Right-wing Women

Gestapo of the British secret intelligence” in the United States. In the

propaganda of Lyndon LaRouche, who has been behind such diverse

groups as the U . S. Labor Party, the Fusion Energy Foundation, the

National Democratic Policy Committee, and the National Anti-Drug

Coalition, “British” is virtually a synonym for “Jewish. ” (See “Lyndon

LaRouche’s Goon Squads, ” Alan Crawford, Inquiry, February 15, 1982,

pp. 8 - 1 0 . ) “Creationism” (God created the world in seven days, there was

no evolution) is a main tenet of the orthodox (not neo-Nazi) Right; the

ideas of Darwin are as despised as the ideas of Freud and Marx.

Women are interchangeable as sex objects; women are slightly

less disposable as mothers. The only dignity and value women get

is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is

all that is offered to women as women. Having children is the best

thing women can do to get respect and be assured a place. The fact

that having children does not get women respect or a place is almost beside the point: poor women don’t get respect and live in dung heaps; black women don’t get respect and are jailed in decimated ghettos; just plain pregnant women don’t get respect and the place they have is a dangerous one— pregnancy is now considered

a cause of battery (stress on the male, don’t you know): in perhaps

25 percent of families in which battery occurs, it is a pregnant

woman who has been battered. In fact, having children may mean

both increased violence and increased dependence; it may significantly worsen the economic circumstances of a woman or a fam ily; it may hurt a woman’s health or jeopardize her in a host of other

ways; but having children is the one social contribution credited to

women— it is the bedrock of women’s social worth. Despite all the

happy smiling public mommies, the private mommies have grim

private recognitions. One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not. Right-wing Judaism and right-wing Christianity both guarantee that women will continue to have a place outside

history but inside the home: through childbearing. Without that,

women know they have nothing. Homosexuality for women means

having nothing; it means extinction. Well, who’s going to have the

babies? men ask when faced with women surgeons and politicians— as if the question had an intrinsic logic; or as if ending war were not logically a part of having “enough” people. “All this talk,

for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins G ilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and

rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are run­

ning short of children—make some more. ’” 14 The extinction

women fear is not this extinction men conjure up: who will make

the babies so that we can fight our wars? It is the extinction of

women: women’s function and with it women’s worth. Men have

one reason for keeping women alive: to bear babies. The sex of

domination leads to death: it is the killing of body and w ill—conquest, possession, annihilation; sex, violence, death—that is pure sex; and it is the slow annihilation of the woman’s will that is eros,

and the slow annihilation of her body that is eros; her violation is

sex, whether it ends in her aesthetic disappearance into oblivion or

her body bludgeoned in a newspaper photograph or the living husk

used and discarded as sexual garbage. Annihilation is sexy, and sex