Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

Before we can live and love, we will have to hone ourselves

into a revolutionary sisterhood. That means that we must stop

supporting the men who oppress us; that we must refuse to

feed and clothe and clean up after them; that we must refuse

to let them take their sustenance from our lives. That means

that we will have to divest ourselves of the identity we have

been trained to as females—that we will have to divest ourselves of all traces of the masochism we have been told is synonymous with being female. That means that we will have

to attack and destroy every institution, law, philosophy, religion, custom, and habit of this patriarchy—this patriarchy that feeds on our “dirty” blood, that is built on our “trivial”

labor.

Halloween is the appropriate time to commit ourselves to

this revolutionary sisterhood. On this night we remember our

dead. On this night we remember together that nine million

women were killed because men said that they were carnal,

malicious, and wicked. On this night we know that they live

now through us.

Let us together rename this night Witches’ Eve. Let us together make it a time of mourning: for all women who are victims of gynocide, dead, in jail, in mental institutions, raped,

sterilized against their wills, brutalized. And let us on this

night consecrate our lives to developing the revolutionary

sisterhood— the political strategies, the feminist actions—

which will stop for all time the devastating violence against

us.

4

The Rape A tro city

and the Boy N ext Door

I want to talk to you about rape— rape—what it is, who does

it, to whom it is done, how it is done, why it is done, and what

to do about it so that it will not be done any more.

First, though, I want to make a few introductory remarks. *

From 1964 to 1965 and from 1966 to 1968, I went to Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington at that time was still a women’s school, or, as people said then, a girls’ school. It

was a very insular place—entirely isolated from the Vermont

Delivered at State University of New York at Stony Brook, March 1, 1975;

University of Pennsylvania, April 25, 1975; State University of New York

College at Old Westbury, May 10, 1975; Womanbooks, New York City,

July 1, 1975; Woodstock Women's Center, Woodstock, New York, July 3,

1975; Suffolk County Community College, October 9, 1975; Queens College,

City University of New York, April 2 6 , 1976.

*

These introductory remarks were delivered only at schools where there

was no women’s studies program.

community in which it was situated, exclusive, expensive.