Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

I felt I had really entered middle age. This presented new

problems for feminist organizers who had little access to the

material resources in their communities. It also presented

me with new problems. For a long time I got no work at all,

so I just got poorer and poorer. It made no sense to anyone

but me: if you have nothing, and someone offers you

something, how can you turn it down? But I did, because I

knew that I would never make a living unless I took a stand.

I had a fine and growing reputation as a speaker and writer;

but still, there was no money for me. When I first began to

ask for fees, I got angry responses from women: how could

the author of Woman Hating be such a scummy capitalist

pig, one woman asked in a nearly obscene letter. The letter

writer was going to live on a farm and have nothing to do

with rat-shit capitalists and bourgeois feminist creeps. Well,

I wrote back, I didn’t live on a farm and didn’t want to. I

bought food in a supermarket and paid rent to a landlord

and I wanted to write books. I answered all the angry

letters. I tried to explain the politics of getting the money,

especially from colleges and universities: the money was

there; it was hard to get; why should it go to Phyllis Schlafly

or William F. Buckley, Jr.? I had to live and I had to write.

Surely my writing m attered, it mattered to them or why did

they want me: and did they want me to stop writing? I

needed money to write. I had done the rotten jobs and I

was living in real, not romantic, poverty. I found that the

effort to explain really helped—not always, and resentments still surfaced, but enough to make me see that explaining even without finally convincing was worthwhile.

Even if I didn’t get paid, somebody else might. After a long

fallow period I began to lecture again. I lectured erratically

and never made enough to live on, even in what I think of

as stable poverty, even when my fees were high. Many

feminist activists did fight for the money and sometimes got

it. So I managed—friends loaned me money, sometimes

anonymous donations came in the mail, women handed me

checks at lectures and refused to let me refuse them,

feminist writers gave me gifts of money and loaned me

money, and women fought incredible and bitter battles with

college administrators and committees and faculties to get

me hired and paid. The women’s movement kept me alive. I

did not live well or safely or easily, but I did not stop writing

either. I remain extremely grateful to those who went the

distance for me.

I decided to publish the talks in Our Blood because I was

desperate for money, the magazines were still closed to me,

and I was living hand-to-mouth on the road. A book was my