Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

over and over, how very beautiful Our Blood was. “You know—urn—um, ” I said, “that—urn, urn—That

Speech is in Our Blood—you know, the one you wrote about. ” “So

beautiful, ” he said, “so beautiful. ” The editor-in-chief of the weekly

wrote me that Our Blood was so fine, so moving. But Our Blood did not

get any help, not even a mention, in those pages.

Hating's publisher to demand that the book be published in

paper. Phyllis Chesler contacted feminist writers of reputation all over the country to ask for written statements of support for the book. Those writers responded with astonishing generosity. Feminist newspapers reported the suppression of the book. Feminists who worked in bookstores scavenged distributors’ warehouses for copies of the book and wrote over and over to the publisher to demand

the book. Women’s studies programs began using it.

Women passed the book from hand to hand, bought second

and third and fourth copies to give friends whenever they

could find it. Even though the publisher of Woman Hating

had told me it was “mediocre, ” the pressure finally resulted

in a paperback edition in 1976: 2500 leftover unbound

copies were bound in paper and distributed, sort of.

Problems with distribution continued, and bookstores,

which reported selling the book steadily when it was in

stock, had to wait months for orders to be filled. Woman

Hating is now in its fifth tiny paperback printing. The book

is not another piece of lost women’s literature only because

feminists would not give it up. In a way this story is

heartening, because it shows what activism can accomplish,

even in the Yahoo land of Amerikan publishing.

But I had nowhere to go, no way to continue as a writer.

So I went on the road—to women’s groups who passed a hat

for me at the end of my talk, to schools where feminist

students fought to get me a hundred dollars or so, to

conferences where women sold T-shirts to pay me. I spent

weeks or months writing a talk. I took long, dreary bus rides

to do what appeared to be only an evening’s work and slept

wherever there was room. Being an insomniac, I did not

sleep much. Women shared their homes, their food, their

hearts with me, and I met women in every circumstance,

nice women and mean women, brave women and terrified

women. And the women I met had suffered every crime,

every indignity: and I listened. “The Rape Atrocity and the

Boy Next D oor” (in this volume) always elicited the same

responses: I heard about rape after rape; women’s lives

passed before me, rape after rape; women who had been

raped in homes, in cars, on beaches, in alleys, in classrooms, by one man, by two men, by five men, by eight men, hit, drugged, knifed, tom , women who had been sleeping,

women who had been with their children, women who had

been out for a walk or shopping or going to school or going

home from school or in their offices working or in factories

or in stockrooms, young women, girls, old women, thin