Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

There was a small student body highly concentrated in the

arts, a low student-faculty ratio, and an apocryphal tradition

of intellectual and sexual “freedom. ” In general, Bennington

was a very distressing kind of playpen where wealthy young

women were educated to various accomplishments which

would insure good marriages for the respectable and good

affairs for the bohemians. At that time, there was more actual

freedom for women at Bennington than at most schools— in

general, we could come and go as we liked, whereas most

other schools had rigid curfews and controls; and in general

we could wear what we wanted, whereas in most other schools

women still had to conform to rigid dress codes. We were

encouraged to read and write and make pots, and in general

to take ourselves seriously, even though the faculty did not

take us seriously at all. Being better educated to reality than

we were, they, the faculty, knew what we did not imagine—

that most of us would take our highfalutin ideas about James

and Joyce and Homer and invest them in marriages and volunteer work. Most of us, as the mostly male faculty knew, would fall by the wayside into silence and all our good intentions and vast enthusiasms had nothing to do with what would happen to us once we left that insulated playpen. At the time I

went to Bennington, there was no feminist consciousness there

or anywhere else at all. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique concerned housewives— we thought that it had nothing to do with us. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was not yet published. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was not yet published. We were in the process of becoming very well-educated women— we were already very privileged women—

and yet not many of us had ever heard the story of the movement for women’s suffrage in this country or Europe. In the Amerikan history courses I took, women’s suffrage was not

mentioned. The names of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, or

Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were never

mentioned. Our ignorance was so complete that we did not

know that we had been consigned from birth to that living

legal and social death called marriage. We imagined, in our

ignorance, that we might be novelists and philosophers. A rare

few among us even aspired to be mathematicians and biologists. We did not know that our professors had a system of beliefs and convictions that designated us as an inferior gender

class, and that that system of beliefs and convictions was virtually universal—the cherished assumption of most of the writers, philosophers, and historians we were so ardently

studying. We did not know, for instance, to pick an obvious

example, that our Freudian psychology professor believed

along with Freud that “the effect of penis-envy has a share. . .

in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value

their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority. ”1 In each field of study, such convictions were central, underlying, crucial. And yet we did not know that they meant us. This was true everywhere where

women were being educated.

As a result, women of my age left colleges and universities

completely ignorant of what one might call “real life. ” We did

not know that we would meet everywhere a systematic de-

spisal of our intelligence, creativity, and strength. We did not

know our herstory as a gender class. We did not know that we

were a gender class, inferior by law and custom to men who