Right-wing Women

recognize, whom men let live. Wife or whore: battered, raped,

prostituted; men desire her. Wife or whore: the whore comes in

from the cold to become the wife if she can; the wife thrown out

into the cold becomes the whore if she must. Is there a way out of

the home that does not lead, inevitably and horribly, to the street

corner? This is the question right-wing women face. This is the

question all women face, but right-wing women know it. And in

the transit—home to street, street to home— is there any place,

reason, or chance for female intelligence that is not simply looking

for the best buyer?

*

So ladies, ye who prefer labor to prostitution, who

pass days and nights in providing for the wants of

your family, it is understood of course that you are

degraded; a woman ought not to do anything; respect

and honor belong to idleness.

You, Victoria of England, Isabella of Spain— you

command, therefore you are radically degraded.

Jenny P. D’Hericourt, A Woman's Philosophy

of Woman; or Woman Affranchised, 1864

The sex labor of women for the most part is private—in the bedroom—or secret—prostitutes may be seen, but how the johns use them may not. Ideally women do nothing; women simply are

women. In truth women get used up in private or in secret being

women. In the ideal conception of womanhood, women do not do

work that can be seen: women only do hidden sex labor. In the real

world, women who work for wages outside of sex are dangerously

outside the female sphere; and women are denigrated for not being

ideal— apparently idle, untouched by visible labor.

Behind the smoke screen of ideal idleness, there is always

women’s work. Women’s work, first, is marriage. “In the morning

I’m always nervous, ” Carolina de Jesus wrote. “I’m afraid of not

getting money to buy food to eat.. . . Senhor Manuel showed up

saying he wanted to marry me. But I don’t want to. . . a man isn’t

going to like a woman who can’t stop reading and gets out of bed to

write and sleeps with paper and pencil under her pillow. T hat’s

why I prefer to live alone, for m y ideals. ” 21

The woman in marriage is often in marriage because her ideal is

eating, not writing.

Women’s work, second, is prostitution: sexual service outside of

marriage for money. “I’d like so much to have the illusion that I

had some freedom of choice, ” said J . in Kate M illett’s The P rostitution Papers. “M aybe it’s just an illusion, but I need to think I had some freedom. Yet then I realize how much was determined in the

way I got into prostitution, how determined m y life had been, how

fucked over I was. . . So I believed I’d chosen it. W hat’s most

terrifying is to look back, to realize what I went through and that I

endured it. ” 22

The woman in prostitution learns, as Linda Lovelace said in