Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

we must repudiate, we have developed a heroic commitment

to sustaining and nurturing life.

In our lifetimes, we will not be able to eradicate that first

fact of female existence under patriarchy: we will continue to

be afraid of the punishments which are inevitable as we challenge male supremacy; we will find it hard to root out the masochism which is so deeply embedded within us; we will

suffer ambivalence and conflict, most of us, throughout our

lives as we advance our revolutionary feminist presence.

But, if we are resolute, we will also deepen and expand that

heroic commitment to sustaining and nurturing life. We will

deepen it by creating visionary new forms of human community; we will expand it by including ourselves in it— by learning to value and cherish each other as sisters. We will

renounce all forms of male control and male domination; we

will destroy the institutions and cultural valuations which imprison us in invisibility and victimization; but we will take with us, out of our bitter, bitter past, our passionate identification with the worth of other human lives.

I want to end by saying that we must never betray the

heroic commitment to the worth of human life which is the

source of our courage as women. If we do betray that commitment, we will find ourselves, hands dripping with blood, equal heroes to men at last.

6

R ed efin in g N onviolence

. . . and finally I twist my heart round again, so that the

bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and

keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would

so like to be, and I could be, if. . . there weren’t any other

people living in the world.

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl,

August 1, 1944, three days before her arrest

( i )

Feminism, according to The Random House Dictionary, is

defined as “the doctrine advocating social and political rights

of women equal to those of men. ” This is one tenet of feminism, and I urge you not to sneer at it, not to deride it as reformist, not to dismiss it with what you might consider left-wing radical purity.

Some of you fought with all your heart and soul for civil

rights for blacks. You understood that to sit at a dirty lunch

counter and eat a rotten hamburger had no revolutionary validity at all— and yet you also understood the indignity, the demeaning indignity, of not being able to do so. And so you, and others like you, laid your lives on the line so that blacks would

not be forced to suffer systematic daily indignities of exclusion

from institutions which, in fact, you did not endorse. In all the

Delivered at Boston College, at a conference on Alternatives to the Military-

Corporate System, in a panel on “Defending Values Without Violence, ”

April 5, 1975.

years of the civil rights movement, I never heard a white male

radical say to a black man— “Why do you want to eat there, it’s