Politically committed women often ask the question, “How
can we as women support the struggles of other people? ” This
question as a basis for political analysis and action replicates
the very form of our oppression—it keeps us a gender class of
helpmates. If we were not women— if we were male workers,
or male blacks, or male anybodies—it would be enough for
us to delineate the facts of our own oppression; that alone
would give our struggle credibility in radical male eyes.
But we are women, and the first fact of our oppression is
that we are invisible to our oppressors. The second fact of our
oppression is that we have been trained— for centuries and
from infancy on— to see through their eyes, and so we are
invisible to ourselves. The third fact of our oppression is that
our oppressors are not only male heads of state, male capitalists, male militarists—but also our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, and lovers. No other people is so entirely captured,
so entirely conquered, so destitute of any memory of freedom,
so dreadfully robbed of identity and culture, so absolutely
slandered as a group, so demeaned and humiliated as a function of daily life. And yet, we go on, blind, and we ask over and over again, “What can we do for them? ” It is time to ask,
“What must they do now for us? ” That question must be the
first question in any political dialogue with men.
(3)
Women, for all these patriarchal centuries, have been adamant in the defense of lives other than our own. We died in
childbirth so that others might live. We sustained the lives of
children, husbands, fathers, and brothers in war, in famine, in
every sort of devastation. We have done this in the bitterness
of global servitude. Whatever can be known under patriarchy
about commitment to life, we know it. Whatever it takes to
make that commitment under patriarchy, we have it.
It is time now to repudiate patriarchy by valuing our own
lives as fully, as seriously, as resolutely, as we have valued
other lives. It is time now to commit ourselves to the nurtur-
ance and protection of each other.
We must
must establish values which repudiate phallic supremacy,
which repudiate phallic aggression, which repudiate all relationships and institutions based on male dominance and female submission.
It will not be easy for us to establish values which originate
in sisterhood. For centuries, we have had male values
slammed down our throats and slammed up our cunts. We are
the victims of a violence so pervasive, so constant, so relentless
and unending, that we cannot point to it and say, “There it
begins and there it ends. ” All of the values which we might
defend as a consequence of our allegiances to men and their
ideas are saturated with the fact or memory of that violence.
We know more about violence than any other people on the
face of this earth. We have absorbed such quantities of it— as
women,
