Right-wing Women

tells her tale. ” 1 And M ailer was being generous, because he endowed the whore with a capacity to know, if not to tell: she knows something firsthand, something worth knowing. “G enius, ” wrote

Edith Wharton more realistically, “is of small use to a woman who

does not know how to do her hair. ” 2

Intelligence is a form of energy, a force that pushes out into the

world. It makes its mark, not once but continuously. It is curious,

penetrating. Without the light of public life, discourse, and action,

it dies. It must have a field of action beyond embroidery or scrubbing toilets or wearing fine clothes. It needs response, challenge, consequences that matter. Intelligence cannot be passive and private through a lifetime. Kept secret, kept inside, it withers and dies. The outside can be brought to it; it can live on bread and

water locked up in a cell—but barely. Florence Nightingale, in her

feminist tract Cassandra, said that intellect died last in women; desire, dreams, activity, and love all died before it. Intelligence does hang on, because it can live on almost nothing: fragments of the

world brought to it by husbands or sons or strangers or, in our

time, television or the occasional film. Imprisoned, intelligence

turns into self-haunting and dread. Isolated, intelligence becomes a

burden and a curse. Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the

bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the

body can use. It swells, like the starved stomach, as the skeleton

shrivels and the bones collapse; it will pick up anything to fill the

hunger, stick anything in, chew anything, swallow anything. “Jose

Carlos came home with a bag of crackers he found in the garbage, ”

wrote Carolina Maria de Jesus, a woman of the Brazilian underclass, in her diary. “When I saw him eating things out of the trash I thought: and if it’s been poisoned? Children can’t stand hunger.

The crackers were delicious. I ate them thinking of that proverb:

He who enters the dance must dance. And as I also was hungry, I

ate. ” 3 The intelligence of women is traditionally starved, isolated,

imprisoned.

Traditionally and practically, the world is brought to women by

men; they are the outside on which female intelligence must feed.

The food is poor, orphan’s gruel. This is because men bring home

half-truths, ego-laden lies, and use them to demand solace or sex or

housekeeping. The intelligence of women is not out in the world,

acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on

behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women’s work, and

her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of

her ass.

Men are the world and women use intelligence to survive men:

their tricks, desires, demands, moods, hatreds, disappointments,

rages, greed, lust, authority, power, weaknesses. The ideas that

come to women come through men, in a field of cultural values

controlled by men, in a political and social system controlled by

men, in a sexual system in which women are used as things. (As

Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in the one sentence that every

woman should risk her life to understand: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object. ”4) Men are the field of action in which female intelligence moves. But the world, the real world, is more than

men, certainly more than what men show of themselves and the