Cross-culturally, girls and women are the illiterates, with two
thirds of the world’s illiterates women and the rate rising steadily.
Girls need husbands, not books. Girls need houses or shacks to
keep clean, or street corners to stand on, not the wide world in
which to roam. Refusal to give the tool of literacy is refusal to give
access to the world. If she can make her own fire, read a book
herself, write a letter or a record of her thoughts or an essay or a
story, it will be harder to get her to tolerate the unwanted fuck, to
bear the unwanted children, to see him as life and life through
him. She might get ideas. But even worse, she might know the
value of the ideas she gets. She must not know that ideas have
value, only that being fucked and reproducing are her value.
It has been hard, in the United States, to get women educated:
there are still many kinds of education off limits to women. In
England, it was hard for Virginia Woolf to use a university library.
Simple literacy is the first step, and, as Abby Kelley told a
women’s rights convention in 1850, “Sisters, bloody feet have
worn smooth the path by which you came here. ” 8 Access to the
whole language has been denied women; we are only supposed to
use the ladylike parts of it. Alice James noted in her diary that “[i]t
is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined aw ay from one! ”9
But it is in the actual exercise of literacy as a tool and as a capacity that women face punishment, ostracization, exile, recrimination, the most virulent contempt. To read and be feminine simultaneously she reads Gothic romances, not medical textbooks;
cookbooks, not case law; m ystery stories, not molecular biology.
The language of mathematics is not a feminine language. She may
learn astrology, not astronomy. She may teach grammar, not invent style or originate ideas. She is permitted to write a little book about neurotic women, fiction or nonfiction, if the little book is
trite and sentimental enough; she had better keep clear of philosophy altogether. In fiction, she had better be careful not to overstep the severe limits imposed by femininity. “This then, ” wrote V irginia Woolf, “is another incident, and quite a common incident in the career of a woman novelist. She has to say I w ill wait. I will
wait until men have become so civilised that they are not shocked
when a woman speaks the truth about her body. The future of
fiction depends very much upon what extent men can be educated
to stand free speech in women. ” 10 The constraint is annihilation:
language that must avoid one’s own body is language that has no
place in the world. But speaking the truth about a woman’s body is
not the simple explication of body parts— it is instead the place of
that particular body in this particular world, its value, its use, its
place in power, its political and economic life, its capacities both
potentially realized and habitually abused.
In a sense intellect is the combination of literacy and intelligence:
literacy disciplines intelligence and intelligence expands the uses of
literacy; there is a body of knowledge that changes and increases
and also a skill in acquiring knowledge; there is a memory filled
with ideas, a storehouse of what has gone before in the world.
Intellect is mastery of ideas, of culture, of the products and processes of other intellects. Intellect is the capacity to learn language disciplined into learning. Intellect must be cultivated: even in men,
