The mother is the primary agent of male culture in the family, and she must
force her daughter to acquiesce to the demands of that culture. 7 She must do to her daughter what was done to her. The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on
means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men,
whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to
force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which
characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.
Fear cements this system together. Fear is the adhesive that
holds each part in its place. We learn to be afraid of the
punishment which is inevitable when we violate the code of
enforced femininity.
We learn that certain fears are in and of themselves feminine— for instance, girls are supposed to be afraid of bugs and mice. As children, we are rewarded for learning these fears.
Girls are taught to be afraid of all activities which are expressly designated as male terrain— running, climbing, playing ball; mathematics and science; composing music, earning money, providing leadership. Any list could go on and on—
because the fact is that girls are taught to be afraid of everything except domestic work and childrearing. By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element.
We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time
we do not even notice it. Instead of “I am afraid, ” we say, “I
don’t want to, ” or “I don’t know how, ” or “I can’t. ”
Fear, then, is a learned response. It is not a human instinct
which manifests itself differently in women and in men. The
whole question of instinct versus learned response in human
beings is a specious one. As Evelyn Reed says in her book,
The essence of socializing the animal is to break the absolute
dictation of nature and replace purely animal instincts with conditioned responses and learned behavior. Humans today have shed their original animal instincts to such a degree that most
have vanished. A child, for example, must be taught the dangers
of fire, which animals flee instinctively. 8
We are separated from our instincts, whatever they were, by
thousands of years of patriarchal culture. What we know and
what we act on is what we have been taught. Women have
been taught fear as a function of femininity, just as men have
been taught courage as a function of masculinity.
What is fear then? What are its characteristics? What is it
about fear that is so effective in compelling women to be good
soldiers on the side of the enemy?
Fear, as women experience it, has three main characteristics: it is isolating; it is confusing; and it is debilitating.
When a woman violates a rule which spells out her proper
behavior as a female, she is singled out by men, their agents,
and their culture as a troublemaker. The rebel’s isolation is
real in that she is avoided, or ignored, or chastised, or denounced. Acceptance back into the community of men, which is the only viable and sanctioned community, is contingent on
her renunciation and repudiation of her deviant behavior.
Every girl as she is growing up experiences this form and
fact of isolation. She learns that it is an inevitable consequence of any rebellion, however small. By the time she is a woman, fear and isolation are tangled into a hard, internal
knot so that she cannot experience one without the other. The
terror which plagues women at even the thought of being
