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Woman Haling
Feminists, most often as individuals but sometimes in
small militant groups, fought the system which oppressed them, analyzed it, were jailed, were ostracized, but there was no general recognition among women
that they were oppressed.
In the last 5 or 6 years, that recognition has become
more widespread among women. We have begun to understand the extraordinary violence that has been done to us, that is being done to us: how our minds are
aborted in their development by sexist education; how
our bodies are violated by oppressive grooming imperatives; how the police function against us in cases of rape and assault; how the media, schools, and
churches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; how
the nuclear family and ritualized sexual behavior imprison us in roles and forms which are degrading to us.
We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try to
fathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to try
to search out the depth and boundaries of our internalized anger, to try to find strategies for freeing ourselves from oppressive relationships, from masochism and passivity, from our own lack of self-respect. There
was both pain and ecstasy in this process. Women
discovered each other, for truly no oppressed group
had ever been so divided and conquered. Women began to deal with concrete oppressions: to become part of the economic process, to erase discriminatory laws,
to gain control over our own lives and over our own
bodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on our
own terms. Women also began to articulate structural
analyses o f sexist society — Millett did that with
Introduction
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the complex and deadly antiwoman biases o f the medical establishment; in
women who rebel against society’s well-defined female
role.
We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we saw
was dreadful. We saw that we were, as Yoko O no wrote,
the niggers o f the world, slaves to the slave. We saw
that we were the ultimate house niggers, ass-licking,
bowing, scraping, shuffling fools. We recognized all o f
our social behavior as learned behavior that functioned
for survival in a sexist world: we painted ourselves,
smiled, exposed legs and ass, had children, kept
house, as our accommodations to the reality o f power
politics.
Most o f the women involved in articulating the oppression o f women were white and middle class. We spent, even if we did not earn or control, enormous
sums o f money. Because o f our participation in the mid-
dle-class lifestyle we were the oppressors o f other
people, our poor white sisters, our Black sisters, our
