repulsion? What would those women do if, finally, they did
want to be free?
I think that they would study the stone. I think that they
would use every mental and physical faculty available to them
to analyze the stone, its structure, its qualities, its nature, its
chemical composition, its density, the physical laws which determine its properties. They would try to discover where it was eroded, what substances could decompose it, what kind of
pressure was required to shatter it.
This investigation would require absolute rigor and honesty. Any lie that they told themselves about the nature of the stone would impede their liberation. Any lie that they told
themselves about their own condition inside the stone would
perpetuate the very situation that had become intolerable to
them.
I think that we do not want to be buried inside the stone
anymore. I think that the stench of decaying female carcasses
has at last become so vile to us that we are ready to face the
truth— about the stone, and about ourselves inside it.
(2 )
The slavery of women originates thousands of years ago, in a
prehistory of civilization which remains inaccessible to us.
How women came to be slaves, owned by men, we do not
know. We do know that the slavery of women to men is the
oldest known form of slavery in the history of the world.
The first slaves brought to this country by Anglo-Saxon
imperialists were women— white women. Their slavery was
sanctified by religious and civil law, reified by custom and
tradition, and enforced by the systematic sadism of men as a
slave-owning class.
The rights of women under English law during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are described in the following paragraph:
In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together.
It is true, that man and wife are one person; but understand in
what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth
with. . . the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name; it is
carried and recarried with the new associate; it beareth no sway;
it possesseth nothing. . . A woman as soon as she is married, is
called
were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her streame.. . .
Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master. . . Eve,
because she helped to seduce her husband, had inflicted upon her
a special bane. See here the reason. . . that women have no voice
in Parliament. They make no laws, they consent to none, they
abrogate none. All of them are understood either married, or to
be married, and their desires are to their husbands.. . . The common laws here shaketh hand with divinitye. 2
English law obtained in the colonies. There was no new world
here for women.
Women were sold into marriage in the colonies, first for the
