as “conservative” in some metaphysical sense because it is true that
women as a class adhere rather strictly to the traditions and values
of their social context, whatever the character of that context. In
societies of whatever description, however narrowly or broadly defined, women as a class are the dulled conformists, the orthodox believers, the obedient followers, the disciples of unwavering faith.
To waver, whatever the creed of the men around them, is tantamount to rebellion; it is dangerous. Most women, holding on for dear life, do not dare abandon blind faith. From father’s house to
husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a
woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be. Sometimes it is a lethargic conformity, in which case male
demands slowly close in on her, as if she were a character buried
alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Sometimes it is a militant conformity. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her.
She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary
Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par
excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person.
But the militant conformist has given so much of herself—her la
bor, heart, soul, often her body, often children— that this betrayal
is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring.
Women know, but must not acknowledge, that resisting male
control or confronting male betrayal w ill lead to rape, battery, destitution, ostracization or exile, confinement in a mental institution or jail, or death. As Phyllis Chesler and Emily Jane Goodman
make clear in
manner of Sisyphus, to avoid the “something worse” that can and
w ill alw ays happen to them if they transgress the rigid boundaries
of appropriate female behavior. Most women cannot afford, either
m aterially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection w ill not appease the angry little gods around them.
It is not surprising, then, that most girls do not want to become
like their mothers, those tired, preoccupied domestic sergeants beset by incomprehensible troubles. Mothers raise daughters to conform to the strictures of the conventional female life as defined by men, whatever the ideological values of the men. Mothers are the
immediate enforcers of male w ill, the guards at the cell door, the
flunkies who administer the electric shocks to punish rebellion.
Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become
very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion
therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts
directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any
number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her
mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl m ay, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different
pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept
abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with
rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment.
It is the fashion among men to despise the smallness of women’s
lives. The so-called bourgeois woman with her shallow vanity, for
instance, is a joke to the brave intellectuals, truck drivers, and revolutionaries who have wider horizons on which to project and indulge deeper vanities that women dare not mock and to which women dare not aspire. The fishwife is a vicious caricature of the
