On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

In teaching women, we have two choices:

and a belief that learning in the classroom could not be isolated from the student’s experience as a member of an urban minority group in white America.

The essays in this book represent the journey of my own thought toward the paragraph I have just written.

It is clearly in the interests of the industry and its advertisers to keep women addicted, not merely to TV but to the social arrangements which isolate us in the home and which reinforce economic dependency and apolitical panaceas for political problems.

Marxist-feminist historian Linda Gordon observes in her book Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, that heterosexual relations are charged with extreme risk for women, and that the entire balance of power between the sexes must change if birth control and abortion are to be genuinely effective in changing women’s lives. She is one of the few heterosexual feminists to have confronted so clearly the institution of heterosexuality as a major buttress of male power.

these ordinary, everyday events inevitably must lead us to ask: who indeed hates whom, who is killing whom, whose interest is served, and whose fantasies expressed, by representing abortion as the selfish, willful, morally contagious expression of woman’s predilection for violence?

How shall we ever make the world intelligent on our movement? I do not think the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

In reality, the feminist movement could be said to be trying to visualize and make way for a world in which abortion would not be necessary; a world free from poverty and rape, in which young girls would grow up with intelligent regard for and knowledge of their bodies and respect for their minds, in which the socialization of women into heterosexual romance and marriage would no longer be the primary lesson of culture; in which single women could raise children with a less crushing cost to themselves, in which female creativity might or might not choose to express itself in motherhood.

Women’s culture, on the other hand, is active: women have been the truly active people in all cultures, without whom human society would long ago have perished, though our activity has most often been on behalf of men and children.

Rachel Speight, Jane Anger, Elizabeth Carey, and Anne Askew, the latter tortured to death and burned as a heretic