formally and officially in its crimes. The hope of our foremothers was this: that when women had the vote, we would use it to stop the crimes of men against men and of men
against women. Our foremothers believed that they had given
us the tool which would enable us to transform a corrupt
nation into a nation of righteousness. It is a bitter thing to say
that they were deluded. It is a bitter thing to say that the vote
became the tombstone over their obscure graves.
We women do not have many victories to celebrate. Everywhere, our people are in chains— designated as biologically inferior to men; our very bodies controlled by men and male
law; the victims of violent, savage crimes; bound by law, custom, and habit to sexual and domestic servitude; exploited mercilessly in any paid labor; robbed of identity and ambition
as a condition of birth. We want to claim the vote as a victory.
We want to celebrate. We want to rejoice. But the fact is that
the vote was only a cosmetic change in our condition. Suffrage
has been for us the illusion of participation without the reality
of self-determination. We are still a colonialized people, subject to the will of men. And, in fact, behind the vote there is the story of a movement that betrayed itself by abandoning its
own visionary insights and compromising its deepest principles. August 26, 1920, signifies, most bitterly, the death of the first feminist movement in Amerika.
How do we celebrate that death? How do we rejoice in the
demise of a movement that set out to salvage our lives from
the wreck and ruin of patriarchal domination? What victory is
there in the dead ash of a feminist movement burned out?
The meaning of the vote is this: that we had better flesh out
our invisible past, so that we can understand how and why so
much ended in so little; that we had better resurrect our dead,
to study how they lived and why they died; that we had better
find a cure for whatever disease wiped them out, so that it will
not decimate us.
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an
agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which
permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships. It is
as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago and now it is
granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone.
Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women
say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me.
Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from
rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is
this stone, what is there without it?
For some women, being buried in the stone is unbearable.
They want to move freely. They exert all their strength to claw
away at the hard rock that encases them. They rip their fingernails, bruise their fists, tear the skin on their hands until it is raw and bleeding. They rip their lips open on the rock, and
break their teeth, and choke on the granite as it crumbles into
their mouths. Many women die in this desperate, solitary battle against the stone.
But what if the impulse to freedom were to be bom in all of
the women buried in the stone? What if the material of the
rock itself had become so saturated with the stinking smell of
women’s rotting bodies, the accumulated stench of thousands
of years of decay and death, that no woman could contain her
