silly, almost stupid attitude toward the world. By the time I
was twelve I knew that I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. I
had been raised really without a mother, and so certain ideas
hadn’t reached me. I didn’t want to be a wife, and I didn’t
want to be a mother.
My father had really raised me although I didn’t see a lot of
him. My father valued books and intellectual dialogue. He was
the son of Russian immigrants, and they had wanted him to be
a doctor. That was their dream. He was a devoted son and so,
even though he wanted to study history, he took a pre-medical
course in college. He was too squeamish to go through with it
all. Blood made him ill. So after pre-med, he found himself,
for almost twenty years, teaching science, which he didn’t like,
instead of history, which he loved. During the years of doing
work he disliked, he made a vow that his children would be
educated as fully as possible and, no matter what it took from
him, no matter what kind of commitment or work or money,
his children would become whatever they wanted. My father
made his children his art, and he devoted himself to nurturing
those children so that they would become whatever they could
become. I don’t know why he didn’t make a distinction between his girl child and his boy child, but he didn’t. I don’t know why, from the beginning, he gave me books to read, and
talked about all of his ideas with me, and watered every ambi
tion that I had so that those ambitions would live and be
nourished and grow—but he did. *
So in our household, my mother was out of the running as
an influence. My father, whose great love was history, whose
commitment was to education and intellectual dialogue, set
the tone and taught both my brother and me that our proper
engagement was with the world. He had a whole set of ideas
and principles that he taught us, in words, by example. He
believed, for instance, in racial equality and integration when
those beliefs were seen as absolutely aberrational by all of his
neighbors, family, and peers. When I, at the age of fifteen,
declared to a family gathering that if I wanted to marry I
would marry whomever I wanted, regardless of color, my
father’s answer before that enraged assembly was that he expected no less. He was a civil libertarian. He believed in unions, and fought hard to unionize teachers— an unpopular
notion in those days since teachers wanted to see themselves as
professionals. He taught us those principles in the Bill of
Rights which are now not thought of very highly by most
Amerikans— an absolute commitment to free speech in all its
forms, equality before just law, and racial equality.
I adored my father, but I had no sympathy for my mother. I
knew that she was physically brave— my father told me so
over and over—but I didn’t see her as any Herculean hero. No
woman ever had been, as far as I knew. Her mind was uninteresting. She seemed small and provincial. I remember that once, in the middle of a terrible argument, she said to me in a
stony tone of voice: You think I’m stupid. I denied it then, but
I know today that she was right. And indeed, what else could
one think of a person whose only concern was that I clean up
*
My mother has reminded me that she introduced me to libraries and that
she also always encouraged me to read. I had forgotten this early shared experience because, as I grew older, she and I had some conflicts over the particular books which I insisted on reading, though she never stopped me
from reading them. Sometime during my adolescence, books came to connote
for me, in part, my intellectual superiority over my mother, who did not
read, and my peership with my father, who did read.
my room, or wear certain clothes, or comb my hair another
way. I had, certainly, great reason to think that she was stupid,
and horrible, and petty, and contemptible even: Edward
Albee, Philip Wylie, and that great male artist Sigmund Freud
writers of the present. And so, though this woman, my mother,
whether present or absent, was the center of my life in so
many inexplicable, powerful, unchartable ways, I experienced
her only as an ignorant irritant, someone without grace or
passion or wisdom. When I married in 1969 I felt free— free
of my mother, her prejudices, her ignorant demands.
I tell you all of this because this story has, possibly for the
first time in history, a rather happier resolution than one might
expect.
Do you remember that in Hemingway’s For Whom the
Bell Tolls Maria is asked about her lovemaking with Robert,
did the earth move? For me, too, in my life, the earth has
sometimes moved. The first time it moved I was ten. I was
going to Hebrew school, but it was closed, a day of mourning
for the six million slaughtered by the Nazis. So I went to see my
cousin who lived nearby. She was shaking, crying, screaming,
vomiting. She told me that it was April, and in April her
youngest sister had been killed in front of her, another sister’s
infant had died a terrible death, their heads had been shaved
— let me just say that she told me what had happened to her in
a Nazi concentration camp. She said that every April she remembered in nightmare and terror what had happened to her that month so many years before, and that every April she
shook, cried, screamed, and vomited. The earth moved for me
then.
The second time the earth moved for me was when I was
eighteen and spent four days in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City. I had been arrested in a demonstration
against the Indochina genocide. I spent four days and four
nights in the filth and terror of that jail. While there two doctors gave me a brutal internal examination. I hemorrhaged for fifteen days after that. The earth moved for me then.
The third time the earth moved for me was when I became
a feminist. It wasn’t on a particular day, or through one experience. It had to do with that afternoon when I was ten and my cousin put the grief of her life into my hands; it had to do
with that women’s jail, and three years of marriage that began
in friendship and ended in despair. It happened sometime after
I left my husband, when I was living in poverty and great
emotional distress. It happened slowly, little by little. A week
after I left my ex-husband I started my book, the book which is
now called Woman Hating. I wanted to find out what had
happened to me in my marriage and in the thousand and one
instances of daily life where it seemed I was being treated like
a subhuman. I felt that I was deeply masochistic, but that my
masochism was not personal— each woman I knew lived out
deep masochism. I wanted to find out why. I knew that I
hadn’t been taught that masochism by my father, and that my
mother had not been my immediate teacher. So I began in
what seemed the only apparent place—with Story of O, a
book that had moved me profoundly. From that beginning I
looked at other pornography, fairy tales, one thousand years
of Chinese footbinding, and the slaughter of nine million
witches. I learned something about the nature of the world
which had been hidden from me before— I saw a systematic
despisal of women that permeated every institution of society,
every cultural organ, every expression of human being. And I
saw that I was a woman, a person who met that systematic
despisal on every street comer, in every living room, in every
human interchange. Because I became a woman who knew
that she was a woman, that is, because I became a feminist, I
began to speak with women for the first time in my life, and
one of the women I began to speak with was my mother. I
came to her life through the long dark tunnel of my own. I
began to see who she was as I began to see the world that had
formed her. I came to her no longer pitying the poverty of her
intellect, but astounded by the quality of her intelligence. I
came to her no longer convinced of her stupidity and triviality, but astonished by the quality of her strength. I came to her, no longer self-righteous and superior, but as a sister, another woman whose life, but for the grace of a feminist father and the new common struggle of my feminist sisters, would
have repeated hers— and when I say “repeated hers” I mean,
been predetermined as hers was predetermined. I came to her,
no longer ashamed of what she lacked, but deeply proud of
what she had achieved— indeed, I came to recognize that my
mother was proud, strong, and honest. By the time I was
twenty-six I had seen enough of the world and its troubles to
know that pride, strength, and integrity were virtues to honor.
And because I addressed her in a new way she came to meet
me, and now, whatever our difficulties, and they are not so
many, she is my mother, and I am her daughter, and we are
sisters.
You asked me to talk about feminism and art, is there a
feminist art, and if so, what is it. For however long writers
have written, until today, there has been masculinist art— art
that serves men in a world made by men. That art has degraded women. It has, almost without exception, characterized us as maimed beings, impoverished sensibilities, trivial people with trivial concerns. It has, almost without exception,
been saturated with a misogyny so profound, a misogyny that
was in fact its world view, that almost all of us, until today,
have thought, that is what the world is, that is how women
are.
I ask myself, what did I learn from all those books I read as
I was growing up? Did I learn anything real or true about
women? Did I learn anything real or true about centuries of
women and what they lived? Did those books illuminate my
life, or life itself, in any useful, or profound, or generous, or
rich, or textured, or real way? I do not think so. I think that
that art, those books, would have robbed me of my life as the
world they served robbed my mother of hers.
Theodore Roethke, a great poet we are told, a poet of the
male condition I would insist, wrote:
Two of the charges most frequently levelled against poetry by
women are lack of range—in subject matter, in emotional tone—
and lack of a sense of humor. And one could, in individual instances among writers of real talent, add other aesthetic and moral shortcomings: the spinning-out; the embroidering of trivial themes; a concern with the mere surfaces of life—that special province of the feminine talent in prose—hiding from the real agonies of the spirit; refusing to face up to what existence is;
lyric or religious posturing; running between the boudoir and the
altar, stamping a tiny foot against God; or lapsing into a sententiousness that implies the author has re-invented integrity; carrying on excessively about Fate, about time; lamenting the lot of woman. . . and so on. 2
What characterizes masculinist art, and the men who make it,
is misogyny— and in the face of that misogyny, someone had
better reinvent integrity.
They, the masculinists, have told us that they write about
the human condition, that their themes are the great themes—
love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself. They have told
us that our themes—love, death, heroism, suffering, history
itself— are trivial because we are, by our very nature, trivial.
I renounce masculinist art. It is not art which illuminates
the human condition— it illuminates only, and to men’s final
and everlasting shame, the masculinist world— and as we look
around us, that world is not one to be proud of. Masculinist
art, the art of centuries of men, is not universal, or the final
explication of what being in the world is. It is, in the end,
descriptive only of a world in which women are subjugated,
submissive, enslaved, robbed of full becoming, distinguished
only by carnality, demeaned. I say, my life is not trivial; my
sensibility is not trivial; my struggle is not trivial. Nor was my
mother’s, or her mother’s before her. I renounce those who
hate women, who have contempt for women, who ridicule and
demean women, and when I do, I renounce most of the art,
masculinist art, ever made.
As feminists, we inhabit the world in a new way. We see the
world in a new way. We threaten to turn it upside down and
inside out. We intend to change it so totally that someday the
texts of masculinist writers will be anthropological curiosities.
What was that Mailer talking about, our descendants will ask,
should they come upon his work in some obscure archive.
And they will wonder—bewildered, sad— at the masculinist
glorification of war; the masculinist mystifications around killing, maiming, violence, and pain; the tortured masks of phallic heroism; the vain arrogance of phallic supremacy; the
impoverished renderings of mothers and daughters, and so of
life itself. They will ask, did those people really believe in
those gods?
Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great
river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless
stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based
on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which
will take the great human themes— love, death, heroism,
suffering, history itself— and render them fully human. It may
also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now
that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new
theme, one as great and as rich as those others— should we
call it “joy”?
We cannot imagine a world in which women are not experienced as trivial and contemptible, in which women are not demeaned, abused, exploited, raped, diminished before we are
even bom— and so we cannot know what kind of art will be
made in that new world. Our work, which does full honor to
those centuries of sisters who went before us, is to midwife
that new world into being. It will be left to our children and
their children to live in it.
2
Renouncing Sexual “E q u a lity ”
Equality: 1. the state of b
eing equal; correspondence in
quantity, degree, value, rank, ability, etc. 2. uniform character, as of motion or surface.
Freedom: 1. state of being at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint. . . 2. exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc. 3.
power of determining one’s or its own action. . . 4.
Philos, the power to make one’s own choices or decisions
without constraint from within or without; autonomy,
self-determination. . . 5. civil liberty, as opposed to subjection to an arbitrary or despotic government. 6. political or national independence. . . 8. personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery. . .
— Syn. f r e e d o m , i n d e p e n d e n c e , l i b e r t y refer to an absence of undue restrictions and an opportunity to exercise one’s rights and powers, f r e e d o m emphasizes the opportunity given for the exercise of one’s rights, powers,
desires, or the like. . . i n d e p e n d e n c e implies not only
lack of restrictions but also the ability to stand alone, unsustained by anything else. . .
— Ant. 1-3. restraint. 5, 6, 8. oppression.
Justice: 1. the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness . . . 2. rightfulness or lawfulness. . . 3. the moral principle determining just conduct.
4. conformity to this principle, as manifested in conduct;
just conduct, dealing, or treatment. . .
from The Random House Dictionary
of the English Language
In 1970 Kate Millett published Sexual Politics. In that book
she proved to many of us— who would have staked our lives
Delivered at the National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality,
New York City, October 12, 1974.
on denying it— that sexual relations, the literature depicting
those relations, the psychology posturing to explain those relations, the economic systems that fix the necessities of those relations, the religious systems that seek to control those relations, are political. She showed us that everything that happens to a woman in her life, everything that touches or molds her, is political. 1
Women who are feminists, that is, women who grasped her
analysis and saw that it explained much of their real existence