so much nicer eating grits at home. ” It was understood that
racism was a festering pathology, and that that pathology had
to be challenged wherever its dread symptoms appeared: to
check the growth of the pathology itself; to diminish its debilitating effects on its victims; to try to save black lives, one by one if necessary, from the ravages of a racist system which
condemned those lives to a bitter misery.
And yet, when it comes to your own lives, you do not make
the same claim. Sexism, which is properly defined as the systematic cultural, political, social, sexual, psychological, and economic servitude of women to men and to patriarchal institutions, is a festering pathology too. It festers in every house, on every street, in every law court, in every job situation, on
every television show, in every movie. It festers in virtually
every transaction between a man and a woman. It festers
in every encounter between a woman and the institutions of this
male-dominated society. Sexism festers when we are raped, or
when we are married. It festers when we are denied absolute
control over our own bodies— whenever the state or any man
decides in our stead the uses to which our bodies will be put.
Sexism festers when we are taught to submit to men, sexually
and/or intellectually. It festers when we are taught and forced
to serve men in their kitchens, in their beds, as domestics, as
shit workers in their multifarious causes, as devoted disciples
of their work, whatever that work may be. It festers when we
are taught and forced to nourish them as wives, mothers, lovers, or daughters. Sexism festers when we are forced to study male culture but are allowed no recognition of or pride in our
own. It festers when we are taught to venerate and respect
male voices, so that we have no voices of our own. Sexism
festers when, from infancy on, we are forced to restrain every
impulse toward adventure, every ambition toward achievement or greatness, every bold or original act or idea. Sexism festers day and night, day after day, night after night. Sexism
is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social
form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female
domination.
I have never heard a white male radical ridicule or denigrate a black man for demanding that the Civil Rights Act be passed, or for recognizing the racist values behind any refusal
to vote for that act. Yet, many left-wing women have said to
me, “I can’t quite figure out the politics of the Equal Rights
Amendment. ” Further discussion always reveals that these
women have been denigrated by left-wing men for being distressed that the Equal Rights Amendment might not pass this year or in the near future. Let me tell you about “the politics
of the Equal Rights Amendment”— a refusal to pass it is a
refusal to recognize women as being sound enough in mind
and body to exercise the rights of citizenship; a refusal to pass
it condemns women to lives as nonentities before the law; a
refusal to pass it is an affirmation of the view that women are
inferior to men by virtue of biology, as a condition of birth.
Among political people, it is shameful to be a racist or an anti-
Semite. No shame attaches to a resolute disregard for the civil
rights of women.
In my view, any man who truly recognizes your right to
dignity and to freedom will recognize that the dread symptoms
of sexism must be challenged wherever they appear: to check
