didn’t ask me to [drowned out by audience applause] but it isn’t my loss. ”
devotion in women who are afraid that they w ill be deprived of the
form, shelter, safety, rules, and love that the Right promises and
on which they believe survival depends.
*
At the National Women’s Conference (Houston, Texas, November
1977), I spoke with many women on the Right. The conversations
were ludicrous, terrifying, bizarre, instructive, and, as other feminists have reported, sometimes strangely moving.
Right-wing women fear lesbians. A liberal black delegate from
Texas told me that local white women had tried to convince her
that lesbians at the conference would assault her, call her dirty
names, and were personally filthy. She told me that she would vote
against the sexual-preference resolution* because otherwise she
would not be able to return home. But she also said that she would
tell the white women that the lesbians had been polite and clean.
She said that she knew it was wrong to deprive anyone of a job and
had had no idea before coming to Houston that lesbian mothers
lost their children. T his, she felt, was genuinely terrible. I asked
her if she thought a time would come when she would have to
stand up for lesbian rights in her hometown. She nodded yes
gravely, then explained with careful, evocative emphasis that the
next-closest town to where she lived was 160 miles away. The history of blacks in the South was palpable.
* “Congress, State, and local legislatures should enact legislation to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sexual and affectional preference in areas including, but not limited to, employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, public facilities, government funding, and the military.
“State legislatures should reform their penal codes or repeal State laws
that restrict private sexual behavior between consenting adults.
“State legislatures should enact legislation that would prohibit consideration o f sexual or affectional orientation as a factor in any judicial determination of child custody or visitation rights. Rather, child custody cases should be evaluated solely on the merits of which party is the better parent, without regard to that person’s sexual and affectional orientation. ”
Right-wing women consistently spoke to me about lesbians as if
lesbians were rapists, certified committers of sexual assault against
women and girls. No facts could intrude on this psychosexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male sexual violence against women and children could change the focus of their fear. They admitted
that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females. The men, they acknowledged when pressed, were sinners, and they hated sin, but there was clearly something
comforting in the normalcy of heterosexual rape. To them, the
lesbian was inherently monstrous, experienced almost as a demonic sexual force hovering closer and closer. She was the dangerous intruder, encroaching, threatening by her very presence a sexual order that cannot bear scrutiny or withstand challenge.
Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilized egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its
existence. The grief of these women for fetuses is real, and their
contempt for women who become pregnant out of wedlock is awesome to behold. The fact that most illegal abortions in the bad old days were performed on married women with children, and that
thousands of those women died each year, is utterly meaningless to
them. They see abortion as a criminal act committed by godless
whores, women absolutely unlike themselves.
