by Barbara Deming

Delivered as a talk at the Florida State University in Tallahassee on March 4, 1977 - sponsored by the Women's Center and the Center for Participant Education. And published in Quest, Summer 1977, in a condensed version.

Dear Susan Saxe -

May I converse with you again? I keep remembering your saying that the feminist movement needs an analytical method, and that leftist women should teach their sisters the method of dialectical materialism. It is "not a male concept", you urge; "it is a tool of liberation" - and would help put our life experiences "into a rational political context". Your suggestions makes me anxious.

I will agree that history can best be understood by examining the changing ways in which we seek the "means of subsistence"; and best understood as a story always in process, the constant motion of our actions, interactions as we seek our lives. I wouldn't name this concept patriarchal. But I do think that those who have used the dialectical method to date have given us a much too limited look at the way in which we try to find our lives. And I also think that the fact that most of these dialecticians have been men helps to explain why they have overlooked so very much. I sent you once a copy of a letter I wrote to Arthur Kinoy and in it - if you remember - I said that I thought Marxists had concentrated much too much upon the ownership and upon the production of things by which we subsist and had scanted a study of the ways in which people try to subsist upon one another. (And i didn't mean upon the labor of others, simply - unless we can call the giving of attention a kind of labor.) Of course if me were to make this study, they would have to face the truth that they keep asking us to be their subsistence (even men who think they want radical change) - keep taking it for granted that women like and even need to give our deepest attention to them; to live, in effect, their lives. If they began to study what it is they ask of us, it would raise an uncomfortable question: Do we need our own lives? Which is why they look away from the obvious fact that just such a study has to be made; why it took a woman, Kate Millett, to suggest that if we want to understand our history - want to "put our life experiences into a rational political context" - we have to begin to talk not merely about the politics of economics but about "sexual politics".

I have just read Wilhelm Reich's The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality and was struck by the fact that even this man, whose primary interest is sexuality, when he examines in dialectical fashion the long-ago shift from Mother Right to Father Right, and suggests that "the central mechanism" of this great shift was the ritual of the marriage gift - which became marriage tribute rather than gift, and then became bride price ("the first economic compulsion of mankind", he names it) - I was struck by the fact that even he looks only to economic interests for an explanation of what happened here. . . . Like Engels, he fails even to suggest the possibility that sexual interests may have been involved. He speaks of the first stirrings of avarice and ownership interest - meaning interest in the ownership of things. But he doesn't explain why avarice began to stir - though he clearly agrees with others that it did not exist within the communal maternal clan. He notes with Engels that at a certain time a surplus in material goods began to exist. But he doesn't explain why men were moved to claim this surplus for their individual selves rather than for the clan; and why they were moved to begin to exact a price for things, in place of the free exchange of gifts became "a preliminary step toward merchandising". But what, in fact, was the first merchandise? Clearly enough, by his own account, woman and her children. So why is it not obvious that sexual politics were involved here: were, to use a phrase of Engels' the driving force behind the driving force at which he does look - the greed for things which he says began to afflict men at this time born of another kind of greed, more primary.

In my letter to Kinoy, if you remember, I suggest that men were moved to force the changes that they did, not because they suffered from the lack of material possessions, but because they suffered from a lack of self possession - when they compared themselves with women. They felt a need to produce for themselves a wealth of self regard that could equal - or rather that could more than equal- the rich sense of herself that women had in those early time, because she was the child bearer. The fact that man had anything to do with the birth of children was for a long time unknown. Each new birth seemed to a man, no doubt, an extension of womanÍs self. He must have felt himself to be less than she; and he must have resented having to feel that way. . . .

When I wrote as I did to Kinoy, I was unaware of one face that I learned soon after by reading Evelyn ReedÍs WomenÍs Evolution. (In ReichÍs The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality it is made clear, too.) Men moved to claim children as their property right before they learned that they were their natural biological offspring. Reed writes: "the evidence is unambiguous; before the facts about paternity were known, a man 'begot' a child not through a genetic process but through a property transaction"; he "became the father . . . by payment in cattle of the bride price and child price".

Though acts of purchase had not existed before this time, it is clear from the evidence she gives that men now managed to insist that such acts had awful power. The property right to children which they purchased could not be dissolved by the woman's remarriage or even by the man's death; it could be dissolved only by the return of those cattle which had been the coin paid. If a woman remarried, but the cattle had not been returned, the children of that second marriage were still "his". If a son were born to the woman years after his death, but the cattle had not been returned, that son could still be claimed by male kin to carry on his "name". When the man did learn that he was a biological father, he then devised very different kinds of laws - to protect his status as "progenitor". But the primary right he demanded was, as before, a property right - property in children and in woman.

Knowing that he first demanded this "right" while in ignorance of paternity, I am more convinced than ever that he was seeking compensation for a lack of naturally experienced pride - dissatisfied with the self he felt to be his, hoping to produce a larger self through his purchase of "heirs". And my own strong guess is that he invented the very concept of purchase to be able to produce his new pride. A pride tragically abstract. If only he had known earlier that he was by nature more than his single self. No need to pretend to be. No need for the theft called "purchase".

Small wonder that money so often obscures what should be natural relationships between people. It appears to have been invented to facilitate a lie. Small wonder, too, that women seldom have any real control over money - as Chesler and Goodman make so clear in Women, Money and Power. The lies is that we women belong to men and not to ourselves. Money was invented to steal from us our independence. It had better be for us, I might add, to dissolve the perverse system.

But to return again to Reich. Why is it that this man, whose particular study was sexuality, who writes in the book I have been citing that sexual needs play a more important part in the formation of character and the development of society than the need for food . . . why is it that when he examines the acts by which men imposed patriarchy, he himself overlooks sexual interests? He makes certain observations about the sexuality he thins characterized prehistory that are certainly relevant to the story of the introduction of patriarchy. But then he seems to forget all about them. When he comes to tell that story, he fails to pick up the thread of any one of these speculations.

In the days before patriarchy, as you probably know, the brother of any woman who bore children was the man who shared, with her, responsibility for those children. Reich remarks of the brother in those days that he was "the real husband of the sister except for the genital relationship". He also speaks of legends that refer to a time when brother and sister lived together in incest; and he makes this assumption that at the stage of savagery, people did live in incest - "without being in the least harmed by it". But there began to be restrictions upon genital freedom, he says. The first such restriction was "the prohibition of the sexual embrace with one's own clan, i.e. with all maternal kin". The process of sexual suppression, he suggests, "is older than the 'class conflict' between man and woman and is the cause of this antagonism". Here are a series of observations that one wouldn't suppose he would be likely to forget having made . . . .

If Reich believed that the primary source of antagonism between man and woman was primitive woman's refusal of her brother's embrace, and if he saw the mother's brother during matriarchal times as a king of husband to her, except for this embrace, why didn't it interest him to speculate upon the sexual feeling of the mother's brothers during this time that patriarchy was gaining its victory? As Reed puts it, the victory of patriarchy was "the victory of father right over mother's brother right". The father has to "usurp the long-established primacy of the mother's brother . . . . Only when the mother's brother relinquished all claims to his sister's son could the father acquire it as his 'own'". Although Reed speaks of "a struggle" here "between two categories of men", every man involved in the struggle of course (or surely almost every man) belonged to both categories - was mother's brother to one woman, mother's mate to another. So what the victory of patriarchy actually meant was that one man after another made a choice: he chose a husband's and a "father's" rights over a brother's rights; he chose the identity of husband and "father" over the identity of brother. As Reed does write, the brother's relinquishing of his claim "required that she abandon his sister and sister's children and 'cleave' to his wife and wife's children". I would substitute for the word "cleave", of course, the words "take possession of". (As Reed herself notes, "the root word from which the word for father in all the Aryan languages is derived appears to mean nothing but 'owner', and the same applies to the Semitic ab, abu".)

And why did Reich prefer not to speculate upon the sexual interests of the men who chose as they did? I think that the answer is obvious. If he were to look very closely at the act by which prehistoric men sought for themselves a new identity, a new self regard, he would be looking very closely - too closely for comfort - at the very act by which he himself (by which any man) still seeks his pride. Reich claimed that Engels was unable to think clearly enough about the part played in history by sexuality because his concept of sexuality considered the function of procreation but left untouched "the function of genital gratification". But I would say that Reich, too, was unable to think about it clearly enough, because he couldn't quite make himself look at the truth that for patriarchal man genital gratification requires the gratification of false pride.

Marxists to date have sought "the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society". (The words are Engels'.) But we do not subsist upon bread alone. I keep remembering a passage in the title essay of Andrea Dworkin's Our Blood - an essay subtitled The Slavery of Women in Amerika. She writes that black slavery was an outgrowth of that older form of slavery, the slavery of women to men. (I very much agree with her.) And she writes, "The white man perpetuated his view of female inferiority in the institution of black slavery. The value of the black male slave in the market place as double the value of the black female slave; his labor in the field or in the house was calculated to be worth twice her". You will remember Sojourner Truth's words about working as hard and ably as any man. And slave women gave birth to additional slaves. I'd say that their economic worth to the slave owner was clearly greater than that of male slaves. Or rather, it was so, but it was not clear that it was so; it was not allowed to be clear. Man does not subsist on bread alone; he subsists also upon pride. And he has chosen to construct his pride upon the lie that men and women are very different from one another, and that men are of greater worth.

Shulamith Firestone has dared to propose a concept of dialectical materialism wider than the original Marxist concept - one that incorporates the view that to understand history we have to study economic developments, but names the primary moving power behind historic events "the dialectic of sex". Only a woman could have proposed this revision of Marx, I think. And most men will find it difficult to accept. For any scrupulous study of sexual dialectics will confront them again and again with evidence that the pride which sustains them is the product of a series of lies. And these lies are still, tragically, experienced as necessary.

The live by the lie that a man has the "right" to think of a child as "his", of a woman as "his". We speak of a shift from "Mother Right" to "Father Right", but women never claimed the "right" to children that men now claim. As Reed and others make clear, a child was once viewed as collectively born to the entire maternal clan. Every nursing mother might participate in suckling a baby. Before patriarchy, no one was thought of as the property of another. But the lie is now that children belong to their fathers - or should not exist, are "illegitimate". And the lie is that those who give birth to men belong to men. Transparent lies. And yet- they have been insisted upon for centuries. And the lie is that men and women are altogether different, one from another. Again, a transparent lie. For how could it be so - when the one is made of the very flesh and blood of the other? But again, it is insisted upon. It is even insisted upon that the male is not really born of the mother. The patriarchal church teaches: everything real "proceedeth from the Father and the Son". Do not ask how. The lie at the very heart of masculine pride is this: that the mother is not really the mother; the mother is unnecessary.

That we are all born of our mothers is so obviously true that I have to keep reminding myself of how true it also is that we are taught to deny it - and really do deny what our very bodies remember to be undeniably so. "The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men," Adrienne Rich names it in Of Woman Born. And yet - this experience that is converted - stubbornly, continually. Rape is an act by which men violently refuse to remember that the place they batter is the place that gave them birth. Praying to "Our Father who art in Heaven" is an act that more subtly erases memory of the mother. (Try the words, pretending that you believe in them, and see what becomes of that memory.) Under patriarchy, woman is acknowledged as wife, and woman is acknowledged as servant to the child; but we are taught and taught to suppress the memory that she is truly mother - that is, that we are flesh of her flesh and once literally lived within her. Taught to suppress it even though this suppression causes us to live in a state of fear.

A few months ago I was discussing feminism with a young man who had been a companion in the struggles of the sixties. He seemed to me, for various reasons, a man who would be open to feminist thought. But I kept finding in him strong resistance to it. It slowly became clear to me that he shared a fear that affects very many men - the fear that feminists would really like, if they could, to kill of men. It occurred to me to say to him, "The is a lot of anger against men among us, but you don't have to be afraid that we want to eliminate men. Don't forget that women give birth to men." I saw on his face a look of utter astonishment and clear relief. He had, I think, quite forgotten that this is so.

Men have for a long time now tried to live by the lie that "man" is self-made - the mother not really the mother, the source of his life not really the source of his life. (The final image in the movie Dr. Strangelove has always seemed to me an inspired image of this false pride: a man straddling a nuclear bomb as it falls from the bomb bay, whooping like a proud cowboy, feeling himself to be altogether "himself" now, altogether A Man - as he blows from under him the very earth itself without which he could have no being.) The masculine identity is built upon lies which are sexual lies. And so men will resist studying the dialectic of sex. But as long as this dialectic remains unexamined, the real place of women in history will remain invisible - our oppression obscured, and the means of our release from oppression obscured too. Man will remain master - of a world he is laying waste beneath him.

Firestone writes of Marx and Engels that though they grounded their theory in reality, it was only a partial reality. I deeply agree with her. And I believe it is for women to ground it truly at last. By insisting: We belong in history, too. You have stolen us from ourselves. We do not exist for your pride to feed upon. We are who we are.

But suddenly I hear your voice - raised in an objection. Ic an hear you saying: "We are who we are, you say. Yet all you keep talking about is how men deny that the mother is really the mother. Women are not all mothers, and women are not simply mothers". No, we are not. I am a woman who has never borne a child and I am, like you, a lesbian. So I really do hear your voice - hear it in imagination. But when men claimed women as their "rightful" property, and in doing so denied, in effect, that they were flesh of their mothers' flesh; when they redefined us as less real than they, real only as their property - they of course stole from us much more than our reality as childbearers.

They stole from us, for one thing, our reality as creative workers. Because we were considered their property now, all work we did was to be taken for granted; was very often not even seen as work. It was service due them. We would of course do what they needed us to do. We would of course want to do it. If we didn't choose to labor in this spirit - labor for them - we were not to think of ourselves as true women. IN the beginning. Evelyn Reed writes in Women's Evolution, women's work was supremely creative. In fact, she claims, "it created nothing less than the human species". For social labor distinguishes humans from animals; and in the beginning, she argues persuasively, this labor was largely in the hands of women. We took the lead in inventing agriculture ("primitive men thought we possessed magical powers in the growing of food, akin to our powers in growing children"); we took the lead in domesticating animals; and in developing crafts. It was only later that men took over what women had developed. Reed notes that the term for "mother" in some primitive languages can be translated as "producer-procreatrix". Primitive women" were not simply the procreators of new life, the biological mothers. They were the prime producers of the necessities of life: the social mothers".

When men, moved by jealousy, laid claim to our labor - both the labor of childbirth and that labor which creates us as an evolving species - they stole from us, too, of course, the fullness of our sexual natures. We are not supposed to acknowledge as natural to us any feelings, any actions that are not in men's service. For example, those of us who are mothers and those of us who are lesbians are supposed to feel that we are utterly different from one another. And too often we do feel just as we are expected to - even when one of us happens to be both a mother and a lesbian. But before the time of patriarchy, being a mother did not mean that one belonged to a man - had better belong to a man; and for a woman to be both a mother and a lover of other women would have been felt as no contradiction at all. We are who we are - when we don't feel constrained to see ourselves with the eyes of our masters. And surely we once experience it as quite natural to move toward man or woman sexually. . . . Reed, though she is often wonderfully bold about using her own eyes, falters here, not quite able to refuse the patriarchal view that women's sexuality is for men only. Primitive women, she says, segregated themselves after childbirth for very long periods, even for years. She puzzles over this: "how is it to be explained? . . . it is highly unlikely that savage women . . . consciously repressed their sexual desires. The terms 'abstinence' or 'continence', so frequently used by anthropologists, are misleading because they imply such suppression". She decides: "The conclusion to be drawn is the savage women felt minimal sexual desires or perhaps none at all during those periods when they segregated themselves". It is not a conclusion that I draw. I conclude - wouldn't you? - that they took other women as their lovers.

Reich, too, resists the thought that we were once this freely sexual. And this leads him, too, to musing I would call fanciful. In one passage in The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality, he is trying to guess at the origin of the taboo upon the genital embrace between sister and brother. He writes that the primeval hordes were of course nomadic hunters, and often "the young men had to go off hunting and live in abstinence, wandering about for weeks, perhaps for months. When such a horde of hunting men came upon a strange tribe living at peace. . . the intruders would seize what the peaceful tribe had gathered. . . and they would steal the women, the men's sisters, in order to embrace them, to which they were especially incited by their abstinence. If they emerged victorious, it was easy to enslave the vanquished men, to prohibit them the genital embrace with their own sister-wives". Engels writes that before patriarchy slavery did not exist, and Reich tends to agree with what Engels writes, so I was surprised to see him take it for granted that the men would be quick to enslave the others. I was surprised, too, to see him assume that they lived in sexual abstinence during their long hunting trips. I assume that they took one another as lovers.

I make my own assumptions, here, you'll notice, and feel very sure of myself in making them. How can I feel so sure, when both Reed and Reich, who would disagree, are learned about prehistory and I am not? I don't think that it requires scholarship to discover that, if we refuse to suppress our desires, we are just as inclined to desire those of our own sex as to desire those of the so-called "opposite" sex. Both Reed and Reich do suppose that it was "highly unlikely" that primitive peoples suppressed their sexual desires. There is a saying, "The history of the individual repeats the history of the race". You will agree with me, I'm sure, that very many women and men in telling the stories of their lives, could tell of recognizing at a late date that they had always felt desire for those of their owns ex, but early in life had learned to refuse to admit it - to refuse to allow themselves to "experience their own experience". (The phrase is Mary Daly's.) Under patriarchy, we are not supposed to belong to ourselves. We are supposed to "know" that we belong to men. (And men who desire other men are supposed to "know" that their "manhood" requires the subjection of women.)

Which bring me full circle in my response to the objection I imagined you voicing: the objection that women are not simply mothers. No, we are not simply mothers. But the very act by which men try to take possession of us, and to pretend that our sexuality is there for men only - and so brand lesbians as outlaws; this same act is the act by which they try to pretend that mothers are not really mothers, our sexuality merely passive. I wrote that in the act of rape men refuse to remember that the place they batter is the place that gave them birth. But I could well have added that in the act of "making love" men are supposed to refuse to remember this, too. Ellen Moers in the last chapter of Literary Women, noting that all the terms for women's sex have been fabricated by the male mind, comments upon the term "vagina". The word is Latin for sheath or scabbard. The mind that chose it chose to disregard the fact that "as passageway to life for the newborn infant, the canal walls miraculously stretch and expand as no scabbard or sheath can do". The word dictates that we think of that passageway as "a tight receptacle for the male organ, visualized as the sword". The choice of this one word exposes the lie by which the artificial self known as "man" has been produced. A lie that is murderous - as the word's evocation of a sword thrust into a woman's body concedes. A lie that has robbed both women and men of our true sexuality.

Our very earliest sensual feeling are of course feeling that we have as infants toward our mothers. And these are feeling which must contain actual memories - not mental, perhaps, but bodily memories - of dwelling within her body, and at peace with her; aware of our own heart beat but also of hers; aware of the life within us, but aware, too, of life not ours with which we are intimately linked. As a baby suckles, it must drink these memories with its mother's milk. And these are memories that are the same for us whether we are female or male. I have come to believe that, for all of us, women and men, this earliest sense experience is the only natural source for later sexual feelings: the experience of remembering, as we touch or are touched, that we are our own self but not this self alone; a single life but also life beyond our life. The bodily memory of this literal fact not rejected but recollected and recollected, and as it were mused upon without words - this is what natural sexuality would be. Not the illusion of proudly "taking", or of being taken by, one who is one's "opposite". A rejoicing in the fact that (whatever our gender; and gender would not divide us), we are kindred, linked to one another and to all of nature. I don't of course mean that the relation of an infant to its mother should be a model for an adult relation. For the infant is altogether dependent. I mean very simply that the child's very body remembers truths which we later repress at our peril. And patriarchy has insisted that we repress them. Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born, "Perhaps all sexual or intimate physical contact brings us back to that first body". Would that it did. Our illness is that we do not allow it. (I don't mean that I think Rich would disagree.)

In the ancient myth in which Persephone is stolen from Demeter, her mother - stolen underground - the result is winter. We have all of us been stolen from our mothers. Patriarchy is our long winter. And perhaps our first task is simply to recover those memories which were rapt from us when we were stolen by the patriarchs, claimed as their possessions. Robin Morgan in her poem The Network of the Imaginary Mother, in which she, too, tries to imagine our true natures, asks, "What do you remember? What is it that you long for still?" I think she asks the crucial question. It is a question we must learn to put not simply to our intellects but to our very bodies. I deeply agree with Adrienne Rich when she writes that we must stop trying to think from somewhere outside of our bodies, must begin at last to think through our bodies. For the lies by which the patriarchs produce themselves - produce themselves as masters (each to be formally addressed as just that - for the dictionary tells me that Mister is but a variant of Master) - these lies are very specifically lies about our bodies. The actual physical assaults - the rapes, the batterings which we have had to endure from them - are logical extension of their attempt to deny in imagination that they are born of our bodies' labor, not of their masterful own selves. The memory that they violently repress - the memory of dwelling with our mothers - teaches us that we are kindred. If our sexuality were allowed to be natural, each movement of desire would stir that memory, reaffirm that truth. The repression of that memory divides us from one another.

Engels writes that class oppression is the result of division of labor. I think it more accurate to say that it is the result of a supposed division of our natures. He writes, with Marx, that the first division of labor was that between man and woman for child breeding. There are very many divisions of labor that have distorted human lives; but that first division of labor happens to be natural. (I am assuming that by the term "child breeding" he means simply that, and not also the rearing of children.) Is he naming the man's contribution labor, as well as the woman's - the division being that it is labor of a different kind? Or does he mean that the woman's body alone must work to produce a child? I would be intrigued to know. But whatever he means, the "division" that he is writing about here is a natural one. If it were indeed the inevitable source of class oppression, the outlook for an end to oppression would be bleak. I think that Engels does almost name the source of our oppression. I think that he looks at it, almost but not quite seeing it. It isn't because the breeding of children involved unequal labor; it's because men once did not know that they played any part in it at all, experienced the difference between us as a division not of labor but of fundamental being - it's because of this, my guess is, that they tried to annex us to themselves, and oppression began here. Because, in their ignorance, they felt themselves to be essentially different - not quite flesh of the mothers' flesh, after all, less than us - they tried to distort the "difference' that was a cause of humiliation into a "difference" on which their pride could feed; chose to assure: "Women are less than men; for they are at our service; they exist only to help us be what we wish to be". The will to negate the selfhood of others, to turn other into slaves, began here. (Engels writes that the first class oppression coincided with the oppression of woman by man, in monogamous marriage. I would say that he avoids stating the obvious: that the first class oppression was this oppression.)

Division of labor can be natural. The "first division of labor" is. And Engels himself says that at certain times, under certain historical conditions, other divisions of labor are natural, in the sense of necessary. He adds that they are always perpetuated by violence and fraud after they have stopped being necessary. This happens, I would say, because men persist in asserting that there is a division of being that is natural - the division between "men" and "women"; by which they insist upon meaning: a division between "masters", whose lives are real lives, and those of us whose lives are (supposedly) real only as we help these "masters" to become what they wish to be. Divisions of labor are sometimes natural; but the division of being is never natural. And I would name the attempt to assert that it is natural the continuing source of class oppression - and the source of all divisions of labor that do distort our lives. Engels writes that the early communal society, the gens, was burst asunder, I would say, by the denial that we are of one nature.

Reed describes how in the maternal gens soon after a child's birth, the women would sit in a circle and the child would be passed around the circle, each woman holding it for a while. The child would then have been born to them all, born into the clan - whether girl child or boy child, one of them now, nobody's possession, but simply kin to all. No, we cannot turn the clock back to matriarchy. And no, I would not want to. Clearly enough there was not the fullness of equity at that time. Men did not sit in that circle; did not know how like they were to women, how altogether kin we are. (They felt it perhaps as children, then learned to doubt it.) But I do agree with Morgan (and with Engels) that the truly equitable society would be a revival of that ancient society in a higher form. For the beauty of the maternal gens was that there were no owners, no owned. The lie that one person can possess another person had not yet been fabricated.

What is the revolution that we need? I would say: We need to dissolve the live that some people have a right to think of other people as their property. And we need at last to form - as welcome to our children - a circle that includes us all, in which all of us are seen as equal. How do we learn to do that?

I think that we have to begin by trying to form again a kinship circle that is simply a circle of women and of children. I don't think that we can form that necessary larger circle, which includes men, until we have found our courage to assert with great clarity (and of course with more than word) that we do not belong to men. If only the men who felt unequal in that ancient society had known to alter it by insisting, "We, too, should be in the circle that welcomes the newborn". If only they had known that they could insist, "We are not that different from you". But they altered their situation instead by bursting the circle asunder. By teaching each child: "You belong to me now". And by forcibly teaching each woman: "You do not belong among your sisters; you belong to me". So we have to learn first to assert: "No, we do not belong to you. We are who we are".

And to truly learn who we are, we have to turn to one another again. We do not belong to others, but our lives are linked; we belong in a circle of others. We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our difference, tun out, if we listen well, to be our stories too. Their anger, which they begin to acknowledge, we recognize as our anger; the strength which they have doubted, but which that very anger hints at, is our strength too.

In the early days of this second wave of the feminist struggle, very many women who had never before really listened to other women began to - formally and informally, in planned consciousness-raising sessions and spontaneously; to listen to friends, to strangers, to themselves; seeming, often to hear themselves as other women spoke. And talking with one another at last, more and more of us began to dare to believe that we can decide for ourselves who we are; we don't need to look at men to define us, by giving us approval or disapproval. We belong to ourselves - we begin to dare to remember this.

Jung writes that there are memories which belong not to any individual but to the race. And it may be so. Perhaps as we sat together in these new circles of women, remembering together who we were, we began even to remember the long-ago - to remember, with that part of the brain which is nonverbal, not only our individual earliest experiences (of drawing life itself from a woman - our flesh knowing well enough that women's power), but also the earliest experience of the race - an experience, too, of knowing well women's strength.

I don't mean that this kind of remembering was the subject of our talk. OUr talk was above al about our present slavery. I mean that as we spoke together of our slave state- daring to name it that, darting to trust ourselves to one another as we described our lives - we may well have begun to recover those strengthening memories without even knowing them for what they were.

Whether or not you give any credence to race memories, we did at any rate trust ourselves to one another, and we did begin to feel our strength. It was declared that "sisterhood is powerful". And for a while everyone assented. In the early days of our struggle, when those words were popular, very many women, I think, had for a while the feeling that we couldn't be stopped; tasted, at least, that feeling - that more and more of us were waking up; that we were more than half the human race (the other less-than-half unable to function without us, though they tried to pretend that they could; just let us go on strike!); and now that we had recognized one another as sisters, we could communicate with one another so swiftly, almost wordlessly - often upon first meeting - that we couldn't lose our struggle; we might even win it very soon. Carol Hanisch of Redstockings has written (in Feminist Revolution), "We thought it would only be a matter of a few years before we would have male supremacy conquered". Very many women, I think, had at least a taste of feeling that.

But then - many women had another experience that followed upon this, painfully. The magic seemed to fail. Communication wasn't that easy. The difference between us began to seem terribly real and to complicate everything. Lesbians began saying that they couldn't talk with "straight" women; "straight" women began saying that they couldn't talk with lesbians. Many women began to feel that class differences divided us. Few of us any longer enjoyed that luxurious feeling that we were sure to win, perhaps even soon. "in retrospect," Hanisch wrote, the idea sounded " a little naive - silly almost".

Naive it was, if course, of all of us - not to anticipate how easily still we could be splintered. But I don't think that the idea was silly. I think that our experience of optimism is one that we should be careful not to forget. If enough of us were able to hold steadily to certain truths, we could end male supremacy swiftly. And when we tasted that optimism I think that we were in touch with those truths. But we were in touch with them too simply feelingly. We didn't fully know what it was that we knew. And so we could too easily be frightened into doubting that we knew it.

I think I can hear your voice: "This is precisely why we need the discipline of dialectics - an analytical method". But I have to respond: My anxiety is that if women adopt the method of dialectics as it is now taught, it will not help them to grasp the truths that I am talking about. It will distract them from these truths. I think, in fact, that this has already been happening. The method of dialectics, as you know, puts great stress upon the need to identify the contradiction in a situation. I think that under the influence of Marxist thinking, in awe of it, women have sought to name the contradictions in our situation, and in this very process have surrendered our strength - calling into question that assumption of commonalty among us which we had begun to dare to make, and which is just what was putting us in touch with our strength.

Let me say quickly that I do not mean that I think the theory of contradictions is a useless theory - the idea that "there is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development" (the words are Mao's); the idea that we should "observe and analyze the movement of opposition in different things and on the basis of such analysis" find the appropriate revolutionary method - a method for resolving the contradictions. I think it can be very clarifying to think in these terms. But I also think that when it is the feminist revolution that we are concerned to make, we have to be very very careful to use our own eyes, make our own analysis. In his essay On Contradiction, Mao makes the point that we must give especial attention "to the distinction between the principal contradiction and non-principal contradictions . . . . Otherwise we shall make mistakes". In any process, he says, "there is only one principal contradiction that plays the leading role. Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved." I have suggested already what seems to me to the be principal contradiction in all our lives. That is the contradiction between the lie men try to live, try to make all of us live - the lie that men and women are of essentially different natures - and the truth that we are of one nature. If we do grasp this as the principal contradiction we have to try to resolve, then what Marxists up til now have spoken of as principal contradictions become non-principal contradictions, and everything shifts.

The Redstocking pamphlet, Feminist Revolution, contains in a note of quotation from the 1940 Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: "Proletary. L. proletarius, fr proles offspring. In ancient Rome, a citizen of the lowest class, without property and regarded as capable of serving the state only by having children." And then it quotes Catherine Henry, of Red Women's Detachment, who said in 1971: "The word proletariat' (from the French) means 'those who breed'. In fact, proletarian women are the proletariat in the proletariat."

But this is what I mean about having to be very careful to use our own eyes. In fact - look at the root of the word - women are the proletariat; those who breed are the proletariat. The proletariat which is women (all women) - the original proletariat - cannot be said to be contained within the proletariat as Marxists have defined it up until now. The one concept cracks the other concept wide open.

And this is what I mean when I say that I worry about our being in too much awe of Marxist thinking. Catherine Henry looks right at the words "those who breed". But she doesn't trust herself to write "Women are the proletariat". She feels that she has to write the proletarian women are the proletariat within the proletariat. But until we dare to write "Women - all women - are the proletariat", I am afraid that we will remain the underclass that we are. We will remain splintered - divided from one another. And we will fail to make the revolution.

What I have just said, I know, is shocking. To accept this new definition of the proletariat, we would have to look at everything differently. I think that we do have to look at everything differently.

You will ask: Do I think, then, that when Marxists define class struggle as they do they are not describing reality? I think that they are describing reality. But only a partial reality. I would say that they are describing the struggle of men who refuse to be the property of others. And they are describing the struggle of women is so far as it coincides with the struggle of men. But I'll repeat: the struggle of women cannot be said to be contained within that struggle. The most oppressed laboring man can go home to "his" woman and show her who's "the man". The most privileged woman can walk down the street and be taught that lesson by a whistle - as we all know. Engels himself, of course, wrote that in the family the wife is the proletariat, the husband the bourgeoisie. But then he forgot that he had said this, seen this. I am daring to say that the class struggle as Marxists have described it is a struggle to resolve a contradiction less fundamental than the contradiction the feminist struggle can resolve. I know this is heresy. It's the man's game that is supposed to matter. There was a piece in the February 6th, 1977, New York Times magazine section called "The Clubs Griffin Bell Had To Quit." It reported that in one of these man's clubs wives and children of members are given privileges; but "should a group of men wish to use a tennis court on which women are playing, the men simply step onto her court, say, 'Thank you very much, ladies', and the women depart". I think that most radical men take a very comparable attitude toward women engaged in making revolution. And I think it is time that women refused to get off the court.

I will probably be accused not only of heresy but of introducing impossible confusion. If I say that the class oppression Marxists have defined is a reality, but that the oppression of all women by men must be seen as a reality more fundamental (the reality from which all other oppression derives) - how can on any longer make neat distinctions between oppressors and oppressed? Won't it often happen that we would have to name the very same person both an oppressed person and an oppressor? Yes, it will very often happen. Life is precisely that complicated. And to pretend that it isn't that complicated doesn't help. We need rescue from neat distinctions that are illusions. Patriarchy is founded upon them.

But if we can't distinguish tidily between oppressor and oppressed, how can we possibly wage battle - without destroying comrades as we strike at enemies? I think this is a question that troubles very many women, whether or not they have put it to themselves as a conscious question. And I think the answer that can be given has been obscured, again, by the fact that many of us are hypnotized by the already existing tradition of Marxist struggle. If our struggle against patriarchal oppression were simply to imitate the forms that class struggle has taken so far, the battle scene would be a scene of confusion. And I'd suggest that this is on reason so many women still hang back from battle. But Mao has again written something that is relevant. He says, "the methods of resolving contradictions, that is, the forms of struggle, differ according to the difference in the nature of the contradictions". If the fundamental contradiction that has to be resolved is, as I think it is, the contradiction between the lie that men and women are of different natures and the truth that we are of one nature, the truth that no human being should be thought of as The Other, then the appropriate form of struggle is surely that form still largely to be invented: nonviolent struggle. One can't prove a common nature with other by doing violence to them. And again: if the complicated truth is that many of the oppressed are also oppressors and many of the oppressors are also oppressed, nonviolent confrontation is the only form of confrontation that allows us to respond realistically to such complexity. In this kind of struggle we address ourselves always both to that which we refuse to accept from others and to that which we can respect in them, have in common with them - however much or little that may be.

I know that you have declared your belief in armed struggle. And I imagine that, with many others, you see nonviolent struggle as essentially passive - a form of appeal, really, rather than a form of struggle. Just the behavior the patriarch would like to have us adopt - very lady-like; inspiring; and ineffectual. But the strike is not a passive form of behavior. It has a power that I don't think you will deny. And to struggle nonviolently is to go on strike. If enough women ever really went on strike - refusing the roles that have been assigned to us, insisting on roles of our own choosing - everything, everything would have to change.

To struggle nonviolently is also, of course, to refuse to reply in kind when there is retaliation. This is what is seen as passive. But I would argue that it can be a much more passive, much more desperate act to reply in king - to accept as one's own the oppressor's vision that there is nothing at all to prevent us from trying to destroy one another.

In nonviolent struggle, we seek to hold in mind both contradiction and commonalty. We refuse to cooperate with that which is in contradiction to our deep needs; and we speak to that commonality linking us all which, if remembered, can inhibit the impulse to destroy. A nonviolent dialectic - that is the dialectic that I do think accords with feminism and that we must try to invent. We will be called violent, of course. For though I would define our struggle with men as an insistence upon the fact that women and men are alike in nature, ironically, the very attempt to insist upon this will lead again and again to our having to adopt a temporary separatism. If me refuse to relate to us in any but the old ways, our only means of making our point is often to refuse, until they change, to relate to them at all. And there are many men who will interpret this as our wishing them dead. There are many men on the Left who will interpret it in this way. Which complicates our making alliances with them - even when such alliances, if possible, would gain all of us much.

I think we have to beware of naming the alliances more urgent than the feminist struggle. I think - as I started earlier to say - that the most urgent action for us to take is that of forming a strong kinship circle of women. Once enough of us are firm in our refusal to be treated by men as their property, men will begin at last to relate to us in another way. (They'll find that this answers not only to our deep needs but to their own - to relate to us not as masters but simply as kin.) But most of us will only find the courage to refuse the old, demeaning relation if we have the company of other women. In the old relation, we allow men to define us. And though the definition that they give us grotesquely constricts us, it does give us a place in the world as it is. A narrow place. But we know that place. We have - if we behave ourselves - the security of the beloved house slave. To refuse that place is to step into the unknown. We risk doubting that we live anywhere at all. It has been so many centuries, after all, since we were our own women.

But what I have just written falls short actually of describing women's situation. It is not simply that, like other servants, we are taught to know our place, to pay attention to the wishes of the aster and learn to keep our own feelings to ourselves. Other servants lead double lives - the lives of their masters and (though there's little enough time for it) their own. But we are taught from childhood on that a woman's fulfillment is to utterly merge her life with that of the man who chooses her to be his (or with that of the son she bears him; or even with the boss who hires her); taught that we only become our true selves, "true women", when we surrender our selves in this way. If we rebel, it is not only that we risk doubting that we any longer have our place in the world; we risk doubting that we have any identity at all.

This is why I would call the rediscovery of sisterhood our most urgent task. In one another's company we begin to dare to believe that we belong to nobody and can create ourselves. We begin to dare to refuse the lies the masters have expected us to live by, and to listen to the truths our own experience contains. The experience of our sisters confirms ours. We begin to dare to presume to trust our own eyes.

But this trust in ourselves is tentative. To feel it - to feel it sometimes very strongly - is such a new experience for us that we can think it reliable. But it easily fails us. And nothing can more quickly cause it to evaporate than harsh judgments upon us made by other women.

I can remember still my feelings two years ago when I read an editorial in Off Our Backs which warned that we had better learn to make harsh judgments - warned of our "having to be careful about who we called 'sister'". I can remember still the constriction in the pit of my stomach as I read those words. The constriction was sudden terror. Terror for the women's movement. And for my self. Within this movement I had begun for the first time in my life to feel that I was allowed to be openly just the person I really was; to decide for myself who I was; and to act upon this. I had felt encouraged to believe that to take this extraordinary freedom - in the company of other women - was in fact to make the revolution. But his freedom was being taken away again. I had to fear again - we all had to fear - being labeled, being found unfit. I think a great many women experienced this shock. I don't mean of course upon reading the editorial in Off Our Backs. But each in her own way to first experienced sisterhood, and then the sudden fear that she could be told that she was not a sister. The fear that she had better stop trying to use her own eyes and instead to try to make sure of saying or doing what a sister "should" say or do. I think as more and more of us received this shock, we began to lose our collective strength.

And as I said earlier, I think that the influence upon us of Marxist thinking had much to do with this - the tradition that says we must be careful to give just the name it deserves to every differing tendency among us. I don't mean to say that there are not very real differences among us. And I don't mean to say that I think we should overlook them. I think it is very very necessary to learn from one another under what varying conditions we live our slave lives. If we don't learn this, we will constantly be hurting one another - failing to imagine the specific difficulties that face us in one condition or another; the specific fears that make it hard to take the actions that can free us. But the longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions. If we adopt the mode that is now traditional for consciousness-raising: take turns speaking, speak from experience, don't interrupt, and don't deliver judgments upon one another. This mode of relating can work a kind of magic.

I think of the split between lesbians and heterosexual women. Each group has felt that it was oppressed by the other; felt on many painful occasions that the other would like to exclude it from the revolution. And yet when women from both groups have dared to believe in the possibility that - by listening to one another - they could find much common ground, they have found that ground. I used to especially seek out lesbian groups at women's conferences. Now I often don't bother to. I now know that a woman who is not a lesbian can learn to identify with me not simply by listening to me as I tell of my life, but by listening to her own self as she is telling me of hers. If, say, she is the mother of a daughter, and allows herself to recall freely how she felt toward her daughter as an infant, she may recall that those feelings were clearly sexual; and as she recalls this, may recognize herself in me. I will as often recognize myself in her. If she tell me, say, of feeling like a failed woman upon hearing that he husband has been unfaithful, I who have never had a husband will recognize that I have known the very feeling she reports - very time a man's glance has labeled me one who does not answer to his need, a "queer". (I have known better than to feel a failed woman at such moments, but - a slave still - have felt it in spit of myself, to my rage.)

Class differences are the differences that have made it most difficult for us to identify with one another. Here we have felt most hypnotized by the Marxist analysis - fearful to commit the act of faith that there is commonality among us; fearful that such an act of faith would be "incorrect", even counter-revolutionary. And yet - it is really only men who belong to the various "classes"; women belong to these classes by belonging to the men. Chesler writes in Women, Money and Power: "As many women of the Watergate crisis have shown us, Great Ladies are always one man away from 'the top' - and one man away 'from welfare'". And Andrea Dworkin writes in her essay Phallic Imperialism: Why Economic Recovery Will Not Work For Us: "Everywhere. . . the female is kept in captivity by the male, denied self-determination so that he can control her reproductive function, fuck her at will, and have his house cleaned. (When the man is rich, his wife does not clean the house; instead she is turned into an ornament, a decoration, and used as a symbol of his wealth. . .)" She writes, "The phenomenon of the lady is a bizarre variation on a consistently cruel theme". We all really know this. A glance in the street from a man of any class can let a women of any "class" know her true status.

There have been many discussion of class among us, and from them we have learned a great deal about one another. Yet these exchanges have sometimes been so painful that the women involved have then split apart. My guess is that it has most often been indirectly that we have closed this particular distance between us - as we exchanged stories of sexual experience, and came more and more to recognize that these stories show all of us to be servants to men. Their servants or, if we refuse to be their servants, outlaws.

I think that the consciousness-raising session is the basic building block of our revolution. The more we describe our lives to one another, and to ourselves, the more we allow ourselves to acknowledge the real feelings that we have experienced - the more we realize that the condition of all women is essentially the same condition; and that we could act together to refuse that condition.

But it does take a kind of faith to sit together and confide our lives to one another in this way: the faith that we won't find that we have exposed ourselves only to be suddenly rejected. I think that the women's movement needs a kind of Law of Return - like the law that says any Jew anywhere can find a welcome in Israel. I think that any woman who decides she lives in slavery and wants to deliver herself from that slavery should know that she will be welcomed as a sister by other women making the same struggle. If she takes a few steps toward freedom and becomes frightened and retreats, she should know that she will be welcomed back into the struggle whenever she finds her courage again. She is much more likely to find it if she does know this. She should know that she would be welcomed back any number of times, never told "You cannot be one of us".

I am not saying that we can trust all sisters to do us no harm. We begin, all of us, in a state of fear; we begin having been trained to give obedience to men, on fear of punishment. So we have to learn to relate to one another as free spirits. The trust that I think we have to dare to give is the trust that we can learn, are trying to. There are sure to be many instances in which we do each other injury. When any woman feels that she has been injured she should speak of it. Though I recommend naming the injury received rather than trying to name the motives of those who've injured us. It is also only common sense when undertaking certain kinds of actions to choose as companions women with whom we feel at ease. But - very simply - I think no woman should be judged unfit to be seeking her freedom. We learn to be free as we begin to dare to act not as we have been taught that we "should" but - as the Quakers say - according to the light that is in us. That light may still be faint. It is nevertheless the light by which we have to try to see, if we are going to put off slavery. We shouldn't frighten each other into doubting this. The magic of C-R is that because we don't frighten each other into saying simply what we think we should, we do begin to be able to see by our own light. In fear fro ourselves, we have kept this light covered. Now we begin to "let it shine" - to steak a phrase from a '60's black freedom song. Sometimes intellect gives us this light; sometimes our very bodies give it. We begin to pay attention to bodily sensations which are comments upon experience; or comments upon words we start to say but realize that we don't mean. And because we speak without fear of one another, and so begin to speak - to know - what has really been true for us, I have never sat in such a circle in which any woman, no matter how new to the struggle, has not had something to tell from which I have learned.

You have objected to what you call the "line" that "anything a woman does should be supported because she is a woman". That would of course be a ridiculous line to follow. But to support the attempt of all women to learn to see with their own eyes - this, I think, is necessary to our revolution. Sa we give this support, the lives of other women become almost as real to us as our own lives; and our own lives, because of this, become more known to us - our lives, and the needs which those lives have suppressed, which are also the needs of other women. And without even aiming at it directly, we prepare ourselves to take action together - to change our lives, to meet our needs. Action in which we don't take a leader's orders; actions that come to seem irrepressible. None of us trying to pressure any other sister to join us if she is not yet ready; or if, from her perspective, the project makes little sense. Each of us encouraged to act upon her own sense of the truth. More and more confident that what will seem necessary to one will seem necessary to many.

The very same women who will come to trust one another in this way, and find that they can often act together, if they had sat together and exchanged not experiences but opinion, carefully defining their respective political positions, might well have always felt at odds. In a C-R group which I was part of for several years (would still be a part of it I had not moved to another part of the country), a group in which we developed the deepest kind of loving trust in one another, it occurred to us after a number of months together to ask how we would label ourselves politically. Our answers marked us as in total contradiction with one another - some of us radical, some liberal, some conservative. I remember beginning to laugh. For we had been finding that we had more and more in common, and knew by the n that we would continue to draw closer to one another. As more months passed, some of us discovered of course that our true political inclinations were more radical than we had known they were.

It is simply more productive, in the feminist struggle, to try to discover commonality among us than it is to try to find contradictions.

Dialecticians have been for the most part men. And under patriarchy men have sought the very identities in terms of contradictions. A "man" is one who is not a woman; not really flesh of a woman's flesh. And so among revolutionaries contradiction has assumed an importance almost hypnotic. I think we have to awaken from this hypnosis. The truth is that we discover ourselves best as we discover how all our lives are linked.

Engels writes that "without contradiction nothing would exist". But one can also say, "Without commonality nothing would exist". In one piece of writing, Engels himself acknowledges this. There is a beautiful passage in the introduction to his Dialectics of Nature in which he imagines the end of our world. "Nothing", he says, "is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes", and however often suns and earths come into being and go out of being, and with them all the innumerable variations of life, "we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost", and so however sure it is to exterminate even the highest forms of life, it is also sure to engender them again.

Reading this passage, it struck me that it bore a surprising resemblance to descriptions I had read of the Great Mother, who is Death Mother and Life Mother, both; who experiences innumerable transformations and who remains eternally the same, able always to engendered all things over again. In The Mother, all things exist. The words "matter" and "mater" (mother) are of course very close. Something for materialists to muse about, I think. (In the word "materialist", the two words become the same.)

Beyond all contradiction, female and male are matter and are also mater, flesh of their mother's flesh - the male as a fetus in the beginning female, too; then becoming a variation of the female. Until this truth is accepted, the so-called materialist is not really a materialist.

Rich writes in Of Woman Born, "The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers". I deeply assent. And as long as the bodies of women are held in contempt by most of those who teach dialectics, dialectical materialism will remain an inadequate "tool of liberation".

In sisterhood -
Barbara