work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence.
But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating
social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all
their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual
subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays
women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for
working outside marriage or prostitution, since women work hard
for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that
punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low
wages contributes significantly to women’s perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman’s life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for
equal work is a simple reform, whereas it is no reform at all; it is
revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay
for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-
wing women have refused to forget it. Devaluation of women’s
labor outside the home pushes women back into the home and encourages women to support a system in which, as she sees it, he is paid for both of them— her share of his wage being more than she
could earn herself.
In the workplace, sexual harassment fixes the low status of
women irreversibly. Women are sex; even filing or typing, women
are sex. The debilitating, insidious violence of sexual harassment
is pervasive in the workplace. It is part of nearly every working
environment. Women shuffle; women placate; women submit;
women leave; the rare, brave women fight and are tied up in the
courts, often without jobs, for years. There is also rape in the
workplace.
Where is the place for intelligence— for literacy, intellect, creativity, moral discernment? Where in this world in which women live, circumscribed by the uses to which men put women’s sexual
organs, is the cultivation of skills, the cultivation of gifts, the
cultivation of dreams, the cultivation of ambition? Of what use is
human intelligence to a woman?
“Of course, ” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the learned women were
very ugly; but then they were very poor. She would like to feed
Chuffy for a term on Lucy’s rations and see what he said then
about Henry the Eighth. ” 28
“No, it would not do the slightest good if he read my manuscript. . . , ” wrote Ellen Glasgow in her memoir. “T h e best advice I can give you, ’ he said, with charming candor, ‘is to stop writing, and go back to the South and have some babies. ’ And I
think, though I may have heard this ripe wisdom from other men,
probably from many, that he added: T h e greatest woman is not
the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who
has had the finest babies. ’ That might be true. I did not stay to
dispute it. However, it was true also that I wanted to write books,
and not ever had I felt the faintest wish to have babies. ” 29
Woodhull thought that freedom from sexual coercion would
come with work in the marketplace. She was wrong; the marketplace became, as men would have it, another place for sexual intimidation, another arena of danger to women burdened already with too many such arenas. Woolf put her faith in education and
