believed I had a right to say what I wanted. My desires were
not particularly whimsical: my sources were history, facts,
experience. I had been brought up in an almost exclusively
male tradition of literature, and that tradition, whatever its
faults, did not teach coyness or fear: the writers I admired
were blunt and not particularly polite. I did not understand
that—even as a writer—I was supposed to be delicate,
fragile, intuitive, personal, introspective. I wanted to claim
the public world of action, not the private world of feelings.
My ambition was perceived as megalomaniacal—in the
wrong sphere, demented by prior definition. Yes, I was
naive. I had not learned my proper place. I knew what I was
rebelling against in life, but I did not know that literature
had the same sorry boundaries, the same absurd rules, the
same cruel proscriptions. * It was easy enough to deal with
me: I was a bitch. And my book was sabotaged. The
publisher simply refused to fill orders for it. Booksellers
wanted the book but could not get it. Reviewers ignored the
* I had been warned early on about what it meant to be a girl, but I hadn’t
listened. “You write like a man, ” an editor wrote me on reading a draft
of a few early chapters of
a woman, we will consider publishing you. ” This admonition reminded
me of a guidance counselor in high school who asked me as graduation
approached what I planned to be when I grew up. A writer, I said. He
lowered his eyes, then looked at me soberly. He knew I wanted to go to a
superb college; he knew I was ambitious. “What you have to do, ” he
said, “is go to a state college—there is no reason for you to go
somewhere else—and become a teacher so that you’ll have something to
fall back on when your husband dies. ” This story is not apocryphal. It
happened to me and to countless others. I had thought both the guidance
counselor and the editor stupid, individually stupid. I was wrong. They
were not individually stupid.
book, consigning me to invisibility, poverty, and failure.
The first speech in
Mother Sylvia”) was written before the publication of
time. By October, the time of the second speech in
in for a hard time, but I still did not know how hard it was
going to be.
“Renouncing Sexual ‘Equality’” was written for the
National Organization for Women Conference on Sexuality
that took place in New York City on October 12, 1974. I
spoke at the end of a three-hour speakout on sex: women
talking about their sexual experiences, feelings, values.
There were 1100 women in the audience; no men were
present. When I was done, the 1100 women rose to their
feet. Women were crying and shaking and shouting. The
