may be affected by the same cultural phenomenon, such as television, celebrity journalism, confessional autobiographies, consumerism, and the preoccupation with addiction, abuse, and problem-solving techniques. Precisely how each group, tribe, or subculture is affected by these phenomena I leave to poststructural scholars to decide.

I’m not assuming, however, that self-help movements always represent every group of Americans they affect. Mainstream, mass market self-help books are generally written and published by whites and tend to target mostly white, broadly middle-class audiences. There are also, no doubt, historic racial divides in the self-help tradition, reflecting racial divides in society. My own reading of turn-of-the-century African-American self-improvement literature and conversations with African-American scholars lead me to suspect that there is an African-American tradition oriented more toward communal, than individual, development; analogous self-improvement efforts among whites tended to emphasize the individual’s progress up the ladder of success and salvation. Given the legacy of slavery and discrimination, it’s not surprising that African-American self-help would focus more on “lifting the race.” But diversity of opinion and ideals within racial and ethnic groups makes it difficult to label self-help movements distinctly black or distinctly white, the tradition of community activism and volunteering cuts across American culture, and the larger self-help tradition involving personal and communal development is a fairly pluralistic one. Early twentieth-century African-American leaders Marcus Garvey and Father Divine adopted some classic positive-thinking ideals — both were proponents of New Thought, a loose collection of beliefs about mind power that emerged in the nineteenth century. Today, Oprah Winfrey is a most effective proselytizer for recovery.

The divide in the self-help tradition that interests me is not demographic (racial, ethnic, sexual, or economic) but ideological: I’m distinguishing between practical (how to do your own taxes) books and personal (how to be happy) books. Of course, sometimes the practical and personal converge: Saving money on your taxes may make you a happy person. A diet book may offer helpful, practical advice on how to eat, while reinforcing cultural ideals of slimness and promising to boost your self-esteem. But if few books are purely personal or purely practical, some are clearly more personal. It is a strong emphasis on individual, personal, or spiritual development that connects the self-help ideals I’m reviewing and composes a tradition. It is that tradition I’m critiquing. How-to books may be appropriate guides to fixing your car, caring for your pet, or even organizing a political campaign. They are fundamentally inapposite to resolving individual psychic or spiritual crises and forming an individual identity.

The self-help tradition has always been covertly authoritarian and conformist, relying as it does on a mystique of expertise, encouraging people to look outside themselves for standardized instructions on how to be, teaching us that different people with different problems can easily be saved by the same techniques. It is anathema to independent thought. Today’s popular programs on recovery from various (and questionable) addictions actively discourage people from actually helping themselves. (Self-help is usually a misnomer for how-to programs in identity formation.) Codependency experts stress that people who shop or eat or love or drink too much cannot stop themselves by solitary exertions of will. Addiction is considered a disease of the will; believing in self-control is one of its symptoms.

That the self-help tradition is rarely described in these terms — as conformist, authoritarian, an exercise in majority rule — is partly a tribute to the power of naming. How could anything called self-help connote dependence? But the authoritarianism of this tradition is cloaked most effectively in the power of the marketplace to make it seem freely chosen. Choice is an American article of faith (as the vocabulary of the abortion debate shows; even antiabortion activists use the rhetoric of choice); and we exercise choice, or enjoy the illusion of it, primarily in the marketplace. We choose from myriad brands of toothpaste and paper towels in the belief that they differ and reflect our own desires. We choose personal development experts, absorbing their maxims and techniques and making them our own.

With luck or good judgment, some readers find guides who are helpful or who at least will do no harm. The best self-help books are like good parents, dispensing common sense. Many more are like superfluous consultants, mystifying the obvious in jargon and italics to justify their jobs. “The first step in dismantling the kind of thinking that reinforces misery addiction is to identify what I call miserable thoughts,” Robert A. Becker, Ph.D., announces in Addicted to Misery.2 Experts package inanities as secrets that they’re generously willing to divulge. In the best-selling Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know, Beverly DeAngelis clears up such mysteries as “why men don’t like to talk and have sex at the same time.”3 The answer, she says, simply restating her question, is that “men have a more difficult time expressing themselves and simultaneously performing a task than women do.” What is the basis for this bold assertion about gender difference? There is only DeAngelis’s claim to expertise — her Ph.D and special insights into humankind. She is, after all, the author of How to Make Love All the Time.

This earnest fatuity that you find in self-help books is what makes them so funny. That millions of people take them seriously is rather sobering. We should be troubled by the fact that the typical mass market self-help book, consumed by many college-educated readers, is accessible to anyone with a decent eighth-grade education. We should worry about the willingness of so many to believe that the answers to existential questions can be encapsulated in the portentous pronouncements of bumper-sticker books. Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.*

Some will call me an elitist for disdaining popular self-help literature and the popular recovery movement; but a concern for literacy and critical thinking is only democratic. The popularity of books comprising slogans, sound bites, and recipes for success is part of a larger, frequently bemoaned trend blamed on television and the failures of public education and blamed for political apathy. Intellectuals, right and left, complain about the debasement of public discourse the way fundamentalist preachers complain about sex. Still, to complain just a little — recently the fascination with self-help has made a significant contribution to the dumbing down of general interest books and begun changing the relationship between writers and readers; it is less collegial and collaborative than didactic. Today, even critical books about ideas are expected to be prescriptive, to conclude with simple, step-by-step solutions to whatever crisis they discuss. Reading itself is becoming a way out of thinking.

This book will not conclude with a ten- or twelve-point recovery plan for the “crisis of codependency;” or the “codependency complex,” or any other “self-help syndrome.” If there is an easy way to get people to think for themselves, I haven’t yet discovered it. (The hard way is education.) This book is not what publishers call prescriptive. As a writer and not a politician, I’ve always felt entitled to raise questions for which I have no answers, to offer instead a point of view.

*Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten was the number one best-seller among college students for the 1989-1990 academic year. Fulghum was chosen as commencement speaker at Smith College in 1991 and offered an honorary degree, to the horror of at least a few alumnae (Edwin McDowell, “What Students Read When They Don’t Have To” New York Times, July 9, 1990, sec. C, p. 16.

Endnotes

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), 49.

Robert A. Becker, Addicted to Misery (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc., 1989), 60.

Beverly DeAngelis, Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know (New York: Delacorte Press, 1990), 156.

[repriseofthereprise]

The Dark Roots of American Optimism

by Barbara Ehrenreich

From Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (Picador, 2009)

Click for PDF

Why did Americans, in such large numbers, adopt this uniquely sunny, self-gratifying view of the world? To some, the answer may be obvious: ours was the “new” world, overflowing with opportunity and potential wealth, at least once the indigenous people had been disposed of. Pessimism and gloom had no place, you might imagine, in a land that offered ample acreage to every settler squeezed out of overcrowded Europe. And surely the ever-advancing frontier, the apparently limitless space and natural resources, contributed to many Americans’ eventual adoption of positive thinking as a central part of their common ideology. But this is not how it all began: Americans did not invent positive thinking because their geography encouraged them to do so but because they had tried the opposite.

The Calvinism brought by white settlers to New England could be described as a system of socially imposed depression. Its God was “utterly lawless,” as literary scholar Ann Douglas has written, an all-powerful entity who “reveals his hatred of his creatures, not his love for them.”1 He maintained a heaven, but one with only limited seating, and those who would be privileged to enter it had been selected before their births through a process of predestination. The task for the living was to constantly examine “the loathsome abominations that lie in his bosom,” seeking to uproot the sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation.2 Calvinism offered only one form of relief from this anxious work of self-examination, and that was another form of labor-clearing, planting, stitching, building up farms and businesses. Anything other than labor of either the industrious or spiritual sort—idleness or pleasure seeking—was a contemptible sin.

I had some exposure to this as a child, though in a diluted and nontheological form. One stream of my ancestors had fled Scotland when the landowners decided that their farms would be more profitably employed as sheep-grazing land, and they brought their harsh Calvinist Presbyterianism with them to British Columbia. Owing to a stint of extreme poverty in my grandmother’s generation, my great-grandparents ended up raising my mother, and although she rebelled against her Presbyterian heritage in many ways—smoking, drinking, and reading such ribald texts as the Kinsey reports on human sexuality—she preserved some of its lineaments in our home. Displays of emotion, including smiling, were denounced as “affected,” and tears were an invitation to slaps. Work was the only known antidote for psychic malaise, leaving my stay-at-home and only-high-school-educated mother to fill her time with fanatical cleaning and other domestic make-work. “When you’re down on your knees,” she liked to say, “scrub the floor.”

So I can appreciate some of the strengths instilled by the Calvinist spirit—or, more loosely, the Protestant ethic—such as the self-discipline and refusal to accept the imagined comfort of an unconditionally loving God. But I also know something of its torments, mitigated in my case by my more Irish-derived father: work—hard, productive, visible work in the world—was our only prayer and salvation, both as a path out of poverty and as a refuge from the terror of meaninglessness.

Elements of Calvinism, again without the theology, persisted and even flourished in American culture well into the late twentieth century and beyond. The middle and upper classes came to see busyness for its own sake as a mark of status in the 1980s and 1990s, which was convenient, because employers were demanding more and more of them, especially once new technologies ended the division between work and private life: the cell phone is always within reach; the laptop comes home every evening. “Multitasking” entered the vocabulary, along with the new problem of “workaholism.” While earlier elites had flaunted their leisure, the comfortable classes of our own time are eager to display evidence of their exhaustion—always “in the loop,” always available for a conference call, always ready to go “the extra mile.” In academia, where you might expect people to have more control over their workload hour by hour, the notion of overwork as virtue reaches almost religious dimensions. Professors boast of being “crazed” by their multiple responsibilities; summer break offers no vacation, only an opportunity for frantic research and writing. I once visited a successful academic couple in their Cape Cod summer home, where they proudly showed me how their living room had been divided into his-and-her work spaces. Deviations from their routine—work, lunch, work, afternoon run—provoked serious unease, as if they sensed that it would be all too easy to collapse into complete and sinful indolence.

In the American colonies—in New England and to a lesser degree Virginia—it was the Puritans who planted this tough-minded, punitive ideology. No doubt it helped them to survive in the New World, where subsistence required relentless effort, but they also struggled to survive Calvinism itself. For the individual believer, the weight of Calvinism, with its demand for perpetual effort and self-examination to the point of self-loathing, could be unbearable. It terrified children, like the seventeenth-century judge Samuel Sewall’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Betty. “A little after dinner,” he reported, “she burst out into an amazing cry, which caused all the family to cry too. Her mother asked the reason. She gave none; at last said she was afraid she would go to hell, her sins were not pardoned.”3 It made people sick. In England, the early seventeenth-century author Robert Burton blamed it for the epidemic of melancholy afflicting that nation:

The main matter which terrifies and torments most that are troubled in mind is the enormity of their offences, the intolerable burthen of their sins, God’s heavy wrath and displeasure so deeply apprehended that they account themselves … already damned … This furious curiosity, needless speculation, fruitless meditation about election, reprobation, free will, grace … torment still, and crucify the souls of too many.4

Two hundred years later, this form of “religious melancholy” was still rampant in New England, often reducing formerly healthy adults to a condition of morbid withdrawal, usually marked by physical maladies as well as inner terror. George Beecher, for example—brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe—tormented himself over his spiritual status until he “shattered” his nervous system and committed suicide in 1843.5

Certainly early America was not the only place to tremble in what Max Weber called the “frost” of Calvin’s Puritanism.6 But it may be that conditions in the New World intensified the grip of this hopeless, unforgiving religion. Looking west, the early settlers saw not the promise of abundance, only “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”7 In the gloom of old-growth forests and surrounded by the indigenous “wild men,” the settlers must have felt as hemmed in as they had been in crowded England. And if Calvinism offered no individual reassurance, it at least exalted the group, the congregation. You might not be saved yourself, but you were part of a social entity set apart by its rigorous spiritual discipline—and set above all those who were unclean, untamed, and unchurched.

In the early nineteenth century, the clouds of Calvinist gloom were just beginning to break. Forests were yielding to roads and eventually railroads. The native peoples slunk westward or succumbed to European diseases. With the nation rapidly expanding, fortunes could be made overnight, or just as readily lost. In this tumultuous new age of possibility, people of all sorts began to reimagine the human condition and reject the punitive religion of their forebears. Religious historian Robert Orsi emphasizes the speculative ferment of nineteenth-century American religious culture, which was “creatively alive with multiple possibilities, contradictions, tensions, concerning the most fundamental questions (the nature of God, the meaning of Christ, salvation, redemption, and so on).”8 As Ralph Waldo Emerson challenged his countrymen: “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”9

Not only philosophers were beginning to question their religious heritage. A substantial movement of workingmen, small farmers, and their wives used their meetings and publications to denounce “King-craft, Priest-craft, Lawyer-craft, and Doctor-craft” and insist on the primacy of individual judgment. One such person was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a self-educated watchmaker and inventor in Portland, Maine, who filled his journals with metaphysical ideas about what he called “the science of life and happiness”—the focus on happiness being itself an implicit reproach to Calvinism. At the same time, middle-class women were chafing against the guilt-ridden, patriarchal strictures of the old religion and beginning to posit a more loving, maternal deity. The most influential of these was Mary Baker, known to us today as Mary Baker Eddy—the daughter of a hardscrabble, fire-and-brimstone-preaching Calvinist farmer and, like Quimby, a self-taught amateur metaphysician. It was the meeting of Eddy and Quimby in the 1860s that launched the cultural phenomenon we now recognize as positive thinking.

As an intellectual tendency, this new, post-Calvinist way of thinking was called, generically enough, “New Thought” or the “New Thought movement.” It drew on many sources—the transcendentalism of Emerson, European mystical currents like Swedenborgianism, even a dash of Hinduism—and it seemed almost designed as a rebuke to the Calvinism many of its adherents had been terrified by as children. In the New Thought vision, God was no longer hostile or indifferent; he was a ubiquitous, all-powerful Spirit or Mind, and since “man” was really Spirit too, man was coterminous with God. There was only “One Mind,” infinite and all-encompassing, and inasmuch as humanity was a part of this universal mind, how could there be such a thing as sin? If it existed at all, it was an “error” as was disease, because if everything was Spirit or Mind or God, everything was actually perfect.

The trick, for humans, was to access the boundless power of Spirit and thus exercise control over the physical world. This thrilling possibility, constantly touted in today’s literature on the “law of attraction,” was anticipated by Emerson when he wrote that man “is learning the great secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character.”10

New Thought might have remained in the realm of parlor talk and occasional lectures, except for one thing: the nineteenth century presented its adherents with a great practical test, which it passed with flying colors. In New Thought, illness was a disturbance in an otherwise perfect Mind and could be cured through Mind alone. Sadly, the strictly mental approach did not seem to work with the infectious diseases—such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera—that ravaged America until the introduction of public sanitary measures at the end of the nineteenth century. But as Quimby and Eddy were to discover, it did work for the slow, nameless, debilitating illness that was reducing many middle-class Americans to invalidism.

The symptoms of this illness, which was to be labeled “neurasthenia” near the end of the century, were multitudinous and diffuse. According to one of her sisters, the teenage Mary Baker Eddy, for example, suffered from a “cankered” stomach and an “ulcer” on her lungs, “in addition to her former diseases.”11 Spinal problems, neuralgia, and dyspepsia also played a role in young Eddy’s invalidism, along with what one of her doctors described as “hysteria mingled with bad temper.”12 Most sufferers, like Eddy, reported back problems, digestive ills, exhaustion, headaches, insomnia, and melancholy. Even at the time, there were suspicions, as there are today in the case of chronic fatigue syndrome, that the illness was not “real,” that it was a calculated bid for attention and exemption from chores and social obligations. But we should recall that this was a time before analgesics, safe laxatives, or, of course, antidepressants, when the first prescription for any complaint, however counterproductively, was often prolonged bed rest.

Neurasthenia was hardly ever fatal, but to some observers it seemed every bit as destructive as the infectious diseases. Catharine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and poor George Beecher, traveled around the country and reported “a terrible decay of female health all over the land.” Her field notes include the following: “Milwaukee, Wis. Mrs. A. frequent sick headaches. Mrs. B. very feeble. Mrs. S., well, except chills. Mrs. D., subject to frequent headaches. Mrs. B. very poor health …. Do not know one healthy woman in the place.”13 Women were not the only victims. William James, who was to become the founder of American psychology, lapsed into invalidism as a young man, as did George M. Beard, who later, as a physician, coined the term “neurasthenia.” But the roster of well-known women who lost at least part of their lives to invalidism is impressive: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who memorialized her experience with cruelly ineffective medical treatments in “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Jane Addams, the founder of the first settlement house; Margaret Sanger, the birth control crusader; Ellen Richard, the founder of domestic science; and Alice James, sister of William and Henry James. Catharine Beecher herself, one of the chroniclers of the illness, “suffered from hysteria and occasional paralytic afflictions.”14

Without in any way impugning the motives of the afflicted, George M. Beard recognized that neurasthenias presented a very different order of problem from diseases like diphtheria, which, for the first time, were being traced to an external physical agent—microbes. Neurasthenia, as his term suggests, represented a malfunction of the nerves. To Beard, the ailment seemed to arise from the challenge of the new: some people simply could not cope with America’s fast-growing, increasingly urban, and highly mobile society. Their nerves were overstrained, he believed; they collapsed.

But the invalidism crippling America’s middle class had more to do with the grip of the old religion than the challenge of new circumstances. In some ways, the malady was simply a continuation of the “religious melancholy” Robert Burton had studied in England around the time when the Puritans set off for Plymouth. Many of the sufferers had been raised in the Calvinist tradition and bore its scars all their lives. Mary Baker Eddy’s father, for example, had once been so incensed to find some children playing with a semitame crow on the Sabbath that he killed the bird with a rock on the spot. As a girl, Eddy agonized over the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to the point of illness: “I was unwilling to be saved, if my brothers and sisters were to be numbered among those who were doomed to perpetual banishment from God. So perturbed was I by the thoughts aroused by this erroneous doctrine, that the family doctor was summoned, and pronounced me stricken with fever.”15

Similarly, Lyman Beecher, the father of Catharine and George, had urged them as young children to “agonize, agonize” over the condition of their souls and “regularly subjected their hearts to … scrutiny” for signs of sin or self-indulgence.16 Charles Beard, a sufferer himself and the son of a strict Calvinist preacher, later condemned religion for teaching children that “to be happy is to be doing wrong.”17 Even those not raised in the Calvinist religious tradition had usually endured child-raising methods predicated on the notion that children were savages in need of discipline and correction—an approach that was to linger in American middle-class culture until the arrival of Benjamin Spock and “permissive” child-raising in the 1940s.

But there is a more decisive reason to reject the notion that the invalidism of the nineteenth century arose from nervous exhaustion in the face of overly rapid expansion and change. If Beard’s hypothesis were true, you would expect the victims to be drawn primarily from the cutting edge of economic dynamism. Industrialists, bankers, prospectors in the Gold Rush of 1848 should have been swooning and taking to their beds. Instead, it was precisely the groups most excluded from the frenzy of nineteenth-century competitiveness that collapsed into invalidism—clergymen, for example. In this era—before megachurches and television ministries—they tended to lead somewhat cloistered and contemplative lives, often remaining within the same geographical area for a lifetime. And nineteenth-century clergymen were a notoriously sickly lot. Ann Douglas cites an 1826 report that “the health of a large number of clergymen has failed or is failing them”; they suffered from dyspepsia, consumption, and a “gradual wearing out of the constitution.”18

The largest demographic to suffer from invalidism or neurasthenia was middle-class women. Male prejudice barred them from higher education and most of the professions; industrialization was stripping away the productive tasks that had occupied women in the home, from sewing to soapmaking. For many women, invalidism became a kind of alternative career. Days spent reclining on chaise longues, attended by doctors and family members and devoted to trying new medicines and medical regimens, substituted for “masculine” striving in the world. Invalidism even became fashionable, as one of Mary Baker Eddy’s biographers writes: “Delicate ill-health, a frailty unsuited to labor, was coming to be considered attractive in the young lady of the 1930s and 1840s, and even in rural New Hampshire sharp young women like the Baker girls had enough access to the magazines and novels of their day to know the fashions.”19

Here, too, under the frills and sickly sentimentality of nineteenth-century feminine culture, we can discern the claw marks of Calvinism. The old religion had offered only one balm for the tormented soul, and that was hard labor in the material world. Take that away and you were left with the morbid introspection that was so conducive to dyspepsia, insomnia, backaches, and all the other symptoms of neurasthenia. Fashionable as it may have been, female invalidism grew out of enforced idleness and a sense of uselessness, and surely involved genuine suffering, mental as well as physical. Alice James rejoiced when, after decades of invalidism, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and told she would be dead in a few months.

Among men, neurasthenia sometimes arose in a period of idleness associated with youthful indecision about a career, as happened in the case of George Beard. Similarly, William James was uncertain about his early choice of medicine when, at the age of twenty-four, his back went out while he was bent over a cadaver. Already suffering from insomnia, digestive troubles, and eye problems, he fell into a paralyzing depression. The medical profession seemed to him too unscientific and illogical, but he could think of nothing else, writing, “I shall hate myself until I get some special work.”20 Women had no “special work”; a clergyman’s day-to-day labors were amorphous and overlapped with the kinds of things women normally did, like visiting the sick. Without real work—”special work”—the Calvinist or Calvinist-influenced soul consumed itself with self-loathing.

The mainstream medical profession had no effective help for the invalid, and a great many interventions that were actually harmful. Doctors were still treating a variety of symptoms by bleeding the patient, often with leeches, and one of their favorite remedies was the toxic, mercury-containing calomel, which could cause the jaw to rot away. In Philadelphia, one of America’s most noted physicians treated female invalids with soft, bland foods and weeks of bed rest in darkened rooms—no reading or conversation allowed. The prevailing “scientific” view was that invalidism was natural and perhaps inevitable in women, that the mere fact of being female was a kind of disease, requiring as much medical intervention as the poor invalid’s family could afford. Why men should also sometimes suffer was not clear, but they, too, were treated with bleedings, purges, and long periods of enforced rest.

Mainstream medicine’s failure to relieve the epidemic of invalidism, and the tragic consequences of many of its interventions, left the field open to alternative sorts of healers. Here is where Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, usually considered the founder of the New Thought movement and hence grandfather of today’s positive thinking, comes in. He had no use for the medical profession, considering it a source of more sickness than health. Having dabbled for some time in mesmerism—along with metaphysics and watchmaking—he went into practice as a healer himself in 1859. A fearless thinker, though by no means irreligious, he quickly identified Calvinism as the source of many of his patients’ ills. As he saw it, according to historian Roy M. Anker, “old-style Calvinism depressed people, its morality constricted their lives and bestowed on them large burdens of debilitating, disease-producing guilt.”21 Quimby gained a minor reputation with a kind of “talking cure,” through which he endeavored to convince his patients that the universe was fundamentally benevolent, that they were one with the “Mind” out of which it was constituted, and that they could leverage their own powers of mind to cure or “correct” their ills.

In 1863, Mary Baker Eddy, forty-two, made the then-arduous journey to Portland to seek help from Quimby, arriving so weak that she had to be carried up the stairs to his consulting rooms. 22 Eddy had been an invalid since childhood and might have been happy to continue that lifestyle—doing a little reading and writing in her more vigorous moments—if anyone had been willing to finance it. But her first husband had died and the second had absconded, leaving her nearly destitute in middle age, reduced to moving from one boardinghouse to another, sometimes just in time to avoid paying the rent. Perhaps she was a bit smitten with the handsome, genial Quimby, and possibly the feelings were returned; Mrs. Quimby certainly distrusted the somewhat pretentious and overly needy new patient. Whatever went on between them, Eddy soon declared herself cured, and when Quimby died three years later, she claimed his teachings as her own—although it should be acknowledged that Eddy’s followers still insist that she was the originator of the New Thought approach. Either way, Quimby proved that New Thought provided a practical therapeutic approach, which the prolific writer and charismatic teacher Mary Baker Eddy went on to promote.

Eddy eventually gained considerable wealth by founding her own religion—Christian Science, with its still ubiquitous “reading rooms.” The core of her teaching was that there is no material world, only Thought, Mind, Spirit, Goodness, Love, or, as she often put it in almost economic terms, “Supply.” Hence there could be no such things as illness or want, except as temporary delusions. Today, you can find the same mystical notion in the teachings of “coaches” like Sue Morter: the world is dissolved into Mind, Energy, and Vibrations, all of which are potentially subject to our conscious control. This is the “science” of Christian Science, much as “quantum physics” (or magnetism) is the “scientific” bedrock of positive thinking. But it arose in the nineteenth century as an actual religion, and in opposition to the Calvinist version of Christianity.

In the long run, however, the most influential convert to Quimby’s New Thought approach to healing was not Mary Baker Eddy but William James, the first American psychologist and definitely a man of science. James sought help for his miscellaneous ills from another disciple—and former patient—of Quimby’s, Annetta Dresser.23 Dresser must have been successful, because in his best-known work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James enthused over the New Thought approach to healing: “The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk. Life-long invalids have had their health restored.”24 To James, it did not matter that New Thought was a philosophical muddle; it worked. He took it as a tribute to American pragmatism that Americans’ “only decidedly original contribution to the systematic philosophy of life”—New Thought—had established itself through “concrete therapeutics” rather than, say, philosophical arguments. New Thought had won its great practical victory. It had healed a disease—the disease of Calvinism, or, as James put it, the “morbidness” associated with “the old hell-fire theology.”25

James understood that New Thought offered much more than a new approach to healing; it was an entirely new way of seeing the world, so pervasive, he wrote, that “one catches [the] spirit at second-hand”:

One hears of the “Gospel of Relaxation,” of the “Don’t Worry Movement,” of people who repeat to themselves “Youth, health, vigor!” when dressing in the morning as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life.26

As a scientist, he was repelled by much of the New Thought literature, finding it “so moonstruck with optimism and so vaguely expressed that an academically trained mind finds it almost impossible to read at all.” Still, he blessed the new way of thinking as “healthy-mindedness” and quoted another academic to the effect that it was “hardly conceivable” that so many intelligent people would be drawn to Christian Science and other schools of New Thought “if the whole thing were a delusion.”27

By the early twentieth century, the rise of scientific medicine, powered originally by the successes of the germ theory of disease, began to make New Thought forms of healing seem obsolete. Middle-class homemakers left their sickbeds to take up the challenge of fighting microbes within their homes, informed by Ellen Richards’s “domestic science.” Teddy Roosevelt, assuming the presidency in 1901, exemplified a new doctrine of muscular activism that precluded even the occasional nap. Of the various currents of New Thought, only Christian Science clung to the mind-over-body notion that all disease could be cured by “thought”; the results were often disastrous, as even some late-twentieth-century adherents chose to read and reread Mary Baker Eddy rather than take antibiotics or undergo surgery. More forward-looking advocates of New Thought turned away from health and found a fresh field as promoters of success and wealth. Not until the 1970s would America’s positive thinkers dare to reclaim physical illnesses—breast cancer, for example—as part of their jurisdiction.

However “moonstruck” its central beliefs, positive thinking came out of the nineteenth century with the scientific imprimatur of William James and the approval of “America’s favorite philosopher,” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Norman Vincent Peale, the man who popularized the phrase “positive thinking,” cited them repeatedly, though not as often as he did the Bible. James, in particular, made positive thinking respectable, not because he found it intellectually convincing but because of its undeniable success in “curing” the poor invalid victims of Calvinism. There is a satisfying irony here: in fostering widespread invalidism, Calvinism had crafted the instrument of its own destruction. It had handed New Thought, or what was to be called positive thinking, a dagger to plunge into its own chest.

But wait, there is a final twist to the story. If one of the best things you can say about positive thinking is that it articulated an alternative to Calvinism, one of the worst is that it ended up preserving some of Calvinism’s more toxic features—a harsh judgmentalism, echoing the old religion’s condemnation of sin and an insistence on the constant interior labor of self-examination. The American alternative to Calvinism was not to be hedonism or even just an emphasis on emotional spontaneity. To the positive thinker, emotions remain suspect and one’s inner life must be subjected to relentless monitoring.

In many important ways, Christian Science itself never fully broke with Calvinism at all. Its twentieth century adherents were overwhelmingly white, middle-class people of outstandingly temperate, even self-denying habits. The British writer V. S. Pritchett, whose father was a “Scientist,” wrote that they “gave up drink, tobacco, tea, coffee—dangerous drugs—they gave up sex, and wrecked their marriages on this account…It was notoriously a menopause religion.”28 In her later years, Mary Baker Eddy even brought back a version of the devil to explain why, in this perfect universe, things did not always go her way. Bad weather, lost objects, imperfect printings of her books—all these were attributed to “Malicious Animal Magnetism” emanating from her imagined enemies.

In my own family, the great-grandmother who raised my mother had switched from Presbyterianism to Christian Science at some point in her life, and the transition was apparently seamless enough for my grandmother to later eulogize her in a letter simply as “a good Christian woman.” My own mother had no more interest in Christian Science than she did in Presbyterianism, but she hewed to one of its harsher doctrines—that, if illness was not entirely imaginary, it was something that happened to people weaker and more suggestible than ourselves. Menstrual cramps and indigestion were the fantasies of idle women; only a fever or vomiting merited a day off from school. In other words, illness was a personal failure, even a kind of sin. I remember the great trepidation with which I confessed to my mother that I was having trouble seeing the blackboard in school; we were not the sort of people who needed glasses.

But the most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work—the constant internal work of self-monitoring. The Calvinist monitored his or her thoughts and feelings for signs of laxness, sin, and self-indulgence, while the positive thinker is ever on the lookout for “negative thoughts” charged with anxiety or doubt.  As sociologist Micki McGee writes of the positive-thinking self-help literature, using language that harks back to its religious antecedents, “continuous and never-ending work on the self is offered not only as a road to success but also to a kind of secular salvation.”29 The self becomes an antagonist with which one wrestles endlessly, the Calvinist attacking it for sinful inclinations, the positive thinker for “negativity.” This antagonism is made clear in the common advice that you can overcome negative thoughts by putting a rubber band on your wrist: “Every time you have a negative thought stretch it out and let it snap. Pow. That hurts. It may even leave a welt if your rubber band is too thick. Take it easy, you aren’t trying to maim yourself, but you are trying to create a little bit of a pain avoidance reflex with the negative thoughts.”30

A curious self-alienation is required for this kind of effort: there is the self that must be worked on, and another self that does the work. Hence the ubiquitous “rules,” work sheets, self-evaluation forms, and exercises offered in the positive-thinking literature. These are the practical instructions for the work of conditioning or reprogramming that the self must accomplish on itself. In the twentieth century, when positive thinkers had largely abandoned health issues to the medical profession, the aim of all this work became wealth and success. The great positive-thinking text of the 1930s, Think and Grow Rich! by Napoleon Hill, set out the familiar New Thought metaphysics. “Thoughts are things”—in fact, they are things that attract their own realization. “ALL IMPULSES OF THOUGHT HAVE A TENDENCY TO CLOTHE THEMSELVES IN THEIR PHYSICAL EQUIVALENT.” Hill reassured his readers that the steps required to achieve this transformation of thoughts into reality would not amount to “hard labor,” but if any step was omitted, “you will fail!” Briefly put, the seeker of wealth had to draw up a statement including the exact sum of money he or she intended to gain and the date by which it should come, which statement was to be read “aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night and once after arising in the morning.” By strict adherence to this regimen, one could manipulate the “subconscious mind,” as Hill called the part of the self that required work, into a “white heat of DESIRE for money.” To further harness the subconscious mind to conscious greed, he advises at one point that one “READ THIS ENTIRE CHAPTER ALOUD ONCE EVERY NIGHT.”31

The book that introduced most twentieth-century Americans—as well as people worldwide—to the ceaseless work of positive thinking was, of course, Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale was a mainstream Protestant minister who had been attracted to New Thought early in his career, thanks, he later wrote, to a New thought Proponent named Ernest Holmes. “Only those who knew me as a boy,” he wrote, “can fully appreciate what Ernest Holmes did for me. Why, he made me a positive thinker.” sup>32 If Peale saw any conflict between positive thinking and the teachings of the Calvinist-derived Dutch Reformed Church that he eventually adopted as his denomination, it did not perturb him. A mediocre student, he had come out of divinity school with a deep aversion to theological debates—and determined to make Christianity “practical” in solving people’s ordinary financial, marital, and business problems. Like the nineteenth-century New Thought leaders before him, he saw himself in part as a healer; only the twentieth-century illness was not neurasthenia but what Peale identified as an “inferiority complex,” something he had struggled with in his own life. In one of his books, written well after the publication of his perennial best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking, he wrote:

A man told me he was having a lot of trouble with himself. “You are not the only one,” I reflected, thinking of the many letters I receive from people who ask for help with problems. And also thinking of myself; for I must admit that the person who has caused me the most trouble over the years has been Norman Vincent Peale …. If we are our own chief problem, the basic reason must be found in the type of thoughts which habitually occupy and direct our minds. 33

We have seen the enemy, in other words, and it is ourselves, or at least our thoughts. Fortunately though, thoughts can be monitored and corrected until, to paraphrase historian Donald Meyer’s summary of Peale, positive thoughts became “automatic” and the individual became fully “conditioned.”34 Today we might call this the work of “reprogramming,” and since individuals easily lapse back into negativity—as Peale often noted with dismay—it had to be done again and again. In The Power of Positive Thinking, Peale offered “ten simple, workable rules,” or exercises, beginning with:

Peale trusted the reader to come up with his or her own positive thoughts, but over time the preachers of positivity have found it more and more necessary to provide a kind of script in the form of “affirmations” or “declarations.” In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, for example, T. Harv Eker offers the reader the following instructions in how to overcome any lingering resistance to the wealth he or she deserves:

Place your hand on your heart and say… “I admire rich people!” “I bless rich people!” “I love rich people!” “And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!”36

This work is never done. Setbacks can precipitate relapses into negativity, requiring what one contemporary guru, M. Scott Peck, calls “a continuing and never-ending process of self-monitoring.”37 Or, more positively, endless work may be necessitated by constantly raising your sights. If you are satisfied with your current condition, you need to “sharpen the saw,” in self-help writer Stephen Covey’s words, and admit you could be doing better. As the famed motivator Tony Robbins puts it: “When you set a goal, you’ve committed to CANI [Constant, Never-Ending Improvement]! You’ve acknowledged the need that all human beings have for constant, never-ending improvement. There is a power in the pressure of dissatisfaction, in the tension of temporary discomfort. This is the kind of pain you want in your life.”38

There is no more exhausting account of the self-work required for positive thinking than motivational speaker Jeffrey Gitomer’s story of how he achieved and maintains his positive attitude. We last encountered Gitomer demanding a purge of “negative people” from one’s associates, much as an old-style Calvinist might have demanded an expulsion of sinners, but Gitomer had not always been so self-confidently positive. In the early 1970s, his business was enjoying only “moderate success,” his marriage was “bad,” and his wife was pregnant with twins. Then he fell in with a marketing company called Dare to Be Great, whose founder now claims to have anticipated the 2006 best seller The Secret by thirty-five years. Told by his new colleagues that “you’re going to get a positive attitude … and you’re going to make big money. Go, go, go!” he sold his business and plunged into the work of self-improvement. He watched the motivational film Challenge to America over five times a week and obsessively reread Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich! with his new colleagues: “Each person was responsible for writing and presenting a book report on one chapter each day. There were 16 chapters in the book, 10 people in the room, and we did this for one year. You can do the math for how many times I have read the book.”39 At first the best he could do was fake a positive attitude: “Friends would ask me how I was doing, and I would extend my arms into the air and scream, ‘Great!’ Even though I was crappy.” Suddenly, “one day I woke up, and I had a positive attitude …. I GOT IT! I GOT IT!”40

Substitute the Bible for Think and Grow Rich! and you have a conversion tale every bit as dramatic as anything Christian lore has to offer. Like the hero of the great seventeenth-century Calvinist classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, Gitomer had found himself trapped by family and wallowing in his slough of despond—of mediocrity, rather than sin—and like Bunyan’s hero, Gitomer shook off his old business, and his first wife, in order to remake himself. Just as Calvinism demanded not only a brief experience of conversion but a lifetime of self-examination, Gitomer’s positive attitude requires constant “maintenance,” in the form of “reading something positive every morning, thinking positive thoughts every morning, … saying positive things every morning,” and so forth.41 This is work, and just to make that clear, Gitomer’s Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude offers a photograph of the author in a blue repairman’s shirt bearing the label “Positive Attitude Maintenance Department.”

Reciting affirmations, checking off work sheets, compulsively re-reading get-rich-quick books: these are not what Emerson had in mind when he urged his countrymen to shake off the shackles of Calvinism and embrace a bounteous world filled with “new lands, new men, and new thoughts.” He was something of a mystic, given to moments of transcendent illumination: “I become a universal eyeball. I am nothing; I see all…All mean egotism vanishes.”42 In such states, the self does not double into a worker and an object of work; it disappears. The universe cannot be “supply,” since such a perception requires a desiring, calculating ego, and as soon as ego enters into the picture, the sense of Oneness is shattered. Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

Still, surely it is better to obsess about one’s chances of success than about the likelihood of hell and damnation, to search one’s inner self for strengths rather than sins. The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?

From the mid-twentieth century on, there was an all too practical answer: more and more people were employed in occupations that seemed to require positive thinking and all the work of self-improvement and maintenance that went into it. Norman Vincent Peale grasped this as well as anyone: the work of Americans, and especially of its ever-growing white-collar proletariat, is in no small part work that is performed on the self in order to make that self more acceptable and even likeable to employers, clients, coworkers, and potential customers. Positive thinking had ceased to be just a balm for the anxious or a cure for the psychosomatically distressed. It was beginning to be an obligation imposed on all American adults.

Notes

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1977), 145.

Thomas Hooker, quoted in Perry Miller, ed., The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 154.

Miller, American Puritans, 241.

Quoted in Noel L. Brann, “The Problem of Distinguishing Religious Guilt from Religious Melancholy in the English Renaissance,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association (1980): 70.

Julius H. Rubin, Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 161.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Dover, 2003), 168.

William Bradford, quoted in Stephen Fender and Arnold Goldman, eds., American Literature in Context (New York: Routledge, 1983), 45.

Personal communication, Jan. 10, 2009.

Quoted in Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 165.

Quoted in Albanese, Republic of Mind and Spirit, 167.

Quoted in Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Cambridge: Perseus, 1998), 43.

Quoted in Caroline Fraser, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (New York: Metropolitan, 1999), 34.

Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor, 1989), 103.

Douglas, Feminization, 170.

Quoted in Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (New York: Norton, 2008), 112.

Douglas, Feminization, 170.

Barbara Sicherman, “The Paradox of Prudence: Mental Health in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 62 (1976): 880-912.

Quoted in Douglas, Feminization, 104.

Gill, Mary Baker Eddy, 33.

Quoted in Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 86.

Roy M. Anker, Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture: An Interpretive Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 190.

Gill, Mary Baker Eddy, 128.

Richardson, William James, 275.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 109.

Ibid., 104.

Ibid., 109.

Ibid., 109, 111n.

Quoted in Fraser, God’s Perfect Child, 195.

Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 142.

http:\\www.bripblap.com/2007/stopping-negative-thoughts/.

Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich! (San Diego: Aventine Press, 2004), 52, 29, 71, 28, 30, 74.

Norman Vincent Peale, back cover quote on Fenwicke Holmes, Ernest Holmes: His Life and Times (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), http:\\self-improvement-ebooks.com/books/ehhlat.php.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Positive Principle Today (New York: Random House, 1994), 289.

Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 268.

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Random House, 1994), 28.

T. Harv Eker, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (New York: Harper Business, 2005), 94.

Quoted in McGee, Self-Help, Inc., 143.

Ibid., 142.

Jeffrey Gitomer, Little Gold Book, 164.

Ibid., 165.

Ibid., 169.

Quoted in Meyer, Positive Thinkers, 80.

[repriseofthereprise]

Therapy and How it Undermines the Practice of Radical Feminism*

By Celia Kitzinger

(As published in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Renate Klein and Diane Bell [Spinifex 1996])

*Excerpt from Celia Kitzinger (1993), Depoliticising the Personal: A Feminist Slogan in Feminist Therapy.

One of the great insights of second wave feminisms was the recognition that “the personal is political” — a phrase first coined by Carol Hanisch in 1971. We meant by this that all our small, personal, day-to-day activities had political meaning, whether intended or not. Aspects of our lives that had previously been seen as purely “personal” — housework, sex, relationships with sons and fathers, mothers, sisters and lovers — were shaped by, and influential upon, their broader social context. “The slogan meant, for example, that when a woman is forced to have sex with her husband it is a political act because it reflects the power dynamics in the relationship: wives are property to which husbands have full access” (Rowland: 1984, p. 5). A feminist understanding of “politics” meant challenging the male definition of the political as something external (to do with governments, laws, banner-waving, and protest marches) towards an understanding of politics as central to our very beings, affecting our thoughts, emotions, and the apparently trivial everyday choices we make about how we live. Feminism meant treating what had been perceived as merely “personal” issues as political concerns.

This article explores the way in which the slogan, “the personal is political” is used within feminist psychological writing, with particular reference to therapy. The growth in feminist therapies (including self-help books, co-counselling, twelve-step groups, and so on, as well as one-to-one therapy) has been rapid, and has attracted criticism from many feminists concerned about their political implications (Cardea: 1985; Hoagland: 1988; Tallen: 1990a and b; Perkins: 1991). However, many feminist psychologists (both researchers and practitioners) state explicitly their belief that “the personal is political.”

According to some, this principle has “prevailed as a cornerstone of feminist therapy” (Gilbert: 1980), and qualitative methodologies have often been adopted by feminists precisely because they permit access to “personal” experience, the “political” implications of which can be drawn out through the research. It would be unusual to find a feminist psychologist who denied believing that “the personal is political,” despite the existence of feminist critiques of some of its implications (its false universalizing of women’s experience, for example, see hooks 1984, and the — ironic — tendency of some women to perceive the slogan’s categories of “personal” and “political” as polarised and in competition, see David: 1992). However, widespread concurrence with this slogan amongst feminist psychologists conceals a variety of interpretations. This article illustrates four of those differing psychological interpretations of “the personal is political,” and argues that far from politicising the personal, psychology personalises the political, focuses attention on “the revolution within,” concentrates on “validating women’s experience” at the expense of political analysis of that experience, and seeks to “empower” women, rather than accord real political power.

Two caveats before launching into my main argument.

First, this article does not claim to present a thorough overview of the whole of feminist psychology — a huge and growing area. Moreover, unlike other critiques (e.g. Jackson: 1983; Sternhall: 1992; Tallen: 1990a and b), this article is not an attack on any one particular brand of psychology, or a discussion from within the discipline (e.g. Burack: 1992). Rather, its aim is to stand outside the disciplinary framework of psychology and to draw attention to the political problems inherent in the very concept of “feminist psychology” per se.

Second, “it doesn’t seem fair,” said one referee, “to scoff at institutions that help women live their lives in less pain.” Many women have been helped by therapy. I have heard enough women say “it saved my life” to feel almost guilty about challenging psychology. Many women say that it was only with the help of therapy that they became able to leave an abusive relationship, to rid themselves of incapacitating fears and anxieties, or to stop drug abuse. Anything that saves women’s lives, anything that makes women happier, most be feminist — mustn’t it? Well, no. It’s possible to patch women up and enable them to make changes in their lives without ever addressing the underlying political issues that cause these personal problems in the first place. “I used to bitch at my husband to do housework and nothing happened,” a woman from Minnesota told Harriet Lerner (1990, p. 15); “Now I’m in an intensive treatment program for codependency and I’m asserting myself very strongly. My husband is more helpful because he knows I’m co-dependent and he supports my recovery.” For this woman, the psychological explanation (“I’m codependent and need to recover”) was more successful than the feminist explanation (women’s work as unpaid domestic labor for men, Mainardi: 1970) in creating change. With the idea of herself as sick, she was able to make him do housework. As Carol Tavris (1992) says, “Women get much more sympathy and support when they define their problems in medical or psychological than in political terms.” The codependency explanation masks what feminists see as the real cause of our problems — male supremacy. Instead we are told that the cause lies in our own “codependency.” This is not feminism. Although it’s clear that “many women have been helped by therapy,” it is equally clear that many women have been helped, and feel better about themselves, as a result of (for example) dieting, buying new clothes, or joining a religious cult. Historically, as Bette Tallen (1990a, p. 390) points out, women have “sought refuge in such institutions as the Catholic church or the military. But does this mean that these are institutions that should be fully embraced by feminists?” The reasons behind the rush into psychology, and the benefits it offers (as well as the price it exacts) are discussed in more detail elsewhere (Kitzinger and Perkins: 1993). In this article, I focus more narrowly on psychological interpretations of “the personal is political,” and the implications of these for feminism.

Personalizing the Political

In this interpretation of “the personal is political,” instead of politicising the “personal,” the “political” is personalised. Political concerns, national and international politics, and major social, economic, and ecological disasters are reduced to personal, individual psychological matters.

This wholesale translation of the political into the personal is characteristic, not just of feminist psychology, but of psychology generally. In the USA a group of twenty-two professionals spent three years and $73,500 in coming to the conclusion that lack of self-esteem is the root cause of “many of the major social ills that plague us today” (The Guardian: April 13, 1990). Sexual violence against women is addressed by setting up social skills training and anger management sessions for rapists (now available in sixty jails in England and Wales, The Guardian: May 21, 1991), and racism becomes something to get off your chest in a counselling workshop (Green: 1987). Many people now think of major social and political issues in psychological terms.

In fact, the whole of life can be seen as one great psychological exercise. Back in 1998, Judi Chamberlain pointed out that mental hospitals tend to use the term “therapy” to describe absolutely everything that goes on inside them:

…making the beds and sweeping the floor can be called “industrial therapy,” going to a dance or movie “recreational therapy,” stupefying patients with drugs “chemotherapy,” and so forth. Custodial mental hospitals, which offer very little treatment, frequently make reference to “milieu therapy,” as if the very hospital air were somehow curative (1977, p. 131).

A decade or so later, with psychology’s major clientele not in mental hospitals but in the community, everything in our lives is translated into “therapy.” Reading books becomes “bibliotherapy;” writing (Wenz: 198), journal keeping (Hagan: 1988), and art are all ascribed therapeutic functions. Even taking photographs is now a psychological technique. Feminist “phototherapist” Jo Spence drew on the psychoanalytic theories of Alice Miller (1987) and advocates healing (among other “wounds”) “the wound of class shame” through photography. And although reading, writing, and taking photographs are ordinary activities, in their therapeutic manifestation they require expert guidance: “I don’t think people can do this with friends or by themselves…they’ll never have the safety working alone that they’ll get working with a therapist because they will encounter their own blockages and be unable to get past them” (Spence: 1990, p. 39). While not wishing to deny that reading, writing, art, photography, and so on might make some people feel better about themselves, it is disturbing to find such activities assessed in purely psychological terms. As feminists, we used to read in order to learn more about feminist history and culture; write and paint to communicate with others. These were social activities directed outwards; now they are treated as explorations of the self. The success of what we do is evaluated in terms of how it makes us feel. Social conditions are assessed in terms of how the inner life of individuals responds to them. Political and ethical commitments are judged by the degree to which they enhance or detract from our individual sense of well being.

Feminist therapists now “prescribe” political activities for their clients — not for their inherent political value, but as cure-alls. The “Guidelines for Feminist Therapy” offered by therapist Marylou Butler in the Handbook of Feminist Therapy (1985) includes the suggestion that feminist therapists should make referrals to women’s centres, CR groups, and feminist organisations, when that would be therapeutic for clients” (p. 37). Consciousness Raising — the practice of making the personal political — was never intended to be “therapy” (Sarachild: 1978). Women who participate in feminist activism with the goal of feeling better about themselves are likely to be disappointed. In sending women to feminist groups, the primary aims of which are activist rather than therapeutic, therapists are doing a disservice to both their clients and to feminism.

Our relationships, too, are considered not in terms of their political implications, but rather, in terms of their therapeutic functions. Therapy used to name what happened between a therapist and a client. Now, as Bonnie Mann points out, it accurately describes what happens between many women in daily interactions: “any activity organised by women is boxed into a therapeutic framework. Its value is determined on the basis of whether or not it is ‘healing’:”

I have often seen an honest conversation turn into a therapeutic interaction before my eyes. For instance, I mention something that has bothered, hurt, or been difficult for me in some way. Something shifts. I see the woman I am with take on The Role of the Supportive Friend. It is as if a tape clicks into her brain, her voice changes, I can see her begin to see me differently, as a victim. She begins to recite the lines, “That must have been very difficult for you,” or “That must have felt so invalidating,” or “What do you think you need to feel better about that?” I know very well the corresponding tape that is supposed to click into my own brain: “I think I just needed to let you know what was going on for me,” or “It helps to hear you say that, it feels very validating,” or “I guess I just need to go off alone and nurture myself a little” (1987, p. 47).

Psychological ways of thinking have spilled out of the therapists office, the AA groups, and self-help books, the experiential workshops and rebirthing sessions to invade all aspects of our lives. The political has been thoroughly personalised.

Revolution from Within

Another common feminist psychologising of “the personal is political” goes something like this:

The supposedly “personal activity of therapy is deeply political because learning to feel better about ourselves, raising our self-esteem, accepting our sexualities and coming to terms with who we really are — all these are political acts in a heteropatriarchal world. With woman-hating all around us, it is revolutionary to love ourselves, to heal the wounds of patriarchy, and to overcome self-oppression. If everyone loved and accepted themselves, so that women (and men) no longer projected on to each other their own repressed self-hatreds, we would have real social change.

This is a very common argument, most recently rehearsed in Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within. As Carol Sternhall points out in a critical review, “The point of all this trendy, tied-dyed [sic] shrinkery isn’t simply feeling better about yourself — or rather, it is, because feeling better about all our selves is now the key to worldwide revolution” (1992, p. 5).

In this model, the “self” is naturally good, but has to be uncovered from beneath the layers of internalised oppression and healed from the wounds inflicted on it by a heteropatriarchal society. Despite her manifest differences from Gloria Steinem in other areas, lesbian feminist therapist Laura Brown (1992) shares Steinem’s notion of the “true self.” She writes, for example, of a client’s “struggle to recover her self from the snares of patriarchy” (pp. 241-42), by “peel(ing) away the layers of patriarchal training” (p. 242) and “heal(ing) the wounds of childhood” (p. 245); in therapy with Laura Brown, a woman is helped to “know herself” (p. 246), to move beyond her “accommodated self” (p. 243) and discover her “true self” (p. 243) (or “shammed [sic] inner self” p. 245) and live “at harmony with herself” (p. 243). In most feminist psychology, this inner self is characterised as a beautiful, spontaneous little girl. Getting in touch with and nurturing her is a first step in creating social change. It is “revolution from within.”

This set of ideas has its roots in the “growth movement” of the 1960s, which emphasised personal liberation and “human potential.” Back then, the central image was of a vaguely defined “sick society.”

“The System” was poisoned by its materialism, consumerism, and lack of concern for the individual. These things were internalised by people; but underneath the layers of “shit” in each person lay an essential “natural self” which could be reached through various therapeutic techniques. What this suggests is that revolutionary change is not something that has to be built, created or invented with other people, but that it is somehow natural, dormant in each of us individually and only has to be released (Scott and Payne: 1984, p. 22).

The absurdity of taking this “revolution from within” argument to its logical conclusion is illustrated by one project, the offspring of a popular therapeutic program, which proposed to end starvation. Not, as might seem sensible, by organising soup kitchens, distributing food parcels to the hungry, campaigning for impoverished countries to be released from their national debts, or sponsoring farming cooperatives. Instead, it offers the simple expedient of getting individuals to sign cards saying that they are “willing to be responsible for making the end of starvation an idea whose time has come.” When an undisclosed number of people have signed such cards, a “context” will have been created in which hunger will somehow end (cited in Zilbergeld: 1983, pp. 5-6). Of course, Laura Brown, along with many other feminist therapists, would probably also want to challenge the obscenity of this project. Yet the logic of her own arguments permits precisely this kind of interpretation.

Such approaches are a very long way from my own understanding of “the personal is political.” I don’t think social change happens from the inside out. I don’t think people have inner children somewhere inside waiting to be nurtured, reparented, and their natural goodness released into the world. On the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere (Kitzinger: 1987; Kitzinger and Perkins: 1993), our inner selves are constructed by the social and political contexts in which we live, and if we want to alter people’s behavior it is far more effective to change the environment than to psychologise individuals. Yet as Sarah Scott and Tracey Payne (1984, p. 24) point out, “when it comes to doing therapy it is essential to each and every technique that women see their ‘real’ selves and their ‘social’ selves as distinct.” This means that the process of making ethical and political decisions about our lives is reduced to the supposed ‘discovery’ of our true selves, the honouring of our “hearts desires.” Political understandings of our thoughts and feelings is occluded, and our ethical choices are cast within a therapeutic rather than a political framework. A set of repressive social conditions has made life hard for women and lesbians. Yet the “revolution from within” solution is to improve the individuals, rather than change the conditions.

Psychology suggests that only after healing yourself can you begin to heal the world. I disagree. People do not have to be perfectly functioning, self-actualised human beings in order to create social change. Think of the feminists you know who have been influential in the world, and who have worked hard and effectively for social justice: Have they all loved and accepted themselves? The vast majority of those admired for their political work go on struggling for change not because they have achieved self-fulfilment (nor in order to attain it), but because of their ethical and political commitments, and often in spite of their own fears, self-doubts, personal angst, and self-hatreds. Those who work for “revolution without” are often no more “in touch with their real selves” than those fixated on inner change: this observation should not be used (as it sometimes is) to discredit their activism, but rather to demonstrate that political action is an option for all of us, whatever our state of psychological well-being. Wait until your inner world is sorted out before shifting your attention to the outer, and you are, indeed “waiting for the revolution” (Brown: 1992).

Validating Women’s Experience

A third psychological version of “the personal is political” as applied to therapy goes something like this:

Politics develops out of personal experience. Feminism is derived from women’s own life stories, and must reflect and validate those. Women’s realities have always been ignored, denied, or invalidated under heteropatriarchy; therapy serves to witness, affirm, and validate women’s experience. As such, it makes the personal, political.

The politics of therapy, according to this approach, involves no more than “validating,” “respecting,” “honouring,” “celebrating,” “affirming,” attending to,” or “witnessing” (these buzz words are generally used interchangeably) another woman’s “experience” or “reality.”

This “validation” process is supposed to have enormous implications: “When we honour our clients, they transform themselves” (Hill: 1990, p. 56).

There is obviously a lot of sense in listening to each other and in being willing to understand the meaning of other women’s experience. We used to do this in Consciousness Raising groups; now we do it in therapy. Because it has been transformed into a therapeutic activity, it now carries all the risks of abuse and power endemic to the therapeutic enterprise (Kitzinger and Perkins: 1993, chapter 3; Silveira: 1985). In particular, therapists are selective about which experiences they will or won’t validate in therapy. Those of a client’s feelings and beliefs which are most similar to those of the therapist are “validated”; the others are more or less subtly “invalidated.”

Few feminist therapists, for example, will uncritically validate a survivor of child sexual abuse who talks of being to blame for her childhood rape because of her seductive behaviour; instead, she is likely to be offered an analysis of the way in which victim-blaming operates under heteropatriarchy. Similarly, few feminist therapists will validate the experience of a woman who says she is sick and perverted for being lesbian; instead, as Laura Brown (1992) herself argues, her “dysfunctional thoughts” (p. 243) will be challenged and therapy geared towards modifying them to the belief that “patriarchy teaches that lesbianism is evil as a means of socially controlling all women and reserving emotional resources for men and dominant institutions (an analysis that I have offered, in various forms, to women wondering out loud in my office why they hate themselves so for being lesbian)” (Brown: 1992, p. 249). While claiming to “validate” all women’s realities, in fact only a subset, consisting of those realities with which the therapist is in agreement, are accepted as “true” reflections of the way things are. The others are “invalidated,” whether as “faulty cognitions” (Padesky: 1989) or as “patriarchal distortions” (Brown: 1992, p. 242). In other words, all this talk about “validating” and “honouring” clients’ reality is thin disguise for the therapeutic shaping of women’s experience in terms of the therapists’s own theories.

In any case, “experience” is always perceived through at theoretical framework (implicit or explicit) within which it gains meaning. Feelings and emotions are not simply immediate, unsocialised, self-authenticating responses. They are socially constructed, and presuppose certain social norms. “Experience” is never “raw”; it is embedded in a social web of interpretation and reinterpretation. In encouraging and perpetuating the notion of pure, unsullied, presocialised “experience” and natural emotion welling up from inside, therapists have disguised or obscured the social roots of our “inner selves.” Placing “experience” beyond debate in this way is deeply anti-feminist because it denies the political sources of experience and renders them purely personal. When psychology simply validates particular emotions, it removes them from an ethical and political framework.

Empowerment

A fourth psychological interpretation of “the personal is political” relies on the notion of “empowerment.” It goes something like this:

Therapy empowers us to act politically. Raising one’s personal awareness through therapy enables individuals to release their psychic energies towards creative social change. Through therapy, lesbians can gain both the feminist consciousness and the self-confidence to engage in political action. Many radical feminist political activists are empowered to continue through their ongoing self-nurturing in therapy.

Those in therapy often use this justification: according to Angela Johnson (1992, p. 8), therapy (along with rock-climbing) “gives me the energy to continue my activism with renewed excitement.” And therapists concur. According to clinical psychologist Jan Burns (1992, p. 230), writing on the psychology of lesbian health care, “It seems intuitively reasonable that an individual may prefer to engage in self-exploration prior to choosing to engage in more political action, and may in fact need to, before being able to take other action.” Laura Brown (1992) says that many of her clients “have precious little to give to the larger struggle from which many are disengaged when I first see them” (p. 245). Her client “Ruth” was helped to understand that “ultimate healing lies in her participation in cultural, not only personal change” (p. 246) and was shown by Laura Brown “how to move her healing process into a broader sphere” (p. 245). As a result of therapy, her “energies” were “freed” (p. 245) and she became a speaker, poet, and teacher about women and war, and engaged in public anti-war activism. Similarly, clinical psychologist Sue Holland (1991), in an article entitled “From private symptoms to public action,” promotes a model of therapy in which the client moves from “passive, ‘ill’ patient/victim” at the start of treatment to a “recognition of oppression as located in the objective environment” which leads to a “collective desire for change” in which “psychic energies can be addressed outward onto structural enemies” (p. 59).

According to this interpretation, the “personal” consists of “psychic energies” (never clearly defined) which operate according to a hydraulic model. There is a fixed amount of “energy” which can be blocked, freed, or redirected along other channels. The “political” is simply one of these “channels.” Therapy can (and some would say should) direct feminist energy along “political” channels. Often, of course, it does not, and women remain perpetually focussed within — a problem noted with regret by the more radical lesbian/feminist therapists. But their therapy (they say) does result in their clients’ becoming politically active.

Far from embodying the notion of “the personal is political,” these ideas rely on a radical separation of the two. The “personal” business of doing therapy is distinguished from the “political” work of going on marches, and having severed the “personal” and “political” in this way, the two are then inspected for degree of correlation.

The “empowerment” argument totally ignores the politics of therapy itself. It is seen simply as a hobby (like rock climbing) or personal activity with no particular ethical or political implications in and of itself. Shorn of intrinsic political meaning, it is assessed only in terms of its presumed consequences for “politics” — defined in terms of the old male left banner-waving variety. If “the personal is political,” the very process of doing therapy is political, and this process (not simply its alleged outcomes) must be critically evaluated in political terms.

In conclusion, and despite the frequency with which feminist therapists routinely state that “the personal is political,” it seems utterly wrong to claim that this aim is a “cornerstone of feminist therapy” (Gilbert: 1980). Certainly the notions of “revolution from within,” the importance of “validating” women’s reality, and “empowering” women for political activism are central to the thinking of many feminist psychologists. These overlapping and interrelated ideas are braided throughout a great deal of lesbian/feminist psychological theory and practice. But such notions are a long way from the radical feminist insight that “the personal is political,” and are often interpreted in direct contradiction to it. They often foster naïve concepts of the mechanisms whereby social change is achieved; involve uncritical acceptance of “true feelings” and/or manipulative “reinterpretation” of women’s lives in terms preferred by the psychologist; lead women to revert to “external” definitions of politics in contradistinction to the “personal” business of therapy; and leave us shorn of ethical and political language. Acknowledging that the personal really is political means rejecting psychology.

I recognise that some women whose politics I admire and respect have not rejected psychology: Many are “in therapy” or are providers of therapy. This observation is sometimes used to counter our arguments. After reading a chapter (Kitzinger and Perkins: 1993) which cites Nancy Johnson’s class action suit against the US government for condemning the people of Utah to cancer (because of nuclear testing), one reader commented that Nancy Johnson now works as a psychic healer in a manner which I was likely to find politically problematic. “I think the situation is more complicated than you’ve presented it: Feminism and psychology don’t seem to be mutually exclusive,” she said. Obviously, feminist activists are sometimes practitioners or consumers of psychology; many feminists clearly find it possible to include both in their lives. But then, health campaigners sometimes smoke cigarettes; ecologists sometimes drop litter; and pacifists sometimes slap their children. The observed coexistence of two views or behaviors in the same person does not render them logically, ethically or politically compatible.

Argument about the ethical and political compatibility of people’s different ideas and behavior is an important part of what feminist political discussion is all about. My argument is that feminism and psychology are not ethically or politically compatible. It’s not, necessarily, that women involved in psychology are apolitical or anti-feminist. Many are serious about their feminism and deeply engaged in political activities. But in-so-far as they organise their lives with reference to psychological ideas, and in-so-far as they limit their thoughts and actions to what they learn from psychology, they are denying the fundamental feminist principle that “the personal is political.”

Feminist Reprise thanks Kya for her help in readying this article for the site.

[repriseofthereprise]

Sickness Unto Death: Medicine as Mythic, Necrophilic and Iatrogenic

by Denise Donnell Connors

Doctoral Candidate, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Instructor (on leave), Department of Nursing, Fitchburg State College, Fitchburg, Massachusetts

(As published in Advances in Nursing Science volume 2, number 3, 1980, Politics of Care issue)

The sick in the grip of contemporary medicine is but a symbol of humanity in the grip of its technique. ~Wolfgang Jacob

A critique of medicine is imperative in order to address the problems of the medicalization of society and the increasing evidence of physician-induced death and disease (iatrogenesis), and more importantly to make possible a pushing beyond institutionalized views of health and illness. By using an inductive cross-disciplinary analysis, the author’s 13 years of experience in the hospital system will be integrated with the perspectives of sociology, philosophy, psychiatry and political science.

Medicine thrives on the maintenance of polarization–expert versus laity, superior versus subordinate, healthy versus sick, infallible versus fallible, physician versus patient. In effect, medicine today legitimizes and lives out an ethic of domination that is profoundly destructive.

Dubos has stated that "complete and lasting freedom from disease is but a dream." The medical profession seems to have turned this dream into a nightmare. Instead of offering health, physicians offer medically induced paralysis, dependence on machinery, invasive diagnostic procedures ("invasive" procedures are distinguished from "noninvasive" procedures when in reality the distinction is between visible and invisible invasion), unnecessary surgery and medication–until the patient’s torment eventually lies in not being able to die. As Illich states:

The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance. Increasingly pain killing turns people into unfeeling spectators of their own decaying selves.(1, p. 54)

Once the medical and legal professions have defined life as a beating heart or a brain wave, technology becomes primary and living, only not dying. The present health care system fosters fragmentation; processing sickness into raw material for institutional enterprise(1, p. 70); and promotes the interests of science over the needs of society.(1, p. 254)

MEDICINE AS MYTHIC

Whenever man has thought it necessary to create a memory for himself his effort has been attended with torture, blood, sacrifice. ~Nietzsche

The medical profession perpetuates and lives out myths in order to ensure its continual existence. It receives legitimation for what it claims to do rather than for what it does and hence gains access to a brand of infallibility. See "The Politics of Medical Deception: Challenging the Trajectory of History," in this issue. The element of mystery is enhanced by the wearing of white, the masks and sterility of the operating room, the use of certain language and use of awe-inspiring symbols of "phallotechnic"(2) power from the scalpel to the intraaortic balloon pump.

On some level the patient is convinced that physicians and their technological devices are in and of themselves good. Questioning by the patient is viewed by the physician as suspect, for it suggests a lack of faith in those who define what is good and bad, healthy and sick. The client gives up the role of independent adult, thereby protecting the esoteric foundation of the profession’s institutional authority.(3, p. 143)

The client ultimately becomes a captive in the closed universe of practitioners established in an official position in society.(3, p. 116) These "expert" practitioners have come to play the role previously reserved for ministers of religion, using scientific principles as their theology, technologists as acolytes and the hospital as church.(1, p. 253) As illustrated by Parsons, in the Judeo-Christian world the clergy is clearly the primary historical matrix from which the modern professions have differentiated.(4, p. 537)

The most all-pervasive medical myth is that the physician has control over life and death. The medical profession reinforces this myth by defining death broadly in order to make feasible "bringing back to life." In the hospital this myth is reenacted in the form of cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest is generally defined as a sudden, unexpected death. What it often means in the hospital setting is an irregularity of the heart rhythm (ventricular fibrillation) which if left untreated eventually leads to death. Often a cardiac arrest is precipitated by the physician performing a procedure such as cardiac catheterization, pericardial tap, surgery or the administration of medication. In these instances the patient is "brought back to life" by terminating the procedure or by giving an antidote for the medication.

After witnessing countless so-called cardiac arrests, it became clear to me that once someone has died, that person cannot be brought back to life. Death is an irreversible process. When patients do in fact respond to treatment they have not yet died. The person whose heart has been shocked and drugged back into beating again often "survives" with extensive brain damage. Those who have lost the ability to breathe on their own are "maintained" on a respirator. Often this results in merely prolonging the lives of those who will later die a mechanized, sterile, prepackaged death. In fact, in the hospital no one "dies." Patients "expire," "cease to breath" or are "lost." This win/lose terminology permeates medical language and alludes to the fact that physicians are playing a game.

Cardiac Drama

Cardiac arrest offers high drama. Its occurrence is announced over the hospital loudspeaker as a "CA," "Mayday," or "Code Blue." The cardiac arrest team responds by rushing to the location announced. The patient often suffers several crushed ribs in the initial effort to resuscitate the heart effectively. Treatment of the patient is rarely synchronized, with each team member arriving and doing what he or she knows best. Tubes are introduced, drugs are administered via every possible route (intravenous, intracardiac, etc.). Blood is transfused and shed (for analysis) simultaneously; however, although physicians can pump blood into the body, they cannot make it flow. Their attempt to instill the "life force" often fails and death becomes the ultimate form of consumer resistance to medicalization.(1, p. 207)

For more than a century researchers have shown that the environment is the primary determinant of any population’s state of general health.(1, p. 17) The myth that the physician has control over life and death persists despite growing evidence to the contrary. Belief in this myth has resulted in widespread addiction to medical intervention. What is obscured by this is the fact that disease itself is largely self-limiting, and death, natural. Once the physician stepped between humanity and death, the latter lost the immediacy and intimacy gained years earlier.(1, p. 199) "The good death has irrevocably become that of the standard consumer of medical care."(1, p. 198)

Manipulative Misuse of Language

DEFINITIONS

According to Arendt, "words can be relied on only if one is sure that their function is to reveal and not to conceal."(5, p. 163) The language of medicine is at times very revealing. In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) the word "patient" is defined (the author’s emphasis in italic) in part as (1) bearing or enduring (pain, affliction, trouble, or evil of any kind) with composure, without discontent or complaint; (2) undergoing the action of another, passive; (3) a person subjected to the supervision, care, treatment, or correction of someone; and (4) a person or thing that undergoes some action, or to whom or which something is done, that which receives impressions from external agents, a recipient.

The reader should also note that the OED definition of "woman" includes: with allusion to their position of inferiority or subjection (phr to make a woman of, to bring into submission); and the definition of "object" includes (1) an object of pity or relief, an afflicted person or thing of pitiable or ridiculous aspect, a gazing stock ("Women are more glorious objects," Green, Perimedes, 1588); and (2) the thing (or person) to which something is done, or upon or about which something acts or operates.

An analysis of the medical profession makes it blatantly clear who the subject is, as well as the interchangeability of the words–women, patient, object. The role of patient is patterned after the role of woman–hence women patients are doubly cursed.

This definition implies a superior/subordinate relationship between health care provider and patient. This type of relationship cannot be a healing one. The fact that patients are often labeled, referred to and treated by medical personnel as "vegetables," "turkeys," "gorks," "crispy critters" (burned patients) and "scrunches" (accident victims) suggests instead an unhealthy, unhealing relationship in which the patient is dehumanized.

SYNTACTIC EXPLOITATION

Stanley exposes some of the ways in which language is used by speakers to convince other persons that the speaker is right.(6) Arendt describes one such process: "What first appears as a hypothesis… turns immediately… into a ‘fact,’ which then gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facts."(5, p. 109) This leads listeners and readers to believe that they have a comprehensive understanding of events; they forget the purely speculative character of the entire process.

Overuse of such words as never, always, fatal, inoperable, must, and phrases such as "I’ll give you six months to live," "These are doctor’s orders," and "Do as I say or find another doctor" serve to further intimidate and convince the "laity" that the physicians are not only right but infallible.

Stanley defines the use of syntax to deceive or mislead the unwary hearer as syntactic exploitation.(6) One instance of this is the use of deletion to suppress information required by the hearer for understanding of the message. As Marcuse illustrates, "What people mean. is related to what they don’t say. Or, what they mean cannot be taken at face value–not because they lie, but because the universe of thought and practice in which they live is a universe of manipulated contradictions."(7, p. 194)

The use of language to accomplish deletion of the truth is a common occurrence in the health care system. Following are examples of deletion that can be observed:

"You hemorrhaged during surgery but we managed to get everything under control" deletes such explanations as "The hemorrhage was due to the surgeon’s nicking an artery."

"Your child is not responding to our treatment" deletes such explanations as "The treatment instituted was not indicated."

"She became confused and combative so we had to restrain her" deletes such explanations as "Due to medication she was given."

"She went into congestive heart failure" deletes such explanations as "She was given too much intravenous fluid too rapidly."

"Everything possible is being done for her" deletes such explanations as "Even if it requires painful, dehumanizing, dangerously unnecessary procedures."

"This medication will clear up your inflammatory process" deletes such explanations as "It may cause cataracts (requiring surgery), diabetes (requiring insulin), fluid retention (requiring salt restriction), psychosis, hirsutism, acne, peptic ulcer, insomnia, pancreatitis, etc."

"She died suddenly" deletes such explanations as "Due to a punctured heart, which occurred during a diagnostic procedure."

Another instance of syntactic exploitation described by Stanley is the use of sentence structure to convince the hearer that there is a message available when in fact the utterance is meaningless. An example might be a physician "explaining" to a patient the reason for transfer to another unit of the hospital: "We are going to put you in intensive care because you are having multifocal PVCs and you need to be given some IV Xylocaine."

Other medical examples might include:

Explaining a diagnosis: "You have thromboangiitis obliterans."

Explaining the results of surgery: "The operation resulted in the expected outcome."

Responding to an inquiry regarding a patient’s condition: "She is being maintained on a respirator, her blood gases are off, but she’s doing as well as can be expected."

The use of the passive voice is also a means of obscuring meaning by making the agent unclear and by appealing to some unspecified authority. The phrases it is thought, it is understood and it is known imply that underlying a particular statement is a great body of universal agreement.(8) In describing a disease as incurable, what is obscured is who is unable to cure it. When an operation is termed "mutilating surgery," who is doing the mutilating is unclear. When "The diagnostic test resulted in a stroke" or "Radiation has been improperly utilized" again the agent is unknown.

Awe, Ignorance and Fear

At most, the noncommunication taking place may convince the person that the physician is intelligent. In other words, the physician attempts to convey a high level of intelligence corresponding to a high level of unintelligibility; that is, using highly technical language that laypersons cannot be expected to understand. It also serves to discourage any further questions or attempts to communicate. In effect, language is used to instill a sense of awe, ignorance and fear in the laity.

Labeling is a means of dehumanizing both the persons labeled and the person doing the labeling. It is a process that can creep into language and a way of viewing others without being fully aware of the objectification taking place. Evidence of this exists in casual conversations, nurses’ notes, reports and written referrals to other agencies or other members of the health care team.

Persons who are labeled "unmotivated," "combative," "demanding" or "confused" are often treated in a way that serves to reinforce these very characteristics. By labeling a person "confused," one creates an excuse for not explaining treatments, tests, procedures, etc.; the medical profession "knows" in advance that the person would not understand. The patient becomes locked into a system where things are being done to her or him. All sense of autonomy or self is cancelled out. What is ignored is that "confusion," "combativeness," etc. are often not symptoms of a disease but a reaction to the sickness of the system.

MEDICINE AS NECROPHILIC

We shall have to learn to refrain from doing things merely because we know how to do them. ~Sir Theodore Fox

One can say that all we know, that is, all we have the power to do, has finally turned against what we are. ~Valery

When technical knowledge is separated from ontological reason, the science which it dominates becomes dogmatic, manipulative and destructive. ~Mary Daly

The sense of awe, fear and ignorance of the laity, combined with the established infallibility and omnipotence of the physician, results in what Illich describes as a "morbid society" demanding universal medicalization. This morbid society frequently finds its demands met by an equally "morbid medical profession."(1)

Fromm points out that the term necrophilia (generally defined as "love of the dead") has not generally been viewed as a character trait, a trait that is rooted in passion, the soil from which its more overt and cruder behavioral manifestations grow. He describes necrophilia in the characterological sense: the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly.(9, p. 362) The process or anti-process of developing this character trait in physicians begins in medical school. As one physician recalls,

One of the first things we had to do was dissect a cadaver. I didn’t think I could. But they started us on the back, so it was several weeks before we saw the face; by that time it didn’t seem so bad. You just see so much, something changes in you.(10)

The repetition of horror scenes eventually results in the inability to be horrified. This perspective leads to the ability to describe "a beautiful case of carcinoma," the excitement over "discovering some good pathology," the inappropriate laughter at the devastation and powerlessness of the "other." It is illustrated by a slide presentation for medical students in which "a dying woman’s emaciated body and huge swollen belly were presented: "Now this is Bubbles, and as you look into her lovely eyes. ‘ Students laughed."(11)

Fromm has stated that the "core of sadism is the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being. ; patients in hospitals offer the possibility for sadistic satisfaction."(9, p. 323)

The Search for Sickness

Illich correlates the diagnostic bias in favor of sickness with the frequency of diagnostic error.(1, p. 93) He points out that diagnosis intensifies stress, defines incapacity, imposes inactivity and focuses apprehension or nonrecovery, uncertainty and dependence on future medical findings, amounting to a loss of autonomy for self-definition.

The fixation on diagnosis is illustrated by the practice of putting elderly people through a series of tests that involve fasting, hours on an x-ray table and the introduction of needles, tubes and dyes into their systems. All this is done to determine, and document on the chart, the accurate diagnosis. Yet the elderly and debilitated are often not in condition to tolerate these tests. Naming the diagnosis seems to take precedence over healing.

Necrophilia is also characterized as the passion to transform that which is alive into something not alive. The fact that patients are reduced to objects being repaired rather than persons being helped to heal is symptomatic of this passion. The ability to feel, to respond, to channel anger into creativity is replaced by a balm of indifference, apathy and passivity administered in the form of daily doses (treatments) of narcotics, sedatives, tranquilizers, mood elevators, antidepressants, hormones, etc. The transformation of that which is alive into something not alive is accomplished by psychosurgery. Cosmetic surgery serves the purpose of transforming the natural (ugly) into the artificial (beautiful), a process of universal standardization nurtured by the mass media and all the allied professions. One of the most flagrant examples of the use of cosmetic surgery to transform something natural into something artificial is transsexualism, a process analyzed in depth by Raymond.(13)

Necrophilia is also characterized by an exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. Proust observed that great physicians often show themselves outside of their specialty to be lacking in sensitivity, intelligence and humanity; having abdicated their freedom, they have nothing else left but their techniques.(13, p. 5) This attribute of necrophilia is implied in Beauvoir’s definition of the "serious man" as one "who wills himself to be god, but he is not one and knows it."(13, p. 52) He becomes obsessed with controlling at least some specialized aspect of his world and often expresses his obsession by technological intervention.

Professional Values

Once the destructive, one-dimensional orientation of the professions has been exposed, the values of professional life are open to question. Woolf has said of persons who are highly successful in their professions:

They lose their senses. Sight goes. Speech goes. Sound goes. They lose their sense of proportion–the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. What remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound and sense of proportion?"(14, p. 72)

These technological troglodytes approach the world as a conglomerate of things to be understood in order to be used effectively. They have sacrificed life in the worship of the idol of technology.

Parsons has written that the teaching hospital "has moved from the purely clinical concerns for the immediate welfare of its patients to concomitant emphasis on use of the patients and facilities for the training of physicians."(4, p. 543) The fact that a facility is a "teaching hospital" is used to justify a multitude of horrors. Just what is being "taught" is never questioned.

A lack of logic and insight leads many physicians to conclude that the medical, technological "we can" somehow implies "we ought." The realm of what medicine actually attempts to do has expanded almost beyond belief. In the face of this expansion, medicine has continuously failed to develop an ethic commensurate with the development of technology.(15) Medicine has also failed to project the long-range consequences of its aspirations and actions to the point that "aims no longer guide inventions; inventions reveal aims."(14, p. 210)

It becomes clear that the health-denying effect of the "health professionals" destroys the potential of people to deal with human weakness, vulnerability and uniqueness in a personal, autonomous way.(1, p. 33)

In order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present directions and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accordance with a new sensibility– the demands of the life instincts.(15, p. 19)

MEDICINE AS IATROGENIC

The sick person is the garden of the physician. –Swahili proverb

Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. ~George Bernard Shaw

For the sick, the least is best. ~Hippocrates

The word iatrogenic is defined in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary as "resulting from the activity of physicians." Originally applied to disorders induced in the patient by autosuggestion based on the physician’s examination, manner or discussion, the term is now applied to any adverse condition in a patient occurring as the result of treatment by a physician or surgeon. Illich points out that among murderous institutional torts, only modern malnutrition injures more people than iatrogenic disease in its various manifestations.(1, p. 26)

Women the Targets

For as long as the present system of patriarchal medicine has existed, women have been the primary targets of iatrogenesis. The so-called first wave of feminism crested in this country at the same time that the field of gynecology was receiving professional recognition. The "second wave of feminism" has coincided with an escalation of unnecessary and abusive gynecological intervention, including unnecessary surgery, prescription of controversial drugs (DES, Depo-Provera and birth control pills), sterilization abuse of black and third-world women, etc.(11, p 16-19)

A recent study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine states that: "The evidence for a connection between the use of conjugated estrogens and the development of endometrial cancer seems rather persuasive. Caution is urged. in view of the absence of data both from similar epidemiologic studies in other populations and from follow-up studies. Such information is necessary before policy conclusions can be drawn."(20)

This mentality was recently reflected in a statement made by an executive of a large food-processing corporation regarding the use of carcinogenic food additives: "Chemicals should have the same rights as individuals. innocent until proven guilty." The fact that the price paid for the proof is the lives of women is not considered.

As Daly clearly points out, "there is a refusal to acknowledge the evidence of medical morbidity, in this case, specifically, refusal to acknowledge the reality of estrogen-related deaths. As usual, we are told that there isn’t enough evidence, that the link-up between drugs and death has not been ‘proved.’ Clearly, no matter how many women die, it still will not be proven to those who do not want to know."(21)

Joseph Chilton Pearce, in The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, relates the experience of his wife, Patricia Ann Pearce. Her grandmother died of cancer and all the females scrupulously avoided all the maneuvers rumored to have possibly caused the horror. Then in neat diabolical two-year intervals her favorite aunt died of cancer and her mother developed cancer but survived the radical-surgery mutilations. Her own debacle occurred in spite of constant submissions to the high priests for inspections and tests. The medical center that had attended her requested that her teenage daughter be given six-month checkups forever after, since they had found and thoroughly advertised that mammary malignancies in a mother tended to be duplicated in the daughter. Surely such duplications do occur, in a clear example of the circularity of expectancy verification, the mirroring by reality of a passionate or basic fear.(22, p. 8) Added to the circularity of expectancy verification is other evidence of medical intervention as a cause of cancer in women: "routine exploratory examinations to detect the early phases of breast cancer may be causing extra cases of cancer through widespread use of X-ray radiation."(23) As Rennie warns: "the human organ most sensitive to radiation-induced cancer is the human breast–more sensitive even than bone marrow or thyroid tissue. We should be wary of even the smallest radiation doses to that organ."(24)

Iatrogenic Despair

A physician’s unawareness or misunderstanding of the role emotion plays in disease may not only prevent cure but may precipitate and perpetuate illness. ~Peter Reich and Martin J. Kelly

An unawareness or misunderstanding by physicians of the role emotion plays in disease is reflected in a recent article entitled "Suicide Attempts by Hospitalized Medical and Surgical Patients," which was written by two physicians and appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.(25)

The authors surveyed all suicide attempts in Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for a period of seven years. Women outnumbered men 13 to 4. Of the total of 17 patients surveyed, 5 had been hospitalized for evaluation of "vague complaints" listed as headache, abdominal pain, seizures, gastrointestinal bleeding and addiction. These persons attempted suicide, the authors report, "when the validity of their medical symptoms was being challenged." Subsequently their demands escalated," and the staff became increasingly "rejecting." (Italics are this author’s emphasis.) From a physician’s viewpoint these individuals were not willing to accept the fact that the physician could not find the etiology of their complaints; their societally induced expectations were seen as demands and the staff’s rejection of them viewed as justifiable under the circumstances.

Two others had been admitted for the management of pain. Their medical problems were peptic ulcer and arteriosclerosis. "They both slashed their wrists when staff members expressed disbelief of the reality of their pain and of their need for medications." They continued to experience pain despite reassurance from the physicians that they had none. By their refusal to accept the labels "painfree," "hypochondriacal" and "demanding," these patients became "adversaries of the ward staff and of their physicians."

As early as 1890, Alice James wrote of the dehumanizing effects created by interaction with a physician: "I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience." These same feelings may have been shared by a woman casually described in the New England Journal of Medicine report: "While being interviewed by the house officer, she suddenly jumped through an open window."

A man developing serious complications "probably due to his medications" became "delusional and expressed the belief that the hospital was contaminated. His usual dependent, obsequious manner changed suddenly to open anger at his doctors." The physicians obviously preferred the patient’s previous manner of behavior despite the fact that his anger seems to reflect a more healthy response toward the nature of medical treatment he was receiving.

Another patient refused to be placed on an artificial kidney machine. "When his angry protests were ignored, he made cuts around his shunt with a razor blade."

Upon discovering that her drug treatment program was not working, a woman with myeloma "was told that radiotherapy was to be started." She subsequently became "resistant. she struggled with them when they attempted to take her to the radiotherapy department." She was told strongly suggests that she was given no choice. When she chose to choose she was labeled "resistant," "angry," and "accusatory."

Perhaps the most insightful statement made by the authors of this study was that "each suicide attempt was associated with anger." This insight does not seem to include any understanding as to what or who precipitated or exacerbated the anger. Instead the authors conclude by describing the suicide attempts as disturbances of "impulse control."

MEDICALIZED VERSUS HEALTHY SOCIETY

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. ~Susan Sontag

Galdston believes that modern medicine has failed, not because it has "no cure for cancer, for essential hypertension, or for multiple sclerosis. Were it to achieve these and other cures besides, it still would have failed." This failure is due to the fact that "modern medicine is almost entirely preoccupied with diseases and their treatment, and very little, if at all, with health."(26, p. 2)

These observations seem tame, for they fail to indict the medical profession for the misuse of the knowledge and skills it has acquired, for keeping the secret cited by Dr. Lewis Thomas "that most things get better by themselves. (and) much of human illness is self-limiting and spontaneously reversible,"(27) for failing to acknowledge that the power to heal resides in the individual, for grossly exaggerating what the profession can do (e.g., bring back to life), and for fostering fragmentation and vulnerability, which serve to undermine the power and autonomy of the individual.

It becomes increasingly clear that a medicalized society (which spends more than $120 billion a year on health) is not a healthy society. The counterproductivity of the medical profession is only one aspect of living in a death-engendering society, and the toll is taken not only in lives but in ecological integrity.

A renaming of the agents of disease is imperative as is a reclaiming of the life instincts that foster health: a health nourished by the environmental and social factors that advance thought and creative effort; a health that springs from the restoration of the normal, balanced rhythms of life.

BREAKING THE SILENCE

The only people who really know anything about medical science are the nurses, and they never tell. ~Djuna Barnes

A sense that many nurses are committed to providing quality nursing care does not cancel out the necessity of examining the role of nurses in the masking or perpetuating of iatrogenesis. Nurses may find themselves living out what Woolf has described as "unreal loyalties" to the medical model, the hospital, the physicians, etc.(14) Unreal loyalties underlie (1) acting as an advocate for the physician and not the patient; (2) taking personal offense to patient’s rebellion against oppressive hospital agendas; (3) justifying harmful or unnecessary procedures out of a fear of legal reprisal; and (4) participating in the erasure of physicians’ errors and inadequacies.

When nurses recognize the incompetence of a particular physician, they often discuss among themselves how they would never have this physician treat anyone they care about, but they do nothing to see that the physician does not continue to "take care of" countless others. When they do take measures to report what they find unconscionable, they are often merely placated because they do not go outside the system with their information and concerns. Loyalties to the institution and the physician take precedence over a basic sense of loyalty to the self and the person being cared for.

Another trap is that of token torturer. "The nurse… functions as a token torturer in the primary sense of the term token, that is, as an outward indication or expression. She is both weapon and shield for the divine doctor in his warfare against The Enemy, Disease, to which the women [sic] patient is susceptible by her nature."(16, p. 277) The role of token torturer is expressed in part by witnessing and/or participating in unnecessary or harmful treatments or surgery and by administering health-damaging drugs.

By attempting to take refuge in the ready-made values of the medical world, nurses validate these ready-made values while negating their own potential as healers. By acting out unreal loyalties, or as token torturers, nurses become alienated from their own sense of integrity, which is the true source of healing ability. Each time nurses remain silent, when they know the silence should be broken, they sacrifice their own personal power and reinforce the syndrome of necrophilia and iatrogenesis. There are nurses who fight against falling into these traps, but the system is such that it facilitates and rewards not seeing, not hearing, not speaking and not acting.

An analysis of the present health care system is fraught with ambiguities. It becomes, however, increasingly more evident and more urgent that nurses break the silence and break out of the system. Nurses must begin removing their energies and healing powers from the medical profession, where they are drained and distorted, and must begin to rechannel them into envisioning and creating biophilic health care.

As Crones/Furies find again our new and ancient wisdom and psychic power, we can communicate the gynergy that will save our sisters from being captured and killed. This creation of Self-identified sense of reality is our most potent safeguard against the mind/body violators who offer the "gift of peace" at the price of living death. (16, p. 292)

REFERENCES

Illich, I. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (New York: Random House 1976).

Term used by Mary Daly in her class on Philosophical Foundations for Revolutionary Ethics, Boston College, Boston, Spring 1975.

Friedson, E. Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care (New York: Atherton Press 1970).

Parsons, T. "Professions" in International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. 1975).

Arendt, H. Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972).

Stanley, J. (Julia Penelope) "The Stylistics of Belief," Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Anaheim, Calif., April 1974.)

Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press 1966).

Stanley, J. "Passive Motivation." Paper presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, Atlanta, November 1971.

Fromm, E. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publications 1973).

Maynard, J. "The Education of Nancy Sokol," New York Times Magazine (May 23, 1976), p. 14.

Corea, G. The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Treats Women as Patients and Professionals (New York: William Morrow 1977) p. 83.

Raymond, J. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press 1979).

de Beauvoir, S. The Ethics of Ambiguity (New Jersey: The Citadel Press 1972).

Woolf, V. Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1966).

Anderson, S. ed. Planning for Diversity and Choice: Possible Futures and Their Relations to the Non-Controlled Environment (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1968).

Daly, M. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press 1978).

Rich, A. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton & Co. 1976).

Seaman, B and Seaman, G. Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones (New York: Rawson Associates 1977).

Barker-Benfield, G.J. The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper & Row 1976).

Ziel, H.K and Finkle, W.D. "Increased Risk of Endometrial Carcinoma Among Users of Conjugated Estrogens," N Engl J Med 293:23 (January 1975), p. 1170.

Daly, M. "Exorcism and Ecstasy: An Anti-Sermon on Demons, Drugs and Doctors." Presentation at the Memorial Service, Washington, DC, December 1975.

Pearce, J.C. The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (New York: Pocket Books 1974).

Boston Globe, evening ed. (February 17, 1976) p. 3.

Rennie, S. "Mammography: X-Rated Film." Chrysalis No. 5, p. 31.

Reich, P. and Kelly, M.J. "Suicide Attempts by Hospitalized Medical and Surgical Patients." N Engl J Med 294:6 (February 1976) p. 298-301.

Bookchin, M. Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Harper Colophon Books 1974).

Lewis, T. The Lives of a Cell (New York: Bantam Books 1975).

[repriseofthereprise]

Women, Health and the Politics of Fat

by Amy Winter

In Rain and Thunder, Autumn Equinox 2003

Malestream culture these days is so saturated with moralistic concern for health that the very word makes me squirm. Because I’m fat, I’m perceived by almost everyone as inherently unhealthy. People make all kinds of assumptions about my lifestyle and behavior often before we even meet. My friends have told me others ask them how much I eat, or if I have some metabolic problem. Doctors think they know all about me the minute I walk through their office door. Naturally, being the object of so many unfounded assumptions makes me furious.

So, I’ve done a lot of reading about the relationship between fat and health and honestly, the logic just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If fat is a death sentence, then why are there so many fat old people wandering around? In fact, in this health-obsessed culture, why are there so many fat people period? If diets really worked, by now you’d think we’d all have found the right one, gone on it, and gotten thin, wouldn’t you? And what’s with all those thin people whose bones disintegrate from osteoporosis or who drop dead jogging? If you really think about it for a minute, you have to realize that Marilyn Wann hits the nail on the head with the sarcastic hammer in her book Fat!So?:

But being healthy is not the same thing as being thin. A long life is not determined by a number on a scale. If it were, it’d be so great to be thin, ’cause you’d never get sick, and you’d never die.

For those of you who like numbers, she goes on to say that the only study that found a correlation between body size and lifespan showed a 5% death risk for fat subjects and a 2% death risk for thin subjects. Gasp! You mean fat people were twice as likely to die as thin people? Reality check: Studies show male smokers have 22 times the risk of death of nonsmokers. (And don’t we all know people who won’t quit smoking because they’re afraid of gaining weight?) Repeated dieting, or the stress of living in a society that hates us, could easily account for the relatively miniscule difference in death risk between fat and thin subjects. So when you start looking at the facts, it’s hard not to suspect that the media scare tactics about fat are motivated by something other than scientific evidence.

In fact, once you get that skeptical head tilt right, it’s not hard to sweep a critical eye over the cultural obsession with health in general, with some interesting results. Let’s think for a minute about the many factors that negatively impact our health which are beyond our individual control. Those of us who live in or near cities routinely breathe smog-choked air. Our water supplies are often contaminated with raw sewage, microbes, pesticide runoff from agriculture, and waste dumping by industry. Our food is often steeped in chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. The buildings in which we live and work are often inadequately ventilated, poorly lit, and constructed with materials which give off toxic fumes for many years. And then there is the work that many of us have no choice but to perform in order to survive: sedentary tasks which sap our physical and psychic energy and expose us to repetitive strain injury, sitting in front of computer screens which bombard us with electromagnetic radiation, or demanding physical work performed without adequate rest breaks, putting us at risk of chemical exposure, exhaustion, physical injury, and chronic illness.

In the face of these realities, doesn’t it seem curious that most media discussions of health focus on what we’re eating or not eating, or the exercise we should be doing? The only time I ever hear mainstream media acknowledge the ways big-business-as-usual is killing us is when they’re trying to sell us an escape hatch: bottled water, water filters, little air purifiers that hang on a cord around your neck, ergonomic keyboards, big rubber balls to stretch your back, low-VOC paint. Does this sound familiar to anyone? The words “individual solution” certainly reverberate in my head—-particularly when we consider that most of these products aren’t doing much for the health of women in other countries, spending their lives in factories for pennies a day making these little items. The fact is, the poisoning of the planet benefits those with a share in corporate profit, at least in the short term, to the detriment of the rest of us, who don’t have access to the resources to buy organic food, live in the country, build our own houses with natural materials, or choose our working environment. So no wonder the corporate-media conglomerate wants us to think our health status is completely a result of our personal choices. “These people,” intones the mellow tenor voice-over for a TV commercial showing white people using the internet, “are getting answers to the most important questions they’ll ever ask: questions about their health.” Do we agree that questions about our health are the most important questions we can ask these days? Our Bodies, Ourselves calls this healthism:

When we are overly focused on fitness or a ‘healthy lifestyle’ as goals to strive for (or as the measure of a ‘healthy’ society) we deflect attention from the more important goals of social justice and peace.

The medical establishment, of course, is right there encouraging our daily sprint, panicked and panting, on the mental hamster wheel marked “health.” So I’d like to shift my critical gaze for just a moment to focus on the institution of western medicine. Let’s remember that men founded it, with the help of the catholic church, by torturing and murdering millions of women practicing indigenous health care in europe during the women’s holocaust, the Burning Times. (Indigenous systems of health care around the world are still being destroyed today, being replaced by systems based on the consumptive western model.) These self-styled doctors consolidated their power by denying women access to medical education, while making medical education a prerequisite for the practice of health care. Since then, among other things, medical men have pathologized (in order to “treat” and control) the natural body experiences of womanhood—-menarche, menstruation, pregnancy/childbirth and menopause. They cut out our clitorises if we showed too much interest in sex and locked us in mental institutions when our husbands wanted control of our property. They prescribed us, our mothers or grandmothers the dalkon shield, thalidomide, diethylstilbestrol, silicone breast implants, and hormone replacement therapy by the millions. They sterilized thousands (millions?) of women without their consent. They perform “medical research” on people in prison or mental hospitals without their consent. For a hefty fee, they are happy to surgically remove a chunk of nose, breasts, or stomach so we can better fit the cultural beauty imperative of the moment. They capitalize on the confusion of women who don’t fit the “feminine” stereotype, handing out a convenient diagnosis, bilateral mastectomies and a lifetime prescription for testosterone. They routinely announce discoveries about “human” health based on studies with only male subjects. They believe the despair and rage of women who have been raped, sexually abused, battered or just overworked are appropriately and sufficiently addressed with prozac. They cannot conceive of a woman collecting information, interpreting it, and coming to a conclusion different from theirs; the only word in their vocabulary for a patient who does not follow a doctor’s advice is “noncompliant.” In short, this system and its adherents are not on the side of women.

Now, wait a minute before you start getting all guilty, defensive, and pissed off at me because you just had your pap smear at Planned Parenthood, or you’re a nurse and you think you’re doing some good, or you take psych meds and they make it possible for you to function in the world. Hear me out here. I’m not saying we should smoke and drink and eat candy bars all the time. Corporations profit from that too! I’m also not saying western medicine never did any good and we’re evil collaborators if we use it. For many of us, particularly those who have public health insurance, it’s the only game in town. And, as an “allied health professional,” I pay my bills with their money too.

So what exactly is my point? I think there are two levels upon which we need to take action. On the individual level, as we make the best choices we can about health-related behaviors and our use of the existing health care system, I would like women to recognize that health and illness are very complicated. We don’t understand all the factors that interact to produce either state, and a lot of the environmental and genetic factors that impact our health are beyond our individual control. Therefore, let’s try to remember as we go through our lives that you can’t tell by looking. You can’t determine what or how much I eat, my cholesterol level, or the state of my coronary arteries when you meet me. Likewise, you might meet a thin, able-bodied-appearing woman and assume she’s perfectly healthy, only to discover on further acquaintance that she has multiple sclerosis or lupus or sickle cell disease or breast cancer. And couldn’t we refuse to spend any more time feeling guilty about the “bad food” we ate or the exercise we didn’t do? Instead, let’s spend that energy encouraging each other to resist healthist media rhetoric.

The collective level is even more important, and is completely ignored in the current media focus on individual solutions to health problems. The call that sparked this article read, in part, “What kind of a future for women’s health are we working towards?” I don’t have the answer, but I do have some ideas. I don’t advocate directing resources to western health care systems, particularly when such systems disallow treatment they consider alternative. I think we ought to get more serious about organizing ourselves to combat the corporate environmental poisoning of our world, recognizing that the activities of industry negatively impact women first and profit us last. As just one example of what we could do, think of how much energy women spend organizing and participating in walks/runs/rides and other fundraisers for various illnesses. And the money raised goes to help women struggling with those diseases, right? Well, no. That money goes to fund medical, usually pharmaceutical, research. What if even some of that woman-energy was directed towards creating networks to help women who are struggling with the limitations illness places on their daily lives, right now? Or to work on cleaning up the environmental causes of disease? Or to support community gardens on vacant city lots to raise fresh, locally grown, chemical-free produce? Why do we participate in raising money to hand over to the male-dominated medical system, putting aside the needs of women right now for the possibility of some probably invasive, side-effect-riddled chemical-based future cure?

At the same time, we ought to be thinking about what health care would be like in the world we want to live in, and about how we can work together to realize our visions, for ourselves and each other. What if health care were a collaborative effort, rather than a hierarchical system where some people are “experts” and others passively accept their prescriptions? What would it be like to give and receive all kinds of health care in naturally lit buildings with windows that open, looking out onto gardens rather than asphalt? What if these buildings were also community centers where we could participate in discussion groups, artistic collaborations, gardening, group meals, exercise classes, craft work, continuing education, internet research, and community organizing? What if these centers were collectively organized to include more women in decisions about the center’s activities? What if the centers were funded in a variety of creative ways, including sliding scale self-pay, private health insurance, grant funding, subscriptions, memberships, donations and ways we haven’t thought of yet? This is the kind of center I’d like to go to, where people would ask my opinion rather than making assumptions, where I’d get information from a variety of sources, have a range of options to choose from, and where I could say “I’ll think about it,” without dire warnings of the likely outcome of my “noncompliance.” This is just my vision; what’s yours? Creating change will undoubtedly take a lot of work on the part of feminists, but let’s get started together by resisting the media’s attempts to blame us for our health problems and organizing to create a society that doesn’t make women sick.

Brief Bibliography

Boston Women’s Health Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves For the New Century. Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1998.

Dykewomon, Elana. “the real fat womon poems” in Nothing Will Be As Sweet as the Taste. Onlywomen Press, 1995.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Doubleday, 1978.

Fraser, Laura. Losing It: False Hopes and Fat Profits in the Diet Industry. Plume, 1998.

Scharff, Sue. “The Defective and Doomed Female Body.” Said It: Feminist News Culture, and Politics, January 2001.

Schoenfelder, Lisa, and Barb Weiser, eds. Shadow On a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Liberation. Aunt Lute Press, 1983.

Wann, Marilyn. Fat!So? Because You Don’t Have to Apologize For Your Size. Ten Speed Press, 1998.

[repriseofthereprise]

The Lesbian Revolution and the 50-Minute Hour: A Working Class Look at Therapy and the Movement

by Caryatis Cardea

Lesbian Ethics, Vol 1 No 3, 1985

…Liberty loses its meaning when women are not in fact free to change their situation or when they participate in limiting others’’ freedom ~Kathleen BarryF1

In the early Spring of 1980, I sat down to my typewriter to compose an essay about the classism I felt subject to within the lesbian movement. As I developed the examples which came to mind, I found it all boiling down to three main categories: The rigid rules of feminist process in politics, the humanist dilution of radical feminism, and the distortion of personal relationships between lesbians. When the paper was completed in draft form, I discovered that each of my analyses of classism reveals the power of therapy in lesbian life.

Feminist process, with its emphasis on courtesy, and on a firm separation of thought and feeling, exists for the comfort, benefit and continued power of middle-class lesbians. And it is to therapy that they go to acquire and maintain this mind-spirit divorce.

The me-first attitude of humanism coupled with its obsessive inclusion of everyone and everything under the formerly womyn’s banner of feminism (See, there’s really no one to be angry with!) is reinforced by, and had its origins in, therapy’s insistence that we each move beyond our anger and create our own reality. And we were to create this reality in our own space, one of individual prosperity and individual happiness.

Lesbian relationships have been newly defined as the place to get one’s needs met, and to enter on a never-ending struggle to process honest political and personal differences. Here therapy has provided perhaps its most popular justification for the imposition of middle-class manners and values under which lesbians like myself, from working-class backgrounds, have been suffocating.

In the intervening years, I’ve tried several times to finish this paper. Each time I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the issue, by the destruction already wrought in the movement, and most of all, by the inescapable fact that no matter when I pulled the article out, my premises still applied. Clearly, the situation was getting no better; in fact, it seemed to degenerate daily.

Everywhere I looked, lesbians were going to therapists, becoming therapists, changing therapists, discussing their therapists, being abused by their therapists. If any other topic of conversation was introduced, it was phrased in the language of therapy. The heart of fire which our movement once contained was gone, replaced by what Mary Daly has termed “plastic passions.” Womyn no longer had opinions, they had “energy around some issues”; they didn’t even get mad any more, they only “experienced some anger.” I have no doubt, as a matter of fact, that I will receive several suggestions when this article is published that I enter therapy to deal with my excessive hostility.

It seems only yesterday that we were yelling in the face of the world which had mislabeled our feelings for centuries, “We’re not crazy, we’re angry.” But anger is passé nowadays. The status quo of misogyny and oppression simply doesn’t exist; we each create our own reality.

Well, in the hope that some semblance of sisterhood still survives, this article is a plea. Let’s try to reverse the tide of “valueless individualism”(2) which stems from therapy. Therapy is not politics; it is not feminism. It is dangerous.

The attitudes and actions which I will describe as middle-class are exhibited in greater or lesser degrees within all strata of the economically privileged in this society. I plan to attack the values and challenge the lesbians who hold to them.

The Drift from Radical Feminism

In the early years of my feminist activism– 1972 and 1973 –the world seemed to be expanding out in front of me as a womon. By early 1975, I had come out as a lesbian and a separatist, and I thought it awesome and beautiful that our horizons, already incredibly broad from the boundaries we had pushed out, moved apace with us, at lightning speed. Radicalism was present even in what would now be seen as the least likely places. Concepts of world feminism, separatism, visions of lesbian nation, and a firm grasp of sexual politics could be found everywhere. We were full steam ahead, no end in sight.

After some time, we realized that the results of our efforts were not to be seen in our lifetimes. Across the country, in the coffeehouses, buildings and centers we had braved everything to establish, the movement sat back to take a breath. Besides the needed rest, challenges were coming from within and without the movement: race, class and other issues were being raised to challenge what we had finally acknowledged to be the white, middle-class domination of the movement.

This breather may be the biggest mistake ever made by a revolutionary movement. For, while some lesbians wanted to rest and move forward again, and others wanted to make the movement inclusive of and responsive to all lesbians and move forward again, many were resting for good. They had sought only reform, and this being achieved, they were through. Like the rest of us, though, they drew energy from lesbians together. So although they retired from the battle, they did not leave our ranks. They remained where their domination was already established, their influence powerful. The lesbian/feminist movement had, often unawares, taken its lead in tone and style from white middle-class womyn. Now their inactivity prevailed, as had most of their other choices, and the Movement became a Community.

The opportunity to challenge our movement’s goals and methods was soon perverted. Few real challenges, and fewer changes, occurred. Political self-examination of ourselves as a group was readily abandoned because it would have required movement, and those dominating the community wished to remain where they were. They met the challenge in a way palatable to them: self-examination on a private level. Therapy. Thus was one of the most dangerous elements of the patriarchy introduced into our midst.

We acknowledge, as feminists, that we live in a patriarchy, but we have failed to recognize that the patriarchy lives in each of us. Had we faced this, we might have taken each political challenge as an opportunity to add more lesbians to our ranks and stretch our horizons further yet. Instead, everything being done by lesbian/feminists was explained, denied, responded to in the terms of therapy, an element of white middle-class life.

Those of us not involved in–or even familiar with–therapy felt as though the earth were shifting beneath our feet. Most of us were working-class and poor. The change was not exactly overnight, it only seemed to be. Attending meetings became an ordeal, conducted according to alien rules. Lesbians who had been by our sides for years grew scornful at our lack of familiarity with the territory into which they were dragging us. Language and vocabulary skidded away from us; words skirted around the edges of clear meaning. Womyn’s centers (and bookstores and restaurants and buildings) were effectively closed to separatist and other radical lesbians by their switch from revolutionary forums to social reform, and later still to a focus on personal growth. Relationships between lesbians were similarly undermined as privileged womyn, bolstered by their therapists, sought not love and mutual respect, but a place to have their needs met. The key word was process; its concepts, goals, and vocabulary were drawn from therapy.

It is claimed by those who employ it that feminist process was devised to correct inequities in our political meetings. Domination by a minority of the lesbians present (those most verbal and assertive), infighting, a lack of structure, certain womyn not being heard. Each of us knew who we believed responsible for these problems; each of us thought all the others meant the same ones.

Throughout the decade of feminist process’s hold on the lesbian movement, I have watched the growing perplexity of working-class dykes as the proffered solution to our problems–feminist process–has proved not only to exclude us further, but to oppress us. (I have shared the ideas contained in this paper with many lesbians who feel excluded and oppressed by these same things, but on the basis of their race or ethnicity. I am aware that process is more than classist, but it is classist. And as a white working-class womon, I will approach it from my personal perspective in this paper.) Process was so highly lauded and so loudly touted, and in terms so foreign to us, that we were, quite literally, powerless to oppose it. The reason is that feminist process is based on middle-class values and experience, and justified by the middle-class phenomenon of therapy.

First, there is the issue of who gets to talk at meetings. I was among those who complained loud and long about some lesbians controlling all meetings. Like other outsiders (non-WASP, non-middle-class), I meant the middle-class WASPs, whose long-winded, abstract discourses bored and irritated me, in addition to taking up entire evenings, often on personal topics. It took me years to truly understand that while I wished to stop the discourses, they wished to stop my loud complaints.

What are the elements of feminist process which so differed from the lives of nonprivileged womyn that we could not understand their enormous attractiveness to other lesbians? One was the practice, ostensibly to put everyone at ease, of going around in a circle at the beginning of each meeting. This may not have been offensive in ongoing groups where the members wished to keep up with one another’s lives between meetings. But I am referring to the request (read: demand), at the opening of a one-time group (forum, support group, work group, etc.) that we go around the circle and have each lesbian relate her feelings, memories, fears and so forth on the topic of discussion. (The voice of the therapist is saying, So, how have you been this week?) This practice, which may seem very simple and straightforward to some of you, can be very disturbing to working-class lesbians. Opening ourselves to this sort of vulnerability and emotional exposure is a strange experience to be asked of us: encounter groups, after all, are not a working-class phenomenon.

How the classes differ in this respect is really rather simple. Working-class people tend to express our ideas with feeling, but we do not necessarily express our feelings. This would be considered poor taste in our cultures. Middle-class people maintain a level of coolness about ideas which baffles us (and is designed to make us feel vulgar), while displaying a willingness to reveal personal feelings which seems positively uncouth to many of us. It is a difference in style. But since the middle class rules, working-class lesbians are continually reprimanded for our “excitability” in meetings, while also being reproached for our failure to “open up” personally. This we generally prefer to do privately, or with good friends, or in meetings designed to handle personal reactions.

Furthermore, in my world, trust (which is what is being asked in these check-ins) was to be earned, not granted at first sight. Even within the confines of feminism, all we have in common is our existence as womyn and lesbians. Trust on a personal, emotional level, that which implies a shared understanding of these experiences as lesbians in the patriarchy, is something I do not accept as a given. The womyn comfortable with these circumstances therefore do most of the talking, setting the stage for their continued starring role in the meeting as it progresses. If you think this is all a voluntary procedure, try passing your turn some time, and watch the fur fly. You get suspicious glances, everyone feels affronted; you are presumed to be aloof, snobbish, superior. If our meetings are such safe, supportive environments, why is it so threatening for anyone to decline to “share feelings”?

Lesbians have, in fact, countless experiences which are not shared. I once tried to relate a story about one of my little sisters which included, on the way to the point of the story, the fact that there had not been enough food for dinner that night. This was important to the story, but it was not the story, and not important by itself. Yet, a middle-class womon who was listening began to weep at the very thought of such a state of affairs and became so distraught with pity for me that I never could get to the end of the anecdote. We just don’t always speak the same language.

The next practice instituted at political meetings was that of having–always–a facilitator. This snowballed from the initial custom of designating one womon to generally oversee, stepping in only when the group threatened to drift irretrievably from the agenda, or when any one or more lesbians took too much attention or became abusive of any other, to a rigid observance wherein one or two lesbians control all aspects of the meeting. They keep time, limiting how long each individual may speak; as each issue is raised, they take names of those who have raised their hands and call them in order–the order in which they saw them, or perhaps in clockwise order around the inevitable circle in which we sit–but with no weight given to the import of what any particular womon has to say. (The voice of the therapist is saying, I think we’ve dwelled on this enough. I’m sorry, our time is up.)

This is true even if one womon was just directly accused of something by the previous speaker, or has a direct response to her, while the others have new topics to introduce. If, by luck, the next speaker is the one with the most direct response to make, what is now considered a good facilitator would rescind the responder’s right to speak: such personal dialogues are nearly always deemed best left until after the meeting. (The voice of the therapist is saying, It seems you have some unresolved feelings with this person.)

Throughout feminist meetings the language has changed also. Slowly the concepts and jargon of therapy have replaced political language. Everything I had watched middle-class lesbians struggling to learn about assertiveness vanished as they settled into the more comfortable–to them–stance of apparent chronic uncertainty, self-effacement. Assertiveness taught middle-class womyn to leave behind ladylike manners (and who, else, I ask you, ever had them?) which interfered with the possibility of tackling head-on the multifaceted monster of patriarchy. Assertiveness teaches that if your roommate borrows your clothes and leaves them in a heap, you should tell her to knock it off. Middle-class womyn never really got comfortable with this approach. Therapy worked much better for them. Therapy teaches that if your roommate repeatedly borrows your clothes and leaves them in a heap, you should tell her that this feels like a violation of trust to you, that you are flattered that she enjoys your taste in clothes enough to want to be seen in them, you are more than happy to allow her to share in the use of them, but she really must show more respect, so that your feelings for her can remain clean and uncluttered by your resentment.

I can recall attending a meeting of a newly formed group at which volunteers were asked to facilitate. There was a short silence; then, a lesbian I knew slightly said (I am paraphrasing), “Well, although I don’t consider myself any more qualified than anyone else, if no one has any objection, I will volunteer to facilitate. If I offend anyone by my choice of methods, please let me know. I could be wrong about how I think this should be done. When the meeting is over, I will offer my criticism of myself as a facilitator, and I will welcome criticism from the rest of you.” She went on in this vein for some time, wielding the power which therapy bestows: for several minutes she kept all attention focused on herself, yet she used words which sounded a note of humility, self-disparagement. She was, in fact, rather authoritarian in her manner of facilitation. I later found out she was a therapist.

This lesbian also inadvertently made evident to me what makes this distinctly courteous-sounding mode of behavior so desirable to some womyn. She was the first in my experience to forbid direct confrontation between any two lesbians at a meeting. At first, I thought it was only more of the fear often evinced by middle-class womyn at any sign of anger. (They sometimes act as though we’re all about to pull knives.) When I saw that she also stopped all humor, I realized that it was simply emotion of all kinds that made her uncomfortable, out of control of the meeting. She wished to conduct a calm, objective meeting.

Therapy, of course, is the training ground for the separation of intellect and emotion. I will not belabor the differences in kinds of therapy. The basic premise, stated or unstated, is that emotions need to be examined with the intellect. Instead of seeing our emotions as expressive of our thoughts, therapy teaches that they actually obscure our thoughts and our thought processes. Therapy is the definitive manifestation of middle-class alienation. Therapy institutionalized one of the essential dichotomies of the patriarchy, one to which womyn are very susceptible: the split between intellect and emotion. Mary Daly notes the dangers of therapy to revolutionary dykes in a very few, very pertinent, pages in Gyn/Ecology.(3) Her observations helped me to begin seeing the link between therapy and lesbian/feminist classism, for her complaints about the former were ultimately the same as mine about the latter. She notes, among other things, that therapy “fixes women’s attention in the wrong direction, fragmenting and privatizing perceptions of problems”(4)

The advantage for lesbians who find open emotion distasteful is that they can declare emotion off limits when working-class dykes express themselves with feeling, and still give vent to their more circumspect sentiments by saying that they are just putting out their personal needs, to which, of course, no one dares object. The personal has superseded the political. Whereas womyn like myself, not being possessed of objectified emotions, try to obey the rules and speak objectively. Ironically, we are then accused by middle-class dykes of being “too much in our heads.”

What is the distinction between intellect and emotion? Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary gives us some clues:

Intellect: The power of knowing, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will. Emotion: A psychic or physical reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling and physiologically involving changes that prepare the body for immediate vigorous action.

Hadn’t we better question our movement’s seeming preference for thought divorced from “the power to feel and to will”? When I began this paper long ago, a working-class friend of mine remarked that what I describe here is what she had long been terming “the difference between feeling and talking about feeling.” The political result is the difference between change and talking about change. A movement aimed at subverting a system (of government, society, religion and personal relationships) many tens of centuries old should welcome “strong feelings” leading to preparation for “immediate, vigorous action.”

But some of our sisters–notably those from middle-class and/or WASP backgrounds–were raised to believe that expressions of emotion signify lack of control. Some years ago, a friend from an upper-middle-class background explained to me the way she had been taught to dissociate herself from the immediacy of her anger by, for example, focusing her attention on the process of being angry rather than on the source of the anger. She was encouraged to doubt her own reactions to the world, and led to believe that intellect was not compatible with emotion. It was all right for her to “have anger,” if she kept control of it. One can’t help one’s feelings, after all, one can only conquer them. She further explained that, without the release of yelling, physically expressing herself, she learned to reach for a reaction from her parent, or whoever had wounded her, by stating–calmly, of course–some essentially cruel thing. Other middle-class womyn have described this kind of training, received either in their families or through therapy. Hence, we now have thousands of lesbians who will sit down, in all earnestness, and say, “I am very angry,” in a perfectly serene tone of voice. (As the years go by, they grow more and more distant in their phrasing, as, “I feel some anger around this,” or even, “I have some anger here.”) The same womyn, while righteously defending the necessity of putting out their feelings, will level charges of aggression, divisiveness, and male-identification at lesbians who don’t need to announce that they are angry, because it is clear, from their every word and gesture.

Alienation, a term widely used in therapy, and chosen by many middle-class lesbians to describe their own state of consciousness, renders understandable their fear of what they see as our emotional outbursts. Assertiveness training, very popular in the 1970s, was a must for active feminists. I never quite got it, having survived working-class poverty, the streets of Buffalo, and eight brothers and sisters. But middle-class feminists, trained as ladies, perhaps afforded an excessively abstract education, and almost certainly exposed to one of the many therapeutic fads of the baby-boomer generation, needed to be taught to speak directly, to make their anger known, to not shrink in fear from their own or others’ emotions, to accept most of all that emotions are not an outside force to abhor and attempt to control.

Therapists thrive on the belief held by these lesbians that feelings are a threatening fog veiling the world, but that with the counselors’ help, the lens of the intellect can be applied so that these womyn, divided against themselves, can see through.

Emotions are not uncontrollable, primitive forces forming a screen between womyn and our world; it is not necessary or advisable to think of them as such, for to do so leaves one open to those who wish to be our interpreters to ourselves.

And so we have the basic set-up of feminist process: a desire to bring into submission those lesbians whose forcefulness was being used to challenge middle-class WASP dominance. A method was devised which included a retreat from the honesty encouraged by assertiveness (and, for that matter, by feminism), and its replacement by a therapeutic substitute which can only function to deeply entrench the power of the middle-class lesbians in the movement. Therapists teach their clients/patients that they have a right to “put out their needs” as whatever they define them to be. But therapists routinely exorcise the demon of open emotion. (The voice of the therapist is saying, Now, let’s calm down and see if we can’t work to get to the true source of this pain.) Open emotion has at least a better chance at being honest, and is much easier to challenge.

Middle-class womyn have had to go through very few changes to adapt to process, to “sharing” feelings, to sublimating anger and emotion and laying a coating of sophistication over their pain. The operate on the tacit assumption that everyone in a feminist political gathering will understand the importance of using the (male-identified) concepts of therapy.

Their explanation usually presents lesbians with an either/or proposition: either feminist process or patriarchal power games. I maintain that the one is the other. Feminist process, we are often told, has been developed so that the business of certain vocal persons dominating the group can be avoided. Through process, we can prevent the yelling bouts, the interruptions, the shouting over each other, the emotional expression of ideas, the mixture of intellect and emotion that have characterized other political movements.

The usual scenario, when the rules are stated for us, is that everyone nods silently, accepting what is really middle-class manners newly defined as feminist process. Many working-class womyn are actually shamed into this silent compliance. And why not? By the equation which has developed, feminist equals middle-class and working-class equals patriarchal. The way we of the working class have related all of our lives is now labeled “male-identified,” “politically incorrect.”

I have had several personal experiences with middle-class folks who were threatened by my readiness to express my anger (or even my sarcasm). They never feared I would strike them or attach bombs to the ignition switches of their cars, but they said repeatedly that my anger frightened them. In the course of their various therapies, they would mention this problem to their counselors.

An incident of mine from about six years ago should serve to explain what happens next. I attended a lesbian concert in a local bar with two friends. At intermission they began a rather esoteric discussion of the talents of the musicians in the band, progress they had noted over the years of observing them, and an assessment of that night’s performance so far. I felt no desire to join the conversation, as I found the academic tone of evaluation inappropriate to the occasion. They asked for my opinion repeatedly and I just said I thought the band was fun. No, they said, they wanted to know what I thought of them musically. Eventually, I said that I had nothing to add, that I had not been listening as critically as they had. Furthermore, their insistence that I contribute to the general running down of the group felt like a test: say something educated, give a critique. I closed with the comment that I thought they were acting rather elitist and campus-y and I didn’t want to play.

What followed immediately is another story. But a few days later, I ran into one of the womyn, who was upper middle class. She had, by now, seen her therapist and they had discussed how my “attack” had hurt her. She resented my having accused her of classist behavior in the other evening’s discussion. To “take back her own power,” she told me that I had had no right to make any “judgments” about her musical opinions because everyone (including some mutual friends whom she had no better grace than to name) knew how rigid I was about music. Her elaboration of this had to do with the fact that some of us got together at her house once a month to play music. Though extremely shy about it (which she knew), I usually played the piano.

In short, I said she was classist. She was angry about this. Unable to say so, she stated something cruel, something which she knew would make me self-conscious about every playing in public again. I was, in fact, momentarily humiliated. But I had time to see the look of triumph on her face. She had cut me down to size and no longer had to deal at all with the truth or falsity of what I said in the bar.

She still hadn’t “expressed her anger,” if you will; but she felt better and could duly report in her next therapy session that she had “dealt with” the situation.

I have eaten it more times than I can count, thanks to lesbian therapists; since the middle-class friends of mine who went to them were never explicit that what made them uncomfortable with me was not what I said but that I could say it, what I got in return was abuse. Just as my long-ago class-privileged friend had explained to me, when people are forbidden a right to honest anger and the apology that could be demanded from one who has injured them, all that is left to express is cruelty; all that is left to reach for from the other person is a reaction–any reaction–but preferably one that hurts as much as the wounded party now feels hurt.

So my friends would approach our next confrontation having gained from therapy no knowledge of how to express anger (and certainly no experience). They would fall back on what skill they had acquired through their class experience and in therapy, for therapy and the middle class are the two places where expression of anger is presumed to mask some other emotion. They would do the familiar: state something cruel, actually make a deliberate attempt of meanness, thereby depleting my power in their eyes, so that I needn’t be taken seriously. They would feel less pain because now I was the one hurt. Because they feel bad when I yell, and I feel bad when they are cruel, they delude themselves that we are doing the same thing. But, of course, they remain therapeutically calm and objective, which gives them enormous power: in a classist culture emotional outbursts in response to such coolness would be so tacky. For both parties would be judged by the standards of “America,” those of the white, Protestant middle class.

As meetings process, and decisions must be made, the only mode now acceptable to feminists is consensus. (Groups such as Abalone Alliance have published statements detailing the consensus process. A pamphlet called “Blocking Progress” is a statement by an Abalone member who finds consensus rife with abuse, especially classism.)

Consensus is said to do away with majority rule, giving everyone an opportunity to speak and to object to group decisions, even if the majority approves them. Being outvoted consistently is decidedly frustrating, but you still get to cast your vote firmly on the side you wish. In consensus, any member of a group may block consensus; for the decisions to go through, then, requires the block to be withdrawn or the person to be persuaded that voting for the decision is best.

In ten years, I have never seen anyone but the most privileged members of any group successfully block a consensus decision. (The important exception is the instance in which womyn attend meetings solely to block decisions. Consensus is dangerous in this way, too. A group of womyn attended the opening sessions of an anti-nuke group I was in some years ago only to make sure that neither the word “lesbian” nor the word “feminist” appeared in the title of the group. They blocked consensus, the group was named as they wanted, and we never saw any of them again.) Since consensus requires that every person be satisfied (the American Dream), that no one be declared the loser of the vote (a horror to privileged folks), the pressure brought to bear on the dissenter is formidable. In the past, if the middle-class lesbians dominated all decision-making, winning simply by outnumbering, we could protest or leave. Now, any objection to losing a vote is childish, because everyone theoretically has the chance to stop any vote from going through. The fact that dissenters must carry the onus of having selfishly stopped the entire group’s process is not officially acknowledged.

Instead, the only authorized dissent is one in which the lesbian who wishes to block the consensus announces, inevitably, that she doesn’t agree with the decision but won’t block. Not many can stand up to the condescension directed at those who don’t seem to understand that consensus is not supposed to be blocked. The dominant group patiently and disdainfully wears the unfortunate down.

To close the meetings, we are offered criticism/self-criticism, perhaps the most jarring item of feminist process for those of us from working-class backgrounds. This allotment of time at the end of meetings for the expression of feeling means implicitly that feelings are taboo during the meeting. Explicitly, it means only that emotionally expressed thoughts are forbidden. Intellectually (read: therapeutically) expressed emotions, the domain of the middle class, are very much indulged. Crit/self-crit is the first element of process to which working-class lesbians objected. When first introduced, it was no secret that it was a therapeutic concept. When we began objecting, they came up with the argument that since it had really originated in China, with the Communist party, it was both racist and anti-revolutionary to resist.

Hand in hand with the disapproval of direct interactions between lesbians at meetings, crit/self-crit serves to allow abusive or manipulative lesbians to say anything they wish in the course of meetings, knowing that it will not be tolerated for them to be directly confronted. The same womyn reign during the crit sessions. Another working-class dyke friend has recounted to me her abuse during these sessions, as her audacity in offering real criticism of middle-class lesbians’ exercise of privilege was consistently punished by a responding criticism of her offensive style. She was castigated in vague therapy terminology about how attacking or unconstructive she had been. This was supposed to silence her protests against oppression. If she couldn’t learn to do it right, she simply had no credibility. Yet, what middle-class dykes said about her never had to do with realities like privilege and oppression (or even with the content of her criticism); only that some delicate spirit experienced her honesty as being hurtful.

Furthermore, lesbians whose low-income backgrounds have placed us in the position of struggling against scorn all our lives sometimes just fail to see the benefit of chastising oneself in the presence of others whose respect one might like to have. We tend to take the brunt of the criticism (which should tell, once again, what and who is being silenced by feminist process) because we do not use the jargon of feminist process. We are not taught in working-class homes to preface everything we say with the phrases: I think, I feel that, in my opinion, I could be wrong but. Our stereotypical bluntness, which precluded the need for assertiveness training in many respects, brings our statements out in a forthright manner. During crit/self-crit, we are often attacked for opinions we expressed, because we neglected to provide ourselves and our listeners, in the fashion of feminist process, with those verbal escape clauses. For the emphasis in middle-class language is not on the “I,” but on the doubt-filled words “think,” “feel,” “opinion.” (As I pointed out in an earlier example, a womon skilled in this manner of speech can still hold the floor a long, long time by using this verbal trick: talk about yourself but sound modest.)

When such phrases are not used by middle-class lesbians, then the “opinions” come out with no agent at all. Mary Daly has referred in lectures to the diluted emotions of what she calls “therapized” lesbians as “plastic passions.” Saying, “There seems to be some energy around this,” removes the fire from the feeling. You don’t, in fact, “feel” anything at all: you “have” some remote “blob” of ersatz emotion to be “dealt with.”

Therapy teaches self-doubt by its basic premise that womyn (who are the patients of all forms of therapy) need interpreters to understand their own spirits. The willingness of working-class lesbians to simply say what we want to say and take the consequences is an affront to the devotees of therapy. With such responses as “Speak for yourself!” when no one had claimed to be doing otherwise, middle-class lesbians make clear their discomfort with, and need to discredit, the fact that working-class dykes do not negate our own statements. It is claimed that we are less open to criticism because of this. In fact, we are more open, because we take the risk of making statements that can’t be as easily withdrawn as those beginning with, I’m not sure, but it seems to me that

Humanism

there has been resurrected an individualism which, flowing directly from the human potential movement, emphasizes taking one’s own space, defining one’s own reality, taking care of one’s own needs. For many, concern over the quality of life is personal, individual, and focused on one’s well-being.

These attitudes Barry describes cannot help but be familiar to active feminist lesbians; they have become part and parcel of what is now accepted as feminism. Chapter 10 of Barry’s Female Sexual Slavery contains a section on womyn’s values that is, itself, invaluable. It has given me strength and words when I needed them over the years, and I honor that by using several quotes in this paper, including the opening quote.

Contradicting the middle-class acclaim of criticism/self-criticism as a necessity to growth, the middle class hold their own growth to be dependent upon their maintaining a right to self-centeredness and freedom from challenge. Although feminism as a movement probably no longer exists, feminists certainly do; and the majority of them have succumbed to the “therapeutically polluted environment,”(6) needing above all else to feel good about themselves.

This is a handy focus to have for oneself in a time when lesbians are trying to challenge each other about privilege and oppression. For example, I tried once to approach a lesbian who had been driving me up the wall with her class-oppressive notions and attitudes. She suggested we discuss it over dinner. (I see now that that should have been a dead giveaway; she, being supported by her family, could afford restaurants, while I, employed and underpaid, found it difficult. This never occurred to her. Challenging it never occurred to me.) We settled in the restaurant and I had to begin the talking.

She initiated no part of the conversation, took no risks and no responsibility. After I did all the work, tracing the various things she had done or said in our encounters (we were not friends, but had mutual friends who brought us together frequently) she answered. Looking utterly unmoved by the pain I had just told her she had inflicted on me, she said that, yes, she could see why I felt this way and she would like to promise to do better. However, she had never felt really good about herself and was trying–with the help, of course, of a therapist–to acquire a better self-image. Therefore, much as she was sorry for my feelings, she would simply be unable to do anything about her classism. To acknowledge her privileged oppression of me would make her feel like a bad person. And her prime motivation at this time of her life was to feel good about herself.

This is not the only instance of a middle-class lesbian telling me it was just too painful for her to confront her own oppressive behavior; other working-class womyn have related to me similar experiences, also. The pursuit of a contentment with oneself as one is, without wishing to grow and change–wishing in fact to avoid growth and change–is the symptom of a self-centeredness which is overtly threatening to a revolutionary feminism. With so much emphasis on self, how much concern could there possibly be for the rest of the world? Even for the rest of one’s immediate environment? What kind of revolution waits until its warriors are happy and fulfilled before confronting the enemy?

The answer is: one which has abandoned revolution for “therapy as a way of life.”(7) The larger context which must be grasped here is that feminism is no longer respected, even by most feminists, as a valid movement to which a lesbian could dedicate her life’s energies. It is seen now as a step on the way to humanism: patriarchy in drag. All the values and attitudes radical feminists started out battling are contained within the humanist approach, disguised by “psychobabble,” which, the author who coined that term says, “must be seen as the expression not of a victory over dehumanization but as its latest and very subtle victory over us.”(8)

Lesbian Relationships

Processing, or dealing, is also required now in lesbian relationships. Dykes no longer seek partners with whom they can relax, with whom they have much in common, with whom they feel deep happiness or even love. (Love, in fact, is seldom mentioned, although falling in love is. It is really the only uncontrolled emotion accepted by lesbians. It should have been the last one we even considered countenancing, for it is fraught with possibilities for abuse.) Lesbians have been seeking “fixes” of various kinds: Alcohol and drugs, to be sure, but more and more frequently “psychological ‘fixes'” in the form of therapy sessions and the drama-filled relationships which serve to provide the symptoms for which they seek therapeutic “cures.”(9)

The most virulent mode in which I see class oppression affecting personal relationships between middle-class and working-class lesbians is in the therapeutic concept of “getting one’s needs met.” Therapy, in trying to teach womyn what they need and how to get it, has been instrumental in redefining lover-relationships as a place of struggle, instead of as a refuge from the outside struggle of our lives. (This makes eminent sense when we realize that therapists have also been instrumental in closing off lesbians’ awareness of these outside struggles: sexism, racism, and classism, etc., are too painful to deal with.)

Needs are now, in feminist/lesbian circles, anything a womon wants or to which she feels entitled. (I am exploring this more fully in a paper on lesbian battery, a depressing sign of how far things have gone.) This is more than a semantic distortion. A womon needs food, clothing, shelter; secondarily, she needs, in order to have a full life, satisfying work, productivity and usefulness, to love and be loved, the achievement of inner peace and spiritual growth. What each of us wants, however, is a matter of individual taste and the choices we have made in our lives.

Seeking to get their needs met in whatever relationship they find themselves, lesbians with enormous differences and with vastly varying visions of a good relationship can remain together indefinitely. Manipulative behavior by one or both of them and the “adjustment” skills of a “good” lesbian therapist can keep the lovers struggling to process their differences, instead of separating because of them. Therapy greatly aids in this circumstance because it doesn’t deal in facts, e.g., that the relationship is no good for you, but in personal feelings about facts, e.g., that you are unhappy about elements of the relationship (but therapy can help you change it and get your needs met.)

If a therapist’s patient was expected–or even allowed–to say, “I am in a relationship which limits my freedom of movement, inhibits my expression of ideas, threatens my peace of mind, and invades my privacy,” chances are an intelligent and caring friend, or even counselor, would say, “Get out of it!” But the report is–as it is expected to be–phrased as, “I feel she doesn’t trust me, or respect my opinions. I have a lot of anxiety and because of her insecurity, I have less free time than I need.” Now there is something a therapist can work with: Fears, anxieties, insecurities. The relationship could go on for years with the therapist encouraging better communication, more efforts to deal with these differences, perhaps even mediation. Moreover, successful relationships (by therapeutic standards: ones where you struggle and make it last) are the hallmark of health to therapists, who are in the business of recommending and facilitating adjustment to existing circumstances.

It has been so easy, therefore, for privileged womyn to take advantage of working-class dykes in relationships. We do not expect others to do for us. Middle-class people hire therapists and any number of others to provide service for them. The interdependency and innate pride of the working class contribute to a culture where you don’t say to your parents, “I wish I had the money to go to camp,” when you already know they can’t afford it. You don’t come to the dinner table complaining of the unfashionable nature of your wardrobe, when there is no means of replacing it. Therapists tell us we should do this, we should put out our needs: To go where our friends go and to have a sense of belonging, to dress like the more affluent kids and to achieve some kind of popularity. Therapy says, even if it cannot be accomplished, putting out your needs means you have done everything you could about the situation, you feel better, and now, if anything can be done by the listeners, it will be done. You have taken power by putting out your needs.

Working-class etiquette says you don’t expect everything in life. Outright demands to parents would likely be met with scorn and a reminder that the world, after all, did not owe you a living! Besides, what therapy recommends is known, in the feminist vernacular, as “dumping.” Why should I burden my parents with the knowledge of the specifics of what I lacked? Do you suppose they didn’t know we were poorly dressed? Rubbing their noses in their–and therefore our–poverty wouldn’t make me feel better. Recommending that we “take power” in a situation like this means recommending “taking power” over those whose obligation you think it is to provide for you. Power-over is not desirable. We all knew that everything was given which could be given. Living in close quarters with many people brings an awareness of the others’ needs. The natural empathy of working-class culture brings a willingness to help when and if possible, though we were probably not conscious that we followed an etiquette. What one wanted/needed, thus, was never named, opening no one to public disappointment; the responsibility of fulfilling needs was given (by putting them out to others) to no one, opening no one to feelings of guilt and failure. It is a matter of pride, mutual respect, and consideration.

Contact with mixed-class society is a culture shock for working-class dykes on many levels. We are accustomed to keeping our private desires to ourselves, unless we have certain knowledge that someone with whom we are intimate can help. Then it is asked, respectfully, as a favor, to be reciprocated when possible. A refusal to help meant an inability to help, which also was treated with respect. This is how things would function between people of my background. Pointing up the absence of something material (even to the point of asking for sugar or coffee in someone’s home) might be exposing temporary or permanent poverty. We all knew that we gave whatever we had; if you didn’t see it, you didn’t ask for it. Trust was built in widening circles, within which things could be taken for granted.

For working-class womyn, there is more at heart than the absence of a personal therapy experience. There is the basic contempt in which therapy is held in working-class environments. For instance, I not only never experienced therapy myself, I was acquainted with no one who had until I was about twenty-one. People at survival level have a justifiable disdain for the privileged, whose leisure time and money can be squandered on having a stranger solve their problems for them.

I have found that middle-class lesbians go through their lives with the expectation, to varying degrees, that their needs/desires can and will and should be met. There is a selfishness, a shortsightedness, in this attitude that is shocking to me. And what they label “needs” is everything they want, like, prefer in life.

Trained in proper etiquette involving the suppression of emotion, middle-class lesbians seek therapists to teach them about emotion. They spend their childhoods being repressed when trying to express emotion; being told that their feelings are invalid and in need of re-examination with the help of professionals. They are taught to doubt their ability to perceive the world through their own eyes. Therapists then lead them into a web of exploring feelings, examining feelings, analyzing feelings, trying to experience feelings, dealing with feelings, dealing with how others deal with their feelings, and how that affects their own ability to deal with these others. In short, they enter on an absorption with self, acquiring an ability to talk about feeling, but not to trust simply feeling.

A key factor in community life is missing because, not trusting her feelings–never, in fact, feeling them–the middle-class lesbian is unable to comprehend those of us who do, and empathy is beyond her. If it were not, the practices of the privileged over the oppressed would have to become obsolete; standing in the other womon’s shoes makes one more considerate.

Meanwhile, a working-class dyke relating intimately to middle-class dykes is unprepared for the outright demands, the assertion that needs be met; more importantly, she is often shocked by the accusation of failure if she doesn’t meet them. What we consider true needs are those things the lack of which mark one as inferior in the U.S. I repeat, we express ourselves with emotion, and pride is an emotion. Our ‘druthers we do not refer to as “needs.” And, since working-class lesbians expect empathy in other womyn (I have found this to be true even in those from the coldest, most non-nurturing homes imaginable), and because of the class dynamics I laid out above, nonprivileged dykes are sometimes unable, and usually unwilling, to state their needs, as needs are defined by the middle class. We are therefore (conveniently, I can’t resist noting) thought to have none. So, those accustomed to asking for things, do so; those who are not accustomed to asking for things, don’t. And the class system marches on.

I categorically refuse the assertion of the middle class that we all learn to put our needs out. When it becomes valid to say, I need not to have meetings scheduled on Thursdays, I need you not to use that expression because it reminds me of an ex-lover, I need you not to raise your voice because my mother used to yell and then hit me it occurs to me that silence may truly be golden. I grew up around too many alcoholics, constantly putting out their needs, and co-dependents, indulging them and fulfilling the needs, not to comprehend the danger in this. I, for one, have no desire to live in, let alone help create, a world of self-centered therapy addicts. Many lesbian relationships, as well as the current “model” for lesbian relationships, are, in fact, based on the dependency of someone seeking the fulfillment of her needs by another (as opposed to an inner fulfillment enhanced by a joy in the existence of the relationship) and someone feeling worthwhile because she succeeds in meeting her lover’s needs. This is a dependency model, much like alcoholic families. Similarly “falling in love” brings together two womyn, each feeling incomplete, looking for a relationship and the person in it to bring wholeness. A mature love/friendship would be the meeting of two womyn, each complete in herself, or at least seeking to be, coming together for further happiness.

The Therapists

Therapists are, very simply, lesbians who believe the tenets they learned as students or patients themselves and think they are helping by offering these services. There is, really though, no earthly reason why lesbians should have turned so much authority and power over to any specific group of womyn. If it is true that none of us has escaped indoctrination in the distortions of the patriarchy (and it is true), it is especially true that lesbians who have taken specialized training in one of the power structures of the mainstream society should not be given such absolute trust.

I have heard stories of abuse of patients by therapists. I have been told of therapists who, in some strange move toward equality with their clients, spend entire sessions discussing their own problems; still, of course, accepting payment from the patient. Therapists are not the objective listeners or wise counselors they are widely accepted to be. They bring all of their own biases and personal experiences to each session with them. Some have admitted to encouraging or discouraging some behavior, such as ending a relationship, depending on how well that aspect of their own lives is going at the moment. Lesbians approaching a therapist for help in escaping an abusive or destructive relationship should not be subjected to the prejudice of a therapist who suggests preserving the relationship because the therapist is content with her lover right now.

Moreover, we must question what they, as womyn who so deeply believe in getting needs met, are getting out of these sessions themselves, besides their often outrageous fees. The power to change the course of other lesbians’ lives, the ego-strokes of clients’ dependence on them, the addiction many womyn develop to the therapy sessions: All these things are distasteful at best, and dangerous at worst.

The dependence especially is usually mutual. Many therapists are panicked at the thought of their patients’ leaving them. Even general criticism of the existence of therapy threatens them greatly. With this sort of dependency in action, therapists cannot be teaching their patients skills for handling problems in their lives. Lesbians do not, as a rule, go to therapy to figure out something general which they can then apply to future situations. They go to therapy to learn from therapists what to do. When the next crisis arises, they will be right back in session. Independence, particularly from the therapist, is not fostered.

The power of therapy, residing in both the practitioners and the patients, has conferred on a relatively small group of middle-class-oriented lesbians the power to define virtually every aspect of life in our community. Because therapy patients can be so religiously firm in their belief in the power of counseling, therapy ends up interpreting reality for the whole community: The therapists, the clients, and the rest of us who have to live and work with both.

“Those who argue in favor of ‘feminist therapy’ maintain that it departs entirely from the old freudian presuppositions.”(10) Even if this argument could hold water, therapy is a part of the mental health establishment, which labels womyn’s behavior aberrant and seeks to alter it. How do we dare ignore the pitfalls of embracing, as central to our community life, even this lesser form of an institution which tortures and imprisons lesbians?

Conclusion

By the equation the feminist movement has accepted, all too eagerly, middle class = feminist, while working class = patriarchal. Yet, there are many qualities from poor and working-class lives which others would be wise to emulate. Honesty, straightforwardness, a natural blending of intellect and emotion, a notion of female competency, empathy, self-reliance, a sense of the interwoven nature of life, and not least of all, survival.

It is important to understand that therapy is one of many abuses which have combined to destroy the womyn’s movement. But while racism, classism, reformism and other oppressive elements

serve each a single purpose, therapy has the double effect of being oppressive in and of itself, and of reinforcing, making possible, all of the others by the use of language and concepts which shield oppression. Middle-class manners and values reign in the lesbian community, disguised by therapy and masquerading as feminism.

What We Have Lost

The physical space we fought so very hard for, in which we had hoped to discover ourselves and each other, our commonality as womyn and lesbians, our shared oppression in the patriarchy and our shared strengths as those who had, so far, survived that patriarchy, no longer exists. In the place of the precious few square feet which was solely ours we have establishments in which everyone is welcomed, except those of us who remember when the space was ours. Exclusion (of, for instance, men) would violate the tenets of humanism, which was peddled to lesbians by therapy as the step beyond feminism. Instead of the invaluable womyn-only or lesbian-only space where we reveled in our freedom to learn and grow together, we now have the ubiquitous “safe, supportive environments,” formerly known as womyn’s centers. Now they exist for therapeutic personal growth where lesbians learn not from each other as peers, but in therapist-led or –facilitated groups. They offer not revolution, not even assertiveness, but adjustment. (Twelve Step groups, patterned on Alcoholics Anonymous, are blossoming everywhere as the means of coping with every imaginable aspect of life. Despite the successes of AA–in lives saved–we should be more than a little alarmed at the popularity of a program whose first Step is for each person to admit her complete powerlessness over some area of her life.) Self-sufficiency, in the form of hands-on workshops and concrete lessons in survival are gone; in their stead, we have not even self-defense, but self-improvement.

And what sort of improvement is being taught? Defeating racism or classism? Not really; just “unlearning” them. The former is political and involves group movement; the latter is a personal realignment of ideas, having nothing to do with community.

The feminist maxim, “The personal is political,” was distorted like so many other things. It has been made to mean that anything a lesbian does, whether or not she involves herself in the furtherance of womyn’s or lesbian liberation, is political activism. It is not, though every aspect of womyn’s lives does have political implications. That, and the fact that the oppression we suffer in our lives is not a personal issue but a political one, was the original meaning. The present-day lesbian has acquired the right to live an utterly personal, self-centered life, because, after all, the personal is political. She may seek completely private solutions, through therapy or its related themes, to what we had once defined as universal female problems. Various workshops and seminars, not specifically under the auspices of any therapeutic discipline, are nevertheless dedicated to the same self-improvement. It breaks my heart, as a lesbian witch, to acknowledge that one of the themes related to therapy, of late, is certain forms of feminist spirituality. With a personal/therapeutic slant and humanist origins, “spirituality” is making its contribution to the individualization of lesbian feminism.

The truism that each of us must start the revolution with herself was not meant, by its originators, to mean that everyone could retreat into prosperity workshops, parental-paid educations, professions and the professionalizing of every aspect of womyn’s liberation (licensed psychics, certified relationship mediators, professional organizers, PhD witches) and the religion of once-a-week therapy. Start with yourself, yes; start and end with yourself, no.

Therapy, with its endless list of diseases to cure in oneself, keeps us standing still and isolated. While dealing with alienation, fear of intimacy, and poverty consciousness, while learning dynamic listening and havingness, we are trapped, as Mary Daly points out, into arrested thinking, “neatly labeling/limiting every impulse,”(11) finding no end to the process, spending our lives peeling off layer after layer after layer of seemingly bottomless personal sickness. It cannot be a stage in preparing ourselves for activism, because “therapy, including the institutions of ‘feminist therapy,’ resists being relegated to the role of a ‘step.'”(12) It is the religion of middle-class-oriented feminist lesbians, and those who oppose it are indeed heretics. There is an element of coercion here that we are not facing.

What We Could Have

Understanding the feminist classism made possible by lesbian therapy does not mean that from now on our groups can have no structure or form. It means that any group’s structure must be arrived at as at least a synthesis of working-class and middle-class experience and values. Whoever is facilitating a meeting must question whether she makes certain decisions and suggestions for the true benefit of the whole group and all of its members, or for the comfort of the group’s middle-class members, who don’t like raised voices and sudden interruptions.

It doesn’t mean that anyone should be allowed to pitch a fit in the middle of meetings or indulge in any sort of temper tantrum. It means recognizing, when a middle-class lesbian uses subtle manipulation of a group’s rules or structure, invoking the principles of therapy which give her the right to demand that others deal with her feelings, that she is on a power trip. It means that when middle-class lesbians, skilled at speaking interminably while sounding humble and altruistic, calmly demand attention to their opinions, taking far more than their share of time, they are interrupting at least as much as a working-class lesbian who yells about the oppressiveness of the rules. We have come to view the middle-class model as objectively right because we live in a classist society that has taught us all to respect and aspire to middle-class values, even if we don’t understand any way in which they are workable in our own lives–even if they mean denying our traditional class and race and ethnic backgrounds.

It does not mean that there can be no politeness, no respectful treatment of one another in meetings. It means realizing that feminist process, while it may prevent yelling bouts (not always evil, you know), also prevents simply the excited expression of ideas, the interruption of each other, the mixture of intellect and emotion that have characterized other groups. Feminist process is not automatically egalitarian. The lesbian community ignores the facts that assuming the necessity of “sharing feelings” in a specified time slot means that those feelings must be hidden (essentially forbidden) until the appropriate time, that many people talking at once does not necessarily mean that on one gets heard (only that it might be a challenge for someone to hold the floor solely to herself for very long, a fact which I am sure upsets those accustomed to undivided attention); that silence while one lesbian speaks does not necessarily imply attention in the listeners; that calm, objective political discussions sometimes indicate (and often create) boredom in many working-class lesbians.

It does not mean that any group should be permitted to dominate group dynamics. It means realizing that feminist process may have put an end to one kind of hierarchical domination of group interactions but has instituted another kind. Both forms of control exclude working-class lesbians. In both formats, the middle class rules; therapy gave them the right to rename much of what they were already doing to maintain control, such that therapy becomes synonymous with feminism. Under feminist process, only objectified feelings, which one has analyzed and dealt with, are acceptable. Our liberation movement was not created to provide a solitary stage for each lesbian/womon who felt entitled to one. The system we know as feminist process has become static, a fixed and rigid presence in our community, which we can ill afford if we are ever to become a movement again.

It does not mean that middle-class lesbians have no rights. It means acknowledging that working-class lesbians have had to learn to relate in the forms acceptable to middle-class womyn for years now–and I do mean had to. The complete denial of our way of life has been a means of coercing us into conformity with a way foreign to us. A middle-class womon relating with a working-class womon should no longer feel completely free to find the solutions to her own problems within the relationship without considering the methods and results of her solutions. Is she making demands which are acceptable according to middle-class standards, but which are painful for a working-class womon? Has she ever considered the vast differences in those standards and whence they arise?

At this point, it is incumbent upon middle-class lesbians to stand aside from the privilege they have assumed for themselves and really listen to their sisters who see things differently. This means an ongoing assessment of choices.

Working-class lesbians who seek therapy or become therapists are advised to think twice. Solid friendships are a better place to talk about problems; politics is a better weapon against our oppression, within and without the movement. Therapy does not truly help any of us, individually or collectively; that many oppressed lesbians (subject to classism, racism, anti-Semitism, etc.) end up in this “helping” profession is not a surprise. We all too often serve the upper classes and act as a buffer for them.

Politically, the anger of working-class lesbians is an expression of raw pain, the unsophisticated anger to which middle-class feminists once felt attached and to which they are now hostile. The acknowledgement of that pain would be many-faceted. It would involve a recognition of the psychic suffering of the affluent housewife (your mother, perhaps); the loneliness of the inner-city widow; the terror of the institutionalized womon, abandoned by everyone (including most of us); the hopelessness of the enslaved prostitute; the entrapment of the incest victim; the struggle of the unemployed teenage mother; the bureaucratic nightmare of lesbians and poor womyn and Third World womyn whose children are “adopted” right out of their homes by social welfare agencies; the isolation of the incarcerated womon: The sadly endless list of nonprivileged lesbians/womyn whose lives our rhetoric has never touched.

Relief from oppression must come to all of us or none. We cannot settle for academic and employment gains for those who had at least limited access to such privilege–albeit, sometimes, through men–even before feminism. A revolution of lesbians cannot make privilege more comfortably accessible to the already privileged. “Feminism demands more than private solutions or even private solutions stated in political terms.”(13)

Life, after all–especially lesbian/feminist life–is a progression of relationships in the truest sense: from the momentary to the life-long, the vital touching of one spirit with another. We should draw laughter and tears from one another, and we must learn to find them in ourselves. Separation of intellect and emotion, the prime raison d’etre of therapy and its primary function, is one of the most deadly dichotomies of the patriarchy, one to which womyn, always stereotyped as controlled by our emotions, are especially susceptible. Above all things, this dichotomy must be struggled against. Certainly, we must not perpetuate it ourselves. Otherwise, defeat is imminent. A successful battle, however, could give us back ourselves: Whole, integrated, prepared to seek the joy of freedom, individually experienced, but collectively achieved.

Endnotes

Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 237. [My emphasis.]

Ibid., p. 223.

Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 275-283.

Ibid., p. 276.

Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, p. 223.

Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 276.

Ibid., p. 280.

R.D. Rosen, Psychobabble (New York: Atheneum, 1978), p. 13.

Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 280.

Ibid., p. 281.

Ibid., p. 282.

Ibid., p. 283.

Footnote

F1 Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, p. 237. [My emphasis.] 

[repriseofthereprise]

Therapism and the Taming of the Lesbian Community

by Joan Ward

Sinister Wisdom 36: Winter 1988/89

Introduction

Therapism is not a word you’d probably find in the average Lesbian’s vocabulary. But oh, how it permeates our communities. Therapism overtakes a community when too many of its members undergo therapy. Actually in this day and age therapism is like herpes–all you need to do is rub up against it a little and you’ve got it. Although preferred, no personal experience with therapy is required. Since so many Lesbians have turned to therapy, those of us who haven’t are also influenced by the behaviors therapy teaches. So therapism is more than just the behaviors learned by women who have undergone therapy. It has become the standard of behavior by which our community judges all of its members.

Therapism emphasizes feeling–having and expressing feelings. Because of this focus on emotions, therapism encourages nurturing, tact and acceptance–all traditionally feminine ways to behave. According to stereotype, women are the emotional gender and men are the rational gender. There are several common ways that oppressed people fight stereotypes. The way therapism has adopted is to say, “So what if we’re emotional. Emotional is the best way to be, and you’re just jealous. Womanhood is superior. Worship the goddess. Revel in your menstrual blood. Glorify your emotions.” Now our community embraces these stereotypes with a zest. This makes me more than just a little suspicious.

Standards of Behavior

It is important to point out that therapism does not necessarily equal therapy. Perhaps the goal of therapy is for us to be more honest about our emotions, for us to learn that it’s OK to feel certain emotions that we’ve been conditioned not to feel (e.g., anger, pride, etc.). This may even be a good idea in certain situations. Whatever the goals of therapy, therapism is the resulting doctrine in our community. And therapism says you must feel–usually at the expense of rational thought. There is an entire set of standards of behavior that follows this basic premise. Of course these standards were not devised by some devious Lesbian who wanted to harm the community. They are an attempt to establish ethical ways of dealing with one another. Unfortunately they have been far from successful.

I have said that therapism requires you to feel. I know this because everyone is always saying how they feel. “When you interrupt me, I feel as if you aren’t listening to me.” “When you raise your voice, I feel frightened.” “When you are late, I feel you don’t care.”

I find it redundant for someone to continually use the phrase I feel as a disclaimer before every opinion. Why say, “I feel you don’t understand,” rather than, “You don’t understand.”? I’ve never credited anyone with infallibility. When you continually use these disclaimers, I feel insulted. (That’s a little therapy joke.) Or, equally annoying, I think you’re a self-effacing wimp. And, believe it or not, when you say, “I feel you don’t understand,” some of us hear you call us “stupid” anyway. For all your attempt at tact, there are those of us who are good translators and don’t buy the sweet talk.

This I feel language encourages us to judge everything by how it makes us feel. If we go to a lecture or read an article on some political topic, therapism encourages responses such as, “The author seemed very hostile to me,” or “She made me feel very frightened.” Rather than encouraging us to evaluate the substance, therapism encourages us to examine how her words made us feel. This promotes a microscopic view. It encourages us to look at most events in terms of how one person’s behavior affects another person’s emotions.

Of course, once one has recognized and expressed how she feels, process begins. After all, you have made yourself vulnerable by sharing your emotions. It would be cruel for the other person not to reciprocate. Process becomes the means by which women either singularly or together dissect their feelings surrounding an incident. I recall the first time a woman explained to me that the process of getting there was just as important as reaching the goal. I agree with this idea. It is important to be ethical in the means we use to achieve our ends. It is also important to recognize that we learn things in the struggle along the way. But today, we frequently process ourselves to a standstill. Process now is the goal.

Friendship

In the good old days–pre-therapism–friendships were made in a variety of ways and were various in nature. We spent endless hours exchanging opinions, brainstorming ideas and telling life stories. During that era, bad times were the exception, not the rule. We knew that friends were there for us in times of crisis just as they were there in good times and even in boring times. This knowledge assisted in getting us through bad times. And we were further assisted by knowing that our friends would not be there if the crisis went on indefinitely. We expected that our friends would overcome their problems in a reasonable period of time. In other words, our friendships were based on the belief that we were strong. And, because we assumed we were strong, we also assumed that we could triumph over difficult situations.

Therapism teaches us quite a different way to be friends. In the first place, one must take one’s problems to a therapist so as not to overburden one’s friends. If one doesn’t have any friends, one doesn’t have to make any. Once in therapy, women come back to their friends with a whole different set of expectations. Now we hear a lot about “getting needs met.” We hear ad nauseam how our actions make our friends feel. Friends don’t ask friends for advice. They have their therapists for that. Friends ask friends to take care of them, not to advise them. Friendship is now based on the assumption that we are weak rather than that we are strong. Instead of being a delightfully varied experience, friendship now consists almost entirely of nurturing or being nurtured.

And let us not forget about “safe space.” A major problem with these therapistic means of communicating is that they can be so damn manipulative. “Safe space” is perhaps the biggest manipulator. At one time safe space for lesbians meant space where we could show affection for each other without fear of heckling or verbal abuse. It meant space where we could dare to look like Dykes without fear of physical assault. This kind of safe space was particularly important to working class Lesbians and Lesbians of Color who did not enjoy the relative safety that academic communities offered white Lesbians. However, today the term “safe space” indicates something entirely different. It means safety from each other. As far as I can tell, “safe space” is now an environment where a woman can express her emotions or feelings without fear of criticism. Safe space is a good example of how therapism has taken away our ability to discern the appropriate application of political ideas–sometimes popularizing these ideas past the point of significant meaning.

Political Ramifications

Let’s talk politics. Politically speaking, what has therapism done to the Lesbian Community? Do you remember what the expression the personal is political originally meant? It meant that all those small, personal day-to-day things we did had political impact. Where we lived, who our friends were, where we worked and how we spent our money were all political choices whether we liked it or not. Now it means that working on personal problems equals political activism. The more time you spend giving or taking support or nurturing, the more politically groovy you are. As a result our community has become politically immobile.

When a lesbian judges everything in terms of how it makes her feel, she becomes very emotionally vulnerable. She cannot take a bold stand on anything for fear of being criticized. Or she cannot criticize for fear that the community will disown her. Although support and safety have always been important to us, our community used to be based on movement. Now, we are so “safe” we cannot move.

Therapism has taught us to find everything equally upsetting. I see Lesbians respond to minor disagreements with other women as if they’d been raped. How did we lose our perspective? We are so emotionally vulnerable that we cannot distinguish between a philosophical difference and a physical assault. Lesbians seem to be spending most of their time being upset with each other rather than recognizing and fighting the real enemies: male dominance and violence.

Therapism also tells us that we cannot trust our intellects because they have been corrupted by male-dominated society. We must trust our “natural” feelings because they are our essence as females. What makes us think our emotions have not been equally corrupted by male culture? It is certainly true that while we remain emotionally vulnerable, refusing to use our intellects, fighting among ourselves in our safe space, we pose absolutely no threat to our oppressors.

Therapism teaches us to make our actions consistent with our feelings. No longer do we try to make our actions consistent with our beliefs. One example is the Lesbian baby boom. I refer, of course, to the explosion of Lesbian motherhood we’ve been experiencing lately. I can see several problems that make this baby boom politically unwise for us. Yet there is an appalling lack of discussion in our communities about the politics of having children. Remember, Lesbian motherhood “feels right.” And safe space means no criticism of feelings.

Therapism has encouraged us to do what “feels right” to the exclusion of political analysis. As a result our community is tolerating behaviors we used to find abhorrent. The resurgence of butch/femme and sadomasochistic activities are good examples. Women who demand the right to play butch/femme and/or sadomasochistic roles because it feels right are failing to accept responsibility for the larger political ramifications of their personal actions–a perfect example of therapism’s approach to the personal is political.

Support Groups & AA

Many Lesbian mothers are forming support groups, as are Lesbian incest survivors, Lesbian adult children of alcoholics, Lesbians battered by Lesbian partners and on and on. If it begins to sound like a list of victims, it’s no wonder.

The support group is a direct manifestation of therapism in our communities. Where we once formed CR (Consciousness Raising) groups, we now have support groups. The difference between the two types of groups is striking. The goal of the CR group was to raise our awareness of our oppression so that we could fight it. The goal of the support group is to band women together to take care of one another. Although they may claim differently, one can see that the majority of women in support groups spend most of their time nurturing one another. Perhaps the original intent of the support group was to give women the strength to overcome their specific hardship. However, I see little of the overcoming or moving on to action. Support groups have become self-perpetuating systems of dependency, once again encouraging weakness rather than strength.

A good example of the support group phenomenon in our community is Alcoholics Anonymous. Certainly no one can deny the importance of Lesbians overcoming drug and alcohol dependencies. Still, the method one uses to overcome these dependencies is important. AA, like many other therapistic ideas our community has adopted, escapes with amazingly little examination. I think it’s time we had a look.

A concept fundamental to AA is that of alcoholism as a disease. The first of the twelve steps proclaims the alcoholic’s inability to control her drinking. Like other manifestations of therapism, AA once again teaches us that we are weak, that we are victims of something beyond our own control. For Lesbians to believe that we have no control over selected personal behaviors is political suicide. In order to overcome our oppression it is vital to recognize and believe in our own individual strength. Most of us have heard the idea that to be truly strong one must know when to be weak. This paradox is very misleading. Yet it is a basic concept for AA people. Alcoholics Anonymous promotes the idea of strength through weakness in its insistence on a “Higher Power.”

AA stresses the idea that its members can believe in God in whatever form God might take to them. For example, Lesbians are free to believe in the Goddess rather than God. On the surface this sounds very open-minded. However, there is no hiding the fact that AA wants its members to believe in an all-powerful, external deity. Those of us who believe that we are the goddess and that the only deity in existence is the one within ourselves are shit out of luck. AA material is full of submissive suggestions like #7 of the twelve steps, “Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings.” Needless to say, I find this spiritual advice to be questionable. It further insures the timidity and passivity of those Lesbians involved with AA.

Quite frankly, AA solves the problem of alcohol dependency by replacing it with a dependency of another sort. In order to overcome alcohol abuse, one must depend on a “Higher Power.” Additionally, AA makes its members dependent on the AA group. Frequent attendance of meetings is expected of members lest they start to drink again. As long as AA convinces its members that one drink will do them in, they will cling to the group out of fear of their own fragility.

The bottom line is that AA doesn’t offer any real improvement for our community. In that it may offer sobriety, it might well benefit some individual Lesbians. But the ideal solution to Lesbians’ chemical dependency would benefit both the individual and the community. As long as we remain convinced that the AA method is the most successful one, we will not look for a better way. By encouraging weakness that needs continual support rather than strength that enables us to move on to other things, AA contributes to our oppression. Rather than looking at AA as a temporary solution until a better one can be found, our community is now using 12-step programs for all kinds of things including drug addiction, eating disorders and “loving too much.”

Lesbian Spirituality

Although AA clearly teaches a Christian spirituality, therapism in the Lesbian Community really teaches more of the pagan beliefs. A combination of Dianic Wicca, Eastern philosophy and “new age” spirituality seems to be popular today. However, both the AA spirituality and the more popular “Women’s Spirituality” teach helplessness. Many of you will sit up at this point and loudly object. Women’s Spirituality claims to teach strength. But this claim can be deceptive.

Those of you who have been in therapy recently or who have observed your friends go through it (just about all of us) have witnessed how many therapists are into Women’s Spirituality. You need not shop around much to find therapists who’ll guide you through creative visualization, teach you self-hypnosis and meditation, clear your aura and clean your chakras. There are even therapists who’ve started ritual groups.

But once again there has been little political analysis of this phenomenon. At first glance one sees the idea of powerfulness. We are told we can create our own reality in a very tangible way. Light a candle, say your words of power and that new job, new car, new lover can be yours. But with power comes endless personal responsibility. So Women’s Spirituality teaches the threefold law which basically says that whatever you do comes back to you threefold. This leads us to another concept common to Women’s Spirituality, karma. Karma is sort of tied into the threefold law but approaches it backwards. Since everything you do comes back to you threefold, it only follows that whatever happens to you is the result of something you did previously. You are responsible for everything that happens to you. It is no wonder that most Lesbians I know who are into Women’s Spirituality are amazingly passive–particularly when it comes to political action. According to karma, a woman who has been raped has no one to blame but herself. Furthermore, the threefold law teaches us to leave known rapists alone. Any harm we do them will only hurt our karma. And the rapist will eventually “get his” threefold some time later anyway (if not in this life, in a future life). These beliefs are almost identical to what our male-dominated, Christian society has been telling us for years. Women are responsible for the abuse they suffer at men’s hands. Bad things will happen to women who try to hold men responsible. If this is teaching Lesbians to be powerful, I fail to see it.

As a woman who believes much of what Dianic Wicca has to teach, I am appalled at the transformation of this information within a therapistic community. It once seemed logical to me that radical politics and Dianic Wicca would go hand in hand. But my experience with the women of my community has been quite the opposite. Those Lesbians who are into Witchcraft usually claim not to be very political (and believe me, they’re not). Furthermore, most Dykes I know with radical politics (and granted they are fewer these days) find Lesbian Witchcraft to be a joke. Therapism has caused this schism. So it is not until we solve the problems of therapism in our communities that our spirituality will fuel our activism again.

Conclusion

It becomes very clear as we analyze further what’s going on in our community that therapism is doing us harm. It has taught us that we are basically fragile and weak. The language of therapism is full of talk about empowering or enabling because we assume that on a personal level we don’t have power to begin with. True, as an oppressed group, Lesbians lack significant political power. However, therapism doesn’t address Lesbians as an oppressed group. It addresses us as individuals. And it tells us that as individuals we need to have personal power because we ain’t got it to begin with. In addition, therapism teaches us to judge everything in terms of how it makes us feel emotionally. It tells us that friendship and caring must be expressed primarily through nurturing. It teaches us to be tolerant, passive and apolitical.

I remember one day when I was very young, my grandmother explained to me her amusement over the corruption of the word square. Calling someone a square was to ridicule that person for being too conservative, too cautious, too old-fashioned. But when my grandmother was a child, calling someone a square was a compliment. It meant the person was well-rounded, balanced and level-headed. As individuals, we need to become more square in my grandmother’s sense of the word. As squares we’d take for granted that we are innately strong. We’d start dealing with specific political topics once again rather than just vague personal “issues.” We’d start to “empower” ourselves in more tangible ways like owning more women’s businesses or thwarting rapists rather than simply solving individual emotional upsets. As squares we’d have less therapy and more friendship. Our friendships would consist of excited philosophical discussions and work on common projects as well as support during difficult times. Our friends would challenge us as well as listen to our troubles. And as friends we would show each other what it means to be strong individuals committed to being a community of Lesbians.[Note: This essay has been substantially edited by Sinister Wisdom.]

[repriseofthereprise]

Bodylove – Full Book

Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves by Rita Freedman, Ph.D., © 1988

Click for PDFPages

Front Matter

Chapter One: From Body Loathing to Bodylove1 – 16

Chapter Two: Minding Your Body17 – 46

Chapter Three: Confronting Images: Past and Present47 – 76

Chapter Four: Weighty Matters77 – 108

Chapter Five: On the Move109 – 132

Chapter Six: Sensually Speaking133 – 158

Chapter Seven: Timely Matters159 – 188

Chapter Eight: Making Up and Making Over189 – 214

Chapter Nine: Taking Charge of Your Image215 – 224

Appendix: The Bodylove Survey225 – 232

Resources233 – 236

Notes and Index237 – 256

Full Textix – 25

Other things to read:

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys

Shadow on a Tightrope, Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser, eds.

Skin Deep: Women Writing on Color, Culture, and Identity, Elena Featherston, ed.

Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, Jean Kilbourne

[repriseofthereprise]

The Fat Illusion

By Vivian F. Mayer

From Shadow On a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression (eds Schoenfelder, Weiser; Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1983)

If you have any doubts, a random handful of women’s magazines from any grocery store will make it clear that fat is one of the biggest issues on women’s minds. Almost every issue of every women’s magazine carries an article on how to lose weight. Fear of fat is so entrenched in the American mind that even the most radical women, who have spent years exploring and rebuilding women’s consciousness through the Women’s Liberation Movement, have failed to spot the fraud.

In gatherings of the highest revolutionary spirit, you will see right-on feminists drinking cans of diet soda to avoid being fat. That they are avoiding fat is a problem but it is not the problem: women ought to be free to choose how they will look. The problem is the belief that drinking a low-calorie soft drink enables them to choose their figures, the illusion that fat or thin is a matter subject to personal choice and control. They are locked into that old-time religion promulgated by the eleven-billion-dollar sexist industry that has made the lives of fat women a living hell.

The electrified rat has learned how to control pleasure. When it presses a button, the electrodes that scientists implanted in its head stimulate the pleasure center of its brain. Since it prefers this intense pleasure even to food, the rat will soon starve to death. –observed in a psychology laboratory

I feel good when I feel hungry. Each pang of hunger reminds me that I’m in control, so I feel proud and successful. –a woman on a reducing diet

Women on reducing diets are not in the extreme circumstances of the electrified rat. The woman probably will not starve to death. The rat probably experiences much greater pleasure.

Figure control is one of the few forms of control most women are allowed to exercise. The fact that some men also struggle against their weight is overshadowed by the legions of woman-oriented reducing industries: the hunger clubs, the sweat salons, the pseudo-foods advertised always in the mouths of slender women. The hunger that average-sized women endure for a few weeks–only to gain back all the weight they lose–fat women endure for months, even years, only to gain back all the weight they lose. No one talks about the 99% failure rate of all reducing diets. Everyone’s too busy talking about the diets.

Even among women who, as a group, have gone the furthest toward renouncing standards of beauty and “health” defined by patriarchal culture–radical feminists and Lesbian feminists–the diet talk continues:

I know I’d feel better if I just lost about fifteen pounds.

She was fat as a way of avoiding men. Since coming out as a Lesbian, she’s lost a lot of weight, and you should see how great she looks!

I really like some fat women as sisters, as good friends. They just don’t turn me on sexually.

Aside from a superficial awareness that fat women are oppressed by looksism, radical women still see fat as a personal sickness: abnormal, undesirable, lamentable, and curable.

The “facts” about fat as known to the woman-on-the-street can be summarized as follows: That fat people lack “will power,” they’re fat because they eat more than thin people. That they overeat to make up for personality problems or because they’re not in touch with their true feelings. That being fat is unhealthy. That weight loss can be fun, or at least tolerable. That once the “excess” weight is lost, a slim figure can be maintained by eating as carefully as any normal slim person eats.

These “facts” are learned from doctors and therapists as well as from common knowledge. We read them in women’s magazines in articles written both by medical/psychiatric “experts” and by journalists; we also hear them in televised interviews with diet doctors and read them in the diet books that they are on television pushing into national best-sellers. All this is astonishing–because the technical medical literature flatly contradicts each of the above popular statements!

Regarding “overeating,” the fundamental sin for which fat people are constantly punished,

When food intakes of obese individuals were accurately assessed and compared with people of normal [sic] weights, the intakes were identical. There are thin people who eat excessively: “He has a huge appetite and never puts on a pound”–and there are fat people who eat too much. Likewise there are thin people and fat people who have small appetites. The average fat person is euphagic.”1

And when this euphagic (pleasant, moderate) food intake is reduced for the sake of weight loss, a United States Public Health Service Report found that,

One well-controlled study showed that young women who lost weight on 1000-calorie diets experienced a decrease in basal metabolism rate and in [calorie] intake required to maintain their reduced weights. Follow-up studies indicated that a lower calorie intake than recorded initially must be maintained indefinitely in order to maintain the reduced weight. 2

Fat people who have endured the pain of starvation to “cure” themselves so that they can live like “normal” (i.e., slim) people find, according to a noted diet doctor, that,

Those who lose and maintain a normal [sic] weight must accept some degree of hunger and unsatisfied appetite as a way of life.3

But since prolonged hunger is a painful condition that all our biological instincts compel us to avoid,

Review of the literature since 1958 did not reveal a successful long-term study using a diet regimen by itself or in combination with drugs, psychologic treatment, or an exercise program.4

There is something grotesque about having to quote from medical sources to defend a liberation movement. Ideally the Fat Liberation Movement will be based, like other liberation movements, upon the assertion of the masses, the reality of oppressed fat people, our lifetimes spent living the contradictions that no one dares admit exist: skipping “fattening” foods like any Vogue beauty (but get an eyeful of the difference), contemplating suicide as we gain weight back after every diet (merely by eating like a slim friend–where does the fat come from?), discovering that to maintain the weight loss one must go to bed hungry every night (is this how slim people live?). But who would believe our assertions? Not doctors, who make money and build their professional status selling weight-loss treatments on a basis that is two-thirds coverup of facts and one-third appeal to emotions. Not the general public, who think we are sick, sinful, and absurd. Not leftists who use our bodies to symbolize the oppressors–the “Fat Capitalist,” the “Pigs”–and consider us disgusting and decadent. Not we ourselves, whose ability to trust our own judgment is undermined by the skepticism with which the rest of society regards us.

Fat and thin, medical and radical, intelligentsia and common people alike, we are all, as a culture, caught in the Fat Illusion. We believe that our bodies’ sizes are chosen and reflect personal control, and we ignore or reject all evidence that contradicts this belief. What powerful forces of social control make this illusion so dazzling that we cling to it through starvation and spiritual pain, through absurdity and failure of hopes?

We stand at the core of the Fat Illusion, looking out. Layers of confusion and cruelty are piled upon each other like the layers of a poisonous atmosphere. Let us begin with the simplest, most personal experience of fat reality, to work our way out of this illusion.

#1: The Illusion of Personal Control

Observation: I eat what others eat. My eating is labeled “overeating,” and I am punished for it. The others who do not get fat are not accused of overeating and are not punished.

Conclusion: I don’t deserve as much food as others do. I am bad, less worthy than others.

Being fat even as a very young child, I naturally saw my condition in such absolute and terrible terms. I don’t think I could have internalized such a condemnation and stayed alive. So I, like many fat women of upwardly mobile middle-class background, found it easier to break from reality and believe that the things I saw happening were not really happening. I rationalized away the sight of slim people eating more than I did with thoughts such as, “They’d skipped lunch,” or “They plan to exercise the calories off.” I did not admit to myself that I felt hungry on the greatly reduced food intake that allowed me to maintain the “normal” body-size I’d starved down to. Or when I had to admit the hunger, I’d rationalize that it was not real because something was “wrong” with my ability to feel hunger. The prolonged hunger eventually led to eating binges, and the uncontrolled intensity of these binges led me to believe that I was crazy. A whole culture’s fat-hating forced me to accept the illusion that what I felt in my guts was imaginary and unjustified. Worse, the hunger became perverted into pleasure. Every pang was a spiritual agony atoning for my imagined sin of gluttony and bringing me one step closer to being a “normal” woman. Like the electrified rat, I thought I was in control of my pleasure and pain. Will power–self-control–figure control: these are all illusions. We are manipulated by the men in white coats.

#2: The Illusion of Freedom of Choice

Regarding aesthetic and economic intertwinement as one aspect of social control, Gudrun Fonfa writes, “Looksism is the standardization of a look (body image) and the discrimination against those who do not meet or conform to the [prescribed] image. Societies set acceptable broad limitations, because it is important to create the illusion that individuals are choosing their personal aesthetics, i.e., which bone to put through your nose.”5

If you are fat, you can choose to count calories or grams of cabohydrates; to drink Sego, Slender, or Liquid Protein diets; to eat Figurines; to go for Dr. Simeon’s Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) injections; to follow the Redbook Wise Woman’s Diet; etc., etc. The range of choices hides the fact that you are compelled to choose. As for the choices themselves, no matter which you choose you are choosing pain through hunger. If therefore you choose to reject all reducing options, you are punished with ridicule and social rejection. Unfortunately, with almost all attempts at weight loss failing, the same women who are constantly using one or another diet product are also punished for looking as though they do not use any diet product!

Social control goes beyond simply repressing deviants. Fundamental means of social control affect every person in the controlled society. One might argue logically that the persecution of fat women takes away each woman’s freedom to become fat. More accurately, since there’s no way to look at a person and know, on the basis of her size, whether she eats a lot or a little, the freedom women lose is the freedom to be comfortable with our appetites.

Most slim women believe that they would become very fat if they “let themselves go.” Particularly in the middle and upper classes, this belief is exploited into an obsession by the sexist imagemakers. As a result, millions of average-sized women experience nagging terror over every bite they eat, and come to look upon their bodies as barely tamed dragons that could turn on them any moment and erupt with fat. The fact that they can gain five pounds easily over Christmas indulgence seems to confirm this danger, and also leads them to believe that fat women are women who indulge themselves all the time. But the millions of women who are convinced that only their diets stand between them and two hundred fifty pounds struggle against their appetites to no real purpose. Approximately 99% of all attempts to lose weight end in failure; consequently, no more than 1% of the women who are slim can attribute their figures to the success of a diet.6 Why are they slim? Maybe it’s genes.7 Maybe it’s magic. The mechanism is beside the point. It is certainly not the power of will or better eating habits, since most slim women are eating as much as most fat women anyway.

Many believe that lack of exercise is what makes people fat. Here again, the individual who exercises regularly tends to gain some weight when she stops exercising. Furthermore, studies show that some groups of fat women (for example, fat adolescent women) tend to be less active than their peers.8 However, the same studies show that these less active fat women also eat significantly less than their slim peers. Instead of assuming that they are fat because they are less active, researchers should ask whether they are less active because they are underfed; lessened activity and lessened productiveness are commonly observed in semi-starved laborers in Third World countries. Those who righteously harp upon exercise ignore the role of persecution in causing fat people to be less physically active. This persecution ranges from the lack of large-sized gym uniforms for fat high school students to the open ridicule that many fat people encounter when they attempt to jog, swim, or dance in public.

Furthermore, those who blame fat on laziness ignore evidence provided by social class differences. Charwomen, for example, do hard physical labor all day long and frequently are fat. They are poor, rarely have their own cars and must rely upon public transportation, which means that they must walk to and from bus stops, etc. In contrast, front-office secretaries sit in front of typewriters all day and are usually slim. Middle-class people are more likely than the poor to own their own cars. Recently more middle-class people, especially women, have taken up regular exercise—-tennis, running, etc. Before this trend they were not all fat—-certainly not as fat as typical charwomen. Jean Mayer, one of the best-known researchers in the question of exercise and diet, writes that weight loss for fat people requires “…an attitude almost stoic in its asceticism and…the deliberate setting aside of time for what will be often lonely walking and exercising.”9 Stoicisim, asceticism, lonely walking and exercising hardly describe a typical slim woman’s life!

The point of all this is that we have much less choice over our figures than we are led to believe. The suffering of women over their figures is meaningless—-and that’s hard to accept.

#3: The Illusion That It’s “For Our Own Good”

Surrounding the shame of fat women and the fear of non-fat women is a half-century of medical and psychiatric lies which the Fat Underground calls “gynocidal malpractice.”10 In this writing, I want to devote only a little space to the radical counter-arguments that doctors make fat people sick and psychiatrists make fat people crazy. The gist of these arguments rests on observations such as the following

Regarding physical health:

That serious bodily damage, including that damage caused by prolonged starvation, is known to occur in fat bodies on diets.11 There is evidence that atherosclerosis, leading to heart attacks and strokes, is caused by repeated dieting.12 This fact alone would account for the high death rate of fat people from these illnesses.

That all studies claiming to prove that fat is unhealthy were done on people who have dieted frequently and who live in an atmosphere of constant persecution and self-hatred.

That the handful of studies existing on non-persecuted fat people suggests that they are quite healthy,13 whereas studies of persecuted groups other than fat people, such as black people, show these groups to suffer from many of the diseases “characteristic” of fat people.14

And regarding mental well-being:

That compulsiveness towards food is found in almost all individuals, fat or thin, who are starved or deprived of food, or who are threatened with starvation or deprivation.

That since all psychiatric theories are based on the assumption that fat people are fat because they eat more than slim people, this psychiatry contradicts reality and forces alienation upon fat people.

Actually, “our own good” is not the real reason for persecution of fat people. The real reason is looks. When was the last time you saw people who smoke cigarettes denied employment, laughed at when they complain about discrimination, ridiculed throughout the media, rejected as friends and as lovers?—-and they are endangering their health and other people’s as well.

Looks are always the reason for women’s dieting, even when the reasons spoken out loud, and often believed, are health. There is no way that a woman can feel good in this culture if she sees herself as fat. Feelings of sluggishness and of being “weighted down” are at least partially a reaction to the culture’s fat-hating, internalized and expressed in the “overweight” person as self-hatred. Keep in mind how many of us had fat grandmothers, and how hard and vigorously those fat grandmothers worked.

Among many women, health is not even a pretence of an issue when it comes to getting rid of fat. At a meeting of fat women in Los Angeles, April 20, 1973, one fat woman admitted her secret fantasy: “I wish I could get cancer or some other wasting disease so I could die thin.” The increasing popularity of intestinal bypass surgery reflects this desperate attitude. In this surgery, all but a few feet (sometimes inches) of the small intestine is surgically shunted aside, so that most of one’s food passes out the gut undigested. Weight losses of a hundred pounds are typical. In the months or years while she is wasting away to a slim (if jaundiced) beauty, the patient endures explosive, foul-smelling, painful diarrhea, malnutrition, and related damage to organs. The death rate for this operation is estimated conservatively at 6%, 15 and since it is still new and experimental, the long-term effects are not even known. Yet at least 5,000 intestinal bypass operations are done annually in the United States, about 80% of them on women 16 (and at an expense of typically $6,000 apiece paid for by the patient—-who, of course, is too fat to qualify for health insurance.)

To alter her organs as if they were so many cogs and circuits is the natural duty of a sex object. Usefulness (sex appeal) is the only virtue; pain is irrelevant. The relation between doctors and fat women is sado-masochistic. Believing that she is inadequate to manipulate herself as a sex object, the fat woman finally gives up her power to the doctor to manipulate (mutilate) her. Her jaws get wired shut. Her guts get cut apart. Her submissiveness approaches a passive ideal. This is the extreme fat version of the masochism inculcated in almost all women by sexism. We are brought up on the old principle that “you have to suffer to be beautiful.” The amount of pain is a matter of degree. According to the rhetoric of sado-masochism, through submission to pain, Woman obtains absolute power. What she really obtains is the illusion that she is in control.

The power that doctors hold to perpetuate or end this misery is not an illusion. Doctors continue to plead that they are puzzled by the contradictions of the obesity literature—-but their puzzlement doesn’t stop them from practicing as if obesity were just a matter of caloric bookkeeping. As long as doctors practice this way, they are using their power to abuse us.

The discovery that doctors can be women’s political enemies is not new to feminism; the self-help movement, the radical therapy movement, and writings such as those of Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English on the history of women as healers17 represent a taking-back of power by women over our bodies and minds. Fat liberation is the next stage in this women’s liberation process.

#4: The Illusion of Self-Limited Achievement

”If you really want something, you can have it—-it’s all up to you.” How many times we hear this double-edged cliche! On the one hand the cliche urges people not to give up in despair. On the other hand, it is a paralyzing excuse for the status quo, implying that the “haves” deserve their privilege and that the “have nots” are “have nots” because they are not sufficiently motivated to work for and obtain the privilege. By this trick, politics are made to look like personal psychology, and the victims bear the blame. Most doctors are deeply hooked into this self-righteous attitude. How could they respect themselves, how could they avoid demoralizing guilt, unless they believed that there was justice in a system that deprives so many and rewards so few, happily including themselves?

Under “The Illusion of Freedom of Choice” I described how the Fat Illusion tricks individual women into meaningless struggles for “figure control.” At the level of the Illusion of Self-Limiting Achievement, those individual struggles become meaningful, making up a system that controls the energies of masses of women.

Women are divided into those who fear getting fat and those who are ashamed of being fat. Through buying weight-loss ideology and products (saccharin, diet soda, Weight Watcher’s Magazine etc.) slim women assert that they are motivated to be slim and beautiful. They are rewarded with male approval and with permission to feel superior to fat women. By the same actions, fat women assert that they want to be approved of by men—-that their hearts are in the right place, that they accept domination by the Patriarchy-—but their reward is only a future promise of male approval, since as long as they are fat, even if they are dieting, they suffer persecution. However, they do get to feel superior to some mythical person who is fatter than they and who goes on eating without shame.

The value and power of male approval is increased by the suffering women go through to earn it.

I have emphasized male approval to show that this is a sexist situation keeping the mass of women dependent upon the mass of men for self-esteem. The same situation exists among Lesbians in a more subtle way.

Money and support which women pour into the weight-loss industry is turned into a whip that persecutes fat women-—creating jeering diet and fashion advertisements whose message is that only slim women are worthy of love. The resulting spectacle of fat women’s suffering terrifies women into continuing to support the weight-loss industries. This is an extortion racket where each penny we pay to the reducing industry increases its power over us. Women’s power is stunted not only by competition to be slimmer than the next woman, but by hunger and by preoccupation with food. The ultimate anti-revolutionary message is that what feels good for us—-such as eating what we want-—is really bad for us.

The Fat Illusion, in all its levels, must be eliminated from women’s lives. There must be no support, and no condoning, of the reducing industries, since these industries degrade fat women. Every can of diet soda that you buy—-no matter how much you may “prefer the taste of it”-—hurts fat women, and by extension, all women. As women liberate knowledge about fat from the medical monopoly, fat women will come out of the closets of our minds to realize that there is nothing wrong with us. It is time to struggle with the implications of thin privilege and fat punishment the same as we struggle with other social injustices that we’ve recognized for years. We cannot wait for help and advice from doctors. Aside from the fact that few doctors will risk their careers to debunk a popular medical racket that is, after all, mainly a women’s issue, the truth in this case is just not good business.

Endnotes

A. M. Bryans, “Childhood obesity: Prelude to adult obesity,” Canadian Journal of Public Health (November 1967), p. 487.

U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.Obesity and Health (Washington, DC: 1966), p. 60.

W. L. Asher, “Appetite suppressants as an aid in obesity control,” in Louis Lasagna, ed., Obesity: Causes, consequences and treatment (New York: Medcom, 1974), p.73.

Joseph A. Glennon, “Weight reduction: An enigma,” Archives of Internal Medicine (July 1966), vol. 118, pp. 1-2.

Gudrun Fonfa, “‘Looksism’ as Social Control,” Lesbian Tide (January I!175), p. 20.

Alvan Feinstein, “How do we measure accomplishment in weight reduction:'” in Lasagna, ed., op. cit., p. 86.

Jean Mayer, Overweight: Causes, cost and control (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968).

Mayer, pp. 125-126.

Mayer, p. 165.

Fat Underground, “Health of fat women … the real problem,” 1974.

Aldebaran, “Fat liberation: A luxury?” State and Mind (June-July 1977), pp. 34-38.

Obesity and Health, p. 40.

Clark Stout, et al., “Unusually low incidence of death from myocardial infarction,” Journal of the American Medical Association (June 8, 1964), Vol. 188, pp. 845-849.

Jack Slater, “Hypertension: Biggest killer of blacks.” Ebony (June 1973).

“Current status of jejuno-ileal bypass for obesity,” Nutrition Reviews (1974), Vol. 32, p. 334.

From a telephone conversation with an office assistant of Dr. J. Howard Payne (an M.D. who pioneered the intestinal bypass surgery for obesity), August 6, 1975.

Many books have been written by feminist women on the subject of women and health. A good introductory bibliography (omitting, of course, information about fat women) is found in the Appendix of The hidden malpractice, by Gena Corea (New York: William Morrow, 1977). The specific book referred to in the text is Witches, Midwives and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, published by The Feminist Press, Box 334, Old Westbury, NY 11568.

[repriseofthereprise]

Feminism and the Politics of Appearance

by Amy Winter

In off our backs, November-December 2004

It’s no secret that mainstream media are obsessed with women’s looks. For years we’ve been bombarded with advertising for all kinds of products, from skin cream to diet pills, and titillated with news of Cher’s latest surgical enhancement. Lately, however, the products and procedures advertised have become more invasive, more dangerous and, significantly, more expensive–Botox injections, chemical peels, liposuction, stomach stapling. And whereas Cher and other famous women used to be considered slightly odd for their excessive concern with appearance, or it was understood that for them cosmetic surgery was an occupational hazard, these days, with shows like ABC’s “Extreme Makeover,” MTV’s “I Want a Famous Face,” and Fox’s “The Swan,” there’s no excuse left for any of us to remain tuck-less and nip-free. As more and more cosmetic procedures are presented as “empowering choices” that we’d be silly not to at least consider–breast implants which can cause chronic pain and disease, injections to deaden the nerves in our feet so we can keep wearing those high-heeled shoes, surgery to make our vulvas resemble that of a famous porn star, permanent makeup tattooed onto our faces, liposuction or stripping of varicose veins which can lead to chronic nerve pain–the greater is the pressure on us to conform, and the smaller the space in which we get to be content with ourselves the way we are.

In the last decade, it’s also become very difficult to discuss issues of personal appearance, in fact, any issue of “personal choice” at all, within feminist and lesbian communities. The second-wave feminist emphasis on a woman’s right to body autonomy and sexual self-determination has been widely misinterpreted to mean that any choice a woman makes about sexual behavior and appearance is automatically feminist. This has led to the acceptance and even glorification of profoundly woman-hating behaviors and institutions, such as pornography, prostitution, cosmetic surgery, dieting, weight loss surgery, and various types of “body modification” including transsexual surgery. What we are left with is a practically incoherent public discourse, wherein mainstream journalists, “queer” activists and “third-wave” writers all champion an amoral liberal attitude toward women’s body-related choices, demand celebration of misogynist institutions and endeavors, and call that celebration “feminism.”

In this climate, it’s vital to discuss personal choices in a political context. To do that requires the acknowledgment that feminism is not only a political philosophy, it’s a system of values; within feminism, some activities and choices are seen as contributing to liberation for women, while others are both a result and a perpetuation of misogynist stereotypes about women. An understanding that women are oppressed as a class, and that this systemic oppression is the framework within which we make individual choices, conflicts sharply with liberal political philosophy, which does not recognize the impact of social power or powerlessness on individual choice. The foundation of liberalism is individual autonomy and rights; it ignores class-based inequality in the distribution of power in society. As long as one’s actions don’t infringe on others’ right to freedom, moral judgment about those actions is disallowed. Feminism, on the other hand, recognizes that patriarchy privileges the class of men and hence that men have historically had power to influence the choices available to women. For this reason, it’s important to understand that women’s choices may appear to be free, but in many cases are actually constrained by the system of patriarchy, which encourages us to make choices that support male supremacy and punishes us when we resist.

The merging of the rhetoric of the equal rights movements for African-Americans, women, and lesbians and gays with liberal political philosophy has resulted in progressives embracing the liberal concept of “tolerance.” The Declaration of Tolerance at www.tolerance.org reads:

“Tolerance is a personal decision that comes from a belief that every person is a treasure. I believe that America’s diversity is its strength. I also recognize that ignorance, insensitivity and bigotry can turn that diversity into a source of prejudice and discrimination. To help keep diversity a wellspring of strength and make America a better place for all, I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own.”

This statement exemplifies the liberal focus on individual actions, rather than an analysis of how the power structure in the US privileges and empowers some groups while stigmatizing and marginalizing others. Emphasis on tolerance, rather than equalizing access to power and resources, deflects attention from systems that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, and locates oppression solely in individual acts of unkindness or discrimination.

When “tolerance of diversity” is the highest value, analyzing the political implications of any “personal choice” usually elicits a reflexic, defensive, even enraged response, which stifles discussion. It’s now considered rude, judgmental and intolerant in many lesbian and feminist circles to question the “choice” to be a stripper or a prostitute, or to practice sadomasochistic sex, for example. It’s out of fashion these days, with so many lesbians “transitioning,” i.e., taking testosterone and undergoing transsexual surgery, to critique the social construction of masculinity and the way it encourages and perpetuates men’s violence against women. But accusations of intolerance and judgmentalness impede our ability to have meaningful discussions about the communities and the world we want to live in, and how as feminists we can move toward those goals. We are encouraged to “respect difference” rather than work for justice. Emphasis on tolerance over feminist critique thus maintains the status quo.

Another factor that contributes to the stifling of political analysis of personal choice in feminist communities is an emphasis on feelings. The focus of discourse these days, the reason given for almost any choice, is “I just feel that way” or “I feel better that way.” The assumption behind this is that feelings are immutable and that they are an appropriate basis on which to make decisions that have political implications. Where appearance is concerned, appealing to feelings denies the fact that feeling better about ourselves has been shown to have almost no correlation with how we actually look to others (Freedman); body image, energy level, and self-esteem can fluctuate by the day, or even by the hour, depending on factors like nutrition, sleep, physical exercise, and positive interactions with others. This emphasis on feelings stems from the influence of the therapy and recovery movements in our communities, fostered in part by women’s very real need to heal from the damage patriarchy inflicts upon us. However, while healing and recovery would not seem to preclude political organizing, in practice the two very rarely go together. Thus, emphasis on feelings as justification for our choices “…has encouraged us to do what “feels right” to the exclusion of political analysis. As a result our community is tolerating behaviors we used to find abhorrent.” (Ward) We’ve forgotten that resisting patriarchy is often difficult and uncomfortable–but also satisfying in a way that conforming is not.

No matter how much we would like to use feminism to justify our choices, feminism cannot be interpreted to encompass any risky, self-hating, violent thing a woman does to herself, or takes money for doing, or pays someone to do to her. Feminism does not value women’s subordination and women’s pain. It doesn’t value healthy women’s lifetime dependence on the medical system for nutritional supplements or hormones–inevitable outcomes of weight-loss surgery or transsexualism. Feminism doesn’t value a standard of beauty for women comprised of extreme thinness, regular Caucasian features, smooth hair, young-looking skin without wrinkles or blemishes, and lack of visible body hair. Feminists know this standard purposely excludes most women and is designed to keep us feeling anxious about our appearance and dependent on surgeons and cosmetic companies for expensive reassurance.

Feminism values women as the subjects of our own lives, not objects to attract and hold another’s gaze. It values cooperation between women, not the competition and comparison fostered by presenting us with image after image of women we’ll never look like–women who, in fact, don’t exist, given the extensive and now-infamous use of airbrushing and retouching in fashion photography. Fat women have been very damaged by the beauty standard under which we’re the ugliest of the ugly–but the feminist response to that is not to dress our fat selves up in lingerie and pose for the NOLOSE newsletter or Dimensions magazine. Feminism does not value expanding the categories of women available for male sexual exploitation; it values ending the sexual exploitation of all women.

Feminists understand that physical ability can change with age, accident or illness; valuing ourselves based on physical ability denies self-esteem and body love to women who are aging, ill, or disabled. Feminism values the diversity of women; it recognizes that we don’t all look the same and says that there is beauty in each of us. Feminism seeks to foster self-esteem and confidence in women, not to encourage us to shore ourselves up through positive attention from others for our appearance. Feminists know that insults like “fat cow” or “dog” are attempts to manipulate us into conformity in the same way that accusations of “dyke” or “slut” serve to break our bonds with other women and direct our sexual attentions toward men.

Feminists know that our separation from our bodies mirrors patriarchy’s attempt to separate human society from the natural world; as multinational corporations view the earth as an inert source of raw materials, so we are taught to view our bodies as matter that we can shape and change at will. But our bodies have a beauty and an integrity all their own, regardless of how poorly they conform to patriarchal aesthetic standards. They have their own balance that is intimately connected to the balance of nature, neither of which patriarchal science comes close to understanding. In the last few decades we’ve become increasingly aware of the devastating effects humans are having on the natural world through our attempts to interfere with processes we don’t comprehend. In the same way that, for example, building a jetty can change the profile of an entire coastline and affect everything that lives there, altering our healthy bodies by smearing chemicals on our skin, ingesting hormones, or fundamentally altering the progress of food through our digestive systems cannot fail to impact every level of our being.

This is not new age romanticism; the biological processes of our bodies are the physical basis for life on this planet, and feminists would do well to remember what Western culture has made it our business to forget–that our bodies are ourselves. We are our bodies, and our bodies are not wrong, they are not ugly, they are not dirty, they are not too fat or too hairy or too tall or too masculine. Our consciousness doesn’t hover somewhere a foot above our heads; it’s embedded in every cell. We can’t damage our bodies without damaging ourselves; we can’t love ourselves and other women if we don’t love our own women’s bodies. And we can’t be honest in our feminism if we pretend that making choices to harm our bodies and conform to the dictates of a system that hates us is liberating and empowering. We collude with woman-hating when we etch it into or carve it out of our flesh, when we starve ourselves to look the way the media says we should, when we refuse to give heart to the resistance of the women around us by proudly living in our bodies as they are.

Though our survival may at times depend on this collusion, we can never forget that these “choices” are made in a context in which we fear the consequences of not conforming to the appearance standards set for women, or we’re weary of the consequences we’ve already suffered–and that context, those consequences, have inevitable effects on our decisions. Deciding to collude may be necessary, but it is not feminist; resistance is the ultimate feminist choice.

References:

Freedman, Rita. Bodylove. Harper & Row, 1989.

Ward, Joan M.“Therapism and the Taming of the Lesbian Community” in Sinister Wisdom 36: Winter 1988/89.

[repriseofthereprise]

Sheila Jeffreys speaks on beauty practices and misogyny

This speech was given by Sheila Jeffreys at the Andrea Dworkin Commemorative Conference, April 7, 2006. This original transcript was prepared by another radical feminist (blog now defunct).

Hello everybody, it’s terrific to be here, and to be invited to be here, for this Commemoration of Andrea Dworkin, because of course her politics and her writings have been enormously influential in my life. And in fact, in Melbourne, we did have a little commemoration in a seminar series that I run, last year, and thirty-five women came together to read from various different books of hers saying how much they meant to them, and we got a great deal of what we have been hearing about here from Clare, which is women talking about how their lives were broken, and how reading the work of Andrea Dworkin healed them because of abuse and so on. So we got a great deal of that at that evening seminar.

Now obviously a lot of my work has been about pornography and is now about prostitution, fighting prostitution as a form of violence against women, and so Andrea’s work on pornography has been enormously important to me and in fact, in London in the late 1970’s, in 1977, I was involved in setting up the first anti-pornography group in Britain, which was the Revolutionary Feminist Anti-Pornography Consciousness Raising Group, the London Revolutionary Feminist Anti-Pornography Consciousness Raising Group. Yes, it doesn’t roll off the tongue! But by the time I was involved in setting up a central London Women Against Violence Against Women in 1980 I had found Andrea Dworkin’s book on pornography and that was enormously important to me.

However, I thought today, lots of people will be covering Andrea’s work on pornography, and therefore I’m going to do something a bit different, I’m going to look at two of her earlier works, her first published work which is Woman Hating from 1974, which she was involved in writing for a couple of years before that. So this is a truly early work, she was 27 when it was published, so it’s really, it’s a quite extraordinary work, if you think about being able to produce a book of that kind at that age. So I want to look at that and talk about how inspiring that was for me in the writing of my book last year, Beauty and Misogyny, that text was really important for me.

And I also want to say a little bit about Right Wing Women, which is another very important book, from I think 1977.

Now, when I became a feminist, in the early 1970s, I wasn’t aware of Woman Hating. The book was about to be published but I didn’t find it at that time. But in the UK the whirlpool of ideas that Andrea Dworkin encapsulates in Woman Hating was the powerful basis of the feminism that I was developing. It wasn’t until later that I discovered these books, with gratitude, and was able to use them. Now, what’s so radical about Woman Hating, is that the book directly opposes the sadomasochistic romance that creates femininity and masculinity and provides the basis of male domination. Now, when I talk about femininity and masculinity, unlike the sort of modern postmodern trendy craze of saying that you can choose and swap genders and so on, I understand femininity and masculinity as the behaviours of male dominance, masculinity, and female subordination, which is femininity. They are actually about behaviours in a hierarchy of power, so I just want to say that quite straightforwardly. I don’t think gender encompasses that term and I’ll have a go at the whole idea of gender later on.

Now, in Woman Hating Andrea Dworkin speaks of foot binding at some length, there is a very useful piece on foot binding in there, but I think what she says about foot binding works just as well for high heeled shoes, particularly the high heeled shoes of the moment. And she writes that through the crippling of a woman, a man, quote:

glories in her agony, he adores her deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her as sex object even if he must destroy the bones in her feet to do it. Brutality, sadism and oppression emerge as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.

Now I think that is the fundamental message of Woman Hating, and I think it’s wonderful stuff, you can see the power of Andrea’s language in there.

Now, she analyses in Woman Hating the idea of beauty as just one aspect of the way women are hated in male supremacist culture, and she indicts woman-hating culture for the deaths, violations and violence done to women, and says that feminists look for alternatives–ways of destroying culture as we know it, rebuilding it as we can imagine it. I think the word destroying is strong, it’s good, and it’s crucial. We’re not talking about tinkering at the edges of culture, and what I’m going to ask you to think about today is how we destroy what is called, sometimes, gender, maybe sex roles is better. I’ll suggest to you sex roles might be better, and certainly destroy masculinity and femininity, not tinkering at the edges but we have to destroy them. And that’s what Andrea’s book asked us to do. Hardly anybody speaks in that kind of language now. Today such talk of destroying culture is much rarer than it was then, because we’re in a very conservative time. We’ve all learned to moderate our language now I think, a little bit. Andrea didn’t moderate her language, really; during the whole course of her writing she refused to moderate. The necessity remains to destroy culture, but the optimism of the early 1970s about the possibility of radical social change no longer really exists, I suggest.

Now when researching my most recent book, which is Beauty and Misogyny, I searched for feminist writings which were clear and unequivocal on the harms of and need to eliminate what are considered natural beauty practices in the West. And to my surprise, they were very hard to find. I think that I had overestimated the extent to which the sort of radical politics that Andrea Dworkin possessed, and that I possessed too, in the early seventies, were actually written down. Andrea did write them down, but then when I looked for politics that radical on beauty practices I didn’t really find them anywhere else. The only other person I found with such strong politics was Sandra Bartky from the late 1970’s. But otherwise, it wasn’t there. And I have to say that I don’t think Naomi Wolf really counts in that she was a lot later, but radical I don’t think that book is. We can discuss that if you would wish.

Andrea Dworkin sees beauty practices as having extensive harmful effects on women’s bodies and lives. Beauty practices, she says, are not only time wasting, expensive, painful to self esteem, rather, quote:

Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They proscribe her mobility, [think high heeled shoes, tight skirts] spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body.

And then she says, in inverted commas,

They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom.

Now that’s crucial to me, I do wonder how women are able to be totally imaginative, creative and create a new future for themselves in their minds, if their bodies are totally tied down and completely constricted. That seems a crucial understanding. Beauty practices aren’t just some kind of interesting optional choice, extra, but they fundamentally construct who a woman is and therefore how she is able to imagine, because they constrict her movements and create the behaviours of her body.

There we are, this is from the 1974 book Woman Hating, and you can see it says “Beauty Hurts” at the top, which is undoubtedly true. I think the little bit on the bottom says, “Why haven’t women made great works of art?” and the answer is “Because they are great works of art.” And this is the way that they are supposed to make themselves into works of art.

Now she says, the description she gives of what happens here, is that in our culture, and I think she’s writing about a culture here, not one part of a woman’s body is left untouched or unaltered, no feature or extremity is spared the art or pain of improvement: Hair is dyed, lacquered, straightened, permanented, eyebrows are plucked, pencilled, dyed, eyes are lined, mascara’d, shadowed, lashes are curled or false. From head to toe every feature of a woman’s face, every section of her body is subject to modification and alteration. And I remember when I first saw this diagram it had a considerable effect on me. Now I think, what are we missing? But at the time when I first saw it I thought that was very helpful, because it actually maps out what women take for granted, the extraordinary practices they perform on themselves every day, before they go out in the morning and so on. So many women take them for granted and it’s very important to actually have them mapped out here so we can see them.

Now today it would need to be supplemented with the more invasive and harmful practices that are becoming common in our times. So if we just look at what’s here then we can see what needs to go in. I thought it was quite interesting that she has actually got the navel bejewelled, I don’t know whether that means pierced, it probably does, but in 1974 not many women were piercing their navels. Now women are supposed to show their navels and have them pierced. So men are getting the sadomasochistic satisfaction of women’s pain and piercing just when they are walking round the street, sitting on the bus, and so on and so on, right. That’s very important.

Now here we have the cunt, that was the word we used at the time, I wasn’t tremendously keen on it then but there you go. The cunt, here, we have deodorised, shaved, and perfumed. Now we would have to say yes, completely shaved because women are doing Brazilian waxing to remove the hair entirely in Western cultures. I think they were probably just shaving bits around the edges in 1974, who knows. And labiaplasty, which is what’s going on now, which is that cosmetic surgeons take off women’s labia because women say they are unsightly or we get the explanation [from surgeons] that they get caught up inside during sexual intercourse and that’s uncomfortable. And I’m thinking, gosh, I used to be heterosexual, I can’t remember [anyone having] the problem! [laughter] Anyway, perhaps, apparently the labia hang out a little bit of the swimsuit. I’m thinking, why don’t we have swimsuits down here, I always wear, you know, summer wetsuits because I like to be covered up. You know you don’t have to have your labia hanging down the leg of your swimsuit [more laughter]. So obviously we would have to put labiaplasty in here.

Buttocks are girdled. I seem to remember my sisters and my mother had girdles, I didn’t actually wear a panty girdle as it was called in the 1960s. But now of course what women are supposed to do are extraordinary regimes of exercise to make sure they have a flat stomach, panty girdles are not really the way to go, but it’s all still going on. Breasts bound and siliconed, much more so, much more breast implants now than there ever was in 1974, nipples rouged and yes they probably have nipple rings in now because of that destruction of women’s bodies with piercing is absolutely de rigueur.

The face would be very different now because of course there’s lots of ordinary cosmetic surgery going on which is just like make-up now. Women are having botox in the face to paralyse their muscles, as an ordinary thing to do, every month you have it renewed and so on. So what I write about in my book is the way that the practices going on in 1974, and I did those practices too, what we have now is much more invasive, is now going in under the skin, drawing blood, and much more painful and brutal, than the practices that were happening at this time.

What Andrea also says about these practices is that “Beauty practices are vital to the economy.” Of course that’s true, there’s been hardly any work on how vital they are to the economy, and “They’re a major substance of male female role differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman.” In other words, they create sex difference. These practices–very harmful, painful, enormously expensive, time wasting and constricting to the body, and affecting what women can think–they create sexual difference. Otherwise how would we know who was on the top and who was on the bottom, and it’s crucial for male dominance that we know who’s on the top and who is on the bottom. Otherwise the system cannot work. So she explains that really well I think.

What I would like to do is criticise what’s going on in the culture now, and what I looked for, because I’m sad to say that this hasn’t changed, we haven’t suddenly got rid of sexual difference, women aren’t suddenly free to actually leave the house, both feet on the ground, hands in the pockets, not worrying about what they look like, bare faced, that’s not happened. That has not happened. It’s my wish for the future that it could happen, that women could have those human rights and freedoms that men have, just to be in the world, run down the street. It hasn’t happened.

Now, you will see the difference here, okay. The men are wearing loose suits, black shoes, and of course they have their mouths closed. Women’s mouths must be open so they can be penetrated at all times, and women’s bodies are open, right, so that’s really clear there. You have to go around going “Uh.” [laughter] I noticed this when I used to watch Dallas as a young girl, that the women have their mouths open, they say “Hello Deirdre, ah” and the men say, “Hello Deirdre, am.” [laughter] You will see here that the men are very very different from the woman. The woman in front, the Spice Girl, has got a lot of her body showing, she’s on incredibly high heeled shoes that would be immensely painful to her, and so on. So I think that even though she’s a celeb, its quite a good example I think, of what a lot of women would like to be, what they would like to look like and try to make themselves into when they go out. So what we have here is the sadomasochistic romance. I think this is extraordinary, and I think that a lot of people just accept it so much they probably wouldn’t even comment or think that was peculiar. I find it extraordinary, we’re in 2006, and this is what is going on. Women are in pain, totally disabled, showing their bodies, taking part in what I call the sexual corvee, which is, you know, how the peasants in medieval France, the serfs would have to do work on the landlords land for nothing in order to even cultivate their own land, this is what women have to do, it’s the sexual corvee, to create men’s sexual satisfaction on the streets and everywhere else they have to do this to their bodies, in order to have the right to, I think in terms of equal opportunities, these days, be in offices, have jobs, be out there in the world, this is the compensation, it’s the sexual corvee that they have to perform.

Perfectly ordinary picture, nothing peculiar, but I think it’s extraordinary. I think the shoes are extraordinary, the fact that she has to expose all her body and I assume she has shaved her legs in order to be able to do this, and so on and so on, and what she’s had to do with her hair, and her face, and the facial gestures are of course crucially important and we need to look at them as well. And she does have her mouth open; I don’t suppose they’d want to photograph her with her mouth closed. Mind you he’s got his mouth slightly open as well, it’s fair to say. Okay. [laughter] But I don’t think it’s because he wishes to be penetrated!

I couldn’t find a man to go with her. She’s on her own but I’ve got her in because I thought it was kind of extraordinary. And I’d love to see a man in that costume! I think that would be great. Why don’t men go round in the evening in that costume? I mean, we’ve got equality, if that’s the situation, if we’re there now. Why aren’t men choosing, ’cause they tell us women choose these practices, choosing to do this? [laughter] Well they’re not, and I think it’s reasonable the men here could probably tell us why they’re not choosing to do this, yes, it’s degrading, it’s extremely painful, and it’s unpleasant. So that’s why they’re choosing not to do it. Okay.

I need to rush on. The cosmetic surgeons who do the cosmetic surgery also cut gender, inscribe gender, into the bodies of men who are trans-sexing, and trans-gendering. And the same surgeons take off the labia of women, and create the labia, supposedly of women, on men who are trans-gendering. And they’ve got websites where they offer all of this stuff. What they’re prepared to offer is getting more and more severe, I suspect at some time in the future they will be offering limb removal on demand, because this is the new thing, this is where we’re going. It’s called Body Identity Integrity Disorder, which is mostly men and I think many of them gay, who wish to have arms and legs removed, some of them wish to have all arms and legs removed, in order to become what’s called quads. Now if you look at the BIID website*, the surgeons and psychiatrists writing on that also do transsexual surgery, and they’re trying to get BIID into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in the US, which would mean that they could legally take legs off, and in fact a surgeon in Scotland has taken healthy legs off two healthy men on demand. Okay? So eventually, there isn’t really a limit, I’m saying to you, to the extraordinary forms of aggressive surgery that are being carried out by cosmetic surgeons.

Now in response to the feminist rejection of beauty practices which Woman Hating encapsulates so well, I abandoned such practices for myself back in 1973. What caused me to do so was reading two books, Sexual Politics and The Female Eunuch, in 1970 to 71. Before that I had long, straight hair which hung over my face, like that. I didn’t want people to see my face, and it was dyed mid golden sable. I used all kinds of make-up, including many different colours around my eyes, false eyelashes, and so on. I depilated my underarms and legs, I wore high heels, I did all that stuff. I was heterosexual and I accepted that I must perform the sexual corvee.

Now, Andrea Dworkin of course abandoned beauty practices, and this is one of the most significant ways in which her detractors have always pilloried her. But her lifelong determination to reject what she called sex roles, and they’re now called gender, and femininity was an inspiration to other feminists always. Few American feminists in particular have rejected femininity entirely. Despite their important contributions in other ways, they have not rejected femininity as firmly and straightforwardly as Andrea did throughout her career.

So we live in a world in which social and political requirements are not just instilled into the minds of citizens through ideological control, but carved into their flesh. In particular the physical requirements that are seen to represent correct gender are carved onto women’s breasts, labia, lips, and onto the bodies of the men who decide they’re women. And the savagery of these practices is an indication that we’re living under a more exacting regime of gender. I will suggest to you that in many ways we are in a worse place, in relation to what’s called gender, than we were before. We are living under what I’d call a new regime of gender. The term gender wasn’t in common usage in the 1970s when Andrea was writing, and she uses the term sex roles. And I like the term sex roles because it makes it clear that the behaviours it describes are socially constructed. It’s a nice, straightforward term, it comes out of sociology. In the 1990s the term gender was adopted by many feminists to stand in for what had previously been called sex roles, i.e. the socially constructed behaviour which boys and girls are acculturated to adopt, in forms appropriate to their sex class categories. Some feminists went further and said the word “gender” was useful because it somehow contained within it the idea that men and women were involved in power relations in something called a “gender system,” or “gender relations.” I never quite understood that and I never liked the term “gender.”

What became clear very quickly was that the term gender experienced what’s called concept capture, in that it was appropriated by those with a very very different politics than feminism, and in fact in many cases anti-feminism. What happened in the nineties was that gender studies took over from women’s studies in universities; gender studies sections took over from women’s studies in bookshops. Meanwhile the term “gender” underwent this metamorphosis with concept capture and went back to the origins, the ways in which sexologists used it in the fifties, which was to describe gender in terms of cross genderism, the sexologists who dealt with transgenders in the fifties really used that term, and they gave it a biological basis, they said there was a biological substrate in the minds of men and women that meant that they could or couldn’t learn the correct gender behaviour. These days the way they explain transgenderism is to say that in the womb, the foetus–there’s no way to prove it so it has to be some kind of mystical thing you can’t prove–in the womb the foetus gets washed in a sudden burst of hormones one day, one morning maybe, and then from then on the person is going to feel they’ve got a different and wrong gender. All right? Can’t prove it, but that is seen as the biological basis of transgenderism today.

“Gender” became an alternative word for sex, so although sex was seen as biological by feminists and gender as socially constructed, eventually “gender” came to stand in for sex. You know that because at universities there are forms for instance that students have to fill in, and there are gender tick boxes, right: gender, tick the box, f or m. And of course, a lot of us would think, I can’t do that, I haven’t got a gender and I don’t want one. So you’re forced in to this, you know, when did you stop beating your wife situation, where you are not able to answer the question. Really, when offered gender, I mean my response would be No, Thank you, [laughter] but I’m not allowed to say on the form, No, thank you. It’s assumed now that gender is the same thing as sex, so gender has, you know, metamorphosed in the public mind.

Now another aspect of this concept capture is the development of a movement of transgender activists, originally called transsexuals. In the nineties this became transgenderism and became more general. Some queer and post-modern theorists would say that transgenderism includes various forms of transvestism, which is usually just the lead up to transgenderism, as well as actual transitioning and sex reassignment surgery. Now, transgenders are committed to traditional notions of gender for their excitement and apparently for their very identities, whereas feminists of the seventies and eighties considered that sex roles would have to be eliminated in the pursuit of women’s freedom. Transgenders seek to protect gender from criticism. They’re involved in what I call a “gender preservation movement,” and through changing legislation in Western countries they’re involved in a gender protection racket. All right? The best example of the gender protection racket is the 2004 legislation in the UK called the Gender Recognition Act, more about that in a moment.

Now gender has now been quarantined for use, not to do with women at all, in the context of transgenderism. There was a 2005 book, called Gender Politics by Surya Monro, published by Pluto Press, and it doesn’t deal with what Surya Monro says are called non-trans women. I think most of the women in this room are probably what are called non-trans women. Judith Butler now calls us bio-women. So as transgenderism actually creates a proper concept of real women, women who are not transgender now have to have a prefix in front of their name, they become non-trans or bio. Hello, Bio-Women! [laughter] In the book, it doesn’t cover women but it’s called Gender Politics, and she does cover sadomasochist and fetish citizenship, on the grounds of human rights. There needs to be human rights for sadomasochists and fetishists, but women are not in the book. Now this is all in a book called Gender Politics, so you can see how far we’ve come from gender being useful to women.

Now the “gender protection racket” has resulted in extraordinary legislation, as in the Gender Recognition Act. In this legislation the term gender is used as if it’s synonymous with sex. The Act enables men or women to come before a Gender Recognition Panel to get a certificate saying that they now have a different gender. The process doesn’t require surgery or hormone treatment, just documents from the medical profession, attesting to the fact that this person has done the real life test of wearing the clothes of the opposite sex. That’s all that’s necessary. One of the results of it is that female to male transsexuals, that is lesbians who have an interest in masculinity, can actually have babies after they’ve got a certificate saying they’re ‘Andrew’, right. So in the maternity ward we could have ‘Andrew’ over the door and Andrew will give birth to a baby. Transgender activists want Andrew then to be able to go down as the father of the child on the birth certificate. That’s not allowed in this legislation but that is what they would like. So that’s how far we’ve got. There are all sorts of other crazy elements of this legislation.

Now one of the things I find puzzling about it is that, when I look at the House of Lords debate on this legislation, those I agree with most are the radical right. Particularly the person I find that I agree with most, in here, and I’m not sure he will be pleased to find this, is Norman Tebbitt. Now, Norman Tebbitt is not having any of it, right, so in response to the Gender Recognition Act, he says, he gives a very good definition of gender as socially constructed and says, in your act you’ve got it confused, right, it should say sex and you’ve got gender. And Lord Filkin, for the government, who is putting this legislation through, says that sex and gender are the same thing and anyway, what does it matter? Right, isn’t that extraordinary? Tebbitt then accuses him of linguistic relativism. Which I love. [laughter] Couldn’t have put it better myself. Tebbitt also says that the savage mutilation of transgenderism, we would say if it was taking place in other cultures apart from the culture of Britain, was a harmful cultural practice, and how come we’re not recognising that in the British Isles. So he makes all of these arguments from the radical right, which is quite embarrassing to me, but I have to say, so called progressive and left people are not recognising the human rights violations of transgenderism or how crazy the legislation is. The legislation makes us engage in a folie à everybody, right? Everybody now has to go mad in order to understand or respond to this legislation.

Okay, what I am worried about is that in this new regime of gender, this very savage regime, we might all have to come before a gender recognition panel. The piece I am writing about this act at the moment is ‘They’ll know it if they see it, The Gender Recognition Act’. I mean if I come before the gender recognition panel, because the State is now regulating gender, it’s always regulated sex but now it’s got into gender, right. If I come before the panel what are they gonna say? I can’t say “no thanks” to them. So we’ve reached a rather dramatic stage where the State and legislation has got involved in regulating gender in incredibly traditional and very vicious, and I think, quite savage ways.

Right, I know I’m going to have to rush to the end. Why is all of that practice, the practice of transgenderism and that legislation acceptable? I think because there’s a very very deep-seated understanding within Western culture and perhaps all cultures, that something called gender does exist, must exist, cannot be got rid of, that there is some inevitable biological difference, doesn’t matter if it hops about and goes to the people you wouldn’t expect to have it, as long as it stays there. What cannot be imagined, is that gender could be got over, got through, and removed so that all women could have their feet on the ground. And that’s the crucial thing I think about Andrea Dworkin’s work and about Woman Hating, is she said, “We have to destroy culture as we know it.” Not accommodate gender with extraordinary legislation, terrible mutilating operations and hormones for the life of these unfortunate people who have been confused and destroyed by the gender system in which we presently live.

I’ll have to leave out everything else I was going to say and simply say at the end that reading Andrea Dworkin’s work makes me feel sane. It helps me to feel that it’s reasonable to work towards the elimination of gender, not tinkering, but actually working towards the elimination of gender. And it helps me in my conviction that feminism will come again. Looking back at 1974, the fact that we’re having this celebration, the fact that there are young women interested in the work of Andrea Dworkin, makes me feel more confident about the future. Thank you. [applause]

Please note: The photos were substituted as the photos shown by Sheila Jeffreys during the talk were not available.

[repriseofthereprise]

On Being White: Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy*

By Marilyn Frye

From The Politics Of Reality: Essays In Feminist Theory (The Crossing Press 1983)

I

White feminists come to renewed and earnest thought about racism not entirely spontaneously. We are pressed by women of color. Women of color have been at feminist conferences, meetings and festivals and speaking up, pointing out that their needs and interests are not being taken into account nor answered and that much that white feminists do and say is racist. Some white feminists have been aware of and acting against racism all along, and spontaneously, but the topic of racism has arrived per force in the feminist newspapers and journals, at the National Women’s Studies Association, in women’s centers and women’s bookstores in the last couple of years, not so much because some white feminists urged this but because women of color have demanded it.

Nonetheless, many white feminists have to a fair extent responded to the demand; by which I mean, white feminists have to a fair extent chosen to hear what it was usually in their power not to hear. The hearing is, as anyone who has been on the scene knows, sometimes very defensive, sometimes dulled by fear, sometimes alarmingly partial or distorted. But it has interested me that I and other white feminists have heard the objections and demands, for I think it is an aspect of race privilege to have a choice–a choice between the options of hearing and not hearing. That is part of what being white gets you.

This matter of the powers white feminists have because of being white came up for me very concretely in a real-life situation a while back. Conscientiously, and with the encouragement of various women of color–both friends and women speaking in the feminist press–a group of white women formed a white women’s consciousness-raising group to identify and explore the racism in our lives with a view to dismantling the barriers that blocked our understanding and action in this matter. As is obvious from this description, we certainly thought of ourselves as doing the right thing. Some women of color talked with us about their view that it was racist to make it a group for white women only; we discussed our reasons and invited women of color who wanted to participate to come to the meeting for further discussion.

In a later community meeting, one Black woman criticized us very angrily for ever thinking we could achieve our goals by working only with white women. We said we never meant this few weeks of this particular kind of work to be all we ever did and told her we had decided at the beginning to organize a group open to all women shortly after our series of white women’s meetings came to a close. Well, as some of you will know without my telling, we could hardly have said anything less satisfying to our critic. She exploded with rage: “You decided!” Yes. We consulted the opinions of some women of color, but still, we decided. “Isn’t that what we are supposed to do?” we said to ourselves, “Take responsibility, decide what to do, and do something?” She seemed to be enraged by our making decisions, by our acting, by our doing anything. It seemed like doing nothing would be racist and whatever we did would be racist just because we did it. We began to lose hope; we felt bewildered and trapped. It seemed that what our critic was saying must be right; but what she was saying didn’t seem to make any sense.

She seemed crazy to me.

That stopped me.

I paused and touched and weighed that seeming. It was familiar. I know it as deceptive, defensive. I know it from both sides; I have been thought crazy by others too righteous, too timid and too defended to grasp the enormity of our difference and the significance of their offenses. I backed off. To get my balance, I reached for what I knew when I was not frightened.

A woman was called “schizophrenic.” She said her father was trying to kill her. He was beside himself: anguished and baffled that she would not drink coffee he brought her for fear he had poisoned it. How could she think that? But then, why had she “gone mad” and been reduced to incompetence by the ensuing familial and social processes? Was her father trying to kill her? No, of course not: he was a good-willed man and loved his daughter. But also, yes, of course. Every good fatherly thing about him, including his caring decisions about what will improve things for her, are poisonous to her. The Father is death to The Daughter. And she knows it.

What is it that our Black woman critic knows? Am I racist when I (a white woman) decide what I shall do to try to grow and heal the wounds and scars of racism among lesbians and feminists? Am I racist if I decide to do nothing? If I decide to refuse to work with other white women on our racism? My deciding, deciding anything, is poison to her. Is this what she knows?

Every choice or decision I make is made in a matrix of options. Racism distorts and limits that matrix in various ways. My being on the white side of racism leaves me a different variety of options than are available to a woman of color. As a white woman I have certain freedoms and liberties. When I use them, according to my white woman’s judgment, to act on matters of racism, my enterprise reflects strangely on the matrix of options within which it is undertaken. In the case at hand, I was deciding when to relate to white women and when to relate to women of color according to what I thought would reduce my racism, enhance my growth and improve my politics. It becomes clearer why no decision I make here can fail to be an exercise of race privilege. (And yet this cannot be an excuse for not making a decision, though perhaps it suggests that a decision should be made at a different level.)

Does being white make it impossible for me to be a good person?

II

What is this “being white” that gets me into so much trouble, after so many years of seeming to me to be so benign? What is this privilege of race? What is race?

First, there is the matter of skin color. Supposedly one is white if one is white. I mean, one is a member of the white race if one’s skin is white. But that is not really so. Many people whose skin is white, by which of course we don’t really mean white, are Black or Mexican or Puerto Rican or Mohawk. And some people who are dark-skinned are white. Natives of India and Pakistan are generally counted as white in this country though perhaps to the average white American they look dark. While it cannot be denied that conceptions of race and of whiteness have much to do with fetishes about pigmentation, that seems to me not to be the Heart of Whiteness. Light skin may get a person counted as white; it does not make a person white.

Whiteness is, it seems pretty obvious, a social or political construct of some sort, something elaborated upon conceptions of kinship or common ancestry and upon ancient ethnocentric associations of good and evil with light and dark. Those who fashion this construct of whiteness, who elaborate on these conceptions, are primarily a certain group of males. It is their construct. They construct a conception of their “us,” their kindred, their nation, their tribe. Earliest uses of the word ‘race’ in English, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, make this clear. The people of one’s race were those of a common lineage or ancestry. People of like coloring could be of different races. The connection of race to color was a historical development and one which did not entirely eclipse the earlier meaning. Race, as defined and conceived by the white male arbiters of conceptions, is still not entirely a matter of color. One can be very pale, and yet if there are persons of color in one’s lineage, one can be classed as Black, Indian, etc.

On the other hand, it is the experience of light-skinned people from family and cultural backgrounds that are Black or another dark group that white people tend to disbelieve or discount their tellings of their histories. There is a pressure coming from white people to make light-skinned people be white. Michelle Cliff speaks of this in her book Claiming An Identity They Taught Me To Despise.1 Cliff is a light-skinned woman who looks white to most white people. She encounters among white people resistance, even hostility, to her assertion that she is Black. In another case, a friend of mine to whom I have been quite close off and on for some fifteen or twenty years, noticed I was assuming she is white: she told me she had told me years ago that she is Mexican. Apparently I did not hear, or I forgot, or it was convenient for me to whitewash her.**

The concept of whiteness is not just used, in these cases, it is wielded. Whites exercise a power of defining who is white and who is not, and are jealous of that power.2 If a light-skinned person of “colored” kinship claims to be white, and white people discover the person’s background, they see that a person who might be a marginal case has decided what she is. Because the white person cannot allow that deciding, the decision must be reversed. On the other hand, when someone has been clearly and definitively decided to be white by whites, her claim that she is not white must be challenged; again because anyone who is even possibly marginal cannot be allowed to draw the line. To such a person, a white person is saying: I have decided you are white so you are white, because what I say about who is white and who is not is definitive.

To be white is to be a member of an in-group, a kin group, which is self-defining. Just as with fraternities or sororities, the power to draw the membership line is jealously guarded. Though a variety of traits and histories are relevant to whether one will be defined into or out of that group, one essential thing is that the group is self-defining, that it exercises control of access to membership. Members can bend the rules of membership anytime, if that is necessary to assert the members’ sole and exclusive authority to decide who is a member; in fact, bending the rules is an ideal expression of that authority.

A particularly insidious expression of this emerges when members of the self-appointed “superior” group tend casually to grant membership by “generously” giving people “the benefit of the doubt.” If the question does not arise, or does not arise explicitly or blatantly, one will generally be assumed by white people to be white, since the contrary assumption might be (by white judgment) insulting. A parallel to this is the arrogant presumption on the part of heterosexual people that anyone they meet is heterosexual. The question often must be made to arise, blatantly and explicitly, before the heterosexual person will consider the thought that one is lesbian or homosexual. Otherwise, even if some doubt arises, one will be given the dubious benefit of the doubt rather than be thought “ill” of, that is, suspected of “deviance.”

The parallelism of heterosexuality and whiteness holds up in at least one more respect. In both cases there are certain members of the dominant group who systematically do not give the benefit of their doubt. They seem on the lookout for people whom they can suppose want to pass as members of their club. These are the sorts of people who are fabulously sensitive to clues that someone is Mulatto, Jewish, Indian or gay, and are eager to notify others of the person’s supposed pretense of being “normal” or “white” (or whatever), though the person may have been making no pretense at all.*** This latter type is quite commonly recognized as a racist, anti-Semite or homophobe, while the other type, the one who “graciously” lets the possibly deviant/dark person pass as normal/white, is often considered a nice person and not a bigot. People of both types seem to me to be equally arrogant: both are arrogating definitional power to themselves and thereby asserting that defining is exclusively their prerogative.

I think that almost all white people engage in the activity of defining membership in the group of white people in one or another of these modes, quite un-self-consciously and quite constantly. It is very hard, in individual cases, to give up this habit and await people’s deciding for themselves what group they are members of.

The tendency of members of the group called white to be generously inclusive, to count as white anybody not obviously nonwhite, seems to be of a piece with another habit of members of that group, namely, the habit of false universalization. As feminists we are very familiar with the male version of this: the men write and speak and presumably, therefore, also think, as though whatever is true of them is true of everybody. White people also speak in universals. A great deal of what has been written by white feminists is limited by this sort of false universalization. Much of what we have said is accurate only if taken to be about white women and white men within white culture (middle-class white women and white men, in fact). For the most part, it never occurred to us to modify our nouns accordingly; to our minds the people we were writing about were people. We don’t think of ourselves as white.

It is an important breakthrough for a member of a dominant group to come to know s/he is a member of a group, to know that what s/he is is only a part of humanity. It was breathtaking to discover that in the culture I was born and reared in, the word `woman’ means white woman, just as we discovered before that the word ‘man’ means male man. This sudden expansion of the scope of one’s perception can produce a cold rush of awareness of the arbitrariness of the definitions, the brittleness of these boundaries. Escape becomes thinkable.

The group to which I belong, presumably by virtue of my pigmentation, is not ordained in Nature to be socially and politically recognized as a group, but is so ordained only by its own members through their own self-serving and politically motivated hoarding of definitional power. What this can mean to white people is that we are not white by nature but by political classification, and hence it is in principle possible to disaffiliate. If being white is not finally a matter of skin color, which is beyond our power to change, but of politics and power, then perhaps white individuals in a white supremacist society are not doomed to dominance by logic or nature.

III

Some of my experience has made me feel trapped and set up so that my actions are caught in a web that connects them inexorably to sources in white privilege and to consequences oppressive to people of color (especially to women of color). Clearly, if one wants to extricate oneself from such a fate or (if the feeling was deceptive) from such a feeling of fatedness, the first rule for the procedure can only be: educate oneself.

One can, and should, educate oneself and overcome the terrible limitations imposed by the abysmal ignorance inherent in racism. There are traps, of course. For instance, one may slip into a frame of mind which distances those one is learning about as “objects of study.” While one is educating oneself about the experiences and perspectives of the peoples one is ignorant about, and in part as a corrective to the errors of one’s ways, one should also be studying one’s own ignorance. Ignorance is not something simple: it is not a simple lack, absence or emptiness, and it is not a passive state. Ignorance of this sort–the determined ignorance most white Americans have of American Indian tribes and clans, the ostrichlike ignorance most white Americans have of the histories of Asian peoples in this country, the impoverishing ignorance most white Americans have of Black language–ignorance of these sorts is a complex result of many acts and many negligences. To begin to appreciate this one need only hear the active verb to ‘ignore’ in the word ‘ignorance’. Our ignorance is perpetuated for us in many ways and we have many ways of perpetuating it for ourselves.

I was at a poetry reading by the Black lesbian feminist, Audre Lorde. In her poems she invoked African goddesses, naming several of them. After the reading a white woman rose to speak. She said first that she was very ignorant of African religious and cultural history, and then she asked the poet to spell the names of these goddesses and to tell her where she might look for their stories. The poet replied by telling her that there is a bibliography in the back of the book from which she was reading which would provide the relevant information. The white woman did not thank the poet and sit down. The white woman (who I know is literate) said, “I see, but will you spell their names for me?” What I saw was a white woman committed to her ignorance and being stubborn in its defense. She would convince herself that she cannot use this bibliography if the Black woman will not spell the names for her. She will say she tried to repair her ignorance but the poet would not cooperate. The poet. The Black woman poet who troubled herself to include a bibliography in her book of poems. ****

In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man3 (a book of considerable value to feminists), one can see the structures of white ignorance from the side of the ignored. Nothing the protagonist can do makes him visible. He wants nothing so badly as to be seen and heard. But he is frustrated by an opaque and dense veil made up of lies the white men tell each other about Black men. He is ignored nearly to death.

There is an enlightening account of some structures of white ignorance also in a story called “Meditations on History,” by Sherley Ann Williams.4 In the story, a man who is writing a book about how to manage slaves is visiting a place where a slave woman is being held until her baby is born so that, when they hang her for running away and killing a white man, her owner will at least have the baby to make up for his loss. The writer is interviewing the woman to find out why she killed the slave trader, and why and how the slaves got loose. (His ignorance is, of course, already showing, along with some of the structures which both motivate and support it.) He is irritated by her humming and singing, but it never occurs to him that it means anything. By way of her songs, the woman is able to conspire with the other slaves around the place; she tells them that her friends will come to rescue her and notifies them when the time is at hand; they cooperate with her, and she escapes. The hapless interviewer is totally baffled by her escape. His presumptions have closed out knowledge; his ignorance has been self-constructed. His ignorance has also been both encouraged and used by the slave woman, who has deliberately and reasonably played on it by pretending to be stupid, robotic and disoriented. It was certainly not in her interest to disabuse him of his assumptions that her singing was mindless and that she was too mindless to be plotting an escape. Ignorance works like this, creating the conditions which ensure its continuance.

White women can dip into our own experience as women for knowledge of the ways in which ignorance is complex and willful, for we know from our interactions with white men (and not necessarily only with men who are white) the “absence” imposed on us by our not being taken seriously, and we sense its motivation and know it is not simply accidental oversight.

If one wonders at the mechanisms of ignorance, at how a person can be right there and see and hear, and yet not know, one of the answers lies with the matter of attention. The man in Williams’ story constantly daydreams about what a great success his book is going to be; he has compelling fantasies of his own fame and recognition–recognition by white men, of course. He is much more intent upon the matter of whom he will please and impress than he is upon the matter at hand. Members of dominant groups are habitually busy with impressing each other and care more for that than for actually knowing what is going on. And again, white women can learn from our own experience a propos (most often, white) men. We do much of what we do with a great anxiety for how we will be received by men–by mentors, friends, husbands, lovers, editors, members of our disciplines, professions or political groups, tenure-review committees, fathers. With our attention focused on these men, or our imaginings of them, we cannot pay attention to the matter at hand and will wind up ignorant of things which were perfectly apparent. Thus, without any specific effort these men can turn white women to the work of falsification even as we try to educate ourselves. Since white women are almost white men, being white, at least, and sometimes more-or-less honorary men, we can cling to a hope of true membership in the dominant and powerful group, and if our focus is thus locked on them by this futile hope, we can be stuck in our ignorance and theirs all our lives. (Some men of color fall into the parallel trap of hoping for membership in the dominant and powerful group, this time because of their sex. With their attention focused on power and money, they cannot see women, of their race or any other.) Attention has everything to do with knowledge.

IV

White women’s attachments to white men have a great deal to do with our race privilege, with our racism and with our inabilities to understand these. Race and racism also have a great deal to do with white women’s attachment to white men. We need to look at these connections more closely. Within the span of a few days, a little while back, I encountered three things that came together like pieces of a simple puzzle:

I heard a report on the radio about the “new” Klan. It included a recording of a man making a speech to the effect that the white race is threatened with extinction. He explicitly compared the white race to the species of animals that are classed as “endangered” and protected by laws. He also noted with concern the fact that ten years ago the population of Canada was 98 percent white and it is now only 87 percent white.#

2. In a report in the feminist newspaper Big Mama Rag, it was pointed out that “they” are making it virtually impossible for white women to get abortions while forcing sterilization of women of color both in the United States and around the world.

In the feminist magazine Conditions, No. 7, there was a conversation among several Black and Jewish lesbians. Among other things, they discussed the matter of the pressure on them to have Black or Jewish babies, to contribute to the survival of their races, which are threatened with extinction. ##

I think on all this. For hundreds of years and for a variety of reasons, mostly economic, white men of European stock have been out, world-wide, conquering, colonizing and enslaving people they classify as dark, earning the latter’s hatred and rage in megadeath magnitudes. For hundreds of years, those same white men have known they were a minority in the population of the world, and more recently many of them, have believed in the doctrine that darkness is genetically dominant. White men have their reasons to be afraid of racial extinction.###

I begin to think that this fear is one of the crucial sources of white racism even among the nonrabid who do not actively participate in Klan Kulture. This suggests a reading of the dominant culture’s immense pressure on “women” to be mothers. The dominant culture is white, and its pressure is on white women to have white babies. The magazine images of the glories of motherhood do not show white mothers with little brown babies. Feminists have commonly recognized that the pressures of compulsory motherhood on women of color is not just pressure to keep women down, but pressure to keep the populations of their races up; we have not so commonly thought that the pressures of compulsory motherhood on white women are not just pressures to keep women down, but pressure to keep the white population up.

This aspect of compulsory motherhood for white women–white men’s anxiety for the survival of their race####–has not been explicit or articulate in the lifetimes and lives of white women in my circles, and the pressure to make babies has been moderated by the pressure for “family planning” (which I interpret as a project of quality control). But what is common and overt in primarily white circles where the racism runs deep and mostly silent is another curious phenomenon.

In the all white or mostly white environments I have usually lived and worked in, when the women start talking up feminism and lesbian feminism, we are very commonly challenged with the claim that if we had our way, the species would die out. (The assumption our critics make here is that if women had a choice, we would never have intercourse and never bear children. This reveals a lot about the critics’ own assessment of the joys of sex, pregnancy, birthing and motherhood.) They say the species would die out. What I suspect is that the critics confuse the white race with the human species, just as men have confused males with the human species. What the critics are saying, once it is decoded, is that the white race might die out. The demand that white women make white babies to keep the race afloat has not been overt, but I think it is being made over and over again in disguised form as a preachment within an all-white context about our duty to keep the species afloat.

Many white women, certainly many white feminists in the milieux I am familiar with, have not consciously thought that white men may be fearing racial extinction and, at the least, wanting our services to maintain their numbers. Perhaps here in middle America, most white women are so secure in white dominance that such insecure thoughts as whether there are enough white people around do not occur. But also, because we white women have been able to think of ourselves as looking just at women and men when we really were looking at white women and white men, we have generally interpreted our connections with these men solely in terms of gender, sexism and male dominance. We have to figure their desire for racial dominance into the equations.

Simply as females, as mere women in this world, we who are female and white stand to be poor, ill-educated, preyed upon and despised. But because we are both female and white, we belong to that group of women from which the men of the racially dominant group choose their mates. Because of that we are given some access to the benefits they have as members of the racially dominant male group–access to material and educational benefits and the specious benefits of enjoying secondhand feelings of superiority and supremacy. We also have the specious benefit of a certain hope (a false hope, as it turns out) which women of subordinated races do not have, namely the hope of becoming actually dominant with the white men, as their “equals.” This last pseudo-benefit binds us most closely to them in racial solidarity. A liberal white feminism would seek “equality”; we can hardly expect to be heard as saying we want social and economic status equal to that of, say, Chicanos. If what we want is equality with our white brothers, then what we want is, among other things, our own firsthand participation in racial dominance rather than the secondhand ersatz dominance we get as the dominant group’s women. No wonder such feminism has no credibility with women of color.

Race is a tie that binds us to men: “us” being white women, and “men” being white men. If we wish not to be bound in subordination to men, we have to give up trading on our white skin for white men’s race privilege. And on the other hand, if we detach ourselves from reproductive service to white men (in the many senses and dimensions of “reproduction”), the threat we pose is not just to their male selves but to their white selves. White men’s domination and control of’ white women is essential to their project of maintaining their racial dominance. This is probably part of the explanation of why the backlash against feminism overlaps in time and personnel with renewed intensity and overtness of white racism in this country. When their control of “their” women is threatened, their confidence in their racial dominance is threatened.

It is perfectly clear that this did not occur to many of us in advance, but for white women a radical feminism is treacherous to the white race as presently constructed and instituted in this country. The growing willingness of white women to forego the material benefits and ego supports available through connections with white men makes us much harder to contain and control as part of the base of their racial dominance. For many of us, resistance to white male domination was first, and quite naturally, action simply for our own release from a degradation and tyranny we hated in and of itself. But in this racial context, our pursuit of our liberation (I do not say “of equality”) is, whether or not we so intend it, disloyal to Whiteness.

I recommend that we make this disloyalty an explicit part of our politics and embrace it, publicly. This can help us to steer clear of a superficial politics of just wanting what our white brothers have, and help us develop toward a genuine disaffiliation from that Whiteness that has, finally, so little to do with skin color and so much to do with racism.

V

In a certain way it is true that being white-skinned means that everything I do will be wrong–at the least an exercise of unwarranted privilege–and I will encounter the reasonable anger of women of color at every turn. But ‘white’ also designates a political category, a sort of political fraternity. Membership in it is not in the same sense “fated” or “natural.” It can be resisted.

There is a correct line on the matter of white racism which is, in fact, quite correct, to the effect that as a white person one must never claim not to be racist, but only to be anti-racist. The reasoning is that racism is so systematic and white privilege so impossible to escape, that one is, simply, trapped. On one level this is perfectly true and must always be taken into account. Taken as the whole and final truth, it is also unbearably and dangerously dismal. It would place us in the hopeless moral position of one who believes in original sin but in no mechanism of redemption. But white supremacy is not a law of nature, nor is any individual’s complicity in it.

Feminists make use of a distinction between being male and being “a man,” or masculine. I have enjoined males of my acquaintance to set themselves against masculinity. I have asked them to think about how they can stop being men, and I was not recommending a sex-change operation. I do not know how they can stop being men, but I think it is thinkable, and it is a counsel of hope. Likewise I can set myself against Whiteness: I can give myself the injunction to stop being White.

I do not suggest for a moment that I can disaffiliate by a private act of will, or by any personal strategy. Nor, certainly, is it accomplished simply by thinking it possible. To think it thinkable shortcuts no work and shields one from no responsibility. Quite the contrary, it may be a necessary prerequisite to assuming responsibility, and it invites the honorable work of radical imagination.

Footnotes

* This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk I delivered to general audience at Cornell University, sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program, the Philosophy Department and the James H. Becker Alumni Lecture Series, October 29, 1981. In the revision process I profited from the comments and criticisms of Nancy K. Bereano, Michele Nevels, Carolyn Shafer, Sandra Siegel, Sharon Keller and Dorothy Yoshimuri This piece, more than any other in the collection, directly reflects and is limited by my own location, both culturally and in a process of change. The last thing I would want is that it be read either as my last, or as a complete, account of what whiteness is and of what that means to a white feminist. I do not for a moment take it or intend it to be either.

** As Ran Hall pointed out: “the definition of ‘whitewash’–a concealing or glossing over of flaws–does not imply improving or correcting an object or situation but the covering of reality with a cheap, inferior disguise (whiteness).” See “dear martha,” in Common Lives Lesbian Lives: A Lesbian Quarterly, No. 6., Winter, 1982, p. 40.

*** I have not generally included Jews in my lists of examples of “racial” groups because when I did, Jewish critics of this material said that the ways in which anti-Semitism and other sorts of racism are similar and different make such simple inclusion misleading. I include Jews among my examples right here because with respect specifically to these questions of being allowed or not allowed to “pass” (whether one wants to or not), anti-Semitism and other kinds of racism are similar. Although many Jews are politically white in many ways in this country, when they “pass” as non-Jewish, what they may get is the treatment and reception accorded to ordinary “white” Americans. Paradoxically, though Jewish is not equivalent to nonwhite, passing still seems to be passing as white. My thanks to Nancy Bereano for useful discussion of these matters.

**** I do not mean to suggest she provided the bibliography specifically or primarily for the education of white women; but it is reasonable to assume she thought it would be useful to whatever white woman might happen along with suitable curiosity.

# This report went by quickly and I had no way to take notes, so I cannot vouch either for his statistics or for the absolute accuracy of my report of his statistics, but these figures do accurately reflect the genera magnitude of “the problem” and of his problem.

## Many Blacks in this country have a global perspective which reveals that though white racism here has its genocidal aspect, Blacks in America are certainly not the whole Black race. For such people, the idea that their race is threatened with extinction may not have the force it would have for those with a more “american” perspective.

### Edward Fields, a principal ideologue and propagandist for the Klan, was asked if homosexuals are a threat to the white race. He replied that they are, and went on to say: “Our birthrate is extremely low. We are below population zero, below 2.5 children per family. The white race is going down fast, we are only 12% of the world population. In 1990, we’ll be only 10% of the population worldwide. We’ll be an extinct species if homosexuality continues to grow, interracial marriage continues to take people out of the white race, if our birthrate continues to fall.” (quoted in “Into the Fires of Hatred: A Portrait of Klan Leader Edward Fields” by Lee David Hoshall with Nancy A. F. Langer, in Gay Community News November 6, 1982, p. 5.)

#### Male chauvinism makes the men think of themselves as the white race. In this context it is appropriate to call it their race, not “our” race.

Endnotes

Persephone Press, Watertown, Massachusetts, 1980.

Cf., “The Problem That Has No Name,” in this collection, for discussion of the speciousness and of the effectiveness of such power.

Random House, New York, 1952.

In Midnight Birds, Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers, edited by Mary Helen Washington (Anchor Doubleday, New York, 1980).

Feminist Reprise thanks KY for her assistance in readying this article for the site.

[repriseofthereprise]

White Woman Feminist

By Marilyn Frye

From Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism (The Crossing Press 1992)

Introduction

This essay is the latest version of something I have been rewriting ever since my essay “On Being White” was published in The Politics of Reality. In a way, this is that first essay, emerging after several metamorphoses.

“On Being White” grew out of experiences I had in my home lesbian community in which I was discovering some of what it means for a woman, a feminist, to be white. These were very frustrating experiences: they played out and revealed the ways in which the fact that I am white gave unbidden and unwanted meanings to my thought and my actions and poisoned them all with privilege.

An intermediate version of this work, delivered at various colleges and universities around 1984-86, began with the following account of my attempts to come to grips with the fact of being white in a white-supremacist racist state, and with some of the criticism my first effort had drawn.1

Many white feminists, myself included, have tried to identify and change the attitudes and behaviors which blocked our friendly and effective comradeship with women of color and limited our ability to act against institutional racism. I assumed at first that these revisions would begin with analysis and decision: I had to understand the problems and then do whatever would effect the changes dictated by this understanding. But as I entered this work, I almost immediately learned that my competence to do it was questionable. The idea was put to me by several women of color (and was stated in writings by women of color) that a white woman is not in a good position to analyze institutional or personal racism and a white woman’s decisions about what to do about racism cannot be authentic. About conscious raising groups for white women, Sharon Keller said to me in a letter, “I think that there are things which white women working together can accomplish but I do not think that white women are in the best positions usually to know what those things are or when it is the right time to do them. It would go a long way …for white women to take seriously their [relative] helplessness in this matter.” White women’s analysis of their own racism has also often been heard by women of color as “mere psychologizing.”…To be rid of racism, a white woman may indeed have to do some introspecting, remembering and verbalizing of feelings, but the self-knowledge which she might achieve by this work would necessarily produce profound change, and there are many reasons why many white women may not want to change. White women’s efforts to gain self-knowledge are easily undermined by the desire not to live out the consequences of getting it; their/our projects of consciousness-raising and self-analysis are very susceptible to the slide from “working on yourself” to “playing with yourself.” Apparently the white woman herself is ill-situated for telling which is which… All of my ways of knowing seemed to have failed me–my perception, my common sense, my good will, my anger, honor and affection, my intelligence and insight. Just as walking requires something fairly sturdy and firm underfoot, so being an actor in the world requires a foundation of ordinary moral and intellectual confidence. Without that, we don’t know how to be or how to act; we become strangely stupid; the commitment against racism becomes itself immobilizing. Even obvious and easy acts either do not occur to us or threaten to be racist by presumptuous assumptions or misjudged timing, wording, or circumstances. Simple things like courtesy or giving money, attending a trial, working on a project initiated by women of color, or dissenting from racist views expressed in white company become fraught with possibilities of error and offense. If you want to do good, and you don’t know good from bad, you can’t move.2 Thus stranded, we also learned that it was exploitive and oppressive to ask for the help of women of color in extricating ourselves from this ignorance, confusion, incompetence and moral failure. Our racism is our problem, not theirs.3 Some white women report that the great enemy of their efforts to combat their own racism is their feelings of guilt. That is not my own experience, or that is not my word for it. The great enemies in my heart have been the despair and the resentment which come with being required (by others and by my own integrity) to repair something apparently irreparable, required to take responsibility for something apparently beyond my powers to effect. Both confounded and angry, my own temptation is to collapse–to admit defeat and retire from the field. What counteracts that temptation, for me, seems to be little more than willfulness and lust: I will not be broken, and my appetite for woman’s touch is not, thank goodness, thoroughly civilized to the established categories. But if I cannot give up and I cannot act, what do Will and Lust recommend? The obvious way out of the relentless logic of my situation is to cease being white.

The Contingency of Racedness

I was brought up with a concept of race according to which you cannot stop being the race you are: your race is an irreversible physical, indeed, ontological fact about you. But when the criteria for membership in a race came up as an issue among white people I knew, considerations of skin color and biological lineage were not definitive or decisive, or rather, they were so precisely when white people decided they should be, and were not when white people wanted them not to be. As I argued in “On Being White”4, white people actively legislate matters of race membership, and if asserting their right to do so requires making decisions that override physical criteria, they ignore physical criteria (without, of course, ever abandoning the ideological strategy of insisting the categories are given in nature). This sort of behavior clearly demonstrates that people construct race, actively, and that people who think they are unquestionably white generally think the criteria of what it is to be of this race or that are theirs to manipulate.5

Being white is not a biological condition. It is being a member of a certain social/political category, a category that is persistently maintained by those people who are, in their own and each others’ perception, most unquestionably in it. It is like being a member of a political party, or a club, or a fraternity–or being a Methodist or a Mormon. If one is white one is a member of a continuously and politically constituted group which holds itself together by rituals of unity and exclusion, which develops in its members certain styles and attitudes useful in the exploitation of others, which demands and rewards fraternal loyalty, which defines itself as the paradigm of humanity, and which rationalizes (and naturalizes) its existence and its practices of exclusion, colonization, slavery and genocide (when it bothers to) in terms of a mythology of blood and skin. If you were born to people who are members of that club, you are socialized and inducted into that club. Your membership in it is in a way, or to a degree, compulsory–nobody gave you any choice in the matter–but it is contingent and, in the Aristotelian sense, accidental. Well then, if you don’t like being a member of that club, you might think of resigning your membership, or of figuring out how to get yourself kicked out of the club, how to get yourself excommunicated.

But this strategy of “separation” is vulnerable to a variety of criticisms. A white woman cannot cease having the history she has by some sort of divorce ritual. Furthermore, the renunciation of whiteness may be an act of self-loathing rather than an act of liberation.6 And disassociation from the racegroup one was born into might seem to be an option for white folks, but seems either not possible or not politically desirable to most members of the other groups from which the whites set themselves off.7 This criticism suggests that my thinking of disassociating from membership in the white fraternity is just another exercise (hence, another reinforcement) of that white privilege which I was finding so onerous and attempting to escape. All these criticisms sound right (and I will circle back to them at the end of the essay), but there is something very wrong here. This closure has the distinctive finality of a trap.

In academic circles where I now circulate, it has become a commonplace that race is a “social construction” and not a naturally given and naturally maintained grouping of human individuals with naturally determined sets of traits. And the recognition of race as non-natural is presumed, in those circles, to be liberatory. Pursuing the idea of disassociating from the race-category in which I am placed and from the perquisites attached to it is a way of pursuing the question of what freedom can be made of this, and for whom. But it is seeming to me that race (together with racism and race privilege) is apparently constructed as something inescapable. And it makes sense that it would be, since such a construction would best serve those served by race and racism. Of course race and racism are impossible to escape; of course a white person is always in a sticky web of privilege that permits only acts which reinforce (“reinscribe”) racism. This just means that some exit must be forced. That will require conceptual creativity, and perhaps conceptual violence.

The “being white” that has presented itself to me as a burden and an insuperable block to my growth out of racism is not essentially about the color of my skin or any other inherited bodily trait, even though doctrines of color are bound up with this status in some ways. The problem then, is to find a way to think clearly about some kind of whiteness that is not essentially tied to color and yet has some significant relation to color. The distinction feminists have made between maleness and masculinity provides a clue and an analogy. Maleness we have construed as something a human animal can be born with; masculinity we have construed as something a human animal can be trained to–and it is an empirical fact that most male human animals are trained to it in one or another of its cultural varieties.8 Masculinity is not a blossoming consequence of genetic constitution as lush growths of facial hair seem to be in the males of many human groups. But the masculinity of an adult male is far from superficial or incidental and we know it is not something an individual could shrug off like a coat or snap out of like an actor stepping out of his character. The masculinity of an adult male human in any particular culture is also profoundly connected with the local perceptions and conceptions of maleness (as “biological”), its causes and its consequences. So it may be with being white, but we need some revision of our vocabulary to say it rightly. We need a term in the realm of race and racism whose grammar is analogous to the grammar of the term ‘masculinity’. I am tempted to recommend the neologism ‘albosity’ for this honor, but I’m afraid it is too strange to catch on. So I will introduce ‘whitely’ and ‘whiteliness’ as terms whose grammar is analogous to that of ‘masculine’ and ‘masculinity’. Being whiteskinned (like being male) is a matter of physical traits presumed to be physically determined; being whitely (like being masculine) I conceive as a deeply ingrained way of being in the world. Following the analogy with masculinity, I assume that the connection between whiteliness and light-colored skin is a contingent connection: this character could be manifested by persons who are not “white;” it can be absent in persons who are.

In the next section, I will talk about whiteliness in a free and speculative way, exploring what it may be. This work is raw preliminary sketching; it moves against no such background of research and attentive observation as there is to guide accounts of masculinity. There is of course a large literature on racism, but I think that what I am after here is not one and the same thing as racism, either institutional or personal. Whiteliness is connected to institutional racism (as will emerge further on in the discussion) by the fact that individuals with this sort of character are well-suited to the social roles of agents of institutional racism, but it is a character of persons, not of institutions. Whiteliness is also related to individual or personal racism, but I think it is not one and the same thing as racism, at least in the sense where ‘racism’ means bigotry/hate/ignorance/indifference. As I understand masculinity it is not the same thing as misogyny; similarly, whiteliness is not the same thing as race-hatred. One can be whitely even if one’s beliefs and feelings are relatively well-informed, humane and good-willed. So I approach whiteliness freshly, as itself, as something which is both familiar and unknown.

Whiteliness

To begin to get a picture of what whiteliness is, we need to invoke a certain candid and thoughtful reflection on the part of white people, who of course in some ways know themselves best; we also need to listen to what people of color perceive of white people, since in some ways they know white people best. For purposes of this brief and preliminary exploration, I will draw on material from three books for documentation of how white people are as presented in the experience of people of color. The three are This Bridge Called My Back9, which is a collection of writings by radical women of color, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center10, by Black theorist bell hooks, and Drylongso11, which is a collection of narratives of members of what its editor calls the “core black community.”12 For white voices, I draw on my own and on those I have heard as a participant/observer of white culture, and on Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, a feminist and a white southerner, has spelled out some of what I would call the whitely way of dealing with issues of morality and change.13 She said she had been taught to be a judge–a judge of responsibility and of punishment, according to an ethical system which countenances no rival; she had been taught to be a preacher–to point out wrongs and tell others what to do; she had been taught to be a martyr–to take all responsibility and all glory; she had been taught to be a peacemaker–because she could see all sides and see how it all ought to be. I too was taught something like this, growing up in a small town south of the Mason-Dixon line, in a self-consciously christian and white family. I learned that I, and “we,” knew right from wrong and had the responsibility to see to it right was done; that there were others who did not know what is right and wrong and should be advised, instructed, helped and directed by us. I was taught that because one knows what is right, it is morally appropriate to have and exercise what I now would call race privilege and class privilege. Not “might is right,” but “right is might,” as Carolyn Shafer put the point.14 In any matter in which we did not know what is right, through youth or inexpertise of some sort, we would await the judgment or instruction of another (white) person who does.

Drylongso:

White people are bolder because they think they are supposed to know everything anyhow. (97) White men look up to their leaders more than we do and they are not much good without their leaders. (99) White people don’t really know how they feel about anything until they consult their leaders or a book or other things outside themselves. (99) White people are not supposed to be stupid, so they tend to think they are intelligent, no matter how stupidly they are behaving. (96)

Margin:

The possibility [they] were not the best spokespeople for all women made [them] fear for [their] self-worth. (13)

Whitely people generally consider themselves to be benevolent and good-willed, fair, honest and ethical. The judge, preacher, peacemaker, martyr, socialist, professional, moral majority, liberal, radical, conservative, working men and women–nobody admits to being prejudiced, everybody has earned every cent they ever had, doesn’t take sides, doesn’t hate anybody, and always votes for the person they think best qualified for the job, regardless of the candidates’ race, sex, religion or national origin, maybe even regardless of their sexual preferences. The professional version of this person is always profoundly insulted by the suggestion that s/he might have permitted some personal feeling about a client to affect the quality of services rendered. S/he believes with perfect confidence that s/he is not prejudiced, not a bigot, not spiteful, jealous or rude, does not engage in favoritism or discrimination. When there is a serious and legitimate challenge, a negotiator has to find a resolution which enables the professional person to save face, to avoid simply agreeing that s/he made an unfair or unjust judgment, discriminated against someone or otherwise behaved badly. Whitely people have a staggering faith in their own rightness and goodness, and that of other whitely people. We are not crooks.

Drylongso:

Every reasonable black person thinks that most white people do not mean him well. (7) They figure, if nobody blows the whistle, then nothing wrong has gone down. (21) White people are very interested in seeming to be of service …(4) Whitefolks can’t do right, even if there was one who wanted to…They are so damn greedy and cheap that it even hurts them to try to do right. (59)

Bridge:

A child is trick-or-treating with her friends. At one house the woman, after realizing the child was an Indian, “quite crudely told me so, refusing to give me treats my friends had received.” (47)

Drylongso:

I used to be a waitress, and I can still remember how white people would leave a tip and then someone at the table, generally some white woman, would take some of the money. (8)

Bridge:

The lies, pretensions, the snobbery and cliquishness. (69) We experience white feminists and their organizations as elitist, crudely insensitive, and condescending. (86) White people are so rarely loyal. (59)

Whitely people do have a sense of right and wrong, and are ethical. Their ethics is in great part an ethics of forms, procedures and due process. As Minnie Bruce Pratt said, their morality is a matter of “ought-to,” not “want to” or “passionately desire to.” And the “oughts” tend to factor out into propriety or good manners and abiding by the rules. Change cannot be initiated unless the moves are made in appropriate ways. The rules are often-rehearsed. I have participated in whitely women’s affirming to each other that some uncomfortable disruption caused by someone objecting to some injustice or offense could have been avoided: had she brought “her” problem forth in the correct way, it could have been correctly processed. We say:

She should have brought it up in the business meeting. She should have just taken the other woman aside and explained that the remark had offended her. She should not have personally attacked me; she should have just told me that my behavior made her uncomfortable, and I would have stopped doing it. She should take this through the grievance procedure.

By believing in rules, by being arbiters of rules, by understanding agency in terms of the applications of principles to particular situations, whitely people think they preserve their detachment from prejudice, bias, meanness and so on. Whitely people tend to believe that one preserves one’s goodness by being principled, by acting according to rules instead of according to feeling.

Drylongso:

We think white people are the most unprincipled folks in the world… (8) White people are some writing folks! They will write! They write everything. Now they do that because they don’t trust each other. Also, they are the kind of people who think that you can think about everything, about whether you are going to do, before you do that thing. Now, that’s bad for them because you can’t do that without wings …All you can do is do what you know has got to be done as right as you know how to do that thing. White people don’t seem to know that. (88) …he keeps changing the rules …Now, Chahlie will rule you to death. (16)

Authority seems to be central to whiteliness, as you might expect from a people who are raised to run things, or to aspire to that: belief in one’s authority in matters practical, moral and intellectual exists in tension with the insecurity and hypocrisy that are essentially connected with the pretense of infallibility. This pretentiousness makes the whitely person simultaneously rude, condescending, overbearing and patronizing on the one hand, and on the other, weak, helpless, insecure and seeking validation of her or his goodness.

Drylongso:

White people have got to bluff it out as rulers… [they] are always unsure of themselves. (99) No matter what Chahlie do, he want his mama to pat him on the head and tell him how cute he is. (19) …[I]n a very real sense white men never grow up. (100) Hard on the outside, soft on the inside. (99)

Bridge:

Socially …juvenile and tasteless. (99) No responsibility to others. (70)

The dogmatic belief in whitely authority and rightness is also at odds with any commitment to truth.

Drylongso:

They won’t tell each other the truth, and the lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth from our mouths. (29) As long as they can make someone say rough is smooth, they are happy …Like I told you, whitefolks don’t care about what the truth is…It’s like when you lie but so much, you don’t know what the truth is. (21) You simply cannot be honest with white people. (45)

Bridge:

White feminists have a serious problem with truth and “accountability.” (85)

And finally, whitely people make it clear to people of other races that the last thing the latter are supposed to do is to challenge whitely people’s authority.

Bridge:

[W]e are expected [by white women] to move, charm or entertain, but not to educate in ways that are threatening to our audiences. (71)

Margin:

Though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. (11)

Often in situations where white feminists aggressively attacked individual black women, they saw themselves as the ones who were under attack, who were the victims. (13)

Drylongso:

Most white people–anyways all the white people I know–are people you wouldn’t want to explain anything to. (67)

No wonder whitely people have so much trouble learning, so much trouble receiving, understanding and acting on moral or political criticism and demands for change. How can you be a preacher who does not know right from wrong, a judge who is an incompetent observer, a martyr who victimizes others, a peace-maker who is the problem, an authority without authority, a grownup who is a child? How can someone who is supposed to be running the world acknowledge their relative powerlessness in some matters in any politically constructive way? Any serious moral or political challenge to a whitely person must be a direct threat to her or his very being.

Whiteliness and Class

What I have been exploring here, and calling “whiteliness,” may sound to some like it is a character of middle class white people, or perhaps of middle class people whatever their race; it may sound like a class phenomenon, not a race phenomenon. Before addressing this question more deeply, I should just register that it is my impression, just looking around at the world, that white self-righteousness is not exclusive to the middle class. Many poor and working class white people are perfectly confident that they are more intelligent, know more, have better judgment and are more moral than Black people or Chicanos or Puerto Ricans, or Indians, or anyone else they view as not-white, and believe that they would be perfectly competent to run the country and to rule others justly and righteously if given the opportunity.

But this issue of the relation of whiteliness to class deserves further attention.

Though I think that what I am talking about is a phenomenon of race, I want to acknowledge a close interweaving and double-determination of manifestations and outcomes of race and of class, and to consider some of the things that give rise to the impression that what I’m calling whiteliness may really be just “middle-class-iness.” One thing that has happened here is that the individual who contributed to the observations assembled in the preceding section as a “participant observer” among white people (viz., the author of this analysis) is herself a lifelong member of the middle class. The whiteliness in which she has participated and about which she can write most vividly and authentically is that of her own kin, associates, and larger social group. This might, to a certain extent, bias that section’s description of whiteliness toward a middle-class version of it.

Another reason that what I am calling whiteliness might appear to be a class character rather than a race one is that even if it is not peculiar to whites of the middle classes, it is nonetheless peculiarly suitable to them: it suits them to their jobs and social roles of managing, policing, training and disciplining, legislating and administering, in a capitalist bureaucratic social order.

Another interesting point in this connection is that the definition of a dominant race tends to fasten on and project an image of a dominant group within that race as paradigmatic of the race.15 The ways in which individual members of that elite group enact and manifest their racedness and dominance would constitute a sort of norm of enacting and manifesting this racedness which non-elite members of the race would generally tend to assimilate themselves to. Those ways of enacting and manifesting racedness would also carry marks of the class position of the paradigmatic elite within the race, and these marks too would appear in the enactments of race by the non-elite. In short, the ways members of the race generally enact and stylistically manifest membership in the race would tend to bear marks of the class status of the elite paradigmatic members of the race.

I do not think whiteliness is just middle-class-ness misnamed. I think of whiteliness as a way of being which extends across ethnic, cultural, and class categories and occurs in ethnic, cultural, and class varieties–varieties which may tend to blend toward a norm set by the elite groups within the race. Whatever class and ethnic variety there is among white people, though, such niceties seem often to have no particular salience in the experience people of other races have with white people. It is very significant that the people of color from whose writings and narratives I have quoted in the preceding section often characterize the white people they talk about in part by class status, but they do not make anything of it. They do not generally indicate that class differences among white people make much difference to how people of color experience them.

Speaking of the oppression of women, Gayle Rubin noted its “endless variety and monotonous similarity.”16 There is great variety among the men of all the nationalities, races, religions and positions in various economies and polities, and women do take into account the particulars of the men they must deal with. But when our understanding of the world is conditioned by consciousness of sexism and misogyny, we see also, very clearly, the impressive and monotonous lack of variety among “masculinities.” With my notion of whiteliness, I am reaching for the monotonous similarity, not the endless variety, in white folks’ ways of being in the world. For various reasons, that monotonous similarity may have a middle-class cast to it, or my own perception of it may give it a middle-class cast, but I think that what I am calling “whiteliness” is a phenomenon of race. It is integral to what constructs and what is constructed by race, and only more indirectly related to class.

Feminism and Whiteliness

Being whitely, like being anything else in a sexist culture, is not the same thing in the lives of white women as it is in the lives of white men. The political significance of one’s whiteliness interacts with the political significance of one’s status as female or male in a male-supremacist culture. For the white men, a whitely way of being in the world is very harmonious with masculinity and their social and political situation. For white women it is, of course, all very much more complicated.

Femininity in white women is praised and encouraged but is nonetheless contemptible as weakness, dependence, feather-brainedness, vulnerability, and so on, but whiteliness in white women is unambivalently taken among white people as an appropriate enactment of a positive status. Because of this, for white women, whiteliness works more consistently than femininity does to disguise and conceal their negative value and low status as women, and at the same time to appear to compensate for it or to offset it.

Those of us who are born female and white are born into the status created by white men’s hatred and contempt for women, but white girls aspire to Being and integrity, like anyone else. Racism translates this into an aspiration to whiteliness. The white girl learns that whiteliness is dignity and respectability; she learns that whiteliness is her aptitude for partnership with white men; she learns that partnership with white men is her salvation from the original position of Woman in patriarchy. Adopting and cultivating whiteliness as an individual character seems to put it in the woman’s own power to lever herself up out of a kind of nonbeing (the status of woman in a male supremacist social order) over into a kind of Being (the status of white in white supremacist social order). But whiteliness does not save white women from the condition of woman. Quite the contrary. A white woman’s whiteliness is deeply involved in her oppression as a woman and works against her liberation.

White women are deceived, deceive ourselves and will deceive others about ourselves, if we believe that by being whitely we can escape the fate of being the women of the white men. Being rational, righteous, and ruly (rule-abiding, and rule enforcing) do for some of us some of the time buy a ticket to a higher level of material well-being than we might otherwise be permitted (though it is not dependable). But the reason, right, and rules are not of our own making; the white men may welcome our whiteliness as endorsement of their own values and as an expression of our loyalty to them (that is, as proof of their power over us), and because it makes us good helpmates to them. But if our whiteliness commands any respect, it is only in the sense that a woman who is chaste and obedient is called (by classic patriarchal reversal) “respectable.”

It is commonly claimed that the Women’s Movement in the United States, this past couple of decades, is a white women’s movement. This claim is grossly disrespectful to the many feminists whom the label ‘white’ does not fit. But it is indeed the case that millions of white women have been drawn to and engaged in feminist action and theorizing, and this creative engagement did not arise from those women’s being respected for their nice whitely ways by white men: it arose from the rape, battery, powerlessness, poverty or material dependence, spiritual depletion, degradation, harassment, servitude, insanity, drug addiction, botched abortions and murder of those very women, those women who are white.17

As doris davenport put it in her analysis of white feminists’ racism:

A few of us [third world women] …see beyond the so-called privilege of being white, and perceive white wimmin as very oppressed, and ironically, invisible… [I]t would seem that some white feminists could [see this] too. Instead, they cling to their myth of being privileged, powerful, and less oppressed…than black wimmin… Somewhere deep down (denied and almost killed) in the psyche of racist white feminists there is some perception of their real position: powerless, spineless, and invisible. Rather than examine it, they run from it. Rather than seek solidarity with wimmin of color, they pull rank within themselves.18

For many reasons it is difficult for women (of any intersection of demographic groups) to grasp the enormity, the full depth and breadth, of their oppression and of men’s hatred and contempt for them. One reason is simply that the facts are so ugly and the image of that oppressed, despised and degraded woman so horrible that recognizing her as oneself seems to be accepting utter defeat. Some women, at some times, I am sure, must deny it to survive. But in the larger picture, denial (at least deep and sustained denial) of one’s own oppression cuts one off from the appreciation of the oppression of others which is necessary for the connections one needs. This is what I think Cherrie Moraga is pointing out when she says:

Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place.19

If white women are not able to ally with women of other races in the construction of another world, we will indeed remain, defeated, in this one.

White women’s whiteliness does not deliver the deliverance we were taught it would; our whiteliness interferes with our ability to form necessary connections both by inhibiting and muddling our understanding of our own oppression as women, and by making us personally obnoxious and insufferable to many other women much of the time; it also is directly opposed to our liberation because it joins and binds us to our oppressors. By our whitely ways of being we enact partnership and racial solidarity with white men, we animate a social (if not also sexual) heterosexual union with white men, we embody and express our possession by white men.

A feminism that boldly names the oppression and degraded condition of white women and recognizes white men as its primary agents and primary beneficiaries–such a feminism can make it obvious to white women that the various forms of mating and racial bonding with white men do not and will never save us from that condition. Such a feminist understanding might free us from the awful confusion of thinking our whiteliness is dignity, and might make it possible for us to know that it is a dreadful mistake to think that our whiteliness earns us our personhood. Such knowledge can open up the possibility of practical understanding of whiteliness as a learned character (as we have already understood masculinity and femininity), a character by which we facilitate our own containment under the “protection” of white men, a character which interferes constantly and (often) conclusively with our ability to be friends with women of other races, a character by which we station ourselves as lieutenants and stenographers of white male power, a character which is not desirable in itself and neither manifests nor merits the full Being to which we aspire. A character by which, in fact, we both participate in and cover up our own defeat. We might then include among our strategies for change a practice of unlearning whiteliness, and as we proceed in this, we can only become less and less well-assimilated members of that racial group called “white.” (I must state as clearly as possible that I do not claim that unbecoming whitely is the only thing white women need to do to combat racism. I have said that whiteliness is not the same thing as racism. I have no thought whatever that I am offering a panacea for the eradication of racism. I do think that being whitely interferes enormously with white women’s attempts in general to be anti-racist.)

Disaffiliation, Deconstruction, Demolition

To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction–both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the “contingency” of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it. The other very impressive thing about such analyses is what they reveal of the complex and intense interplay of construction of concepts and construction of concrete realities. This interplay is what I take to be that phenomenon called the “social construction of reality.”

In combination, the revelation of the historical contingency of a concept and the revelation of the intricacy of interplay between concept and the concrete lived reality give rise to a strong sense that “deconstruction” of a concept simultaneously dismantles the reality in whose social construction the evolution of the concept is so closely involved. But things do not work that way. In the first place, analyzing a concept and circulating the analysis among a few interested colleagues does not make the concept go away, does not dislodge it from the matrix of concepts in the active conceptual repertoire even of those few people, much less of people in general. In the second place, even if the deconstructive analysis so drains the concept of power for those few individuals that they can no longer use it, and perhaps their participation in the social constructions of which that concept is a part becomes awkward and halting (like tying your shoelaces while thinking directly about what you are doing), it still leaves those social constructions fully intact. Once constructed and assimilated, a social construct may be a pretty sturdy thing, not very vulnerable to erosion, decay, or demolition.20 It is one thing to “deconstruct” a concept, another to dismantle a well-established, well-entrenched social construct. For example, Foucault’s revelations about the arbitrariness and coerciveness of classifications of sexualities did not put an end to queer-bashing or to the fears lesbians and gay men have of being victims of a witch-hunt.

I am interested, as I suggested earlier in this essay, in the matter of how to translate the recognition of the social constructedness of races into some practice of the freedom these contingencies seem to promise, some way to proceed by which people can be liberated from the concrete reality of races as they are determined by racism. But the social-constructedness of race and races in the racist state has very different meanings for groups differently placed with respect to these categories. The ontological freedom of categorical reconstruction may be generic, but what is politically possible differs for those differently positioned, and not all the political possibilities for every group are desirable. Attempts by any group to act in this ontological freedom need to be informed by understanding of how the action is related to the possibilities and needs of the others.

I have some hope that if I can manage to refuse to enact, embody, animate this category–the white race–as I am supposed to, I can free up my energies and actions from a range of disabling confinements and burdens, and align my will with the forces which eventually will dissolve or dismantle that race as such. If it is objected that it is an exercise of white privilege to dissociate myself from the white race this way, I would say that in fact this project is strictly forbidden by the rules of white solidarity and white supremacy, and is not one of the privileges of white power. It may also be objected that my adoption or recommendation of this strategy implies that the right thing to do, in general, for everyone, is to dissolve, dismantle, bring an end to, races; and if this indeed is the implication, it can sound very threatening to some of the people whose races are thus to be erased. This point is well-made by Franz Fanon in a response to Jean-Paul Sartre, described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Reading Sartre’s account of Negritude (as an antithesis preparatory to a “society without races,” hence “a transition and not a conclusion”), Fanon reports “I felt I had been robbed of my last chance”…”Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal… “21

The dynamic creative claiming of racial identities (and gender identity) that arose as devices of people’s oppression has been a politically powerful and life-enhancing response of oppressed people in modern and contemporary times. For members of oppressor groups to suddenly turn around and decide to abolish races would be, it seems, genocide, not liberation. (I have a parallel unease about the project of dismantling the category of women, which some feminists seem to favor.)

But I am not suggesting that if white women should try to abandon the white race and contribute to its demolition, then women of other races should take the same approach to their racial categorization and their races. Quite the contrary. Approaches to the matter of dismantling a dominance-subordinance structure surely should be asymmetrical–they should differ according to whether one has been molded into its category of dominance or its category of subordination. My hope is that it may contribute to the demise of racism, if we upset the logical symmetry of race–if Black women, for instance, cultivate a racial identity and a distinctive (sexually egalitarian) Black community (and other women of racialized groups, likewise), while white women are undermining white racial identity and cultivating communities and agency among women along lines of affinity not defined by race. Such an approach would work toward a genuine redistribution of power.

Growing Room

The experience of feminists’ unlearning femininity, and our readiness to require men to unlearn masculinity shows that it is thinkable to unlearn whiteliness. If I am right about all this, then, indeed, we even know a good deal about how to do it.

We know that white feminists have to inform ourselves exhaustively of its politics. We know we have to avoid, or be extremely alert in, environments in which whiteliness is particularly required or rewarded (e.g., academia). We know we have to practice new ways of being in environments which nurture different habits of feeling, perception, and thought, and that we will have to make these environments for ourselves since the world will not offer them to us. We know that the process will be collective and that this collectivity does not mean we will blend seamlessly with the others into a colorless mass; women unlearning femininity together have not become clones of each other or of those who have been valuable models. As feminists we have learned that we have to resist the temptation to encourage femininity in other women when, in moments of exhaustion and need we longed for another’s sacrificial mothering or wifing. Similarly, white women have to resist the temptation to encourage whiteliness in each other when, in moments of cowardice or insecurity, we long for the comfort of “solidarity in superiority,” or when we wish someone would relieve our painful uncertainty with a timely application of judgments and rules.

Seasoned feminists (white feminists along with feminists of other races) know how to transform consciousness. The first break-through is in the moment of knowing another way of being is possible. In this matter of a white woman’s racedness, the possibility in question is the possibility of disengaging (on some levels, at least) one’s own energies and wits from the continuing project of the social creation and maintenance of the white race, the possibility of being disloyal to that project by stopping constantly making oneself whitely. And this project should be a very attractive one to white women once we get it that it is the possibility of not being whitely, rather than the possibility of being whitely, that holds some promise of our rescuing ourselves from the degraded condition of women in white men’s world.

Notes

The working title during that period was “Ritual Libations and Points of Explosion,” which referred to a remark made by Helene Wenzel in a review of my Politics of Reality which appeared in The Women’s Review of Books, Vol.1, No.1, October, 1983. Wenzel said:“Even when white women call third world women our friends, and they us, we still agonize over “the issue.” The result is that when we write or teach about race, racism and feminism we tend either to condense everything we have to say to the point of explosion, or, fearing just that explosion, we sprinkle our material with ritual libations which evaporate without altering our own, or anyone else’s consciousness.”And, coming down to cases, she continued: “Frye has fallen into both of these traps.”

For some critical reflection on “wanting to do good,” and on “not knowing how to act,” see “A Response to Lesbian Ethics: Why Ethics?” in this volume.

Actually, what I think women of color have communicated in this matter is not so harsh as that. The point is that no one can do someone else’s growing for her, that white women must not expect women of color to be on call to help, and that there is a great deal of knowledge to be gained by reading, interacting, paying attention, which white women need not ask women of color to supply. Some women of color have helped me a great deal (sometimes in spite of me).

Frye, The Politics of Reality (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983), pp.115-116.

It is easy for a white person who is trying to understand white privilege and white power in white supremacist states to make the mistake of (selfservingly) exaggerating that power and privilege, assuming it is total. In this case, I was earlier making the mistake of thinking that white domination means that white people totally control the definition of race and the races. Reading bell hook’s Yearning (Boston: South End Press, 1990), I awoke to the fact that afro-americans (and other racialized people) are engaged also in the definition of Black (and other “race” categories); white people have the power to enforce their own definitions in many (but not all) situations, but they are not the only people determining the meanings of race categories and race words, and what they determine for themselves (and enforce) is not necessarily congruent with what others are determining for themselves.

I want to thank Maria Lugones, whose palpably loving anger on this point made me take it seriously. See “Hablando Cara a Cara/Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism” in Gloria Anzaldua, editor, Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras: Critical and Creative Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: aunt lute foundation press, 1990).

Singleton, Carrie Jane, “Race and Gender in Feminist Theory,” SAGE, Vol VI, No. 1 (Summer 1989), p.15.

I am not unmindful here of the anxiety some readers may have about my reliance on a distinction between that which is physically given and that which is socially acquired. I could immensely complicate this passage by shifting from the material mode of talking about maleness and skin colors to the formal mode of talking about conceptions or constructions of maleness and skin colors. But it would not make anything clearer. It is perfectly meaningful to use the terms ‘male’ and ‘white’ (as a pigment word), while understanding that sex categories and color categories are “constructed” as the kinds of categories they are, i.e., physical categories, as opposed to social categories like lawyer or arithmetic categories like ordinals.

Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writing By Radical Women of Color (Brooklyn, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981). I quote from writings by Barbara Cameron, Chrystos, doris davenport, and Mitsuye Yamada.

hooks, bell, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1985).

11. Gewaltney, John Langston, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (NY: Random House, 1983). I quote from statements by Jackson Jordan, Jr., Hannah Nelson, John Oliver, Howard Roundtree, Rosa Wakefield, and Mabel Lincoln.

The people speaking in Drylongso were responding to questions put by an interviewer. The narratives as published do not include the questions, but the people clearly were asked in some manner to say something about how they see white people or what they think white people generally are like. Most of them but not every one, prefaced or appended their comments with remarks to the effect that they did not think white people were “like that” by birth or blood, but by being brought up a certain way in certain circumstances.

“Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” in Yours in Struggle, edited by Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Barbara Smith (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1984).

For more exploration of some of the meanings of this, see “Response to Lesbian Ethics: Why Ethics?” in this volume.

Cf. Balibar, Etienne, “Paradoxes of Universality,” translated by Michael Edwards in David Theo Goldberg, editor, Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 284-85, extracted from “Racisme et nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Classe (Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 1988).

“The Traffic in Women,” Toward An Anthropology of Woman, ed., Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p.160.

Carolyn Shafer is the one who brought to my attention the fact that there is a certain contradiction in claiming both that this stage of the women’s movement was created by and belongs to white women and (on the grounds of the generally better material welfare of white women, compared to women of other races in the U.S.) that white women are not all that badly off and don’t really know what suffering is about. If white women were as generally comfortable, secure and healthy as they might appear to some observers, they would not have participated as they have in an enormous movement whose first and most enduring issues are bodily integrity and economic self-sufficiency.

“The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin,” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, ed., Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981), pp. 89-90.

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981), p.21.

My lover Carolyn was explaining what I do for a living to our coheart Keyosha, and included an account of “deconstruction.” Keyosha, a welder and pipefitter in the construction trades, said that wasn’t a real word and offered “demolition” as the real word for this. Carolyn then had to admit (on my behalf) that all this deconstructing did not add up to any demolition, and a made-up abstract word was probably suitable to this abstract activity.

21. “Critical Remarks,” Anatomy of Racism, ed., David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p.325.

Feminist Reprise thanks KY for her help in readying this article for the site.

[repriseofthereprise]

Who Wants a Piece of the Pie?

By Marilyn Frye

From Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism (1992, The Crossing Press)(1)

1976

For feminists, the permanent moral problem of how to live becomes the problem of how to live in accord with feminist values; we have to subsist by means which are harmonious with these values, and we have to live well enough to have resources for change and for enduring processes and events precipitated by our own movement. In short, we need more than subsistence, we are committed to getting it in wholesome ways, and we must manage all of this now, within a hostile sexist society. Looking about at people’s lives generally, it seems that requiring more than subsistence is a considerable luxury, and so it can seem that a feminist ethic which presupposes that luxury is necessarily elitist. There is truth in this, but it is not the last word. For one thing, revolution may in fact be something of a luxury–its moment is not to be found among the absolutely destitute. And furthermore, if having resources beyond the requirements of material subsistence is deemed a luxury, then a great many of us were born to that luxury as surely as we were born to our oppression as women, and we had better understand what it means and what we should do with it.

For some of us these dilemmas rise concretely in the matters of work and privilege. One apparently rich resource which many feminists have, have access to, or aspire to, is a situation in an establishment institution or profession. Attractions include salaries, fringe benefits, offices and supplies, postage, secretarial services and assistants, transportation services, contacts with other persons similarly situated, and respectability. But there are feminists who have been wary of this, and have been inclined to reject such situations or aspirations, as part of their rejection of class privilege.

Elimination of class privilege, along with race privilege, is certainly a feminist goal; if we ignore it we will find ourselves outmaneuvered by a strategy of sex-integration in middle bureaucracy, which would strengthen white middle-class dominance and divert the force of radical feminism. Part of our defense against this is steady awareness of class and race. Class privilege is offensive; but privilege is itself an odd sort of self-regenerative thing which, once you’ve got it, cannot be simply shucked off like a too-warm jacket.

Privilege in general is maintained by its exercise. It must remain substantially unquestioned by the non-privileged and this is achieved through the constant, easy, more-or-less unconscious exercise of it. The constancy and the ease make it seem natural, and then render it almost imperceptible, like the weight of one’s clothes on one’s body. As a consequence of this, one cannot merely do something which happens to be a privilege to be able to do. The “mere” exercise of the privilege positively contributes to the continuance of privilege. Using it strengthens it. This obviously applies to taking a position in an establishment institution: taking such a job not only uses privilege but builds privilege. And even this is not the worst of it. For, to reject the position is also to exercise privilege. As a matter of fact, it seems more of a privilege to be able to turn down a $15,000-a-year administrative job than to be in a position to get it in the first place. If the question even arises for a particular woman, then she has privilege; and she cannot refrain from having it, whichever decision she then makes. In deciding not to do some lucrative thing one is privileged to do, one is falling back on other privileges. The person who does not take the $15,000 job can handle the resulting poverty relatively well because the same skills, training, connections and style which fit her for the job, enable her to be a reasonably crafty consumer and manipulator of bureaucratic process, and give her a network of well-connected acquaintances; and she starts out her poverty in good health and forearmed with feminist analysis. For most people, poverty is intolerably destructive; for most people, choosing it would be choosing a form of suicide. Having relative poverty as a genuine and interesting option is itself a privilege.

I see no way to suddenly stop having privilege, or to stop exercising it. I certainly am not saying that privilege is ineradicable absolutely–but one cannot suddenly, by a simple act of will, detach oneself from it (which is perhaps one of the many reasons why “personal” solutions are inadequate). And in the end, if poverty and detachment from establishment institutions would eventually reduce one to having no privilege it is still far from obvious that feminists should do it. To renounce middle-class privilege is not to extricate oneself from the system but to relocate oneself within it. Joining the lower classes and recruiting members to them may tend more to the support of the system than to its downfall, for it may simply be providing more victims for the more thorough exploitation and oppression which take place at the lower levels of the hierarchy: those more thoroughly oppressed provide more fuel for the machinery.(2)

Impoverishment and deprivation reduce power, vision and endurance. The idea that justice and Dignity require Suffering belongs to an ethic of self-denial, a slave morality. All resource is tainted (men have not yet been dispossessed). We recognize this and we aim to change it. Meanwhile it is not politically incorrect to avail ourselves of the resources available to us.

If the foregoing arguments are sound, then holding a well-paying job is not necessarily in violation of feminist principles. Since virtually all well-paying jobs are establishment jobs, the next rack of problems is generated by tokenism. In virtually all middle-income, middle-bureaucracy, middle-civil-service jobs, a woman will be a token woman, since virtually none of these are classified as “women’s work.” Her existence there as a token woman works for the good of the institution and the ill of women generally. The presence of the token is used to convince both her employers and the rest of the world that the institution is not sexist and need not bother seriously with affirmative action, or correcting salary inequities or sexist division of work, et cetera, while it cheerfully continues to hire and promote men and serve male interests. These goods done the institutions are complemented by various harms done the token woman (one never gets something for nothing). The token woman is generally quite isolated; she will not have the relations with her colleagues that the men have, and thus the whole work situation is not as rich in stimulation, assistance, and comradeship as it is for most men in similar positions. This is likely to affect the quality of her work, or the amount of energy it takes to maintain the quality of her work. And this isolation also aggravates the constant problem of coping with the difficult questions of integrity and compromise that arise for her. She has to decide whether and in what degree she must be a closet feminist, how manly to act in order to be taken seriously, how much, when, where and with whom to fight over sexist language, sexist jokes, sexist gallantry, sexist assumptions, sexism in hiring and promotion and such consummate evils as sexist dress requirements. If a woman fails to take matters of integrity and compromise seriously, or makes the wrong decisions, she is likely to slip into being one of the boys–a female man. If she takes them seriously and makes the right decisions, she invites the fate of being a token feminist, and the whole situation becomes more complicated. My situation as a professor at a university exemplifies this nicely.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a classroom, in a university building, clothed and fed and insured by the university, before an audience brought there by the university; and I am very seriously spelling out and explaining for them as persuasively as I can a radical feminist perception of the world, and coaching them in the arts of right reason and clear vision so they will be able to discover for themselves what is going on in this sexist culture. And the better I am at teaching these things, the more truth I find and communicate, the more good I do the institution. The fact that it allows someone to stand in it and say those things gives it credit in the eyes of the students and the wider public. That I am there saying truths and teaching women makes the whole thing more tolerable for the women. The better I am, the better they feel about being in the university, the more they are inclined to believe that professors know what they are talking about, the more they feel the university really is a place where knowledge will bring them freedom. And the stronger is the institution. But among the truths is the truth that the institution is male-dominated and directed to serve the ends of a male-dominated society, economy and culture. As such, its existence, not to mention its strength and vigor, is inimical to the welfare of women, and probably to the survival of the species. If the women in the class come to agree with me in belief and perception, they must see me then as an absurd figure. For I am just that. I can try to see myself as someone working as an undercover agent, fomenting restlessness and stirring up radical sentiment and anger, working as a traitor from within, as an agent of the new order…. But that gratifying fantasy is absurdly counterbalanced by the fact that I am doing all this fomenting quite openly, in the pay of the institution, with the blessing of the patriarchy, in the context of a grading system, and with the students learning through all of this that the university is a good place, a place where freedom reigns. The university is in the business of authority; by bestowing its authority on selected token representatives of non-standard views, it enhances its own authority, which is used and designed to be used in the maintenance and justification of male hegemony over knowledge.(3)

Tokenism is painful, and either resolution of the problems of integrity and compromise–joining the boys or becoming a token feminist–immerses the woman in the absurdity. For the token feminist, the thing must eventually come down to the question of when, over what issues, and with what provocation to fight the battle which will lose her job; or when to reject the absurdity and resign. It is inevitable that it comes to this question. If she is a feminist her tolerance for sexist abuse must have a limit; if she is unable or unwilling to risk her job, she has no limit; if she can risk it she eventually will.

The conclusion here is, of course, that a feminist should not be too dependent upon her establishment job. And this is not peculiar to establishment jobs; anyone living and acting in a manner calculated to bring about changes in her situation must keep her options open. Economic flexibility is needed by anyone who is sticking to some principles. But there are factors contributing to dependence which are of particular significance to a feminist working an establishment job–especially in the kind of emotive or psychological relationship one has to the institution in which one works.

I began to see these questions of relationship through discussion with another woman professor about the role and life of a feminist in such a position. There was much agreement, until we got to the question of reforming the university. She claimed the university’s ideals were fine and it could be made to live up to them; that one should work for reform in the institution, and this would help reform society. I claimed that these “ideals” were not really the university’s ideals at all but a public relations hype, and it was never meant to live up to them and never would. What emerged was a crucial and profound difference of affect, not of opinion. She was loyal to the university and its professed ideology, she had faith in the institution; I had neither faith nor loyalty. As she talked, it became clear that her loyalty was rather like filial love or patriotism. I have seen such loyalty also among those who have worked for a long time for one of the large paternalistic corporations.

The pathology of institutional loyalty seems to come from at least three sources. First, the institution keeps the person on the payroll, increasing salary and benefits a little faster than the cost of living goes up. Second, there is the matter of exclusivity, of fraternal bonding, especially in loyalty to a profession. This has a nice additional twist when the subject, a sister, is being taken in as a brother. A third source of loyalty lies in the fact that one gains status and identity from one’s position in an established institution, profession, or the like. One is a professor; one is a physician; one is the director of the women’s studies program. The bestower of such meaning and identity is the bestower of self-respect, of personhood (or so it seems to the love-struck employee). One is grateful, and indebted, almost as to one’s heavenly creator.

An institution, profession, corporation or such, to which one feels loyal, which one loves, has a great deal more than mere economic power over one. The threat of being fired, in one form or another, is laced with overtones of the threat of rejection by a loved one, ostracism by the brotherhood, and annihilation through loss of identity. I believe that for mere mortals these are irresistible forces.

The various sorts of dependence upon institutions which can undermine the feminist’s ability to make proper use of an establishment employment as a resource for herself and the movement bear a rather obvious similarity to the sorts of dependence the stereotypic wife has on the stereotypic husband. She is tied to him by economic necessity and by feelings of owing him loyalty because he supports her, and she loves him because she derives her sense of meaning, her identity and status from his gracious association with her. The first salvation of woman from her fallen state, through her love and marriage to prince Charming, was a disaster; re-marrying prince Charming now, deceptively clothed as a title and a good salary, would be a disaster of the same magnitude and type.

It is, I find, a fundamental difference between me and many other feminists I know as colleagues, that I judge the opposition of interests between women and sexist (misogynist) institutions to be such that we can be united with them in matrimony or brotherhood, or alienated from them in sisterhood. The duality is so sharp because these anti-woman institutions offer (or pretend to offer) livelihood and identity, and women, the dispossessed and invisible, are dying for these. As a consequence of this the integrity of a feminist working within such an institution must depend on her alienation from it and the constancy of her adversarial relation with it. This orientation is maintained, not negatively through resistance of temptation or a system of coercive pressures and checks from other feminists, but positively, through woman-loving.

This woman-loving that supports one’s spiritual independence of the establishment institutions, supports best if it is not closeted. The publicity of a primary and loving identification with women places one in a position both with respect to the agents of the institution and with respect to other women, of having to live up to it or be a fool or a fake. And the openness of one’s woman-loving feminism is necessary also to be realizing one of the most important benefits one’s own establishment employment can have for other women. This is the benefit of space in which they can be women and feminists without fatal opposition and deprecation. One’s status, authority, recognition and power, however modest, are conveyed to those with whom one is identified. Respectability, like guilt, travels by association, without specific effort and without specific control; and respectability purchases space. Every time one woman moves or acts, she makes room for other women to move, to act, to be–if her womanness is overtly present as a salient factor in the situation, and not if she is masquerading as a man or a neuter.

The material benefits of establishment jobs include the income, the insurance, the access to duplicating machines and space for meetings, the material support of one’s feminist work through use of paid “company-time” for work, organizing, proselytizing, etc. One can and should share the wealth and resource within the community of feminists through incomesharing, use and support of membership in feminist operations such as credit unions, health clinics, woman’s centers, bookstores and so on. And one’s position and whatever accumulation of savings it makes possible can serve a community, and not just one person or one household, as a sort of cushion for emergencies–medical, spiritual, monetary, cop-and-court, welfare.(4)

There are material and political benefits to be derived from having some of us working establishment jobs. But integration into the establishment bureaucracies is not woman’s final answer. I do not think we can change the existing government, health, military, business or educational establishments significantly enough from within to bother with it. The internal structures of these institutions are designed to maintain a privileged elite and to organize even that elite in dominance-subordinance patterns. The health and welfare of women ultimately require entirely different ways of organizing things. If we were to try to transform the existing structures, our success would depend partly on enlightenment but largely on numbers. We would have to transcend tokenism. As long as a substantial majority of men are benefitting from the male-dominance within the institutions and in the world served by the institutions, and as long as men are in the substantial majority in these institutions, there is simply no reason why they should want, tolerate, or encourage enlightenment. The structures maintain the tokenism, which in turn protects the structures.

My conclusion, for now, is that a feminist can conscientiously hold and use an establishment position, if she is simultaneously cultivating skills, attitudes, identity and an alternative community, with and in which she can function without that position, and which will keep her honest while she has it. One day, when some who have been working straight jobs, and some have not, and all have been inventing new ways to survive and thrive, and when the evolving negotiations between my conscience and my patience set a new shit-limit which is found unacceptable by my employers; one day the time will be right for me to leave my post on the boundary and move into the new space.

1992 Postscript

It is clear enough that when I was writing the speech that became this essay, I was trying to come to grips with the phenomena of class and class privilege. Though I had come from a paradigmcase white middle class family background and education, feminism and lesbianism had brought me into a community of friends and associates that was both class-mixed and class conscious. This essay documents the fact that U.S. feminism of the second wave was not, in its first decade, “a middle class phenomenon” in at least one sense–those articulating and developing it were not all middle class and were not oblivious to their class positions or the political importance of class. I was not oblivious, and members of the N.O.W. audience to whom I spoke at least were hearing about concerns about class privilege as it related to the liberation of women, however seriously they may or may not have taken it. Feminism and lesbian feminism of that period were in fact vehicles of increased class awareness (as of increased race awareness) for middle class white women. But also, as conscious and self-conscious as I was at that time about class, this essay reads to me in 1992 as strangely unconscious of class.

One thing that seems missing here is the balance of consciousness of myself as both class-privileged and not a member of the ruling class. My issue in 1976 was about whether or not to avail myself of certain opportunities. The existence and permanence of those opportunities seems to be utterly taken for granted. The essay seems to me now to betray no working consciousness of the fact that the those opportunities, that life, are not a permanent element of the natural order of the universe but a product of a certain phase in the processes of global capitalism. To the extent those processes are manipulable, they are manipulated by members of another class entirely than mine. Middle class privilege is not an immutable “given” and does not include the privilege of ruling and running the things that create and maintain the middle class and its privilege.(5) In 1992 my academic job is still by world standards (and even by U.S. standards) plush and amazingly secure and the dollar amount of my present salary makes my reference in this essay to annual incomes of $15,000 seem comical. But “budget cuts” are coming down, teaching loads are going up; opportunities for interesting, creative, or innovative scholarly or instructional work are drying up; travel funds have disappeared almost entirely, and we have to supply our own paper, pencils, pens, printer ribbons; our use of the copying machine is strictly monitored, and we will not get cost-of-living raises (or “merit” raises) next year. My point is not “poor me”; I understand that I am still very well set in this world. My point is that the privileges of which I was going to avail myself (or not) are demonstrably mutable, contingent, dissolvable.

Also, in 1992 as I assemble this anthology many of my friends and acquaintances are unemployed or living with the daily threat of unemployment–both white collar and blue collar workers, and many have no medical insurance or may soon have none. It occurred to me within the last year, for the first time, that it might be irresponsible of me to give up the secure and well-paying job I have so chronically considered leaving, since we may well be coming into a period of economic desperation in which that income could be an invaluable community resource. Already some of my income is being worked into helping sustain some women more precariously, not to say desperately, situated than I, and it may become necessary for several or many women to live on this income. It is not only my own maintenance and survival (or that of my immediate kin) I must consider when I decide to avail myself or not to avail myself of these “middle class” opportunities (which are themselves not necessarily permanent), and it is not only the question of the contribution I can make to “the revolution”; survival issues within the community of my living are far closer to me (and really always have been) than I had any living, working idea of when I wrote “Who Wants a Piece of the Pie.”

The author of “Who Wants a Piece of the Pie” was privileged to think of herself as born to a kind of security, autonomy, and control of her fate that in fact did not and do not exist for (middle class) her, if they exist for anybody. It may indeed be a “privilege” to live in such false consciousness, and I grieve the loss of it as though it were something valuable; but false, it is.

But the author of “Who Wants a Piece of the Pie” was, in my 1992 opinion, absolutely right about the matter of the kinds of personal and political investment a feminist might put into her job and place in a commercial, government, or educational institution and still maintain her integrity and radical edge. Though economic circumstances might make one stick with such a job when the negotiations of one’s class/race/sex conscience would recommend quitting it, I think one yields everything up to the dominant order if one does not maintain a primary “homeplace” in a separate community of identity and value.(6)

NOTES

Published in Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, Vol.111, No.3, Winter, 197677, pp.28-35 and reprinted in Building Feminist Theory: Essays from QUEST, edited by the Quest Collective (New York, NY: Longman, 1981). This essay evolved from a lecture commissioned by NOW-Detroit for presentation in a series of lectures sponsored by them and funded by the Michigan Council for the Humanities. The lecture was delivered in Detroit, on May 19, 1976. I received much aid and advice from Carolyn Shafer in the thinking-through of these thoughts.

This essay has a long history during which it has incorporated contributions by C. Rene Davis and by Carolyn Shafer who is, among other things, my regular thinking-partner. It got valuable criticism also from Jane English, Alison Jaggar, Sandra Harding and Adele Laslie. At this point in particular, this essay draws on conversations with Carolyn Shafer.

This paragraph draws on conversations with Rene Davis.

[In the original, there is a footnote at this point that recommends sharesecuring loans through your local feminist credit union as a way of sharing the benefits of financial solvency beyond the limits of one’s own social circle. But in 1992, feminist credit unions are a thing of the past. In my community, though, and in other communities I know of, lesbians have organized to collect contributions and make grants anonymously, in order to accomplish that sort of sharing of resources. 1992]

Further thoughts on white middle class consciousness are worked out in my “Response to Lesbian Ethics” in this anthology.

Using her term “homeplace,” I link my views with those of bell hooks. See “Homeplace,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 41-49.

[repriseofthereprise]

From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway?

By Catharine A. MacKinnon, as published in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein, Spinifex, 1996)

And ain’t I a woman? –Sojourner Truth (1)

Black feminists speak as women because we are women… –Audre Lorde (2)

It is common to say that something is good in theory but not in practice. I always want to say, then it is not such a good theory, is it? To be good in theory but not in practice posits a relation between theory and practice that places theory prior to practice, both methodologically and normatively, as if theory is a terrain unto itself. The conventional image of the relation between the two is first theory, then practice. You have an idea, then act on it. In legal academia you theorize, then try to get some practitioner to put it into practice. To be more exact, you read law review articles, then write more law review articles. The closest most legal academics come to practice is teaching–their students, most of whom will practice, being regarded by many as an occupational hazard to their theorizing.

The postmodern version of the relation between theory and practice is discourse unto death. Theory begets no practice, only more text. It proceeds as if you can deconstruct power relations by shifting their markers around in your head. Like all formal idealism, this approach to theory tends unselfconsciously to reproduce existing relations of dominance, in part because it is an utterly removed elite activity. On this level, all theory is a form of practice, because it either subverts or shores up existing deployments of power, in their martial metaphor. As an approach to change, it is the same as the conventional approach to the theory/practice relation: head driven, not world driven. Social change is first thought about, then acted out. Books relate to books, heads talk to heads. Bodies do not crunch bodies or people move people. As theory, it is the de-realization of the world.

The movement for the liberation of women, including in law, moves the other way around. It is first practice, then theory. Actually, it moves this way in practice, not just in theory. Feminism was a practice long before it was a theory. On its real level, the Women’s Movement–where women move against their determinants as women–remains more practice than theory. This distinguishes it from academic feminism. For women in the world, the gap between theory and practice is the gap between practice and theory. We know things with our lives, and live that knowledge, beyond anything any theory has yet theorized. Women’s practice of confrontation with the realities of male dominance outruns any existing theory of the possibility of consciousness or resistance. To write the theory of this practice is not to work through logical puzzles or entertaining conundra, not to fantasize utopias, not to moralize or tell people what to do. It is not to exercise authority; it does not lead practice. Its task is to engage life through developing mechanisms that identify and criticize rather than reproduce social practices of subordination and to make tools of women’s consciousness and resistance that further a practical struggle to end inequality. This kind of theory requires humility and it requires participation.

I am saying: we who work with law need to be about the business of articulating the theory of women’s practice–women’s resistance, visions, consciousness, injuries, notions of community, experience of inequality. By practical, I mean socially lived. As our theoretical question becomes "what is the theory of women’s practice," our theory becomes a way of moving against and through the world, and methodology becomes technology.

Specifically–and such theory inhabits particularity–I want to take up the notion of experience "as a woman" and argue that it is the practice of which the concept of discrimination "based on sex" is the legal theory. That is, I want to investigate how the realities of women’s experience of sex inequality in the world have shaped some contours of sex discrimination in the law.

Sex equality as a legal concept has not traditionally been theorized to encompass issues of sexual assault or reproduction because equality theory has been written out of men’s practice, not women’s. Men’s experiences of group-based subordination have not centered on sexual and reproductive abuse, although they include instances of it. Some men have been hurt in these ways, but they are few and are not usually regarded as hurt because they are men, but in spite of it or in derogation of it. Few men are, sexually and reproductively speaking, "similarly situated" to women but treated better. So sexuality and reproduction are not regarded as equality issues in the traditional approach.(3) Two intrepid, indomitable women, women determined to write the practice of their lives into the law, moved the theory of sex equality to include these issues.

In her case, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (4), Mechelle Vinson established that sexual harassment as a working environment is sex discrimination under civil rights law. Her resistance to her supervisor Sidney Taylor–specifically, her identification that his repeated rape, his standing over her in the bank vault waving his penis and laughing, were done to her because she was a woman–changed the theory of sex discrimination for all women. In her case, California Federal Savings and Loan Association v. Guerra (5), Lillian Garland established that guaranteeing unpaid leaves for pregnant women by law is not discrimination on the basis of sex, but is a step in ending discrimination on the basis of sex. Her resistance to her employer, the California Federal Savings and Loan Association, in its refusal to reinstate her in her job after a pregnancy leave; her identification of that practice as illegal treatment of her because she was a woman, gave sex equality law a decisive spin in the direction of promoting equality, away from its prior status quo mirroring regressive neutrality. The arguments that won these cases were based on the plaintiff’s lives as women, on insisting that actual social practices that subordinated them as women be theoretically recognized as impermissible sex-based discrimination under law. In the process, sexual assault and reproduction became sex equality issues, with implications for the laws of rape and abortion, among others.

So what is meant by treatment "as women" here? To speak of being treated "as a woman" is to make an empirical statement about reality, to describe the realities of women’s situation. In the USA, with parallels in other cultures, women’s situation combines unequal pay with allocation to disrespected work, sexual targeting for rape, domestic battering, sexual abuse as children, and systematic sexual harassment; depersonalization, demeaned physical characteristics, use in denigrating entertainment, deprivation of reproductive control, and forced prostitution. To see that these practices are done by men to women is to see these abuses as forming a system, a hierarchy of inequality. This situation has occurred in many places, in one form or another, for a very long time, often in a context characterized by disenfranchisement, preclusion from property ownership (women are more likely to be property than to own any), ownership and use as object, exclusion from public life, sex-based poverty, degraded sexuality, and a devaluation of women’s human worth and contributions throughout society. This subordination of women to men is socially institutionalized, cumulatively and systematically shaping access to human dignity, respect, resources, physical security, credibility, membership in community, speech and power. Comprised of all its variations, the group women can be seen to have a collective social history of disempowerment, exploitation and subordination extending to the present. To be treated "as a woman" in this sense is to be disadvantaged in these ways incident to being socially assigned to the female sex. To speak of social treatment "as a woman" is thus not to invoke any abstract essence or homogeneous generic or ideal type, not to posit anything, far less a universal anything, but to refer to this diverse and pervasive concrete material reality of social meanings and practices such that, in the words of Richard Rorty, "a woman is not yet the name of a way of being human…"(6)

Thus cohering the theory of "women" out of the practice of "women" produces the opposite of what Elizabeth Spelman has criticized as a reductive assumption of essential sameness of all women that she identifies in some feminist theory.(7) The task of theorizing women’s practice produces a new kind of theory, a theory that is different from prior modes of theorizing in form, not just content. As Andrea Dworkin said quite a long time ago, women’s situation requires new ways of thinking, not just thinking new things.(8) "Woman" as abstraction, distillation, common denominator, or idea is the old way of thinking, or at most a new thing to think, but it is not a new way of thinking. Nor is thinking "as" a woman, as one embodiment of a collective experience, the same as thinking "like" a woman, which is to reproduce one’s determinants and think like a victim.

Some recent work, especially Elizabeth Spelman’s, could be read to argue that there is no such thing as experience "as a woman" and women of color prove it.(9) This theory converges with the elevation of "differences" as a flag under which to develop diverse feminisms.(10) To do theory in its conventional abstract way, as many do, is to import the assumption that all women are the same or they are not women. What makes them women is their fit within the abstraction "woman" or their conformity to a fixed, posited female essence. The consequence is to reproduce dominance. While much work subjected to this criticism does not do this (11), one can trace it, surprisingly, in the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Brownmiller.

De Beauvoir, explaining why women are second class citizens, says:

Here we have the key to the whole mystery. On the biological level a species is maintained only by creating life itself anew; but this creation results only in repeating the same Life in more individuals…Her [woman’s] misfortune is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of Life, when even in her own view Life does not carry within itself reasons for being, reasons that are more important than Life itself (de Beauvoir: 1971, p. 64).

Here women are defined in terms of biological reproductive capacity. It is unclear exactly how any social organization of equality could change such an existential fact, far less how to argue that a social policy that institutionalized it could be sex discriminatory.

Susan Brownmiller argues the centrality of rape in women’s condition in the following terms:

Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself. Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accommodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis and vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know it. By anatomical fiat–the inescapable construction of their genital organs–the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey (Brownmiller: 1976, pp. 4, 6).

Exactly how to oppose sexual assault from this vantage point is similarly unclear. Do we make a law against intercourse? Although both theorists have considerably more to offer on the question of what defines women’s condition, what we have in these passages is simple biological determinism presented as a critical theory of social change.

The problem here, it seems to me, does not begin with a failure to take account of race or class, but with the failure to take account of gender. It is not only or most fundamentally an account of race or class dominance that is missing here, but an account of male dominance. There is nothing biologically necessary about rape, as Mechelle Vinson made abundantly clear when she sued for rape as unequal treatment on the basis of sex. And, as Lillian Garland saw, and made everyone else see, it is the way society punishes women for reproduction that creates women’s problems with reproduction, not reproduction itself. Both women are Black. This only supports my suspicion that if a theory is not true of, and does not work for, women of color, it is not really true of, and will not work for, any women, and that it is not really about gender at all. The theory of the practice of Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland, because it is about the experience of Black women, is what gender is about.

In recent critiques of feminist work for failing to take account of race or class (12), it is worth noting that the fact that there is such a thing as race and class is assumed, although race and class are generally treated as abstractions to attack gender rather than as concrete realities, if indeed they are treated at all. Spelman, for example, discusses race but does virtually nothing with class. (13) In any event, race and class are regarded as unproblematically real and not in need of justification or theoretical construction. Only gender is not real and needs to be justified. Although many women have demanded that discussions of race or class take gender into account, typically these demands do not take the form that, outside explicit recognition of gender, race or class do not exist. That there is a diversity to the experience of men and women of color, and of working class women and men regardless of race, is not said to mean that race and class are not meaningful concepts. I have heard no one say that there can be no meaningful discussion of "people of color" without gender specificity. Thus, the phrase "people of color and white women" has come to replace the previous "women and minorities," which women of color rightly perceived as not including them twice, and embodying a white standard for sex and a male standard for race. But I hear not talk of "all women and men of color," for instance. It is worth thinking about that when women of color refer to "people who look like me," it is understood that they mean people of color, not women, in spite of the fact that both race and sex are visual assignments, both possess clarity as well as ambiguity, and both are marks of oppression, hence community.

In this connection, it has recently come to my attention that the white woman is the issue here, so I decided I better find out what one is. This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother, and not economically exploited. She doesn’t work. She is either the white man’s image of her–effete, pampered, privileged, protected, flighty, and self-indulgent–or the Black man’s image of her–all that, plus the "pretty white girl" (meaning ugly as sin but regarded as the ultimate in beauty because she is white). She is Miss Anne of the kitchen, she puts Frederick Douglass to the lash, she cries rape when Emmet Till looks at her sideways, she manipulates white men’s very real power with the lifting of her very well-manicured little finger. She makes an appearance in Baraka’s "rape the white girl,"(14) as Cleaver’s real thing after target practice on Black women (15), as Helmut Newton’s glossy upscale hard-edged, distanced vamp (1976), and as the Central Park Jogger, the classy white madonna who got herself raped and beaten nearly to death. She flings her hair, feels beautiful all the time, complains about the colored help, tips badly, can’t do anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t know anything, and alternates fantasizing about fucking Black men with accusing them of raping her. As Ntozake Shange points out, all Western civilization depends on her (1981, p. 48). On top of all this, out of impudence, imitativeness, pique, and a simple lack of anything meaningful to do, she thinks she needs to be liberated. Her feminist incarnation is all of the above, and guilty about every single bit of it, having by dint of repetition refined saying "I’m sorry" to a high form of art. She can’t even make up her own songs.

There is, of course, much to much of this, this "woman, modified," this woman discounted by white, meaning she would be oppressed but for her privilege. But this image seldom comes face to face with the rest of her reality: the fact that the majority of the poor are white women and their children (at least half of whom are female); that white women are systematically battered in their homes, murdered by intimates and serial killers alike, molested as children, actually raped (mostly by white men), and that even Black men, on average, make more than they do. (16) If one did not know this, one could be taken in by white men’s image of white women: that the pedestal is real, rather than a cage in which to confine and trivialize them and segregate them from the rest of life, a vehicle for sexualized infantilization, a virginal set-up for rape by men who enjoy violating the pure, and a myth with which to try to control Black women. (See, if you would lie down and be quiet and not move, we would revere you, too.) One would think that the white men’s myth that they protect white women was real, rather than a racist cover to guarantee their exclusive and unimpeded sexual access–meaning they can rape her at will, and do, a posture made good in the marital rape exclusion and the largely useless rape law generally. One would think that the only white women in brothels in the South during the Civil War were in Gone with the Wind. (17) This is not to say that there is no such thing as skin privilege, but rather that it has never insulated white women from the brutality and misogyny of men, mostly but not exclusively white men, or from its effective legalization. In other words, the "white girls" of this theory miss quite a lot of the reality of white women in the practice of male supremacy.

Beneath the trivialization of the white woman’s subordination implicit in the dismissive sneer "straight white economically privileged women" (a phrase which has become one word, the accuracy of some of its terms being rarely documented even in law journals) lies the notion that there is no such thing as the oppression of women as such. If white women’s oppression is an illusion of privilege and a rip-off and reduction of the civil rights movement, we are being told that there is no such thing as a woman, that our practice produces no theory, and that there is no such thing as discrimination on the basis of sex. What I am saying is, to argue that oppression "as a woman" negates rather than encompasses recognition of the oppression of women on other bases, is to say that there is no such thing as the practice of sex inequality.

Let’s take this the other way around. As I mentioned, both Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland are African-American women. Wasn’t Mechelle Vinson sexually harassed as a woman? Wasn’t Lillian Garland pregnant as a woman? They thought so. The whole point of their cases was to get their injuries understood as "based on sex," that is, because they are women. The perpetrators, and the policies under which they were disadvantaged, saw them as women. What is being a woman if it does not include being oppressed as one? When the Reconstruction Amendments "gave Blacks the vote," and Black women still could not vote, weren’t they kept from voting "as women"? When African-American women are raped two times as often as white women, aren’t they raped as women? That does not mean that their race is irrelevant and it does not mean that their injuries can be understood outside a racial context. Rather, it means that "sex" is made up of the reality of the experiences of all women, including theirs. It is a composite unit rather than a divided unitary whole, such that each woman, in her way, is all women. So, when white women are sexually harassed or lose their jobs because they are pregnant, aren’t they women too?

The treatment of women in pornography shows this approach in graphic relief. One way or another, all women are in pornography. African-American women are featured in bondage, struggling, in cages, as animals, insatiable. As Andrea Dworkin has shown, the sexualized hostility directed against them makes their skin into a sex organ, focusing the aggression and contempt directed principally at other women’s genitals (1981, pp. 215-16). Asian women are passive, inert, as if dead, tortured unspeakably. Latinas are hot mommas. Fill in the rest from every demeaning and hostile racial stereotype you know; it is sex here. This is not done to men, not in heterosexual pornography. What is done to white women is a kind of floor; it is the best anyone is treated and it runs from Playboy through sadomasochism to snuff. What is done to white women can be done to any woman, and then some. This does not make white women the essence of womanhood. It is a reality to observe that this is what can be done and is done to the most privileged of women. This is what privilege as a woman gets you: most valued as dead meat.

I am saying, each woman is in pornography as the embodiment of her particularities. This is not in tension with her being there "as a woman," it is what being there as a woman means. Her specificity makes up what gender is. White, for instance, is not a residual category. It is not a standard against which the rest are "different." There is no generic "woman" in pornography. White is not unmarked; it is a specific sexual taste. Being defined and used in this way defines what being a woman means in practice. Robin Morgan once said, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." (1978, p. 169) This is true, but Andrea Dworkin’s revision is more true: "Pornography is the theory, pornography is the practice."(18) This approach to "what is a woman" is reminiscent of Sartre’s answer to the question "what is a Jew?" Start with the anti-Semite.(19)

In my view, the subtext to the critique of oppression "as a woman," the critique that holds that there is no such thing, is dis-identification with women. One of its consequences is the destruction of the basis for a jurisprudence of sex equality. An argument advanced in many critiques by women of color has been that theories of women must include all women, and when they do, theory will change. On one level, this is necessarily true. On another, it ignores the formative contributions of women of color to feminist theory since its inception. I also sense, though, that many women, not only women of color and not only academics, do not want to be "just women," not only because something important is left out, but also because that means being in the category with "her," the useless white woman whose first reaction when the going gets rough is to cry. I sense here that people feel more dignity in being part of a group that includes men than in being part of a group that includes that ultimate reduction of the notion of oppression, that instigator of lynch mobs, that ludicrous whiner, that equality coat-tails rider, the white woman. It seems that if your oppression is also done to a man, you are more likely to be recognized as oppressed, as opposed to inferior. Once a group is seen as putatively human, a process helped by including men in it, an oppressed man falls from a human standard.(20) A woman is just a woman–the ontological victim–so not victimized at all.

Unlike other women, the white woman who is not poor or working class or lesbian or Jewish or disabled or old or young does not share her oppression with any man. That does not make her condition any more definitive of the meaning of "women" than the condition of any other woman is. But trivializing her oppression, because it is not even potentially racist or class-biased or heterosexist or anti-Semitic, does define the meaning of being "anti-woman" with a special clarity. How the white woman is imagined and constructed and treated becomes a particularly sensitive indicator of the degree to which women, as such, are despised.

If we build a theory out of women’s practice, comprised of the diversity of all women’s experiences, we do not have the problem that some feminist theory has been rightly criticized for. When we have it is when we make theory out of abstractions and accept the images forced on us by male dominance. I said all that so I could say this: the assumption that all women are the same is part of the bedrock of sexism that the Women’s Movement is predicated on challenging. That some academics find it difficult to theorize without reproducing it simply means that they continue to do to women what theory, predicated on the practice of male dominance, has always done to women. It is their notion of what theory is, and its relation to its world, that needs to change.

If our theory of what is "based on sex" makes gender out of actual social practices distinctively directed against women as women identify them, the problem that the critique of so-called "essentialism" exists to rectify ceases to exist. And this bridge, the one made from practice to theory, is not built on anyone’s back.

NOTES

* Reprinted from Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (1991b), 4 (13) pp. 13-22. This paper benefited from the comments of members of the Collective on Women of Color and the Law at Yale Law School.

Bert J. Loewenberg & Ruth Dugin (1976, p. 235).

Audre Lorde (1984, p. 60). The whole quotation is "Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us."

I detail this argument further in Reflections on Sex Equality Under Law (1991a, p. 100).

Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986).

California Fed. Sav. & Loan Ass’n v. Guerra, 479 U.S. 272 (1987).

Richard Rorty (1991, pp. 231-34) states "MacKinnon’s central point, as I read her, is that ‘a woman’ is not yet the name of a way of being human–not yet the name of a moral identity, but, at most, the name of a disability."

Elizabeth V. Spelman (1988, pp.158-59).

"[O]ne can be excited about ideas without changing at all. [O]ne can think about ideas, talk about ideas, without changing at all. [P]eople are willing to think about many things. What people refuse to do, or are not permitted to do, or resist doing, is to change the way they think." Andrea Dworkin (1974, p. 202).

Spelman (1988, pp. 164-66, 174, 186) defines "essentialism" largely in terms of central tenets of radical feminism, without being clear whether the experience "as a woman" she identifies in radical feminism is a social or a biological construct. Having done this, it becomes easy to conclude that the "woman" of feminism is a distilled projection of the personal lives of a few comparatively powerful biological females, rather than a congealed synthesis of the lived social situation of women as a class, historically and worldwide.

Spelman implies that "differences" not be valorized or used as a theoretical construct (1988, p. 174) but others, building on her work and that of Carol Gilligan (1982), do.

The philosophical term "essentialism" is sometimes wrongly applied to socially based theories that observe and analyze empirical commonalities in women’s condition. See for example, Angela P. Harris (1990). One can also take an essentialist approach to race or class. In other words, a theory does not become "essentialist" to the degree it discusses gender as such nor is it saved from "essentialism" to the degree it incorporates race or class.

I am thinking in particular of Spelman (1988) and Marlee Kline (1989, p. 115), although this analysis also applies to others who have made the same argument, such as Harris (1990). Among its other problems, much of this work tends to make invisible the women of color who were and are instrumental in defining and creating feminism as a movement of women in the world, as well as a movement of mind.

This is by contrast with the massive feminist literature on the problem of class, which I discuss and summarize as a foundational problem for feminist theory in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989a). Harris (1990) discusses race but does nothing with either class or sexual orientation except invoke them as clubs against others.

Imamu Amiri Baraka is also known as LeRoi Jones (Baraka: 1964, pp. 61, 63).

"I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto–and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey." "[R]aping the white girl" as an activity for Black men is described as one of "the funky facts of life." In a racist context in which the white girl’s white girlness is sexualized–that is, made a site of lust, hatred and hostility–for the Black man through the history of lynching. Eldridge Cleaver (1968, pp. 14-15).

In 1989, the median income of white women was approximately one-fourth less than that of Black men, in 1990 it was one-fifth less. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Report (1991, p. 60).

This is an insight of Dorothy Teer.

Personal communication with Andrea Dworkin. See also Andrea Dworkin (1991, pp. 304-7).

"Thus, to know what the contemporary Jew is, we must ask the Christian conscience. And we must ask, not ‘What is a Jew?’ but ‘What have you made of the Jews?’ The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew; that is the simple truth from which we must start. In this sense…it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew." Jean-Paul Sartre (1948).

I sense a similar dynamic at work in the attraction among some lesbians with "gay rights" rather than "women’s rights," with the result of obscuring the roots in male dominance of the oppression of both lesbians and gay men.

[repriseofthereprise]

Separatism is Not a Luxury

By C. Maria

In Lesbian Ethics Vol 4 No 1 Spring 1990

Julia Penelope, in “The Mystery of Lesbians,” asks, “HOW, in spite of derision, incarceration, violence, and poverty, do we find the courage TO CREATE OURSELVES??”(1) This question rekindled my anger at having been unemployed for two years following college graduation in 1986, as well as at the poverty many women are forced to endure. But as an Afra-Latina Radical Dyke living and working in racist heteropatriarchy,(2) I was next brought to consider the current phallocratic system and wondered how possible it would be for Lesbian Separatists to move beyond a focus on class.

My point in this paper is that socialist feminists are wrong in insisting Lesbians focus on class. They dismiss the connection between economic deprivation and the sexual caste system, where men make women’s lives almost unlivable. We live in a world that is ready to prepare our funeral pyres daily.(3) Many Lesbians, in focussing on class, have missed the importance of separatism, which is to make our Lesbian lives livable in the present. This is not living “one day at a time.” Rather, Lesbians must be active, creative, and rigorous participants in our present reality. To that end I conclude with A Proposal.

Socialism Is Not the Answer

Most women could care less about separatism. This purposeful ignorance not only comes from non-feminists and anti-feminists, but also from feminists who should know better, yet choose to ignore separatism even as a possibility. Some of this ignorance is caused by the fear of male reprisals. But fear alone has not stopped many Lesbians and Radical Feminists from envisioning a world free from male oppression and violence. So what else is behind this ignorance?

The only way to account for this dismissal is the belief among liberal and socialist/left-wing heterosexual and lesbian feminists that some men, particularly poor men and ethnically different men, are more oppressed than women in general. They say these men do not benefit from the sexual oppression of women. bell hooks even goes as far as to justify male sexual crimes committed against women and to argue that men are the real victims.

Alienated, frustrated, pissed off, he may attack, abuse, and oppress any individual woman or women, but he is not reaping the benefits from his support of sexist ideology. When he beats or rapes women, he is not exercising privilege or reaping any positive rewards; he may feel satisfied in exercising the only form of domination allowed him [emphases mine].(4)

In fact, physical and sexual abuse that come from male heterosexual privilege are so pervasive and oppressive, that less privileged and LEAST privileged women often DO become Lesbian Separatists.

Those who see Lesbian Separatism as classist and racist deny the lives of Lesbian Separatists, most of whom are not privileged. For example, hooks sees separatism as purely a class issue.

Most women do not have the economic freedom to separate from men because of economic interdependence. The separatist notion that women could resist sexism by withdrawing contact with men reflects a bourgeois class perspective.(5)

hooks assumes all Separatists are white and privileged. But if Separatism derived from a “bourgeois class perspective,” most of the more privileged lesbians would be Separatists, or at least give separatism some serious consideration. And there would be few racially and ethnically different Separatists or less privileged Separatists.

Yet Separatism IS an economic issue. Lesbian Separatists are painfully aware it is racist heteropatriarchy that keeps women poor. No woman, however wealthy, has unrevocable power. All men however poor, have some unrevocable power.(6) In patriarchal heteroeconomy,(7) ALL women are economically bound to men. Jeffner Allen explains this dilemma:

Although we choose to live as lesbians, we are obliged … to stand in relation to the patriarchal economy … We are obliged to stand in relation to men, especially to secure food, water, shelter, clothing, and frequently, for the goods and money that must be exchanged for such commodities.(8)

Any woman who separates, however partially, from a man or men, will suffer economically. Living as a Separatist entails taking the risk that racist heteropatriarchy can, at any time, withdraw the only means of support available to us for obtaining basic necessities and maintaining any quality of life. Becoming a Separatist means that a Lesbian has placed integrity above any other consideration that would unnecessarily bind her to men.

Socialist feminists, however, would say less privileged women must remain allied with men IN OUR GROUP, because it would be in “our” best interests. But less privileged men still equate their interests with the interests of “our group.” If women follow the socialist feminist prescription, they will remain the economic and sexual slaves of the men they are forced to serve. “Freedom,” for socialist feminists, means keeping solidarity with less economically privileged men no matter how sexually, physically, or psychically abusive they are to the women who have the misfortune to be around or involved with these men. Women are not allowed to separate from men for any reason.

According to Alison Jaggar:

What the politics of total separatism ignores, however, is that some groups of women have interests in common with some groups of men. Working-class women have interests in common with working-class men; Jewish women have interests in common with Jewish men; differently able women have interests in common with differently able men; and women of color have interests in common with men of color.(9)

What Jaggar doesn’t explain is how women of color, Jewish women, working-class women, and differently able women, despite a strong commitment to ending all oppression, still have the fortitude to be Separatists. Yet socialist feminists call working-class, Semitic,(10) differently able, Afra-Amerikan, Latina, Native Amerikan, and Asian Amerikan Lesbian Separatists racist, classist, antisemitic, ableist, and ageist.

Jaggar continues:

… a politics of total separatism is necessarily classist and racist no matter how far classism and racism are eradicated inside womanculture. In part, it is classist and racist because access to the womanculture is more difficult for poor women and women of color, just as it is more difficult for such women to be exclusively lesbian. On the most fundamental level … total separatism is classist and racist because it denies the importance of class and race divisions … Consequently, it can never be effective in bringing about far-reaching social transformation [emphasis mine].(11)

Jaggar contradicts herself immediately in this statement. If classism and racism are done away with in “womanculture,” why does she still see it as classist and racist? The contradiction doesn’t bother her, or else she would have given this comment more thought. Everything desirable is more difficult for less privileged women to obtain. But she chose to focus on the idea that less privileged women are supposedly unable to be Lesbians. Her mentality is the same as that of many socialist countries, such as Cuba, which proclaim Lesbians are the result of regressive, perverse, bourgeois influence. They uphold compulsory heterosexuality by making criminals out of Lesbians.

Socialist feminism suffers from a lack of moral and ethical intelligence. When socialist feminists tell us we are classist and racist for being Lesbian Separatists, they are hiding their own moral failure to consider the same for themselves. Socialist feminists assume economically, racially, and ethnically oppressed women are not intelligent enough to make our lives as livable as possible, or to choose our beliefs and how best to act on them. They assume we must be “rescued” and placed back in the “graces” of racist heteropatriarchy.

It is impossible for Lesbian Separatists, especially racially and ethnically different Lesbian Separatists to ignore race and economics because these are our daily reality. We understand very well what divides us. And however real many of these dichotomies are, we NAME the agents responsible for the imposed FALSE differences.

While Lesbian Separatism cannot afford to ignore race and economics, it is the strength of our diversities AND similarities that will bring about a REAL social transformation, one far beyond the reach of socialist feminism.

The Bottom Line

Many feminists, particularly liberal and socialist feminists, will defend working in the male economy on the basis that doing so will increase our socio-economic standing. But, as Jeffner Allen states men, not women, achieve a monetary advantage.(12)

Class status is something possessed by men working in patriarchal heteroeconomy. Women do not have class status. The male class structure defines and prescribes women’s economic, emotional, and sexual servitude to men, while the patriarchal heteroeconomy constructs the concrete basis for women’s economic oppression. Patriarchal heteroeconomy, by paying women the lowest wages, coerces us into remaining under racist heteropatriarchal domination. Sexual terrorism in the workplace extends women’s continued servitude beyond the realm of the phallocratic household. In turn this terrorism forces women into the “private” sphere, where the terrorism can continue in secrecy. Like rape and pornography, sexual terrorism in the workplace tells women what men think of our presence, our existence, and our place in racist heteropatriarchy.

Women do not acquire class status on our own merit, but rather as socio-economic, political, and sexual attachments to males. Any woman who refuses to be a male attachment loses the “benefits” of the male economy. The Lesbian Separatist is not part of the patriarchal heteroeconomy. Nor is any woman who is not attached to a man.

Poverty is something not fully belonging to patriarchal heteroeconomy. The levels of the class structure imply that members have “upward” mobility.(13) This mobility is a phallic mobility. Women, not phallic beings, are automatically excluded. In order to survive, unattached women, including Lesbian Separatists, work in the male economic system performing tasks that define our lack of class status. We are forced to live like stationary migrant workers, who must earn our keep and never protest our condition, lest we sink further into degradation.

Women’s lack of our own class status can be seen most clearly in the “service” industries, such as restaurants and diners, corporate offices, and retail stores. Women are the majority of low-level workers in these industries. We often work 8 or more hours a day, frequently at minimum wage. Some jobs, particularly in restaurants, pay below the minimum, forcing women to live on tips received for smiling, being courteous, and being compliant.(14) These jobs require little educational training and offer few opportunities for promotion or increased wages. It is not surprising that these jobs have the highest turnover rates, because the women who do them are easily expendable.

By having women perform degrading and repetitive tasks, men in control of the patriarchal heteroeconomy can continue to do whatever they choose without thinking about the consequences. Men continue, with total confidence, to waste and destroy, knowing they have conditioned women well to clean up for them. Women

…take on the dirty work, to take charge of the material and psychic rubble … [to] yield simply another variation … of female self-sacrifice and female housework: sweeping up the ruins of patriarchy.(15)

The Lesbian Separatist has chosen to defy men, to hate men,(16) in order to be for women and for our freedom to be our Selves. The price to maintain our integrity is often poverty, violence, degradation, and the denial of basic necessities. Despite the poverty suffered and the obstacles placed in front of us, we know we are right.(17) And because of the joy and freedom we radiate, our enemies know we are right.

Consider the case of the Masai warriors, a group of pastoralists that live in Kenya and parts of Tanzania. Although the women take care of the cattle, the source of the group’s wealth, their husbands are the owners, and the cattle are passed down to their sons. If a woman gives birth only to daughters or is unable to give birth, she is ostracized and is forced to live on her own. She is not valued as a woman in her own right. She is valued only if she takes care of the cattle and gives her husband sons. Her daughters will not be able to take care of her when she is old. They must leave when they are married off to men in neighboring villages, forced to repeat the same pattern their mother suffered when she was younger.(18)

Since power given to women by men is revocable, no woman can be said to be economically wealthy, because she does not live in an economy or a society based on female values.

A Proposal

Many feminists do not want to acknowledge how comfortable they have become with their heterosexual privilege within the oppressive system that many other women want to leave behind. They continue to ask for a few privileges for themselves, while conditions for most women remain unchanged. Few feminists any longer propose the abolition of racist heteropatriarchy, because to do so they would have to confront their own complicity and the painful subordination men have forced upon women through terrorism, indoctrination, deprivation, and lies.(19)

We can start, even in modest ways, to disrupt the male economy. Lesbian Separatists and Radical feminists have already begun, by refusing to be with men, or to cater to their needs, desires, and whims in our personal/political lives. Although heterosexual women can also contribute to this disruption, through sabotage, it is unlikely they will place themselves and other women above male priorities.

Lesbian Separatists can do much more:

We can disrupt patriarchal heteroeconomy through the barter system, where goods and services are exchanged directly for each other rather than for money. For example, if I need to have my broken window replaced, I would have a friend who is an expert glazier replace my window in exchange for my fixing her car when needed, in the present or the future. We both obtain what we need without the exchange of money. We can also create our own monetary system through the use of a voucher system only Dykes networking together would recognize. These vouchers could be used to obtain basic necessities and services from Dykes with specialized skills.

A similar form of disruption is to refuse to pay taxes. Most of the tax money paid goes directly to the phallo-military waste machine to invent more weapons to annihilate sentient life. The rest is used to keep so-called elected and appointed “officials” and corporate “officers” in the death-dealing, white, heterosexual male system wealthy. The two most recent, blatant examples are the theft of millions of dollars of federal housing money and the theft of billions of dollars by savings and loan executives. The system of taxes is another form of male parasitism, draining women’s energy through degrading work to feed their insatiable greed and hatred for life.

There are “illegal” methods that can be pursued, such as counterfeiting money, tapping into the money supply, which is regulated by computers, disrupting business on Wall Street and other financial centers where the business of patriarchal heteroeconomics is conducted each day.

We can organize ourselves into cadres of thieves and shoplifters to steal basic necessities and money for our daily living. With increased skill, we can also teach other Dykes how to steal.

We can squat in abandoned buildings and renovate them for living and/or political action purposes. Lesbians are often denied space, even by feminists. Renovating buildings would be a good way to re/claim our much needed space to think and act toward our well-being.

For those who have female children, we can refuse to send them to public and so-called private schools. We can instead create our own Radical Lesbian schools. Some fundamentalist christians have resisted sending their children to public schools, because, in their opinion, racist heteropatriarchal values are not promoted enough. They actually want to take control of the public school system by taking away the few “reforms” education has been allowed to make. Christians notwithstanding, most schools continue to teach racist heteropatriarchal values and to promote “great” white men, while women are ignored or shown only in stereotypically “supporting” roles. The agents of the monetary tax system are running a protection racket on the educational system, so that it will accept money on the agents’ terms. A Radical Lesbian education would be based on values that maintain our moral intelligence and integrity. We can learn about our foresisters’ lives, struggle, and achievements and about what is being done in the present.

Some feminists have proposed destroying the system by working within the male economy, especially at a bank or large corporation, but giving the money to our causes. There is nothing inherently wrong with taking the money we earn from our jobs in patriarchal heteroeconomy and using it for Lesbian causes. It is a good strategy to give back energy to our Selves and each other. We need to find every possible way to get money from the male economy for our well-being. But we must understand that any such strategy is short-term and must contribute to long-range goals. It also must be understood that it is very difficult, although not impossible, to work in a corporation, a large business, or government, and simultaneously maintain Radical Dyke perspective and anger.

The corporation, the state, and the heteropatriarchal family all have the same hierarchy and “relational” lines of superiority and subordination. Dissenting women, especially Lesbian Separatists, are removed for not deferring to and being for men. Dissenting women are also held up by the male corporate structure to all other women as examples of what their fate will be if they challenge the system. Women’s reason, intelligence, and anger are fragmented, dissipated, and purposely misaimed(20) in order to maintain corporate power. The male economy needs female complicity, at any expense, up to and including the destruction of women’s knowledge and passion. The corporation is part of the phallic upward mobility scheme. And as we have seen, women cannot achieve upward mobility in patriarchal heteroeconomy.

We must realize that as long as we work in the male economy, females will not benefit from the work men have told us to perform. A crucial step to ending patriarchal heteroeconomy, and ultimately racist heteropatriarchy has been proposed by Susan Cavin and must at the very least be considered by ALL Lesbian Separatists. That is to stop working for men in any capacity.

.. it is when the oppressed stop working for the oppressors … that liberation solutions are actualized. As long as women work in patriarchal economies, they will remain oppressed.(21)

We can be very creative in our methods of disruption. But we have to end the phallic heteroeconomy that perpetuates the male class structure and the male value system. Thus we can continue to create the gynocentric society we have already begun. We must act now, because we have recognized the racist heteropatriarchy for what it is; we must “… render it harmless and … see how one goes about living without it.”(22)

Lesbians and our liberation are, and must be, the most important considerations in our lives. To assign our Selves and each other lesser value is to the peril of us all.

Notes

Julia Penelope, “The Mystery of Lesbians: IL” Lesbian Ethics 1:2 (1985), p. 53.

It is impossible to conceive of patriarchy as NOT racist as well as lesbophobic. Therefore I have chosen to expand on the Original insight Julia Penelope had when she coined the term heteropatriarchy, which I first encountered in her article, “WHOSE Past Are We Reclaiming?” Common Lives, Lesbian Lives 13 (Autumn 1984), p. 19.

The Inquisition in Europe has been referred to by Starhawk as The Burning Times. The truth is that since the beginning of racist heteropatriarchy, women’s bodies, minds, and spirits have been immolated in the phallocratic death pyres. The evidence of woman-burning is global because phallocracy is global.

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), p. 73.

ibid., p. 77.

Although this insight/incite has been around the Feminist movement for some time, it is always Original. Among those who have dis-covered this is Anna Lee in her article, “One Black Separatist,” Innerviews 5:3 (1981), p. 31.

A term I have coined to show how the exploitation of all women by men is connected to the economy that maintains heterosexuality as the “standard” and forces women to remain in relation to men.

Jeffner Allen, “Lesbian Economics.” Trivia 8 (Winter 1986), p. 40.

Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), p. 296.

I have purposely not written “Jewish.” This is not done out of disrespect to Jewish Dyke Separatists, but to include our Arab sisters who are Lesbian Separatists.

Jaggar, Ibid.

Allen, p. 49.

I am not proposing any form of “downward” mobility. When women are earning 0.73 to every dollar men earn, when women who are college graduates earn LESS than men with an eight grade education, when women cannot afford day care for young children, when it is estimated that by the year 2000 virtually all of the poor will be WOMEN AND CHILDREN, we are not “downwardly” mobile. We are IMMOBILE!

A personal/political point After working in several varieties of restaurants in the past years, I have made this observation: Although many men also work in restaurants, they generally are not working in the local greasy-spoon diner or fast-food restaurant. As restaurants become more “up-scale,” catering to the clientele they want to attract, men are seen in these establishments as employees, where pay, benefits and opportunities for advancement are much better. Women are never seen as employees in these restaurants. Do YOU support this instance of oppression by eating in these restaurants anyway?

Christina Thurmer-Rohr. “From Deception to Un-Deception: On the Complicity of Women.” Trivia 12 (Spring 1988), p. 69.

See Jeffner Allen’s discussion on man-hating in her essay, “Remembering: A Time I Will Be My Own Beginning.” In her Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations (Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1986), pp. 19-24.

Marilyn Frye, “Some Reflections on Separatism and Power.” In her The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1983), p. 98.

I first heard about the lives of the Masai women from a movie I saw in a sociology of gender class in April 1985. Their plight is the plight of many women throughout the world including Amerika, where older women, after making many self-sacrifices to raise children and maintain the house, often find themselves with nothing to show for their hard work, especially if the husbands die or divorce them.

There is also an interesting story told about the male ownership of the cattle. In pre-patriarchal history women were the owners of the cattle and were responsible for making all decisions. But a drought came during the summer season and killed all the cattle. Although the drought could not have been prevented, the men blamed the women for the death of the cattle. When they were able to replenish the livestock, the men took everything away from the women, from positions of responsibility to ownership of the cattle. Here we have more evidence that we have not always lived in a patriarchal society. Yet the fact that this story, assigning women blame for a natural disaster, was told by a woman shows female complicity in justifying and maintaining male lies and male control.

Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 217.

See Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 206-7, for her discussion on women’s passions and knowledge and how they are fragmented and dissipated by racist heteropatriarchy.

Susan Cavin, Lesbian Origins (San Francisco: Ism Press, 1985), p. 153. 22Thurmer-Rohr, p. 74.

Thurmer-Rohr, p.. 74.

[repriseofthereprise]

No Mercenary Warrior

Bridget Collins

In Lesbian Ethics Vol. 4, No.2, Spring 1991)

I am not a mercenary warrior. As a woman born to poverty, my first loyalty is to other women of poverty. It is often difficult to reconcile this position with my life as a radical lesbian feminist. How, for instance, am I to receive discussions of classism which address only the interface between the working and middle classes, while ignoring poverty women, who by definition must bear the heaviest onus of class oppression?

It seems to me obvious that the poverty women who have lived to tell about it must necessarily have words of value to offer to the discussion of classism. Classism is not merely offending and insulting us. It is murdering us. It is casting us into prisons made of concrete and steel, as well as the prisons of addiction, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and inadequate education. It forces us to become warriors before we lose our milk teeth and demands that we harden our hearts before we grow to full size. If we manage to learn to trust our instincts and hunches, if we can kick our brains into gear when panic would more naturally prevail, then we survive.

We create the very notion of hope out of our own gossamer dreams, and at poverty, gossamer is in short supply. We exist as testament to our own endeavor. We have been compelled to improvise and to create the avenues by which we survive classism at its most vicious, yet in discussions of classism, what we have to say is largely ignored. It serves little purpose to ascribe intent to motives which one does not understand, yet I cannot help but wonder at the motives of those who aspire to comprehend class oppression while denying the credibility of those who survived the front lines of that battle.

Because we live as prey, women of poverty learn that it is unwise to form into groups, for as groups, we make easier targets. One poor person is regarded as a manageable criminal, two are a gang, three or more constitute a riot. To avoid the repercussions of being perceived as a threat, poverty women often keep to themselves. By and large, we live lives of abiding isolation. When you are thoroughly absorbed in protecting your back, you tend to eschew any approaches to your front or flank. Because of this, it is incumbent on me to say that I can only truly speak of the phenomena of poverty from a very personal perspective. While there are many, many women of poverty, we each experience it alone and those of us who survive it do so alone. The old reflexes die hard. While we must on one hand depend on one another, we learn that we must ultimately depend on ourselves to survive. Women of poverty learn to give trust reluctantly. A mistaken trust will not only result in a broken heart, but possibly in the loss of our next breath and heartbeat.

And so, I will reiterate this very important point: I speak from a personal perspective. My experience is that of nomadic poverty, shifting from migrant farm camps to rural poverty to inner city squalor. I cannot speak as one who has ever stayed in one neighborhood for a full generation or as one who has managed to maintain her family through a lifetime of picking fruit. There are many women of poverty with experience akin to mine. Transience is a very real part of what life at poverty is. It is however not the only avenue of poverty. Black poverty, white poverty, Latin poverty, immigrant poverty, rural poverty, urban poverty, the poverty of those who live in cars, on the streets, on reservations, in institutions, in servant’s quarters, in migrant camps …. Poverty is everywhere and takes many forms. What we all have in common is that we are regarded as expendable. We are on the outside looking in, but we are looking in from many different windows.

Interfaces

The middle class and the poor seldom encounter each other, and so, as a woman born to poverty, the naming of the middle class as the ultimate classist aggressor seems ludicrous to me. I am not unaware of how the middle class benefits from the oppression of the poor, but in my neighborhoods, it was not the middle class who were arresting us and shaking us down. It was not the middle class beating us up, spitting on us, robbing us of our integrity. It is the working class who actively and vehemently hate the poor.

In radical lesbian discussions of classism, poverty is occasionally included as a subgroup of the working class. The sardonic irony of this is astonishing. The working class affirm repeatedly that their families never took a dime that they hadn’t earned, that they would have died rather than accept welfare or food stamps. They rankle at being treated like poor people, at being regarded as part of the undeserving and unfortunate teeming masses. They make little or no attempt to hide their contempt for what they regard as the lazy, crazy, criminal, poverty class, and yet no one ever calls them on their own classism. In fact, their claims to hard working virtue are offered as proof that the working class absolutely does not deserve to bear the burden of classist oppression. This very argument implies that the poor do deserve to be oppressed.

While the working class and the middle class seem to have an ongoing feud raging, poverty so seldom comes in contact with the middle class that there is very little opportunity for any genuine animosity to develop. Those few middle class individuals whom we do encounter are usually intending benevolence. They are social workers, community activists, church people, or school teachers. While it is recognized that these people often do more harm than good to poor people, it is also recognized that, however convoluted and confused their efforts may seem, they generally intend kindness.

As a woman of poverty, I am sometimes struck by what appears to me to be the vapidity of the middle class, and often I have been stunned by their emotional sterility. I distrust the middle class when they pity us. Poverty learns early on that pity is merely honeyed contempt. In all honesty, I cannot say that I bear the middle class any abiding malice. I find their assumption that I would prefer their lives to my own irksome. I would not trade my experience, my family, my friends, my entire life to have a middle class life. The arrogance of that assumption is galling, but beyond that, I have never known them well enough to develop any passionate emotion towards them. The only exceptions to this that come to mind are judges and the “ten-dollar man.”

A long white car used to drive through Chicago’s Uptown, a very poor, racially mixed neighborhood. It was a new car, a Cadillac or a Lincoln, and it contrasted sharply with the broken down relics that littered Uptown’s streets. The driver of the car was a middle-aged white man. As he drove through the neighborhood, he paused occasionally, sliding down his electric windows to speak with the women and girls on the street. He was the “ten-dollar man,” and everybody knew what he wanted. If a girl would agree to get into his car and perform oral sex, he would pay her ten dollars. Mostly, we laughed at him, but he was a clever fellow. He knew that the most promising time to visit Uptown was toward the end of the month when women’s food stamps had run out and their AFDC checks were still a week away. That was when the “ten-dollar man” could find a taker or two for his proposition. Though we tried to laugh him away, we hated him. We hated his white car. We hated the home we supposed he lived in, we hated the power his ten dollars could wield, and I suppose we hated the woman whom we imagined shared his house and who did not keep him on a tight enough rein. The “ten-dollar man” is the only middle class individual whom I ever had the opportunity to learn to hate.

The “ten-dollar man” was not the only one to seek out poverty girls as sexual targets. Boys from the working class are encouraged to sow their wild oats with poverty girls, but to marry “nice” girls, i.e., their own kind. Not until I became an adult did I learn that rape is generally regarded as a crime. Growing up, I believed it to be merely a part of life, a denigrating and humiliating rite of passage which every woman must endure.

The working class provide the poor with considerable fodder for bitterness. For years in the lesbian community I have listened to working class women bemoan their oppression at the hands of the middle class. In my experience, when lesbians talk about classism, they are generally referring to the interface between middle class and working class. To date, I have not heard the classism discussions address the interface between the working class and the poor. I suspect that the middle class women’s fear of being labeled classist precludes their listening, and the working class claim to classist victimization cannot afford the truths that women of poverty would bring to the discussion of classism.

As I have said, we seldom encounter the middle class and so, seldom develop genuine feelings about them. However we do encounter the working class with frightening regularity. The interface between the working class and the poor is often fraught with violence. We were the kids they mugged on the bus, slammed into the lockers, and harassed with unyielding fervor. They were the salt of the earth. We were the scum of the earth. Lest we forget our place, the working class infused our lives with vicious and cruel reminders that they were noble and hard working people. We were the human garbage that polluted their environs. The message was clear. They had every reason to be proud, while we merited shame. Their efforts were to be honored, ours were to be scorned and ridiculed.

Yes, I do understand that the working class has a legitimate case to make in the classism arena. The middle class treat them badly and disrespectfully. However the insinuation that the working class are candidates for canonization in this arena completely astounds my sensibilities and disregards the abuses that poverty regularly suffers at working class hands. The intimation that, had the working class had the power that the middle class wields, they would have used it more benevolently is completely without merit. The working class does have power. They have power over the poor, and they abuse it with a determination that the middle class can only imagine. If in radical lesbian discussions of classism, I ever hear working class women accepting even a fraction of the culpability that they foist into the laps of middle class women, I will be both stunned and heartened. At that point, these discussions will truly gain some measure of credibility to me. Until that time, I will regard these discussions as exercises in shaming the middle class to guilt and aggrandizing the working class to supercilious sainthood. I am serious about my radical lesbian politics, and I am eager to see classism openly and honestly addressed. I am not a mercenary warrior however, and I see not point in fighting battles in which the issues of poverty go unattended.

Classism is Murder

There are many issues which relate particularly to poverty which I wish radical lesbian feminists would acknowledge and address. The average age of mortality for women of poverty is between 47 and 52 years old. When we discuss the rights and respect due to lesbian elders, it would be gratifying to hear it at least noticed that poor women seldom ever live long enough to join the ranks of the elders.

A recent phenomenon in lesbian circles is to hold events which use racial quotas of 50% lesbians of color and 50% white lesbians. These events cost money, and so the first to register for them will be women who are sure of their money situation. The sequence of registration by class is an inevitable one. Those most certain of their resources three months down the line will be able to register three months ahead. Those who are playing catch as catch can with their resources will not know until the last minute if they will be able to spare the time and money to attend an event. For an event which has established racial quotas, this results in an attendance which is 50% lesbians of color and 50% white lesbians from middle and working class backgrounds. White women of poverty are virtually excluded because, by the time we are able to register, the quota for white women has already been filled.

Attempting to navigate the seams between my commitment to women of poverty and my commitment to the feminist movement has often been very difficult. In the battle for reproductive rights, Operation Rescue has been clearly named an enemy of the feminist movement. I agree that every woman should have the right of reproductive choice and so on this issue stand with my feminist sisters in renouncing Operation Rescue’s position. Yet the children of the poor, based on their poverty and their parents’ lack of access to resources, are routinely rejected in the selection process for organ transplants, experimental treatments, and potentially lifesaving surgeries. To date, only Operation Rescue has rallied against the practice of condemning the children of the poor to death based solely on the economic status of their parents. Of course, I believe in and support a woman’s right to choose. I also believe in a poor child’s right to live the life that she has been born to. How can I fully and wholeheartedly denounce Operation Rescue when only they have stood against the barbarism of the medical selection process as it relates to the children of poverty? As a woman of poverty, it is just one of the quandaries which I must navigate. I do so by keeping Operation Rescue in mind as a strange bedfellow. I continue to support any woman’s right to choice, and at the same time, I will refuse to carry an organ donor card until some chance exists that people of poverty will benefit from the organ donor program. I am not a mercenary warrior.

The problem of gang activity in the inner cities is overwhelming. Young men armed with guns and dealing drugs bring a sad and violent picture to mind. Yet in poor neighborhoods where the role of the police is primarily to arrest and abuse, and almost never to serve and protect, the gangs serve a purpose. They are often the closest thing to a police force which exist in poverty neighborhoods.

As a teen-aged girl in Uptown, I avoided any involvement with the gangs that ruled the streets there. As far as I was concerned, they were pitching their lives down a dead end alley. I knew I did not want to make that trip with them. A day came when I was walking down the street and was yanked into a gangway by a man whom I had never seen before. As he dragged me between the building, ripping at my clothes, boys clad in denim and black leather filled both ends of the gangway. They entered the fracas and pulled me free of the man. They told him that they intended to teach him not to “fuck with Uptown’s home girls.”

I left before they administered the lesson, and so cannot tell you what exactly they did to my would-be assailant. I never wanted to know and so never asked. I will not forget though that they saved my hide that day. While the police do not perceive the rape of a poor woman as a crime, gang members do perceive the assault on a home girl by an outsider as a crime to be averted and avenged. Does this forgive the violence that gangs do in their own neighborhoods? No. Does it forgive the truth that those same gang members would feel entitled to rape the home girls themselves? No. When there are no police though, these vigilantes will step in, committing all the sins and taking all the liberties that are the hallmarks of vigilantism. So, do I want gang activity stopped? Yes, I do. Do I worry about what will happen in poor neighborhoods if gangs are wiped out? Very much.

Education in poor neighborhoods is hopelessly inadequate. The dropout rate for children of poverty is overwhelming, and for poverty girls, the situation is particularly bleak. I left Uptown after dropping out of high school. In the years that followed, I managed to get a GED and then worked two full time jobs to put myself through college. I earned a degree in sociology, and then returned to Uptown to work with adolescents. I ran a career training program which prepared kids for white collar work. At the beginning of one year, 90 students who had dropped out of high school enrolled in the program. Of these 60 were boys and 30 were girls. By year’s end, 25 boys had finished the program. Every one of the girls had dropped out, most due to the demands of unexpected pregnancies.

Poverty girls are born with the label of “slut” hanging over their heads. They are barely out of diapers before they become the sexual prey of boys and men from all classes, including, and perhaps most especially, poverty. In a place where growing up very quickly is necessary in order to survive, sexual maturity is hard pressed to keep up with sexual activity. And so, babies are born to babies. Fourteen-year old girls are compelled into motherhood, coerced away from an education, and forced into the degradation of the welfare system. (That we have opted to use the term “welfare” for a system which degrades and humiliates its recipients is a particularly cruel and insulting irony.) In fact, it will not matter how many new computers and textbooks are added to poverty schools if adolescent pregnancies preclude the students’ presence in the classroom.

In many states, the lottery has been offered as the solution to the problem of educational opportunity. The irony of this is no less cruel than the use of the term “welfare system.” By and large, the millions of dollars raised through lotteries comes directly out of poor neighborhoods. People teased by the possibility of escape from the ongoing degradation wind up providing the financial support for a system from which they will almost certainly receive minimal benefit. In grocery stores where no other concession to bilingualism is even attempted, only the lottery advertisements are posted in both English and Spanish. Millions of dollars, many of which are welfare dollars, are taken out of poor neighborhoods and recirculated “equally” throughout the lotteries’ home states.

I am anxious for the day when lesbian discussion of classism include the topics of the function of gangs at poverty level, the sexual exploitation and abuse of poverty women and girls, the health care of the poor, and the inadequacies of the educational system as it relates to poverty. While the discussions of classism address only the interface between the middle and working classes, it is difficult for me not to close my ears and harden my heart. The discussion seems to focus on the hurt feelings and compromised self esteem of the working class. I truly regret their pain, but I recoil at the notion that these issues of classism seem to have taken precedence over the fact that classism is not just compromising the perceived self worth of poverty women. It is killing us. It is killing our children. It is killing our mothers and our sisters and our friends. My mother and sister are dead. I saw my friends die. I have seen more miscarriages and stillbirths among the women of my family than I have seen live births. Classism is a deadly and formidable enemy. I cannot and will not forget that.

It is impossible for me to attend to or to believe in discussions of classism which trivialize the impact of class hatred. For women of poverty, classism is not just a matter of hurt feelings or low self esteem. We bear the enormity of classism’s weight. If we are not crushed by it, it makes us very strong women. We are scattered throughout Lesbos, and we have a great deal to offer in the battle against classism. To date, we have represented an untapped resource in lesbian discussions about classism. It is my fervent hope that this will change.

Of middle class lesbians, I would ask that you stop caressing your guilt and allow for the possibility that classism is not merely a function of your relationships with the working class. Listen. Notice that you have rarely, if ever, heard a woman of poverty speak in classism discussions, and ask yourself why. Not a lot of us survive to name the names and tell the stories, but when we do survive, when we offer you the information, for the love of the Mother, listen. What we have to say you have not heard before. Do not suppose when we recount the ravages of classism that we are hating our lives as poor women. It would be no wiser for a poor woman to curse her poverty background than it would be wise for a pot to curse the kiln or a sword to curse the forge. As much as you are the product of your life, so we are the products of ours. We have earned our survival as you have earned yours. Truth to tell, I am not sure that I could have survived the emotional sterility of the middle class. I comported myself well at poverty though. I will honor and respect the battles which you had to fight in order to become a lesbian, and I ask those same courtesies of you.

Of working class lesbians I would ask that you acknowledge the interface between the working and poverty classes, and tell the truth about the vehement hatred which exists there. Your role in classism has been a dual one. You stand as both the oppressed and the oppressor. Classism is not limited to the vagaries of the middle/working class interface. You know that. While you were aspiring to the middle class, you were also eschewing and belittling the poverty class. Please add this information to the discussions of classism. It is not my intent to diminish the impact of what you suffered in the arena of classism. I ask a similar courtesy of you.

Of my sisters, of other women of poverty, I would ask that you insist on being heard. Refuse to be mercenary warriors. You more than anyone know the price that classism exacts. Do not be shamed or intimidated away from the truth. More than anything, I ask you to continue doing what you have always done. Resist the temptation to make love to the pain. Instead, celebrate your survival and your strength. I ask that you not be seduced by pity. Those who would prefer to pity us rather than honor us do not understand. They offer a siren song of sympathy that is occasionally enticing, but ultimately destructive. We danced on death’s borders and survived. That is not cause for mourning, but for jubilation. Your loves, your passions, your determination bought you every breath and heartbeat. You are amazing and formidable warriors. That is a sound and sturdy truth worthy of your embrace.

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