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
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
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
