wants more: not more being fucked, not more pregnancy; but more
of a bigger world. A woman cannot be ambitious in her own right
without also being damned.
We take girls and send them to schools. It is good of us, because
girls are not supposed to know anything much, and in many other
societies girls are not sent to school or taught to read and write. In
our society, such a generous one to women, girls are taught some
facts, but not inquiry or the passion of knowing. Girls are taught
in order to make them compliant: intellectual adventurousness is
drained, punished, ridiculed out of girls. We use schools first to
narrow the girl’s scope, her curiosity, then to teach her certain
skills, necessary to the abstract husband. Girls are taught to be
passive in relation to facts. Girls are not seen as the potential originators of ideas or the potential searchers into the human condition.
Good behavior is the intellectual goal of a girl. A girl with intellectual drive is a girl who has to be cut down to size. An intelligent girl is supposed to use that intelligence to find a smarter husband.
Simone de Beauvoir settled on Sartre when she determined that he
was smarter than she was. In a film made when both were old,
toward the end of his life, Sartre asks de Beauvoir, the woman
with whom he has shared an astonishing life of intellectual action
and accomplishment: how does it feel, to have been a literary lady?
Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: “Everyone has an
ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read. ” 5 She is ambitious, but it is
a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants
the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she
suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing.
They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the
focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self- respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a
larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her
poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the
street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get
her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for
literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know.
Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have
dreams of being in the world, not m erely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. 'Women dream , ” Florence N ightingale wrote in
strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so
honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet
which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those
dreams go at last.. . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream,
neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. ”6
V irginia Woolf, the most splendid modern writer, told us over
and over how awful it was to be a woman of creative intelligence.
She told us when she loaded a large stone into her pocket and
