about commitment to life, we know it. Whatever it takes to
make that commitment under patriarchy, we have it.
It is time now to repudiate patriarchy by valuing our own
lives as fully, as seriously, as resolutely, as we have valued
other lives. It is time now to commit ourselves to the nurtur-
ance and protection of each other.
We must establish values which originate in sisterhood. We
must establish values which repudiate phallic supremacy,
which repudiate phallic aggression, which repudiate all relationships and institutions based on male dominance and female submission.
It will not be easy for us to establish values which originate
in sisterhood. For centuries, we have had male values
slammed down our throats and slammed up our cunts. We are
the victims of a violence so pervasive, so constant, so relentless
and unending, that we cannot point to it and say, “There it
begins and there it ends. ” All of the values which we might
defend as a consequence of our allegiances to men and their
ideas are saturated with the fact or memory of that violence.
We know more about violence than any other people on the
face of this earth. We have absorbed such quantities of it— as
women, and as Jews, blacks, Vietnamese, native Americans,
etc. — that our bodies and souls are seared through with the
effects of it.
I suggest to you that any commitment to nonviolence which
is real, which is authentic, must begin in the recognition of the
forms and degrees of violence perpetrated against women by
the gender class men. I suggest to you that any analysis of
violence, or any commitment to act against it, which does not
begin there is hollow, meaningless— a sham which will have,
as its direct consequence, the perpetuation of your servitude. I
suggest to you that any male apostle of so-called nonviolence
who is not committed, body and soul, to ending the violence
against you is not trustworthy. He is not your comrade, not
your brother, not your friend. He is someone to whom your
life is invisible.
As women, nonviolence must begin for us in the refusal to
be violated, in the refusal to be victimized. We must find alternatives to submission, because our submission—to rape, to assault, to domestic servitude, to abuse and victimization of
every sort—perpetuates violence.
The refusal to be a victim does not originate in any act of
resistance as male-derived as killing. The refusal of which I
speak is a revolutionary refusal to be a victim, any time, any
place, for friend or foe. This refusal requires the conscientious
unlearning of all the forms of masochistic submission which
are taught to us as the very content of womanhood. Male
aggression feeds on female masochism as vultures feed on carrion. Our nonviolent project is to find the social, sexual, political, and cultural forms which repudiate our programmed submissive behaviors, so that male aggression can find no dead
flesh on which to feast.
When I say that we must establish values which originate in
sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a
moment, male notions of what nonviolence is. Those notions
have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The
men who hold those notions have never renounced the male
behaviors, privileges, values, and conceits which are in and of
themselves acts of violence against us.
We will diminish violence by refusing to be violated. We
will repudiate the whole patriarchal system, with its sadomasochistic institutions, with its social scenarios of dominance and submission all based on the male-over-female model,
when we refuse conscientiously, rigorously, and absolutely to
be the soil in which male aggression, pride, and arrogance can
grow like wild weeds.
7
L esb ian P rid e
For me, being a lesbian means three things—
First, it means that I love, cherish, and respect women in
my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is
the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common
life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I
would die. In whatever ways I am strong, I am strong because
of the power and passion of this nurturant love.
Second, being a lesbian means to me that there is an erotic
passion and intimacy which comes of touch and taste, a wild,
salty tenderness, a wet sweet sweat, our breasts, our mouths,
our cunts, our intertangled hairs, our hands. I am speaking
here of a sensual passion as deep and mysterious as the sea, as
strong and still as the mountain, as insistent and changing as
the wind.
Delivered at a rally for Lesbian Pride Week, Central Park, New York City,
June 28, 1975.
Third, being a lesbian means to me the memory of the
mother, remembered in my own body, sought for, desired,
found, and truly honored. It means the memory of the womb,
when we were one with our mothers, until birth when we were
torn asunder. It means a return to that place inside, inside her,
inside ourselves, to the tissues and membranes, to the moisture and blood.
There is a pride in the nurturant love which is our common
ground, and in the sensual love, and in the memory of the
mother— and that pride shines as bright as the summer sun at
noon. That pride cannot be degraded. Those who would degrade it are in the position of throwing handfuls of mud at the sun. Still it shines, and those who sling mud only dirty their
own hands.
Sometimes the sun is covered by dense layers of dark clouds.
A person looking up would swear that there is no sun. But
still the sun shines. At night, when there is no light, still the
sun shines. During rain or hail or hurricane or tornado, still
the sun shines.
Does the sun ask itself, “Am I good? Am I worthwhile? Is
there enough of me? ” No, it bums and it shines. Does the sun
ask itself, “What does the moon think of me? How does Mars
feel about me today? ” No, it bums, it shines. Does the sun ask
itself, “Am I as big as other suns in other galaxies? ” No, it
bums, it shines.
In this country in the coming years, I think that there will
be a terrible storm. I think that the skies will darken beyond
all recognition. Those who walk the streets will walk them in
darkness. Those who are in prisons and mental institutions
will not see the sky at all, only the dark out of barred windows. Those who are hungry and in despair may not look up at all. They will see the darkness as it lies on the ground in
front of their feet. Those who are raped will see the darkness
as they look up into the face of the rapist. Those who are
assaulted and brutalized by madmen will stare intently into
the darkness to discern who is moving toward them at every
moment. It will be hard to remember, as the storm is raging,
that still, even though we cannot see it, the sun shines. It will
be hard to remember that still, even though we cannot see it,
the sun burns. We will try to see it and we will try to feel it,
and we will forget that it warms
us still, that if it were not
there, burning, shining, this earth would be a cold and desolate and barren place.
As long as we have life and breath, no matter how dark the
earth around us, that sun still bums, still shines. There is no
today without it. There is no tomorrow without it. There was
no yesterday without it. That light is within us— constant,
warm, and healing. Remember it, sisters, in the dark times to
come.
8
Our Blood:
The Slavery of Women ia A m erika
(In memory of Sarah Grimke, 1792-1873,
and Angelina Grimke, 1805-1879)
( 1 )
In her introduction to Felix Holt (1866), George Eliot wrote:
. . . there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that
hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and
raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for
ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—
committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night,
seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow
months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many
an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed
into no human ear. 1
I want to speak to you tonight about the “inherited sorrows” of women on this Amerikan soil, sorrows which have Delivered for the National Organization for Women, Washington, D. C., on
August 23, 1975, to commemorate the fifty-fifth anniversary of women's
suffrage; The Community Church of Boston, November 9, 1975.
marred millions upon millions of human lives, sorrows which
have “been breathed into no human ear, ” or sorrows which
were breathed and then forgotten.
This nation’s history is one of spilled blood. Everything that
has grown here has grown in fields irrigated by the blood of
whole peoples. This is a nation built on the human carrion of
the Indian nations. This is a nation built on slave labor,
slaughter, and grief. This is a racist nation, a sexist nation, a
murderous nation. This is a nation pathologically seized by the
will to domination.
Fifty-five years ago, we women became citizens of this nation. After seventy years of fierce struggle for suffrage, our kindly lords saw fit to give us the vote. Since that time, we
have been, at least in a ceremonial way, participants in the
blood-letting of our government; we have been implicated
formally and officially in its crimes. The hope of our foremothers was this: that when women had the vote, we would use it to stop the crimes of men against men and of men
against women. Our foremothers believed that they had given
us the tool which would enable us to transform a corrupt
nation into a nation of righteousness. It is a bitter thing to say
that they were deluded. It is a bitter thing to say that the vote
became the tombstone over their obscure graves.
We women do not have many victories to celebrate. Everywhere, our people are in chains— designated as biologically inferior to men; our very bodies controlled by men and male
law; the victims of violent, savage crimes; bound by law, custom, and habit to sexual and domestic servitude; exploited mercilessly in any paid labor; robbed of identity and ambition
as a condition of birth. We want to claim the vote as a victory.
We want to celebrate. We want to rejoice. But the fact is that
the vote was only a cosmetic change in our condition. Suffrage
has been for us the illusion of participation without the reality
of self-determination. We are still a colonialized people, subject to the will of men. And, in fact, behind the vote there is the story of a movement that betrayed itself by abandoning its
own visionary insights and compromising its deepest principles. August 26, 1920, signifies, most bitterly, the death of the first feminist movement in Amerika.
How do we celebrate that death? How do we rejoice in the
demise of a movement that set out to salvage our lives from
the wreck and ruin of patriarchal domination? What victory is
there in the dead ash of a feminist movement burned out?
The meaning of the vote is this: that we had better flesh out
our invisible past, so that we can understand how and why so
much ended in so little; that we had better resurrect our dead,
to study how they lived and why they died; that we had better
find a cure for whatever disease wiped them out, so that it will
not decimate us.
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an
agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which
permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. It is
as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago and now it is
granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone.
Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women
say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me.
Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from
rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is
this stone, what is there without it?
For some women, being buried in the stone is unbearable.
They want to move freely. They exert all their strength to claw
away at the hard rock that encases them. They rip their fingernails, bruise their fists, tear the skin on their hands until it is raw and bleeding. They rip their lips open on the rock, and
break their teeth, and choke on the granite as it crumbles into
But what if the impulse to freedom were to be bom in all of
the women buried in the stone? What if the material of the
rock itself had become so saturated with the stinking smell of
women’s rotting bodies, the accumulated stench of thousands
of years of decay and death, that no woman could contain her
repulsion? What would those women do if, finally, they did
want to be free?
I think that they would study the stone. I think that they
would use every mental and physical faculty available to them
to analyze the stone, its structure, its qualities, its nature, its
chemical composition, its density, the physical laws which determine its properties. They would try to discover where it was eroded, what substances could decompose it, what kind of
pressure was required to shatter it.
This investigation would require absolute rigor and honesty. Any lie that they told themselves about the nature of the stone would impede their liberation. Any lie that they told
themselves about their own condition inside the stone would
perpetuate the very situation that had become intolerable to
them.
I think that we do not want to be buried inside the stone
anymore. I think that the stench of decaying female carcasses
has at last become so vile to us that we are ready to face the
truth— about the stone, and about ourselves inside it.
(2 )
The slavery of women originates thousands of years ago, in a
prehistory of civilization which remains inaccessible to us.
How women came to be slaves, owned by men, we do not
know. We do know that the slavery of women to men is the
oldest known form of slav
ery in the history of the world.
The first slaves brought to this country by Anglo-Saxon
imperialists were women— white women. Their slavery was
sanctified by religious and civil law, reified by custom and
tradition, and enforced by the systematic sadism of men as a
slave-owning class.
The rights of women under English law during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are described in the following paragraph:
In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together.
It is true, that man and wife are one person; but understand in
what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth
with. . . the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name; it is
carried and recarried with the new associate; it beareth no sway;
it possesseth nothing. . . A woman as soon as she is married, is
called covert [covered]; in Latine nupta, that is, “veiled”; as it
were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her streame.. . .
Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master. . . Eve,
because she helped to seduce her husband, had inflicted upon her
a special bane. See here the reason. . . that women have no voice
in Parliament. They make no laws, they consent to none, they
abrogate none. All of them are understood either married, or to
be married, and their desires are to their husbands.. . . The common laws here shaketh hand with divinitye. 2
English law obtained in the colonies. There was no new world
here for women.
Women were sold into marriage in the colonies, first for the
price of passage from England; then, as men began to accrue
wealth, for larger sums, paid to merchants who sold women as
if they were potatoes.
Women were imported into the colonies to breed. Just as a
man bought land so that he could grow food, he bought a wife
so that he could grow sons.
A man owned his wife and all that she produced. Her crop
came from her womb, and this crop was harvested year after
year until she died.
According to law, a man even owned a woman’s unborn
children. He also owned any personal property she might have