to protect slavery, and even though forced integration did diminish the scope, breadth, substance, and importance of the First Amendment right to freedom of association (for whites,
of course), a time came when these tenets of constitutional law
had to be reinterpreted. The authority of law could be maintained only if law sanctioned the equality that had been anathema to it.
The courts never said they had been wrong; and to this day
it is a dicey business to impugn the more perfect Constitution
of the framers. But law had to bend or break. The authority
of the law always appears to be absolute but in fact it is never
absolute or immutable. Resistance can force it to change its
ground.
The authority of the law had been used to impose inequality.
This inequality gave whites authority. The resistance to
inequality had to confront, resist, and repudiate both the
authority of the law and the authority of whites. To maintain
itself, law changed. The authority of whites was pret y much
destroyed. It had to be, because white authority carried the
contagion of white supremacy beyond where law could go.
Male authority over women permeates every social institution and most intimate exchanges and practices. The state is one agent of male authority. The rapist is another. The
husband is another. The pimp is another. The priest is
another. The publisher is another. And so on. Resistance to
male authority requires far more than resistance to the state
or to the authority of the state. For women, the authority of
the man extends into intimacy and privacy, inside the body in
sex and in reproduction. In worshiping a male God, in conforming to social codes of dress and demeanor, even in using language, women defer to the authority of men.
The means of resistance to this ubiquitous and invasive
authority have never been adequate. Sometimes they hardly
Authority and Resistance
19
seem serious. Even when women resist inequality and the
authority of the state that imposes inequality, women continue
to capitulate to the authority of men, an authority premised
on women’s inequality. In a fight for freedom, such a capitulation is suicidal. Accepting male authority means accepting important elements of one’s own social and sexual inferiority.
Deference to male authority means deference to second-class
status.
The authority of the law must be—and can be—forced to
change its ground: to sanction equality. The authority of men
has to be pret y much destroyed. It is probably impossible to
repudiate women’s inequality while accepting male authority.
So far, hostility to the authority of men appears to be a serious no-no, even though each act or at itude of deference further entrenches male dominance. It is likely that women’s
inequality—the habits and pat erns of discrimination, prejudice, and debasement that injure women—can survive any political resistance so long as the authority of men remains, as
it is now, both sacrosanct and intact.
Principles:
1. The authority of law, which has sanctioned inequality, can
be forced to sanction equality if resistance is intense enough
and if the stakes are high enough, for example, the viability of the law itself.
