the growth of the pathology itself; to diminish its debilitating
effects on its victims; to try to save women’s lives, one by one
if necessary, from the ravages of a sexist system which condemns those lives to a bitter misery. Any man who is your comrade will know in his gut the indignity, the demeaning
indignity, of systematic exclusion from the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Any man who is your true comrade will be committed to laying his body, his life, on the line so
that you will be subjected to that indignity no longer. I ask
you to look to your male comrades on the left, and to determine whether they have made that commitment to you. If they have not, then they do not take your lives seriously, and as
long as you work for and with them, you do not take your
lives seriously either.
(2 )
Feminism is an exploration, one that has just begun. Women
have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we
venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.
Our exploration has three parts. First, we must discover our
past. The road back is obscure, hard to find. We look for signs
that tell us: women have lived here. And then we try to see
what life was like for those women. It is a bitter exploration.
We find that for centuries, all through recorded time, women
have been violated, exploited, demeaned, systematically and
unconscionably. We find that millions upon millions of
women have died as the victims of organized gynocide. We
find atrocity after atrocity, executed on such a vast scale that
other atrocities pale by comparison. We find that gynocide
takes many forms— slaughter, crippling, mutilation, slavery,
rape. It is not easy for us to bear what we see.
Second, we must examine the present: how is society presently organized; how do women live now; how does it work—
this global system of oppression based on gender which takes
so many invisible lives; what are the sources of male dominance; how does male dominance perpetuate itself in organized violence and totalitarian institutions? This too is a bitter exploration. We see that all over the world our people,
women, are in chains. These chains are psychological, social,
sexual, legal, economic. These chains are heavy. These
chains are locked by a systematic violence perpetrated against
us by the gender class men. It is not easy for us to bear what
we see. It is not easy for us to shed these chains, to find the
resources to withdraw our consent from oppression. It is not
easy for us to determine what forms our resistance must take.
Third, we must imagine a future in which we would be free.
Only the imagining of this future can energize us so that we do
not remain victims of our past and our present. Only the imagining of this future can give us the strength to repudiate our slave behavior—to identify it whenever we manifest it, and to
root it out of our lives. This exploration is not bitter, but it is
insanely difficult—because each time a woman does renounce
slave behavior, she meets the full force and cruelty of her
oppressor head on.
