Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

be hard to remember that still, even though we cannot see it,

the sun burns. We will try to see it and we will try to feel it,

and we will forget that it warms us still, that if it were not

there, burning, shining, this earth would be a cold and desolate and barren place.

As long as we have life and breath, no matter how dark the

earth around us, that sun still bums, still shines. There is no

today without it. There is no tomorrow without it. There was

no yesterday without it. That light is within us— constant,

warm, and healing. Remember it, sisters, in the dark times to

come.

8

Our Blood:

The Slavery of Women ia A m erika

(In memory of Sarah Grimke, 1792-1873,

and Angelina Grimke, 1805-1879)

( 1 )

In her introduction to Felix Holt (1866), George Eliot wrote:

. . . there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that

make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of

hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and

raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for

ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—

committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night,

seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow

months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many

an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed

into no human ear. 1

I want to speak to you tonight about the “inherited sorrows” of women on this Amerikan soil, sorrows which have Delivered for the National Organization for Women, Washington, D. C., on

August 23, 1975, to commemorate the fifty-fifth anniversary of women's

suffrage; The Community Church of Boston, November 9, 1975.

marred millions upon millions of human lives, sorrows which

have “been breathed into no human ear, ” or sorrows which

were breathed and then forgotten.

This nation’s history is one of spilled blood. Everything that

has grown here has grown in fields irrigated by the blood of

whole peoples. This is a nation built on the human carrion of

the Indian nations. This is a nation built on slave labor,

slaughter, and grief. This is a racist nation, a sexist nation, a

murderous nation. This is a nation pathologically seized by the

will to domination.

Fifty-five years ago, we women became citizens of this nation. After seventy years of fierce struggle for suffrage, our kindly lords saw fit to give us the vote. Since that time, we

have been, at least in a ceremonial way, participants in the

blood-letting of our government; we have been implicated