then, there is one woman speaking, not a movement. *
Woodhull was not taken seriously as a thinker, writer, publisher,
journalist, activist, pioneer, by those who followed her—not by
the historians, teachers, intellectuals, revolutionaries, reformers;
not by the lovers or rapists; not by the women. Had she been part
of the cultural dialogue on sexual issues, the whole subsequent development of movements for sexual freedom would have been different in character: because she hated rape and prostitution and
*In a recent essay, novelist Alice Walker wrote:. . I submit that any
sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or
controls is rape. ” (See “Embracing the Dark and the Light, ”
1982, p. 117. ) This definition has the advantage of articulating the power
that is the context for as well as the substance of the act.
understood them as violations of sexual freedom, which male liber-
ationists did not. But then, this was w hy she was excluded: the
men wanted the rape and prostitution. She threatened not only
those sacred institutions but the male hallucinations that prettify
those institutions: those happy visions of happy women, caged, domesticated or wanton, numb to rape, numb to being bought and sold. Her sexual intelligence was despised, then ignored, because
of what it revealed: he who hates the truth hates the intelligence
that brings it.
Sexual intelligence in women, that rarest intelligence in a male-
supremacist world, is necessarily a revolutionary intelligence, the
opposite of the pornographic (which sim ply reiterates the world as
it is for women), the opposite of the w ill to be used, the opposite of
masochism and self-hatred, the opposite of “good woman” and
“bad woman” both. It is not in being a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man’s world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her
separateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not
his. Prostitution m ay be against the written law, but no prostitute
has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through
prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female
sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men
who enjoy them. The prostitute is no honest woman. She manipulates as the wife manipulates. So too no honest woman can live in marriage: no woman honest in her will to be free. Marriage delivers
her body to another to use: and there is no basis for self-respect in
this carnal arrangement, however sanctified it may be by church
and state.
Wife or whore: she is defined by what men want; sexual intelligence is stopped dead. Wife or whore: to paraphrase Thackeray, her heart is dead (“Her heart was dead long before her body. She
had sold it to become Sir Pitt C raw ley’s wife. Mothers and daugh
ters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair” 20).
Wife or whore: both are fucked, bear children, resent, suffer, grow
numb, want more. Wife or whore: both are denied a human life,
forced to live a female one. Wife or whore: intelligence denied,
annihilated, ridiculed, obliterated, primes her to surrender—to her
female fate. Wife or whore: the two kinds of women whom men
