art. She too was wrong. Men erase; misogyny distorts; the intelligence of women is still both punished and despised.
Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They
see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they
see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having
ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage
means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see
that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired,
sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not
make them independent of men and that they will still have to play
the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no
way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in
the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better
to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value
whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not
wrong. T hey fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and
promiscuity as values, w ill make them more vulnerable to male
sexual aggression, and that they w ill be despised for not liking it.
They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. T hey know that they are valued for their sex—
their sex organs and their reproductive capacity— and so they try
to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity;
through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through
submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“fem ininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” T heir desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. T hey see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence
realized in a woman is a crime. T hey see the world they live in and
they are not wrong. T hey use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. T hey use the traditional intelligence of the female— animal, not human: they do what they
have to to survive.
3
Abortion
I have never regretted the abortion. I
both my marriage and having children.
A witness on forced motherhood,
International Tribunal on Crimes Against
Women, * March 1976
Before the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the
United States, abortion was a crime. Some abortions were medically licensed, but they were a minute percentage of the abortions actually undergone by women. This meant that there were no records of the illegal abortions performed (each abortion was a crime, each abortion was clandestine), no medical histories or records, no
statistics. Information on illegal abortions came from these sources:
(1) the testimonies of women who had had such abortions and survived; (2) the physical evidence of the botched abortions, evidence that showed up in hospital emergency rooms all over the country
every single d ay— perforated uteruses, infections including gangrene, severe hemorrhaging, incomplete abortions (in which fetal tissue is left in the womb, always fatal if not removed); (3) the
physical evidence of the dead bodies (for instance, nearly one half
