::rinifTE"""R wifDom•fiXfinifTE"""R wifDom 6
A Journal of Words and Pictures for the Lesbian
Imagination in A II Women

Summer, 1978

We are moving.to Lincoln, Nebraska.
We are moving
to four issues a year.
(See page 2 for details.)

Editors: Harriet Desmoines
Catherine Nicholson
Poetry Editor: Susan Leigh
Star
This issue edited by:
Catherine, Harriet, and
Mab Segrest
Design and art work:
Beth Hodges

New address:
Sinister Wisdom
P.O. Box 30541
Lincoln, Nebraska

68503

Technical Assistance:
Debbie Alicen and
Lynn Crisco

Cover by Beth Hodges

Printed by Iowa City
Women's Press

Copyright © Sinister Wisdom, 1978. All rights reserved to individual authors and artists .
Published quarterly
Individual subscriptions : one year (4 issues) $7.50
two years (8 issues) $13.00
Institutions: 4 issues, $12.00
Single copy, no . 6: $2.50
Back issues, while available:
No. 1, $2.00
Book Issue No . 2, "Lesbian Writing and Publishing, " $2.50
No . 3, sold out
No . 4, $2.25
No . 5, $2.25(Add 36c postage when ordering single copies.)

CONTENTS
Harriet and Catherine
Letter to Readers
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action:
Julia Stanley
Mary Daly
Audre Lorde
Judith McDaniel
Adrienne Rich
Dear Sphinx,
Madeline Tiger Bass
Sentence Stress
Vicki Shafli:Jrnary Gabriner
Some Thoughts on Separatism and Power
Marilyn Fryewith you I have understoodSusan Robbins
Nights and Days
Adrienne Rich
In which I weep like Niobe...
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Nothing Safe in Crabtree Meadow
Sandy Boucher
Parthenogenesis
Jan Millsapps
My Mother was a Light Housekeeper
Thyme Seagull
Openings
Melanie Perish
The Double Pink Sphinxes
mh north
Sisters
mh northJean-Paul Sartre as a NO to Women
Peggy Holland
Drawing
Caron
Excerpt from Berrigan
Ginger~ox
The Priscilla Poems
Jennifer Turner
Coercive Consensus
Sarah L. Hoagland
Interviews with Deidre McCalla and Llena de Madrugada
The Snake Woman
Martha Courtot
Our Lives Tangle
Melanie Kaye
Photograph
Christine Amy Straayer
Contributors' Notes

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Dear Sisters,
This issue #6 marks the end of Sinister Wisdom's second year--:an
event calling for celebration and congratulations all around. To all of you
who, in so many different ways, caused the lady to survive and flourish,
our deepest thanks. We all deserve to give ourselves a Big Party ....
You may have noticed that this is not the double issue promised lasttime. (Everything that is not in #6 will be in #7 ... and more!) We didn't
have enough cash-on-hand to print a double issue. Also, we finallyrealized that most wymyn wanted Sinister Wisdom to come out more
often instead. So, beginning with issue #7, fall 1978, Sinister Wisdom
becomes a quarterly--4 issues, instead of 3, a year.
The rate for new subscriptions and renewals after July, 1978, is $7.50
a year. This is a jump, but not as big a jump as it looks. Formerly, you
paid $4.50 for 3 issues, which works out to $1.50 an issue; now you pay$7.50 for 4 issues, which works out to $1.87 for each 100-108 pp. issue.
(Subscribing for 8 issues reduces the cost to $1.63 an issue.) We are lessthan thrilled about this increase; however, without it, Sinister Wisdom
dies of a broken pocket book. (The increase is not due to typesetting;that we have managed so far on an exchange-of-Iabor basis.)
Our other big news is that soon after issue #5 came out, we were invited to move to Lincoln, Nebraska, by a group of wymyn there who promised to work on the magazine. By the time this issue is printed, Sinister
Wisdom will be located in Lincoln. (New address: Box 30541, Lincoln,
NE 68503) Now, in the midst of a chaos of packing boxes, clingy cats,
and unanswered correspondence, we're simultaneously looking forward
and back--forward, to new energy in a new space; back, with a renewed
appreciation of what this Lesbian community in Charlotte has meant toboth of us, and to the magazine.
Apologies are due from us to the wymyn who, in the last year; havewritten letters or sent in manuscripts, only to receive delayed replies, or-in a few cases--no reply at all. Our first priority now is to change thissituation and make sure it doesn't happen again--that no womyn who
works on Sinister Wisdom in the future becomes so burned out that she
loses the capacity to respond.
Our endings are a/so beginnings: North Carolina's Feminary is now a
Lesbian feminist journal for the South. (See announcement on last pageof this issue.) And the 1st Annual Southeastern Lesbian Writing andPublishing Conference (a focused, non-hierarchically organized working
weekend in the country) is set for October 13-15, 1978. (Send to"Woman Writes," Box 5502, Atlanta, Ga. 30307 for more information.)-Catherine and Harriet2

<<your silence
will notsaveyou ... »3

THE TRANSFORMATION OF
SILENCE INTO LANGUAGE
AND ACTION

The Lesbians and Literature Panel of the 1977 ANNUAL MODERN LANGUAGE
ASSOCIATION CONVENTION . December. Chicago . Chair: Julia P. Stanley; Participants : Mary Daly. Audre Lorde. Judith McDaniel. Adrienne Rich . Attended by 700
women .

Julia Penelope Stanley:This afternoon's panel grew out of an MLA panel last year on which
Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Honor Moore spoke tous about the relationship between their identity as wimmin, as Blacks, as
Lesbians, and their poetry. Last year I learned how little wimmin understand about any of the language that I claim as essential to my identity.
Too often in my past I've felt alienated in an environment such as this,felt that the structure, atmosphere, architecture, of academic meetingseroded, devoured the meaning of my words, made my syntax hemorrhage; I would feel my connections to my language drain away, dissolve.
Last year at MLA I sat with tears in my eyes listening to an unknown
woman object to Adrienne Rich's statement that there "is a Lesbian inevery womon," saying that she could not accept the "freudian implications of the word Lesbian." I raged in silence, torn, wounded, not knowing how to explain that, although I had loved wimmin, and only wimmin,
emotionally, physically, sexually, for 24 years, I had not been able to let
the word Lesbian pass my lips in all those years; that in 1972, when I first
tried to apply that name to myself, I stuttered, I whispered, I choked.
Last year, I still didn't know how to explain the importance of that wordin my life to other wimmin . This panel grew out of my silence last year.
Naming ourselves; naming our lives; naming our actions. Without
language, I am nameless, I am invisible, I am silent. If I refuse language, I
refuse myself. Through my language, I define myself to myself; I can"see" myself. My language always goes before me, illuminating myactions; through my language, I create myself, for myself, and for otherwimmin .
Last year, I found myself telling another womon my coming out story,
the story of how and when I had become a Lesbian, in all the senses in"which I now use that word. I was telling her the story of my life. I halted,
stumbled, paused through that narrat ion. My story was broken by longsilences while I groped in my mind for words, phrases, metaphorsthrough which I might communicate myself to her. I wanted her tounderstand me as I understand me, and I discovered in that telling thatmy life, my coming out, was a narrative of silences, the silence of denial,of self-hatred, of pain. Later, I told another womon of that long and painful narration. She asked, "Did you tell her everything?" I said, "Yes.
Everything I thought was important." She said, once again, "Did you tellher everything? Did you tell her about your long silences with other wim min?" And I was glad that I could say, "Yes. I told her about my longsilences, my pain, my muteness."
Too many of us still want to believe that language is a trivial, irrelevant
issue, that it is not a wimmin's concern. The patriarchy devalues
language in two ways: First, we are told that continued use ofmasculinist English, e.g., he, man, mankind, bitch, chairman, etc., is"correct," and that changing the language is both useless and impossible! Second, within the patriarchy, language is used to deceive, tocoerce, to protect those who hold power. Wimmin can't allow the boys
to continue to control English (or any other language). We must makeEnglish our own, in our way, to serve our purposes. We must end 'themillenia of silence about our lives; if we don't, we will be unable to define
our lives in ways that're different from what we know now. As a Lesbian,
I understand the importance of language in my life. With language, I canclaim aspects of myself that I've denied, express ideas that have been
suppressed and tabooed for a long time. With language, I can define mylife as real, and I can act to change my life. The wimmin I've asked to behere this afternoon underst~md language and silence and language andaction--MARY DALY:
The first and essential point which I'd like to make is that we exist in aState of Possession. Secondly, I'd like to talk about the fact that we exist
in a State of War, and after that I'll be speaking of female friendship .
' When I began to try to think about the State of Possession, I realizedthat words fail. It isn't only a matter of having to create new words buthaving to look into the deep Background of the very old words, which
are women's words. For example, Hag, Harpy, Crone, Fury, Spinster.
Hagiography is a term employed by christians, and is defined as "thebiography of saints; saints' lives; biography of an idealizing or idolizing
character." Hagiology has a similar meaning; it is "a description ofsacred writings or sacred persons." Both of these terms are from theGreek hagios, meaning holy. Surviving, moving women can hardly lookto the masochistic martyrs of sadospiritual religion as models. Since
most patriarchal writing that purports to deal with women is pornography or hagiography (which amount to the same thing), women in aworld from which woman-identified writing has been eliminatea are try5

ing to break away from these moldy "models," both of writing and of living. Our foresisters were the Great Hags whom the institutionally powerful but privately impotent patriarchs found too threatening for coexistence, and whom historians erase. Hag is from an Old English word
meaning harpy, witch. Webster's gives as the first and "archaic" meaning of hag: a female demon: "FURY, HARPY." It also formerly meant:"an evil or frightening spirit." (Lest this sound too negative, we should
ask the relevant questions: "Evil" by whose definition? "Frightening" towhom?) A third archaic definition of hag is "nightmare."t (The important question is: Whose nightmare?) Hag is also defined as "an ugly or
evil-looking old woman." But this, considering the source, may be considered a compliment. For the beauty of strong, creative women is "ugly" by misogynistic standards of "beauty." The look of female-identified
women is "evil" to those who fear us. As for "old": ageism is a featureof phallic society. For women who have transvaluated this, a Crone is
one who should be an example of strength, courage and wisdom.
For women who are on the journey of radical be-ing, the lives of thewitches, of thE! r,reat Hags of our hidden history are deeply intertwinedwith our own process. As we write/live our own story, we are uncovering their history, creating Hag-ography and Hag-ology. Unlike the" saints" of christianity, who must, by definition, be dead, Hags live.
Women traveling into feminist time-space are creating Hag-ocracy, theplace we govern. To govern is to steer, to pilot. We are learning individually and together to pilot the time-spaceships of our voyage. The
vehicles of our voyage may be any creative enterprises that further
women's process. The point is that they should be governed by the
Witch within--the Hag within.
In living/writing Hag-ography it is important to recognize that those
who live in the tradition of the Great Hags will become haggard. But thisterm, like so many others, must be understood in its radical sense.
Although haggard is commonly used to describe one who has a worn or
emaciated appearance, this was not its original or primary meaning. Applied to a hawk. it means "untamed." So-called obsolete meanings
given in Merriam-Webster include "intractable," "willful," "wanton,"and "unchaste." The second meaning is "wild in appearance, as a) of
the eyes: wild and staring b) of a person: WILD-EYED." Only after these
meanings do we find the idea of "a worn or emaciated appearance." Asa noun, haggard has an "obsolete" meaning: "an intractable person,
especially: a woman reluctant to yield to wooing."
Haggard writing is by and for haggard women, those who are intractable, willful, wanton, unchaste, and especially, those who are reluctant
to yield to wooing. It belongs to the tradition of those who refuse to
assume the woes of wooed women, who cast off these woes as unwortNightmare, is said to be derived from the Middle English terms night plus mare, meaning
spirit . The first definition given in Merriam-Webster is "an evil spirit formerly thought to oppress people during sleep ." Another definition is "a hag sometimes believed to be accompanied by nine attendant spirits." For Hags this should be a friendly gathering.

6thy of Hags, of Harpies. Haggard women are not man-wooed. As Furies,
women in the tradition of the Great Hags reject the curse of compromise.
The Great Hags of history, when their lives have not been prematurely
terminated, have lived to be Crones. Crones are the long-lasting
ones. tThey are the Survivors of the perpetual witch-craze of patriarchy,
the Survivors of the Burning Times.* In living/writing , feminists arerecording and creating the history of Crones. As Denise Connors has
suggested, women who can identify with the Great Crones may wish tocall our writing of women's history Crone-ography.
It is also appropriate to think of our writing in this tradition as Croneology. Chronology, generally speaking, means an arrangement (as ofdata, events) in order of time of occurrence or appearance. In a specificsense, however, it refers to "the classification of archeological sites or
prehistoric periods of culture." Since the history of Hags and Crones istruly Prehistoric in relation to patriarchal history--being prior both in timeand in importance--haggard women should consider that our Croneology is indeed our chronology. In writing/recording/creating Croneography and in studying our own Prehistoric chronology, we are unmasking deceptive patriarchal history, rendering it obsolete. Women
who refuse to be wooed by patriarchal scholarship can conjure thechronicles of the Great Crones, foresisters of our present and future
Selves. In Greek mythology, the crow is an oracular bird . Whether or not
an etymological connection can be demonstrated, the association between Crones and oracular utterances is natural and obvious. As unwooed women unearth more of our tradition, we can begin to hear andunderstand our own oracles, which have been caricatured as the"~creeching" of "old crovys."
A Spinster, of course, is a woman who spins. This is its primary definition . To spin has many meanings, you know. All great Goddesses spin
and weave. To spin, to whirl and twirl, to reverse, to spin on one's heel,to turn everything upside down--so we don't always have to look forbrand new words: this is creation .
One night I sort of went into a trance and was thinking about dispossession as we move more into territory and terrain of Hags, Crones,
Harpies, Spinsters, Witches. In the State of Possession, what happens?
Under the appearance of bonding there is binding. The mothers bind thefeet and minds of daughters. The daughter is turned against the mother,
the pseudo-sister is the re-sister of her Sister, standing against her. As

tThe status of Crones is not determined merely by chronological age, but by Crone-logicalconsiderations. A woman becomes a Crone as a result of Surviving early stages of the
Otherworld Journey and therefore having dis-covered depths of courage, strength, andwisdom in her Self.

:I: The Burning Times is a Crone-logical term which refers not only to the period of the European witchcraze (the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries) but to the perpetual witch craze whichis the entire period of patriarchal rule.

7

her re-sister she is a reversed imitation, a mirror image, her "Iife-like"
reproduction. She covers and re-covers the Sister until she can no longer
find her Self, having forgotten to search for her Self. Trapped into researching she finds only the re-sister.
In order truly to search for the Sister it is necessary to see the dismembered Sister within, the Sister Self, and to re-member her, coming
into touch with the original intuition of integrity. Once mindful of the
Sister, the Self need no longer resist her, her mind is full of her. She IS
her. She is her Self. Re-membering is the remedy. The reign of healing iswithin the Self, within the Selves seen by the Self and seeing the Self.
The remedy is not to turn back but to become in a healing environment,
the Self, and to become the healing environment.
In this space the Self is not re-ligious, not tied back by old ligatures,
old allegiances. She pledges allegiance to no flag, no cross. She sees
through the lies of alleged allies. She re-veres no one, for she is free-ing
her Self from fears. This space, the SeWs holy environment, is the opposite of the re-covery rooms of the unnatural physicians of soul andbody . It is dis-covery room.
In our dis-covery room our Selves dis-cover room, re-versing therefrains that have framed our know-ing into "knowledge." No need here
to stay in the hearses the false physicians have made of our bodies, ourminds, when they made us re-hearse each reversed truth, boxing theminto coffins of deception, our false selves. No need to repeat the refrainsof the rituals that restrain our Selves, that strain our Selves.

The rulers of patriarchy--males with power--wage an unceasing war
against life itself. Since female energy is essentially biophilic, the female
spirit/body is the primary target in this perpetual war of aggression
against life. Gyn/Ecology is the re-claiming of life-loving female energy.
This claiming of gynergy requires knowing/naming the fact that theState of Patriarchy is the State of War, in which periods of recuperationfrom and preparation for battle are euphemistically called "peace."
Furies/ Amazons must know the nature and conditions of this State inorder to dis-cover and create radical female friendship. Given the fact ·that we are struggling to emerge from an estranged State, we must
understand that the Female Self is The Enemy under fire from the gunsof patriarchy. We must struggle to dis-cover this Self as Friend to all thatis truly female, igniting the fire of female friendship.
It is Crone-logically important to re-call that the word friend is derived
from an Old English term meaning to love, and that it is akin in its roots
to an Old English word meaning free. The radical friendship of Hags
means loving our own freedom, loving/encouraging the freedom of theother, the friend, and therefore loving freely. To those who might object
that the word friend is an "old word," Crones who know what radical
female friendship is can reply that it is indeed an Old Word and that weare re-calling it, re-claiming it as our heritage. The identity named by the
Old Word friend is from our own Background. It names our Presence toeach other on the Journey. It cannot be experienced by those who areunder the spell of the Prepossessors. Nor can it be experienced by those
who feel the need to prepossess others, for this need is evidence of inability to be radically alone, and thus of inability to be a friend. It is thislack that is hidden by the fraudulent claims of patriarchal males who
name themselves The Proprietors of friendship itself, who propagate the ·Lie that "only men can be friends."
Women fil~ding and creating deep bonds with each other seek to use
the contaminated words of our patriarchal false heritage to express
these. Women finding each other speak of sisters, friends, lovers. Yet
the words often mysteriously bend back upon themselves, forming
boomerangs rather than instruments for expression of bonding . Since
the terms are all polluted with patriarchal associations, they function not
only" as means of expression, but also as mind pollutants.
Women breaking away from the feminine condition often tend at firstto imitate male comradeship, initially misperceiving sisterhood assomething like the female equivalent of brotherhood. However, Crones
who have persisted in the Otherworld Journey have come to know deeply that sisterhood, like female friendship, has at its (ore the affirmation of
freedom. Thus sisterhood differs radically from male comradeship/brotherhood, which functions to perpetuate the State of War.
Since sisterhood is deeply like female friendship, rather than being its
opposite (as in the case of male semantic counterparts) it is radically
Self-affirming. In this respect it is totally different from male comradeship/brotherhood, in which individuals seek to lose their identity.
The difference between sisterhood and male comradeship, which is
disguised by an apparent similarity of terms, would be almost impossible
to exaggerate. An important clue to the essence of this difference is thefact that the epitome of male bonding in comradeship is experienced inwar.
Since Sisterhood is the expression of biophilic energy burning throughthe encasements of the Necrophilic State of Staledom, it is more complex than mere male monogender merging. Since Bonding Furies are notprimarily concerned with fighting, but with breaking boundaries, bounding free, our ecstasy is totally other than "war ecstasy." However,
Crones also know that since the Female Self, who is Friend to her Self, is
The Enemy of patriarchy, the bonding of our Selves is perceived by thewarriors as the Ultimate Threat to be shot down with every big gun
available. Given such conditions, beseiged Furies do fight back, andthus there is a warrior element in Sisterhood. There is, then, an elementin Haggard bonding which is "us versus a third," and which is Positively
Furious. Yet Crones know that this warrior aspect of Amazon bonding
becomes truly dreadless daring only when it is focused beyond fighting.
Our inherited vocabulary is inadequate to express this complexity and its
inherent priorities, since it has been dwarfed to accommodate the pale
male experience of bonding.
In order to overcome this inherited vocabulary of idiotology,
Hags/Harpies must use our Double Axes to hack away its false
dichotomies, particularly the demonic opposition between Sister andFriend. For it is the Friend in the Sister who defines/limits/expands her 9role as warrior. It is the Free Friend who has no need to be consumed inthe "fire of communal ecstasy," to melt/meld in mass murder/mergers.
It is the Friend/Self who can define sisterhood as Other thanbrotherhood, who can aim the fire of Fury so that it transcends the stateof enmity. It is she who can blaze the trails that will lead Journeyers
away from the battleground, into the Background.
Far from being opposites, then, sisterhood and female friendship are
not clearly distinct. A feminist thinks of her close friends as sisters, but
she knows that she has many sisters--women extremely close in theirtemperaments, vision, commitment--whom she has never met.
Sometimes she meets such women and some conversation unmasks thesimilarities between them. She may have an uncanny feeling that she
has known these women for years, that the present conversation ismerely one in a series of many with these women. The proximity that she
feels is not merely geographic/spatial. It is psychic, spiritual, in the realmof inner life-time . She senses gynaesthetically, that there is a convergence of personal histories, of wave-lengths. She knows that there isa network of communication present, and that on some level, at least
potentially, it exists among women who have never met or heard of eachother. Because of limitations of energy, time, space, these women are
not actually her friends, but they are sisters, potential friends.
Male-defined erotic love involves loss of identity and is inherently transitory. It involves hierarchies, ranking roles--like the military--on themodel of Sand M . While male erotic love is seen as similar to comradeship in these respects, it is experienced as weaker in intensity anddepth. Woman-loving Spinsters/Lesbians who are finding integrity ofgynaesthetic experience know that such splitting of erotic love fromfriendship and likening it to warrior-comradeship is symptomatic of thedisease of fragmentation. This is the diseased State of Fraternity, andthe well-being of sisterhood requires understanding that radically Lesbian loving is totally Other from this. For female-identified erotic love is
not dichotomized from radical female friendship, but rather is one important expression/manifestation of friendship.
I would like to briefly wind up (unwind) by speaking of invitatior:ls to
assimilation. Just coming to this convention was a terrible shocker. I
crawled up into bed for a half hour and went into a sort of coma after being on the elevators with male academics and their chosen tokens. In
case there is any doubt that sisterhood is unlike male merging, just geton the elevators of the hotels which "host" these conventions. Hags
also should hear the "authorities." D.H. Lawrence in an essay on Whitman expresses the patriarchal poetic vision of fulfillment: "Woman is inadequate for the last merging. So the next step is the merging of manfor-man love. And this is on the brink of death . It slides over into death."
Grateful for our "inadequacy," Amazons/Lesbians strive to step aside
while the death-loving Mergers slide over the brink.
Women loving women do not seek to lose our identity, but to express
it, dis-cover it, create it. A Spinster/Lesbian can be and often is a deeply
loving friend to another woman without being her "lover," but it is impossible to be female-identified lovers without being friends and sisters.
10

The Presence of Enspiriting Female Selves to each other is a creative
gynergetic flow that may assume different shapes and colors. The sparking of ideas and the flaming of physical passion emerge from the same
source. The bonding of woman-loving women survives its transformations because its source is the Sister-Self. It survives because the very
meaning of this bonding is Surviving, that is, Super-living. It is biophilic
bonding.
NOTE: This talk contains sections from Gyn / Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Femmism
by Mary Daly; copyright © 1978 by Mary Daly, printed by permission of Beacon Press,
Boston . Gyn / Ecology wili be published, by Beacon in the fall of 1978.

Audre Lorde:
I would like to preface my remarks on the transformation of silence into language and action with a poem. The title of it is " A Song for Many
Movements" and this reading is dedicated to Winnie Mandala. Winnie
Mandala is a South African freedom fighter who is in exile now
somewhere in South Africa. She had been in prison and had been released and was picked up again after she spoke ·out against the recent
jailing of black school children who were singing freedom songs, and
who were charged with public violence .. , "A Song for Many
Movements" :Nobody wants to die on the waycaught between (ghosts of whitenessand the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our boneson the way to salvation
three planets to the lefta century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.
Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpotsof every beleaguered citywhere it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall11

too many empty casesof blood to bury or burnthere will be no body left
to listenand our laborhas become more important
than our silence.
Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.
(from Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn, W .W . Norton & Co ., 1978)

In listening to Mary I was struck by how many of the same words seemto come up. They did in her paper, and I know that they do in mine,words such as war, separation, fear, and the ways in which those words
are intimately connected with our battlings against silence, and the
distortions silence commits upon us. I have come to believe over andover again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing
here as a black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon thefact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months
ago, I was told by two doctors, one female and one male, that I would
have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent
chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there was a three week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and thegrowth was benign.
But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself andmy living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but
much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some ofyou here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped
elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation ofsilence into language and action.
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and by
what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be,priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, andwhat I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death.
But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either
change, or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And thatmight be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had everspoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small
silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's
words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself thatcomes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to beafraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

12

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had everspoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will notprotect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had evermade to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world inwhich we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern
and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me
to scrutinize the essentials of my living .
The women who sustained me through that period were black andwhite, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all
shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strengthand concern without which I could not have survived intact. Withinthose weeks of acute fear came the knowledge--within the war we are all
waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not,I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to makeyour own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps
for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I
am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am
myself, a black woman' warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you,are you doing yours?
And, of course, I am afraid--you can hear it in my voice--because thetransformation of silence into language and action is an act of selfrevelation and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter,- when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, "Tell them
about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent,because there's always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be
spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder andhotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up andpunch you in the mouth."
In the cause of silence, each one of us draws the face of her own fear-fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of
challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the very
visibility without which we also cannot truly live. Within this country
where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so,on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women's movement, we have
had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us mostvulnerable, our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon wecall america, we have had to learn this first and most vitallesson--that wewere never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither weremost of you here today, black or not. And that visibility which makes us
most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or
not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters13and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted anddestroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners
mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid .
In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, theAfrican-American festival of harvest which begins the day after
Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, thedecision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia--selfdetermination--the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, andspeak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others.
Today is the third day of Kwanza , and the principle for today is Ujima-collective work and responsibility--the decision to build and maintainourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve ourproblems together.
Each one of us is here now because in one way or another we share acommitment to language and to the power of language, and to thereclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In
the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitallynecessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in thattransformation, and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
For those of us who write, to scrutinize not only the truth of what we
speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it
is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But
primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking thosetruths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because inthis way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that iscreative and continuing, that is growth.
And it is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny
and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through allof those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all thetime now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained anoath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered,and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must eachof us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read themand share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That
we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed
upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance, "1 can't
possibly teach black women's writings--their experience is so different
from mine," yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato andShakespeare and Proust? Or another: "She's a white woman and what
could she possibly have to say to me?" Or "She's a lesbian, what would
my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of hersons and I have no children ." And all the other endless ways in which we
rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.

14

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way
we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have beensocialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language anddefinition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury offearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And
there are so many silences to be broken.

Judith McDaniel:
Many of us--especially on this panel--have talked about silences in ourlives and in our writing.
And we have talked about the power of naming--naming ourselves as
women, as lesbians, the need to claim certain words (or names) for ourown use. In all of this is a recognition of the power of words to create alarger reality.
For two years now I have been thinking about these things with regard
to women's given names. I wrote a poem about the grandmother I wasnamed after, a grandmother who died long before I was born, died of aself-induced abortion, an admission that the circumstances of her life
were no longer tolerable to her. And in that poem, "For My Mother's
Mother," I consider my own identification with the woman who was mynamesake and what the story of her life and death means to me .
More recently the death of a close friend, who was named Ruth, sent
sent me in reflection to the bid testament story of Ruth--as if I could findin the telling of one life satisfaction for the loss of another.
And I read with fascination of Ruth who married the son of Naomi andwhen he died and Naomi urged Ruth to return to her own people, Ruth
chooses to stay with Naomi, saying to her--surely with greatlove--"whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will
lodge ... where thou diest, willi die and there willi be buried." And I readon, waiting for some account of their life together--not waiting, actually,
for I already knew the story, but needing, expecting through that needmore than I would find--for as we all know, Ruth works in the fields of a
wealthy man and sleeps at his feet at night to keep them warm; and hemarries her and she gives birth to a son who is to be the grandfather ofDavid.
What struck me most profoundly--finally--about this story was its
silences. Where can we hear or learn:
What satisfaction did Ruth and Naomi find in their life together?
What was Ruth thinking as she lay on the cold hard floor wrappedaround that man's feet?
Did it mean anything to her that she was the great grandmother ofKing David?
15

How did she love Naomi?
When she died, did she feel her life had been a full and happy one?
The old stories--the stories that name us and tell us how we can live ourlives--the old stories are filled with. such silences.
And yes, we can and are rewriting these stories, lesbians are rewriting
them. I know now there are other possibilities for the life Ruth andNaomi might have had together--and those possibilities will become
realities.
But self-defining, I believe, is more than renaming. To break thesilence, particularly the silence around lesbianism, ultimately means tohave access to a part of ourselves that is not conscious, access to an inner reality that defines and limits us. It is a part of ourselves that has incorporated the old stories and it lies beyond our conscious will.
How do we change this inner censor? or how is it changed? For
change it we must. And this necessity seems to me more and moreurgent. We know the oppressor out there--we each know the identity of
the rich man in whose fields we toil and what we pay to him for our surviva l. But to know the limitations that come from within us, that seems
to me an even more difficult task . For first we must conceptualize it andthen we must speak it aloud.
One primitive method of conceptualization for me has been my dream
life . If I am very careful and if I listen, sometimes I have access to that unconscious self. Some of these dreams are funny--like the night I awoke
saying to myself, "Oh my god, vagina dentata, what next?" --and someare nightmares, which as I wake I dream over and over and seem to betrying through the dream to impose a more conscious control of myroles. Some of the dreams perplex, but give me a conceptualization I had
not had before. For example, I once dreamed that I was reading a book,a large old manuscript with parchment-like pages . And as I turned thepages a warrior goddess sprang out from between them. She was dressed in ancient armour and so was I, I noticed with no surprise whatever.
We faced each other and prepared to fight, never asking why or what
about, it seemed enough that we were warriors. Much clashing ofswords and then this: she stood behind me and released a dozen snakes
that went in my skull. I became passive immediately, felt my skill and intelligence ooze away. I grew smaller, infantile.
Then I was myself, leading this creature who had been me along apath in a deep woods. As we walked, occasionally we passed people
who would comment on it; strange animals came out of the bushes tosniff it. As evening came I knew that I was going to have to defend it andclimbed into the ruin of a large old building. I fought for a long time tokeep it safe, but finally I was exhausted and the animals who were attacking came closer and closer. And then I saw it. As it stood behind me
I realized it glowed in the dark . I knew this meant it was poison. It moved
forward toward the attacking animals and they shrank away. I knew thepoison was its protection and it would be ok and I didn't have to fight forit any more.

16But what is conceptualized here, we ask. Surely not a literal selfimage. I do not conceive that self as a two foot tall pudgy little t hing thatglows in the dark and is poison.
But the dream tells me something about defiance, about wh ich battles
need to be faced and which are already won if we only look at them.
And it tells me somet hing about the essence of what we are as
feminists--and especially as lesbians--that is seen by those who would
destroy us as a threat, poison, and in that threat is our defense; and, yes,at the same time that which antagonizes. For by being what we are, by
speaking aloud, we come immediately into confrontation with the world
around us. Certain things--if imagined and then spoken--deny us accessto approved roles within our social sphere. As a self-spoken lesbian, I will
never again be the same "good girl" I was when the approval of thefathers was possible for . me; whether in my personal life or my professional and political lives.
Which brings me ~o a basic disagreement with the title of this panel--I
can't talk about language and action in separate modes. Language forme is action. To speak words that have been unspoken, to imagine thatwhich is unimaginable, is to create the place in which change (action)
occurs. I do believe our acts are limited--ultimately--only by what we failor succeed in conceptualizing. To imagine a changed universe will notcause it to come into being, that is a more complex affair; but to fail toimagine it, the consequences of that are clear.
If feminism is the final cause--and I believe it is--then language is thefirst necessity.

Adrienne Rich:
Many of the ideas in what follows belong to a continuing, non-linear,
meditation and colloquy. For me, it began when I first heard Tillie Olsen,
at the Chicago MLA in 1971, speak of the forces that have stifled andmuted women writers, and when in 19721 first read Mary Daly's Beyond
God the Father, in which she identified the "Great Silence" which hasburied or erased the history and creations of women. It has gone on in
private and public places; on paper and over the long distance
telephone; as I listened to tapes of Judith McDaniel , Susan Griffin andSandy Boucher speaking on Lesbian literature at the San Francisco MLA
in 1975; as I read in lavender ditto versions Julia Stanley's and Susan
Robbins' papers on the politics of grammar and naming; as I read Deena
Metzger on secrets, Alice Walker on the lost, illiterate black women artists, Michelle Cliff on speechlessness; as I have talked with old. friends
and with women newly met, as I have tried to probe the nature of myown life's silences in journals, poems and dreams.l So everything I say
here has been touched in some way by other women writers, thinkers,
teachers and students, without whose work my own would be impoverished.
17

I would like to speak this afternoon of silence as a crucial element incivilization. Of namelessness, denial, secrets, taboo subjects, erasure,false-naming , non-naming, encoding, omission, veiling , fragmentationand lying. Because time is short, I will be able only to speak these words
in your ears, hoping that hearing the forms of silence named will keep us
all alert for its presence, aware that it has many presences. Most of all I
would like to speak of how the unspaken--that which we are forbidden
or dread to name and describe--becomes the unspeakable (as in thephrase unspeakable acts); how the nameless becomes the invisible. And
I am going to try to suggest some thoughts to you about the act s ofwriting and teaching , as a choice between collusion with silence, or
revolt against silence .
One of the most recent voices that has entered this meditation andcolloquy is that of Barbara Smith , in her essay, "Toward a Black
Feminist Criticism". 2 She writes of the interconnections between theviolence committed by white racist culture against Black women, theviolence committed by homophobic culture--white and Black--against
Lesbians, the blotting-out by literature and literary criticism--includingthat written by Black males and white feminists- -of the lives of Black
women and most utterly the lives of Black Lesbians. I urge you to findand read this essay, because it addresses eloquently a silence that imprisons all women , white or Black, Lesbian or heterosexual. In otherwords, I urge each of you to read it for her own sake, not for the sake ofBlack or Lesbian women. We cannot escape collusion with racism orhomophobia simply by having "humanistic" intentions, by a desire to bepolitically liberal, or in the belief that we are in revolt against silence foranyone's sake but our own.
I want ,to re-examine here, however briefly, the terms "racism" and"homophobia" because they too seem to me in need of redefining, and,in the case of "homophobia", re-naming. The instrumentality of white
women in the perpetration of inhumanity against Black people is a fact ofhistory. t So also is the instrumentality of women of the same race
against each other, or against our own children : the horizontal andmisdirected violence born of a sense of impotence. White women havecollaborated actively and passively with racism. Our brains and our affections have been poisoned by its fumes, but there is another tale to be
told as well. White women, like Black women and men, have lived fromthe founding of this country under a constitution drawn up and still interpreted by white men , and in which, until such time as the Equal Rights
Amendment is passed, there is still no guarantee to any woman ofequality of rights under the law. It is important to remember that, despitelack of constitutional citizenship, economic bondage to men, laws andcustoms forbidding women to speak in public or to disobey fathers,
tl say " Black" and not " Third World " because although separation by skin color is by nomeans limited to Black and white women, Black women and white women in this country
have a special history of polarization as well as of mutual oppression and mutual activism.

18

husbands and brothers, our white fore-sisters have, in Lillian Smith's
words, repeatedly been "disloyal to civilization", and have " smelleddeath in the word 'segregation''';3 have often defied patriarchy for the
first time, not on their own behalf but for the sake uf Black men , womenand children. In the late '50's and early '60's SCLC and SNCC voter
registration projects and freedom schools, white women placed
themselves politically and physically on the line; and it can truthfully besaid that the late 1960's wave of feminism was propelled, in its mostradical form, by women who had learned, in SNCC, Ita language toname and describe oppression; a deep belief in freedom, equality andcommunity soon to be translated into 'sisterhood'; a willingness to question and challenge any social institution which failed to meet humanneeds; and the ability to organize."4
I believe that we must recognize and reclaim an anti-racist female
tradition, closely entwined though not identical with feminist tradition .
This history has been erased, both by Black and white-Leftist
documenters of the Black movement, for whom the only "Ieaders" (withthe token exception of Angela Davis) are men; and by white male
historians who have erased or trivialized in their texts not only the suffrage and birth control movements and the socialist feminism of the'twenties and 'thirties, but the activism of women like the Grimke sisters,
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Lillian Smith, Fannie Lou Hamer.
But the mutual history of Black and white women in this country is arealm so painful and resonant that it has barely been touched by writers
either of political "science" or of imaginative literature. Yet until thatsilence is broken, that history revealed, we will all be struggling in a stateof deprivation and ignorance. It is not that white feminists have simply
ignored or discounted the experience, the existence, of Black women,though as Barbara Smith points out, much feminist scholarship has been
written as if Black women did not exist, and many a women's studies
course or text pays token reference, if any, to Black female experience.
A deeper and more insidious problem is that a great deal of whitefeminist theorizing, where it has dealt with racism at all, has done solaboring under a burden of liberal guilt and false consciousness, the products of a long-inculcated female guilt and self-blame. It is time that we
shed this un-useful burden and look freshly at the concepts of racism
and responsibility. To understand that we have been, not the creators of
racism, but often its instruments, is not to deny or trivialize that instrumentality; it is, perhaps, for the first time, to recognize and resolve toend it.
Women did not create the power relationship between master andslave, nor the mythologies used to justify it, which so strongly resemble
the mythologies used to justify the domination of man over woman.
Women in revolt against the ideologies of slavery and segregation--two
dominant themes of patriarchy--have most often worked from a positionof powerlessness, while men in power have called our sense of justice19

" emotionalism", dismissing our voices and acts of protest because wehave had no collective leverage of our own to bring to the struggles weundertook on behalf of others. And white feminists have too readily
tolerated the charge that "white, middle-class women" or "bourgeois
white women", are rather despicable creatures of privilege whose oppression is trivial beside the oppression of Black and Third world women.
This charge was hurled at the first groupings of the independent feminist
movement, a charge of " racism" made in the most obscene ill-faith bymiddle-class white males against white women fighting for collective
autonomy . An analysis that places the burden of racism on white women
does not only compound false consciousness: it neglects the profoundinterconnections between Black and white women from the historicalconditions of slavery on; and it does not permit any real examination of
the nature of female instrumentality in a system which oppresses all
women.
As a Lesbian/feminist my nerves and my flesh as well as my intellect tell me that the connections between and among women
are the most feared , the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet. I need to understand more
about the connections between Black and white women. I wantto know, for instance, about the several thousand Northern white
women and Southern Black women who together taught in theschools instituted under Reconstruction by the Freedmen's
Bureau , and who together suffered Ku Klux Klan harassment andterrorism , and the host ility of white communities. t I want tounderstand the dynamics by which many white women allowed
themselves to become infantilized by the presence in theirhomes of Black women as enslaved or underpaid domestic
workers--who mothered and " coped" for them; how the Black
woman and the white woman have become mythologized in . eachothers' consciousness not simply through class but through thesexual divisions created by the white male psyche, including its
perverse ideas of beauty. How have white women projected ourown sexuality, our own feelings of deviance, onto Black women,
not to speak of · our own rage? What illusions of the other's
Amazonism or incompetence, glamor or disability, sexuality or
sexlessness, still imprint our psyches, and where did we receive
these impressions? How did the Civil Rights movement of the
1960's explode the long-dormant reservoirs of intensity between
Black and white women? How has the Black man, how has thewhite man , gained from polarizing the "white bitch" and the "nigger cunt"? Why have questions like these remained

unspeakable?
tNancy Hoffman, of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a long-time activist in
women 's st udies, has recently sent me a paper based on her extensive research on the" Yankee schoolmarms" of the Civil War South .

20

In her Conditions article, Barbara Smith says that she would
like "to encourage in white women a sane accountability to all
the women who live and write on this soil." Speaking as a white
Lesbian/feminist, I would add that for this accountability to betruly sane, it cannot be nourished by guilt, nor by "correct
politics" nor by the false consciousness born of powerless
responsibility; nor can it be felt as an accountability to someshadowy "other", the Black Woman, the myth. It cannot, above
all, be founded in ignorance. If we begin to recognize what the
separation of Black and white women means, it must become
clear that it means separation from ourselves. Breaking silence
about our past means breaking silence about what the politics ofskin color, of white and Black male mythology and sexual
politics, have meant to us, and listening closely as Black womentell us what it has meant for them . Why should we feel more aliento the literature and lives of Black women than to centuries of thewritings and experience of wi lite men? Which of these two
cultures is most truly significant to us as we struggle to build afemale vision? And what, for a feminist, can passive racism
mean but that we passively consent to remain the instruments ofmen, who have always profited from colonialism, imperialism ,slavery, enforced heterosexuality and motherhood, organized
prostitution and pornography, and the separation of women fromeach other?
The past ten years of feminist writing and speaking, saying ourown words or attempting to, have shown us that it is the realities
civilization tells us are regressive or unspeakable which prove
our deepest resources. Female anger. Love between women . The
tragic, potent bond between mother and daughter. The fact that awoman may rejoice in creating with her brain and not with her
uterus. The actualities of Lesbian motherhood. The sexuality ofolder women. The connections--painful, oblique and often bitter-between white and Black women, including shame, manipulation, betrayal, contempt, hypocrisy, envy, and love . If we havelearned anything in our coming to language out of silence, it isthat what has been kept unspoken, therefore unspeakable, in us
is what is threatening to the patriarchal order in which men control, first women, then all who can be defined and exploited as"other". All silence has a meaning .
.
And so if we re-examine the term "racism" from a feminist
POSition, we must also take a closer look at the term
"homophobia" (meaning the fear of same-gender erotic feelings,
in oneself and in others). I suggest that it is an inadequate andmisleading term--a form of silence, or false-naming, or veiling-where the fear of Lesbianism is concerned. What all women live21

with, what feminists and Lesbians have consciously to confront,
is gynophobia: the age-old male fear, and hatred, of women,
which women too inhale like poisonous fumes, from the air webreathe daily. This is a qualitatively and politically different question from the fear of male homosexuality. The gynophobia
directed at all women is more virulently and violently directed at
the Lesbian because she is most clearly "disloyal to civilization",in choosing women to be at the center of her life. Women, like
Blacks, are seem as needing to be controlled, as embodiments of
the "dark" unconscious, inferior in intellectual quality, marginal,
guilty victims, dangerous. Violence against women, like violenceagainst Blacks, is rationalized, condoned, and, in the case of
women, encouraged by pornography. And so I would like to urge
upon all women, Black or white, who are teaching literature, or
writing it, or writing about it, an accountability to the Lesbian inthemselves, a commitment to hear her and give her space, tospeak for her, however stifled she may have become, however
faint her voice or blurred her visage. Accountability to Lesbian
experience, literature and history is accountability to what has
been unspoken and unspeakable. As writers, as scholars, as
teachers, we have a choice: to name or not to name. But nonnaming is also action: the adding of yet another layer--our own-to the walls that entomb a part of the truth, a part of our freedom.
Silence. Denial. Secrets. Taboo. False-naming. Erasure. Encoding. Omission. Veiling. Non-naming. Fragmentation. Lying.
Against this texture or tissue of the unspoken, what wonder if
Emily Dickinson exhorted herself to "Tell all the Truth -- but tell it
Slant --"; that the words of Phyllis Wheatley that come down to us
give us only a ghost of her lifelong pain; or that Gertrude Steinwrote that poetry is "of naming something of really naming thatthing by its name" yet that "in Tender Buttons and then on andon I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns
must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is
everything was to go on meaning something". If the noun orname for something is unspeakable and the writer is committed
to her own meaning, she may, as Stein did, adopt desperate
strategies. Like Virginia Woolf, she may elaborate in metaphor:
I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which
for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot . The image
that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman
lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over thewater. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rockand cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depth of our subconscious being . Now came the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl's
fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was asmash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused

22from her dream . .. To speak without figure , ; [and at last Woolf is able,
however briefly, to do so) she had thought of something, something about
the body, about the passions, which it was unfitting for her as a woman tosay. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked . The consciousness ofwhat men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions hadroused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write nomore. sThe passage I just read comes from Woolf's speech on "Professions for Women", given before the London/National Society
for Women's Service in 1931. Rather, it is the version of thatspeech revised by Leonard Woolf for a posthumous volume of
essays, The Death of the Moth. If you examine the original version of that essay, in the recently published volume, The
Pargiters, you discover, among other interesting variations, that
Woolf originally wrote "fisherwoman", not "fisherman"; that, as
Ellen Hawkes of Bo'ston University has noted, 6 Leonard Woolfsmoothed over and . toned-down the "anger and vehemence"withwhich Woolf flailed at the conventions which circumscribed her
and made so much of the woman writer's experience
unspeakable. This kind of information matters, because it helps
us to understand not only Woolf's struggles with her truths, but
our own struggles to pierce the silence, the impediments--such
as false editing, false criticism, false interpretation and false
naming--that we confront as readers and teachers of literature,
and as writers even after we are dead .
There is so much to be done. Feminist scholars and theorists
still need to examine the question of how institutionalized
heterosexuality has served to buttress patriarchy, the control bymen of women's minds, bodies and energies. Hetero-feminism isstill not feminism in its wholeness, any more than a feminism
which engages in passive racism is worthy the name . If in the
study and teaching of literature we fail to listen for the silences
underlying the poetry of heterosexual romance, if we are not attuned to the gaps in language, the unwritten scenes and absent
characters of the novel, the encoded messages in the writing actually before us, we are failing as scholars and educators in thetask of bringing-to-light, rescuing from oblivion, exposing both. the limits and the untouched possibilities of literature.
I . wan~ t? end by reading two poems. The first was written by
Emily Dickinson at the age of forty-nine, seven years before her
death, and eleven years after she had written, "Tell all the Truth--but tell it Slant":
A Counterfeit - a Plated Person I would not be Whatever strata of Iniquity
My Nature underlie ;italics mine23

Truth is good Health - and Safety, and the Sky.
How meagre, what an Exile - is a lie,
And Vocal - when we die. 7
The second is from a poem by Stephanie Byrd, a 25 year oldBlack Lesbian poet. I found it in a first volume of her poetry, titled
Twenty-Five Years of Malcontent.
"Quarter of A Century"
I'll never know my real naming
Never know its origin
What would you call this high yellow
Born into uncertainty and schizophrenia
Born into a place where I have no say
I live with the ghosts of slaves
Whose blood still colours my dreams
What would you call meme whose name is jigaboo
and nigger
My body aches from unseen beatings
I cry tears of blood
I work tilling a field of my brother's
and sister's
bleeding bodies
And all the while searching for a naming

What would you call me
Black woman
Who has sought namingin strange women's breasts
and between their legs
What is it that you call me
who pays homage to heathen gods
and decorates the family treewith nightmares
Is there no naming for this child of soil
who stands before you now ...
Bones say seek my naming in the Eastswollen cracked lips tell me to turn home
grandmothers warn me to turn away the alien ways ofwhat is white
For when these things are connected
Winding serpentine in hieroglyphs andlanguagea name long evasive wanderer and prophet
will be written in the stone 8
24

'Tillie Olsen, "One Out of Twelve" in Silences (Delacorte Press, Boston, 1978); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Beacon Press,
Boston, 1973, pp. 92-95) ; Sinister Wisdom, special issue on Lesbian Writing andPublishing, Vol. I #2, Fall 1976, pp. 20-27; Julia P. Stanley, "Sexist Grammar" and " The
Prostitute: Paradigmatic Woman"; Julia P. Stanley and Susan Robbins, "Sex-Marked
Predicates in English", "Sexist Slang and the Gay Community: Are You One Too?"; Deena
Metzger, excerpt from The Book of Hags in Sinister Wisdom, Vol. I #2; Alice Walker, " In
Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" in Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scholars
and Scientists Talk About Their Lives and Work, ed. by P. Daniels and S. Ruddick (Pantheon Books, 1977); Michelle Cliff, "Notes on Speechlessness" in Sinister Wisdom, -II5,Winter 1978.
'Barbara Smith, "Toward A Black Feminist Criticism" in Conditions, #2; to be reprinted
as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1978.
'Lillian Smith, "Autobiography as a Dialogue between King and Corpse" in The Winner
Names tbe Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith, edited by Michelle Cliff, W.W.
Norton Co., 1978.
'Sarah Evans, "Women's Consciousness and the Southern Black Movement" in"Generations: Women in the South", special issue of Southern Exposure , vol. IV, #4, p.
18. See also Cynthia Washington, "We Started from Different Ends of the Spectrum"(same issue) .
'Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women", in Collected Essays, II, pp. 287-288.
'Ellen Hawkes, "Will the Real Virginia Woolf Stand Up?" in Ms. , January, 1978.
7The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas Johnson, Harvard University
Press, 1955, #1453.

'Stephanie Byrd, " Quarter of A Century" in Twenty-Five Years of Malcontent, GoodGay Poets Press, Boston , 1976),

CONDITIO-NS:
a new magaz ine ofwriring by women
wirh an emphasis on wririn/l bv lesbians

PO ETR Y* * * FICTION * * *JOURNALS***CRITICAL ESSA YS"*INTERVIEWS"*REVIEWS"Lesbian/feminist writers are undertaking the hard work ofcreating a tradition of our own, one which could not havebeen created before our time. I see CONDITIONS as one ofthe places where this work is being done with seriousness andintelligence. Certainly the p'o etry in the first issue would bereason enough for subscribing. And to subscribe means to
help give continuity to our culture; to nourish that which
nourishes us."-ADRIENNE RICH
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25

About "Dear Sphinx":
In 1971 the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed "Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries." The Sphinx of Hatshepsut and Kneeling Hatshepsut stoodin one of the first rooms of the show, two enormous presences . Aboutthat time I read that Hatshepsut had been the first female pharoah :chosen by her father, at the expense of her brother's life! Herbiographers record that her successors did indeed try to obliterate herrecord of works and monuments . They couldn't .
At the time of the Met show I was very married, very domesticallysituated, unconsciously beseiged , terrified--of him , of change, of theworld out there, of myself . The morning after I had seen the show, there
was our usual breakfast-time hassle . My alleged " laziness" and "inefficiency" were to blame, as usual, for the chaos getting the five kids off toschool , for their not practicing well on their musical instruments, for theirrushing through the sullen meal. Next, the standard examination of myinsensitivity to embattled lawyer-husband's heroic and Important highpressure career; then came the question of why I didn 't go back to highschool teaching , to help support the family and "keep busy." I retreated,
as was my custom, upstairs to make beds. Suddenly, while I was bending over my own pillow, the image of those great Sphinx--of that
Woman --of that unfamiliar strength--came to me, like Light and lovely
thunder; and balm. Leaning on the ironing board, I wrote out the poem
to Hatshepsut-- right to her, immediately and wholly . Maybe I wept; I
don't remember. It probably took no more than 10 minutes, the poem
rushed out so torrentially. One of those miracles : the voice coming, word
and rhythm, from so deep inside me, yet as if it had been Given fromsomewhere else . But it was my voice, and I knew that surely. And I was
speaking to a woman , a woman -image, with such love . And I was--ah-beginning at last, at long last, to find the image and standard and voice
and expression of myself. I suspect that writing that poem was a turning
point: for more clarity and firmness in my work. More understanding--formyself--in my life, leading (much later, many excruciating years later) tomore strength and decisiveness in my life. Risks. Ugly domestic
violences and violations, causing terrible pain to my children (that's theworst we have to do in making changes: witnessing that I cause immediate pain to "innocent" children is not softened by believing thatlat er, more serious pain will be thus circumvented)' Guilt and isolation,
innumerable new vulnerabilities to myself. The classic story. The daily
common story now . Divorce and fear. Custody figh t s and bitterness.
Financial strains. Nightmares. Years of wear . But--from that moment
unriddling in my bedroom, when I saw the great symbolic Woman cometoward me with Water--a steady straightening up ; the cheer of pride; thesteady reduction of shame ...
-Madeline Tiger BassNOTE : " Dear Sphin x" w ill also appear in a forth coming issue of £lima .

26

Dear Sphinx,

arcane model of my daydreams,
colossal woman! sitting for me,stone quietude, certain of her
self - eternity,
she winks! (she never moves) motionlessin her beard
on her lionessness
she winks
and the blue black of all
the world, the museum rooms
turns
red forever dark forever"truth is beauty"
stone stays to say
yes, the woman lived in power
yes, the woman outlived
pharoahs who followed
to destroy her footsteps footprints
yes,
her name was massive
even after erasureyes,
she slept smug in her stone
mountain mountainous
yes
Hatshepsut never queen
grew larger yes and after death
more fear of Hatshepsut her self
her head erect her breasts
obliterate- remembered yes her jaw
Iprepared for silenceyesthe men rode humble camels through the desert
sun to crash her monumentsl
dust settled smaller cactus broke the bleak sandsprouting yes the fertile Egypt
yes the martial men in thongs and amulets. with catapults and carven breast-plates
crumbled temples, told milleniums she neverheld the knees of Egypt.
Sphinx of man and Lord of all his heavens,
long accustomed regal woman
waits
and smiles no smileno effort to deny them. Lion woman isand brings me water in two heavy jugs.

-Madeline Tiger Bass27

sentc n re s tres~ . n. Phon. the arrangementof stresses in a sentence.

Imposition of sentence is hereby suspended. The
Court orders that you be placed on probation fora period of one year.·
I peer into the corners of thewoodpaneledneat
courtroom
Searching for the
blood&gutsof theViet Nam War

clean

She has a history of hostility toward law enforcemenfThe judge says
This case is serious
in my view
because we are agovernment of forms:·
I listen to taped conversations
Riding the TimeLine
Between
Then&Now
Caughtin the Past in the Present

I think we probably should not speak overthese telephones. 3
Well, fucking' A, I want to talk to you.
Yeah, but we certainly can't do it on thisphone, we have this, this, the problem is,they have a live tap ...
Yeah, I know.
and is listening to every word we say, uhm .. .4
The floodgates open
To let back in the 60s
in the 50s
I re-explore connections
IntenseEnergypeople's income tax returns, social security applications, andapplications of all shapes and sizes and descriptions;lIS THIS WHAT YOU THINK IT WAS ALL ABOUT?
The world was on tilt!
I scream
insideI reconnect
with myself
with otherswith our collective memory28and the government in these complex times simply iscompelled to rely upon the truthfulness of the responses
to questions put in this whole series of forms. I

HOLY SHIT!
The judge has no clothes on.
He has no sense of history /or perhaps too much.
FORMS replace VIETNAM
No one mentions VIETNAM
except us/US
and we/WE are on trial
Have you read The Trial by Kafka?
my cousin asks.
Commiejewdykeanarchistwitch
on trial for
crimes against the stateseven years earlier
committed when she was only
the first twoof that five part
personGABRINER adheres somewhat (degree unknown) to
lesbian practices. 2

I re-explore connections
IntenseEnergyInformant coverage is always the heart of an investigationof this nature. However, Atlanta's problem is multipliedby the fact that the subjects live in a tightly knit
feminist commune and are apparently lesbians. 2

The boys can't put it together.
We have some trouble ourselves.
There is a lot of stress in the sentence.
There is a lot of stress
There is a lot of powerin the doing and the living and the remembering and theconnecting and the going on- Vicki Shanamary Gabriner
Note: I was arrested in May of 1973 on charges of passport fraud and conspiracy to commit
passport fraud, stemming from my anti Viet Nam War work with Weatherman in 1970. I
was tried, convicted and sentenced in Jan-Feb 1977, and on Susan' B. Anthony's birthdayof 1978, I won my appeal. In responSE! to pre-trial motions, I listened to conversations illegally taped by the FBI from the national office of Students for a Democratic Society(SDS) in 1969-70. Footnotes: 'Judge'!> sentencing statement, 2/28/77; ·from FBI files onme, dated 1972-73; >from transcript of illegal FBI tapes, 1/21170, 5:08 pm; 'from transcriptof illegal FBI tapes, 2/6170, 11 :02 pIT- .
29

Some Reflections on Separatism and Powerby Marilyn Frye

This piece of writing was done to be presented in the format / situation called"reading a paper" for a meeting of the eastern division of the Society for Women in
Philosophy, in December of 1977, in Washington, D. C. The SWIP meeting was heldin conjunction with the eastern meetings of the APA (American Phl1osophical
Association}-- the audience was not going to be just SWIP women, or even just
women. When I sent the manuscript to Catherine and H~rriet after the meetings, I
sent a covering letter which included the following remark·about the paper. " .. .1 expected my audience to be uncomfortable at the least and possibly hostile with / toany defense of separatism. A lot of them aren't lesbians; many are married; all arecommitted to working in colleges and uni versities; most of them work more, andmore closely, with various male colleagues than I do. So this paper is not addressed
to a gang of lesbian feminist man-haters ... " It worked out well: I do my best workwhen I am trying to explain things persuasively to those who are not already persuaded, and most of the women at the meeting seemed to find the product fairly
persuasive. (One man told me he found it threatening, which I suppose is a versionof persuasive. )At the meeting, and from readers of the manuscript both before and after the
meeting, I received many comments. I've incorporated some, made note of others. I
got crucial help from Carolyn Shafer in seeing the structure of it all, in particular, theconnections among parasitism and access and definition, which I was seeing only
very dimly at first. Loving with Carolyn is a sort of intellectual Vitamin A--helps me
have good vision, even in the dark.

I have been trying to write something about separatism almost since
my first dawning of feminist consciousness, but it has always been forme somehow a mercurial topic which, when I tried to grasp it, would
softly shatter into many other topics like sexuality, man-hating, so-called
reverse discrimination, apocalyptic utopianism, and so on. What I haveto share with you today is my latest attempt to get to the heart of thematter.
In my life, and within feminism as I understand it, separatism is not atheory or a doctrine, nor a demand for certain specific behaviors on thepart of feminists, though it is undeniably connected with lesbianism.
Feminism seems to me to be kaleidoscopic--something whose shapes,
structures and patterns alter with every turn of feminist creativity; andone element which is present through all the changes is an element of
separation. This element has different roles and relations in different
turns of the glass--it assumes different meanings, is variously con-30

spicuous, variously determined or determining, depending on how thepieces fall and who is the beholder. The theme of separation , in its
multitude variations, is there in everything from divorce to exclusive lesbian separatist communities, from shelters for battered women to witch
covens, from women's studies programs to women's bars, from expansion of day-care to abortion on demand. The presence of this theme isvigorously obscured, trivialized, mystified and outright denied by many
feminist apologists, who seem to find it embarrassing, while it is embraced, explored, expanded and ramified by most of the more inspiring
theorists and activists. The theme of separation is noticeably absent or
heavily qualified in most of the things I take to be personal solutions andband-aid projects, like legalization of prostitution , liberal marriage contracts, improvement of the treatment of rape victims and affirmative action. It is clear to me in my own case at least, the contrariety of assimilation and separation is one of the main things that guides or determines
assessments of various theories, actions and practices as reformist orradical, as going to the root of the thing or being relatively superficial. So
my topical question comes to this: What is it about separation, in any or
all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister,so exciting and so repellent?
Feminist separation is, of course, separation of various sorts or modes
from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and activities which
are male-defined, male-dominated and operating for the benefit of males
and the maintenance of male privilege--this separation being initiated or
maintained, at will, by women . (Masculist separatism is the partial
segregation of women from men and male domains at the will of men .
This difference is cruciaL) The feminist separation can take many forms.
Breaking up or avoiding close relationships or working relationships; forbidding someone to enter your house; excluding someone from yourcompany, or from your meeting; withdrawal from participation in some
activity or institution, or avoidance of participation; avoidance of communications and influence from certain quarters (not listening to musicwith sexist lyrics, not watching tv); withholding commitment or support;
rejection of or rudeness toward obnoxious individuals. t Some separations are subtle re-alignments of identification, priorities and commitments, or working with agendas which only incidently coincide with the'agendas of the institution one works in.l Ceasing to be loyal tosomething or someone is a separation; and ceasing to love. The
feminist's separations are rarely if ever sought or maintained directly asultimate personal or political ends. The closest we come to that, I think,is the separation which is the instinctive and self-preserving recoil fromtAdrienne Rich: " ... makes me question the whole idea of 'courtesy' or'rudeness'--surely their constructs, since women become 'rude' when we ignore or rejectmale obnoxiousness, while male 'rudeness'is usually punctuated with the 'Haven't you asense of humor' tactic. " Yes; me too. I embrace rudeness; our compulsive/compulsory
politeness so often is what coerces us into their "fellowship."31

the systematic misogyny that surrounds us.:!: Generally, the separations
are brought about and maintained for the sake of something else like independence, liberty, growth, invention, sisterhood, safety, health, or
the practice of novel or heretical customs. 2 Often the separations inquestion evolve, unpremeditated, as one goes one's way and finds
various persons, institutions, or relationships useless, obstructive or
noisome and leaves them aside or behind. Sometimes the separations
are consciously planned and cultivated as necessary prerequisites orconditions for getting on with one's business. Sometimes the separations are accomplished or maintained easily, or with a sense of relief, oreven joy; sometimes they are accomplished or maintained with difficulty,
by dint of constant vigilance, or with anxiety, pain or grief.
Most feminists, probably all, practice some separation from males andmale-dominated institutions. A separatist practices separation consciously, systematically, and probably more generally than the others,
and advocates thorough and "broad-spectrum" separation as part of the
conscious strategy of liberation. And, contrary to the image of theseparatist as a cowardly escapist,3 hers is the life and program which inspires the greatest hostility, disparagement, insult and confrontation andgenerally she is the one against whom economic sanctions operate mostconclusively. The penalty for refusing to work with or for men is usually
starvation (or, at the very least, doing without medical insurance4 ); and if
one's policy of non-cooperation is more subtle, one's livelihood is still
constantly on the line, since one is not a loyal partisan, a proper memberof the team, or what have you. The penalties for being a lesbian are
ostracism, harrassment and job-insecurity or joblessness. The penalty
for rejecting men's sexual advances is often rape, and perhaps evenmore often forfeit of such things as professional or job opportunities.
And the separatist lives with the added burden of being assumed bymany to be a morally depraved man-hating bigot. But there is a clue
here: if you are doing something that is so strictly forbidden by the
patriarchs, you must be doing something right.
There is an idea floating around in both feminist and anti-feminist
literature to the effect that females and males generally live in a relationof parasitism,S a parasitism of the male on the female ... that it is, generally speaking, the strength, energy, inspiration and nurturance of womenthat keeps men going, and not the strength, aggression, spirituality andhunting of men that keeps women going.
t Ti-Grace Atkinson: Should give more attention here to our vulnerability to assault anddegradation, and to separation as protection . Okay, but then we have to re-emphasizethat it has to be separation at our behest--we 've had enough of their imposed separationfor our " protection. " (There's no denying that in my real -life life, protection andmaintenance of places for healing are major motives for separation .)32

It is sometimes said that the parasitism goes the other way around ,that the female is the parasite. But one can conjure the appearance ofthe female as parasite only if one takes a very narrow view of humanliving--historically parochial, narrow with respect to class and race, andlimited in conception of what are the necessary goods. Generally, thefemale's contribution to her material support is and always has been
substantial; in many times and places it has been independently sufficient. One can and should distinguish between a partial and contingent
material dependence created by a certain sort of money economy andclass structure, and the nearly ubiquitous spiritual, emotional andmaterial dependence of males on females. Males presently provide, off
and on, a portion of the material support of women, within circumstances apparently designed to make it difficult for women to provide them for themselves. But females provide and generally have provided for males the energy and spirit for living; the males are nurtured by
the females. And this the males apparently cannot do for themselves,
even partially.
The parasitism of males on females is, as I see it, demonstrated by the
panic, rage and hysteria generated in so many of them by the thought ofbeing abandoned by women. But it is demonstrated in a way that isperhaps more generally persuasive by both literary and sociologicalevidence. Evidence cited in Jesse Bernard's work in The Future of Marriage and in George Gilder's Sexual Suicide and Men Alone convincingly
shows that males tend in shockingly significant numbers and in alarming
degree to fall into mental illness, petty crime, alcoholism, physical infirmity, chronic unemployment, drug addiction and neurosis when deprived of the care and companionship of a female mate, or keeper. (While on
the other hand, women without male mates are significantly healthierand happier than women with male mates.) And masculist literature isabundant with indications of male cannibalism, of males deriving essential sustenance from females. Cannibalistic imagery, visual and verbal , iscommon in pornography: images likening women to food, and sex toeating. And, as documented in Millett's Sexual Politics and many otherfeminist analyses of masculist literature, the theme of men getting highoff beating, raping or killing women (or merely bullying them) is common. These interactions with women, or rather, these actions upon
women, make men feel good, walk tall, feel refreshed, invigorated. Men
are drained and depleted by their living by themselves and with andamong other men, and are revived and refreshed, re-created, by goinghome and being served dinner, changing to clean clothes, having sex
with the wife ... or by dropping by the apartment of a woman-friend to beserved coffee or a drink and stroked in one way or another, or by picking
up a prostitute for a quicky or for a dip in favorite sexual escape fantasies, or by raping refugees from their wars (foreign and domestic). The
ministrations of women, be they willing or unwilling, free or paid for, arewhat restore in men the strength, will, and confidence to go on withwhat they call living.

If it is true that a fundamental aspect of the relations between 'thesexes is male parasitism, it might help to explain why certain issues are
particularly exciting to patriarchal loyalists. For instance, in view of theobvious advantages of easy abortion to population control, to control of
welfare rolls, and to ensuring sexual availability of women to men, it is alittle surprising that the loyalists are so adamant and riled up in their objection to it. But look ...
The fetus lives parasitically. It is a distinct animal surviving off the life(the blood) of another animal creature. It is incapable of surviving on its
own resources, of independent nutrition; incapable even of symbiosis. If
it is true that males live parasitically upon females, it seems reasonable tosuppose that many of them and those loyal to them are in some way sensitive to the parallelism between their situation and that of the fetus.
They could easily identify with the fetus. The woman who is free to see
the fetus as a parasitet might be free to see the man as a parasite. The
woman's willingness to cut off the life-line to one parasite suggests a
willingness to cut off the life-line to another parasite. The woman who iscapable (legally, psychologically, physically) of decisively, selfinterestedly, independently rejecting the one parasite, is capable of rejecting, with the same decisiveness and independence, the like burden of
the other parasite. In the eyes of the other parasite, the image of thewholly self-determined abortion, involving not even a ritual submission
to male veto power, is the mirror image of death.
Another clue here is that one line of argument against free and easy
abortion is the slippery slope argument that if fetuses are to be freely
dispensed with, old people will be next. Old people? Why are old people
next? And why the great concern for them? Most old people are women,
indeed, and patriarchal loyalists are not generally so solicitous of thewelfare of any women . Why old people? Because, I think, in the modern
patriarchal divisions of labor, old people too are parasites on women.
The anti-abortion folks seem not to worry about wife-beating and wifemurder--there is no broad or emotional popular support for stoppingthese violences. They do not worry about murder and involuntarysterilization in prisons, nor murder in war, nor murder by pollution and industrial accidents. Either these are not real to them or they cannot identify with the victims; but anyway, killing in general is not what they oppose. They worry about the rejection by women, at women's discretion,of something which lives parasitically on women. I suspect that they fretnot because old people are next, but because men are next.
tCaroline Whitbeck: Cross-cultural evidence suggests it's not the fetus that gets rejectedin cultures where abortion is common, it is the role of motherhood, the burden, in particular, of "illegitimacy"; where the institution of illegitimacy does not exist, abortion rates
are pretty low. This suggests to me that the woman's rejection of the fetus is even more
directly a rejection of the male and his world than I had thought.

34

There are other reasons, of course, why patriarchal loyalists should be
disturbed about abortion on demand, a major one being that it would bea significant form of female control of reproduction, and at least fromcertain angles it looks like the progress of patriarchy is the progress
toward male control of reproduction, starting with possession of wives
and continuing through the invention of obstetrics and the technology ofextra-uterine gestation. Giving up that control would be giving up patriarchy. But such an objection to abortion is too abstract, and requires too
historical a vision, to generate the hysteria there is now in the reaction
against abortion. The hysteria is I think to be accounted for more interms of a much more immediate and personal presentiment of ejection
by the woman-womb. 6
I discuss abortion here because it seems to me to be the most publicly
emotional and most physically dramatic ground on which the theme ofseparation and male parasitism is pr.esently being played out. But there
are other locales for this play. For instance,7 women with newly raised
consciousnesses tend to leave marriages and families, either completely
through divorce, or partially, through unavailability of their cooking,housekeeping and sexual services. And women academics tend to
become alienated from their colleagues and male mentors and no longer
serve as sounding-board, ego booster, editor, mistress or proof-reader.
Many awakening women become celibate or lesbian, and the others
become a very great deal more choosy about when, where and in what
relationships they will have sex with men. And the men affected by theseseparations generally react with defensive hostility, anxiety, and guilttripping, not to mention descents into illogical argument which matchand exceed their own most fanciful images of female irrationality. My
claim is that they are very afraid because they depend very heavily upon
the goods they receive from women, and these separations cut them offfrom those goods.
Male parasitism means that males must have access to women; it is
the Patriarchal Imperative. But feminist no-saying is more than asubstantial removal (re-direction, re-allocation) of goods and services
because Access is one of the faces of Power. Female denial of male access to females substantially cuts off a flow of benefits, but it has also
the form and full portent of assumption of power.
Differences of power are always manifested in asymmetrical access.
The President of the United States has access to almost everybody foralmost anything he might want of them, and almost nobody has accessto him. The super-rich have access to almost everybody; almost nobody
has access to them. The resources of the employee are available to theboss as the resources of the boss are not to the employee. The parent
has unconditional access to the child's room; the child does not have
similar access to the parent's room. Students adjust to professors' officehours; professors do not adjust to students' conference hours. The child35

is required not to lie; the parent is free to close out the child with lies ather discretion. The slave is unconditionally accessible to the master .
Total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible. The creation and manipulation of power is constituted of the manipulation and control of access.
All-woman groups, meetings, projects seem to be great things forcausing controversy and confrontation. Many women are offended bythem; many are afraid to be the one to announce the exclusion of men; it
is seen as a device whose use needs much elaborate justification. I think
this is because conscious and deliberate exclusion of men by women,from anything, is blatant insubordination, and generates in women fearof punishment and reprisal (fear which is often well-justified). Our own
timidity and desire to avoid confrontations generally keeps us from doing
very much in the way of all-woman groups and meetings. But when wedo, we invariably run into the male champion who challenges our right to
do it. Only a small minority of men go crazy when an event is advertised
to be for women only--just one man tried to crash our women-only Rape
Speak-Out, and only a few hid under the auditorium seats to try to spy
on a women-only meeting at a NOW convention in Philadelphia. But
these few are onto something their less rabid com-patriots are missing.
The woman-only meeting is a fundamental challenge to the structure of
power. It is always the privilege of the master to enter the slave's hut.
The slave who decides to exclude the master from her hut is declaring
herself not a slave. The exclusion of men from the meeting not only
deprives them of certain benefits (which they might survive without), it isa controlling of access, hence an assumption of power. It is not only
mean, it is arrogant.
It becomes clearer now why there is always an off-putting aura ofnegativity about separatism--one which offends the feminine pollyanna
in us and smacks of the purely defensive to the political theorist in us. It
is this: First: When those who control access have made you totally accessible, your first act of taking control must be denying access, or musthave denial of access as one of its aspects. This is not because you arecharged up with (unfeminine or politically incorrect) negativity; it isbecause of the logic of the situation. When we start from a position of
total accessibility there must be an aspect of no-saying, which is the
beginning of control, in every effective act and strategy, the effective
ones being precisely those which shift power, i.e., ones which involve
manipulation and control of access. Second: Whether or not one says
"no," or withholds or closes out or rejects, on this occasion or that, thecapacity and ability to say "no," (with effect) is logically necessary tocontrol. When we are in control of access to ourselves there will be someno-saying, and when we are more accustomed to it, when it is morecommon, an ordinary part of living, it will not seem so prominent, obvious, or strained ... we will not strike ourselves or others as being particularly negative. In this aspect of ourselves and our lives, we will strike36

ourselves pleasingly, as active beings with momentum of our own , with
sufficient shape and structure, with sufficient integrity, to generate friction. Our experience of our no-saying will be an aspect of our experienceof our definition .
When our feminist acts or practices have an aspect of separation weare assuming power by controlling access, and simultaneously by undertaking definition. The slave who excludes the master from her hut
thereby declares herself not a slave. And definition is another face ofpower.
The powerful normally determine what is said and sayable. When the
powerful label something or dub it or baptize it, the thing becomes what
they call it. When the Secretary of Defense calls something a peace
negotiation, for instance, then whatever it is that he called a peace
negotiation is an instance of negotiating peace. If the activity in questionis the working out of terms of a trade-off of nuclear reactors and territorial redistributions, complete with arrangements for the resulting
refugees, that is peacemaking. People laud it, and the negotiators get
Noble Piece Prizes for it. On the other hand, when I call a certain speech
act a rape, my "calling" it does not make it so. At best, I have to explain
and justify and make clear exactly what it is about this speech act whichis assaultive in just what way, and then. the others acquiesce in saying
the act was like rape or could figuratively be called a rape. My counterassault will not be counted a simple case of self-defense. And what I called rejection of parasitism, they call the loss of the womanly virtues ofcompassion and "caring." And generally, when renegade women callsomething one thing and patriarchal loyalists call it another, the loyalists
get their way. t
tThis paragraph and the succeeding one are the passage which has provoked themost substantial questions from women who read the paper. One thing that causestrouble here is that I am talking from a stance or position that is ambiguous·· it islocated in two different and non-communicating systems of thought-action. Re thepatriarchy and the English language, there is general usage over which I/we do nothave the control that elite males have (with the cooperation of all the ordinary
patriarchal loyalists) . Re the new being and meaning which are being created now
by lesbianfeminists, we do have semantic authority, and, collectively, can and do
define with effect. I think it is only by maintaining our boundaries through controll.ing concrete access to us that we can enforce on those who are not-us our definitions of ourselves, hence force on them the fact of our existence and thence open
up the possibility of our having semantic authority with them. (I wrote some stuff
that's relevant to this in the last section of my paper "Male Chauvinism--A Conceptual Analysis.")' Our unintelligibility to patriarchal loyalists is a source of pride anddelight, in some contexts; but if we don't have an effect on their usage, while wecontinue, willy nilly, to be subject to theirs, being totally unintelligible to them could
be fatal. (A friend of mine had a dream where the women were meeting in a cabin at
the edge of town, and they had a sort of inspiration through the vision of one ofthem that they should put a sign on the door which would connect with the patriarchs' meaning-system, for otherwise the men would be too curious/frightened about
them and would break the door down to get in . They put a picture of a fish on thedoor.) Of course, you might say that being intelligible to them might be fatal. Well,
perhaps it's best to be in a position to make tactical decisions about when and how
to be intelligible and unintelligible.

37

Women generally are not the people who do the defining, and we cannot from our isolation and powerlessness simply commence saying different things than others say and make it stick. There is a humptydumpty problem in that. But we are able to arrogate definition toourselves when we re-pattern access. Assuming control of access, wedraw new boundaries and create new roles and relationships. This,
though it causes some strain, puzzlement and hostility, is to a fair extent
within the scope of individuals and small gangs, as outright verbal
redefinition is not, at least in the first instance.
One may see access as coming in two sorts, "natural" and humanly
arranged. A grizzly bear has what you might call natural access to thepicnic basket of the unarmed human. The access of the boss to the personal services of the secretary is humanly arranged access; the boss exercises institutional power. It looks to me, looking from a certain angle,
like institutions are humanly designed patterns of access--access to persons and their services. But institutions are artifacts of definition. In thecase of intentionally and formally designed institutions, this is very clear,for the relevant definitions are explicitly set forth in by-laws and constitutions, regulations and rules. When one defines the term "president,"
one defines presidents in terms of what they can do and what is owed
them by other offices, and "what they can do" is a matter of their accessto the services of others. Similarly, definitions of dean, student, judge,
and cop set forth patterns of access, and definitions of writer, child,owner, and of course, husband, wife, and man and girl. When one
changes the pattern of access, one forces new uses of words on thoseaffected. The term 'man' has to shift in meaning when rape is no longer
possible. When we take control of sexual access to us, of access to our
nurturance and to our reproductive function, access to mothering andsistering, we redefine the word 'woman.' The shift of usage is pressedon others by a change in social reality; it does not await their recognitionof our definitional authority.
When women separate (withdraw, break out, re-group, transcend,
shove aside, step outside, migrate, say no) we are simultaneously controlling access and defining. We are doubly insubordinate, since neitherof these is permitted. And access and definition are fundamental ingredients in the alchemy of power, so we are doubly, and radically, insubordinate.
If these, then, are some of the ways in which separation is at the heartof our struggle, it helps to explain why separation is such a hot topic. If
there is one thing women are queasy about it is actually taking power. As
long as one stops just short of that, the patriarchs will for the most parttake an indulgent attitude. We are afraid of what will happen to us when
we really frighten them. This is not an irrational fear. It is our experiencein the movement generally that the defensiveness, nastiness, violence,
hostility and irrationality of the reaction to feminism tends to correlate38with the blatancy of the element of separation in the strategy or project
which triggers the reaction. The separations involved in women leaving
homes, marriages and boyfriends, separations from fetuses, and theseparation of lesbianism are all pretty dramatic . That is, they aredramatic and blatant when perceived from within the framework provid- 'ed by the patriarchal world-view and male parasitism. Matters pertaining
to marriage and divorce, lesbianism, and abortion touch individual men(and their sympathizers) because they can feel the relevance of these tothemselves--they can feel the threat that they might be next. Hence,
heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood, which are the institutions
which most obviously and individually maintain female accessibility tomales, form the core triad of anti-feminist ideology; and all -woman
spaces, all-woman organizations, all-woman meetings, all-woman
classes, are outlawed, suppressed, harrassed, ridiculed, and punished,in the name of that other fine and enduring patriarchal institution, Sex
Equality.
To some of us these issues can almost seem foreign ... strange ones to
be occupying center stage. We are busily engaged in what seem to us
our blatant insubordinations: living our own lives, taking care ofourselves and one another, doing our work, and in particular, telling it as
we see it. Still, the original sin is the separation which these presuppose,and it is that, not our art or philosophy, not our speech-making, nor our"sexual acts" (or abstinences), for which we will be persecuted, whenworse comes to worst.

'help from Claudia Card .
'help from Chris Pierce and Sara Ann Ketchum. See "Separatism and Sexual
Relationships," forthcoming in A Philosophical Approach to Women 's Liberation,
eds. S. Hill and M . Weinnzweig (Wadsworth).
'answering Claudia'levity due to Carolyn
51 first noticed this when reading Beyond God the Father (Mary Daly). See also
Women's Evolution (Evelyn Reed) for rich hints about male cannibalism and maledependence .
'Claudia
7The instances mentioned are selected for their relevance to the lives of the particular women addressed in this talk. There are many other sorts of instances to be
drawn from other sorts of women's lives.
°in (improbably enough) Philosophy and Sex, eds. Baker & Elliston (Prometheus,1976).

39

With you I have understood
The earth's craving:
The splitting rockreleasing pain
is joy;Your fingers in me
are putting down their roots.
A teacher stands
before the blackboard
holding chalk.
The hands now poised
to write are mine.
Upturned faces
glaze with hope,
expecting words.
Blue ink on white pages
dully strewn across the desktop
answer nothing.
I think of the salt spring of you"
Responding.
"Lesbian, "my body whispers.
My life has been a long answer
to a question
no one asked.

-Susan Robbins

40

Nights and Days
The stars will come out over and overthe hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of Upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sunt he days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burnand I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.
Pictures form and dissolve in my head:
we are walking in a city
you fled, came back to and come back to still
which I saw once through winter frost
years back, before I knew you,before I knew myself .
We are walking streets you have by heart from childhoodstreets you have graven and erased in dreams:
scrolled portals, trees, nineteenth-century statues.
We are holding hands so I can see
everything as you see it
I follow you into your dreams
your past, the places
none of us can explain to anyone.
We are standing in the windon an empty beach, the onslaught of the surf
tells me Point Reyes, or maybe some northern
Pacific shoreline neither of us has seen.
In its fine spectral mist our hairis grey as the sea
someone who saw us far-off would say we were two old womenNorms, perhaps, or sisters of the spraybut our breasts are beginning to sing together
your eyes are on my mouth.

42

I wake early in the morning
in a bed we have shared for years
lie watching your innocent, sacred sleep
as if for the first time.
We have been together so many nights and days
this day is not unusual.
I walk to an east~rn window, pull up the blinds:
the city around us is stillon a clear October morning
wrapped in her indestructible light .
The stars will come out over and overthe hyacinths rise like flames
from the windswept turf down the middle of Upper Broadway
where the desolate take the sun
the days will run together and stream into years
as the rivers freeze and burnand I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.

-Adrienne Rich

(from The Dream of a Common
Language, W .W . Norton, 1978)43

In which I weep like Niobe
but dry my own tears

by Minnie Bruce Pratt

9/11/75
I will shrivel up like the sauteed onions and squash we ate if I have to sit
through another family meal like last night's, with M taping "You don't
ever listen to a word I say" into R's rebellious ear and my sitting silent,silent. I feel a coward for not intervening between them as I used to: yet,then, I was the mother-peacemaker, not a fighter against M the father'sbullying . I feel a coward for not fighting M on the lesbian mother issue
through the streets and into the courtroom in the mother battles liketigress for her children routine: but I already feel I have lost them. In Jo
Freeman's Women: A Feminist Perspective an essay proclaims" At age 5boys and girls begin to want to be like their fathers; neither sex wants tobe like their mothers ." And I think of how my sons will turn away fromme soon anyway; Rand B will bracket me as 'mother' and have smashem-up fantasies about me, their own Punch and Judy show. I know now
that I cut communication with M because he is male, because he doesn't
hear me even when he listens, yet I long to keep a line on two boys who
at 5 and 7 are merely pre-pubescent patriarchs. Yesterday the JuniorService League had a "feminist" speaker who justified women's liberation because it would help men and children in the long run: trash fromthe same receptacle as the Renaissance argument that women should be
educated because then we would be better mothers. I slept with S for
myself; I work in the Movement for myself and that self in other women,
for that female self which was conceived and born in my male children
but which dies with every year of their growth toward manhood. Yet I
can hardly face toward my own leaving and deliberately leaving them in
M's world. I still feel them to be my babies, those selves rolled in theflesh of my womb, even though they were mine for only these few years,
or perhaps were never mine.

44

9/15/75
A dream: the boys and I are swimming in a muddy creek, with sharp currents of warm and cold water, like Schultz creek in my childhood. There
are sudden drops and I warn them of the danger. Getting out on theother side, we meet groups of women; we have no place to stay and I
feel awkward about asking any of the women for help: social embarrassment on the other side of the Jordan. After the Revolution, what do I dowith my boy children?

9/18/75
I spent Tuesday evening with S after a mud and acid bath from M. Being
with her in that clear stream of love washed away some of the despair.
We listened to Brodsky on tape and made love slowly, my hands slipping
down to her knees, my hair rubbing, brushing her hair, kissing her.
Denying all the while his revulsion at my love affair with S, nevertheless
M is reworking his icon of the Constant Wife into a caricature of the
Crazy Lesbian. When I requested an equal split of debts and cars, hethreatened to close the joint checking account, leaving me penniless forthree weeks until my first check from school comes. He says, "As theman I'm responsible for the debts; you are being irresponsible." When I
refuse to talk to him when he threatens me, he says, "You have to communicate more or I won't let the boys go with you." When I become
angry or anxious about arrangements with the children, he says, "Youhave been acting rather strange, funny, possessed." When I said I didn't
believe in this male-headed family for myself or for the children, hesneered, "Then are you going to tell your family, your mother about S?"

9/25/75
I'm down deep, inside a diving-bell of depression. S and I had anotherfight which she ended by saying that I treated her like M treated me; I
was just like a man. My first check from school was cut 30% for taxes,
so I don't know if I can leave M before November. But more shaking
than doubts about love and money is my fear of the effect of my leavingon the children.
M has finally succeeded in making me feel guilty about something: that I
don't care for the children because I haven't talked with him about how
to prepare them for the separation. The moment has to come, but I can't
stand to cause them pain. What will it be for them, those four nights anddays a week when I won't be there? They are already saying, "Will you
be here tonight?" or "I don't want M to yell at me about my clothes
before school tomorrow; will you be here to dress me?" I feel that I am
leaving them without a comforter for their bad dreams, and without aconfidant for bad days. I don't see how I can leave, but I have to. It is as
logical for me to leave M as it was for me to marry him. I have outgrown
dependence on him as I outgrew prayers to a Presbyterian Father. But
the very inevitability of being alone is frightening.
45

10/12/75
My heart is crushed by fury at my lover. After telling the children that,like our stories of the two boys who lived alone in the woods, I was tohave a house of my own, I went over to see S. Talking to the children
numbed me, with R screaming "no, no" and B adrift in his six-year-old
world. We drove over to my house, and they scrambled about forawhile, frantically shoving and pushing drawers, light switches; thenthey went back to M's to bed. At S's, I told her each comment in babbling detail and, I suppose, irritated her with my obvious distress overthem . When I asked her to hold me for a little warmth and said I loved
her, I was told, "Don't say those words to me." She is too quick with menow; the pain of the children hurts me so and I need comfort. I am
bodiless, headless, heartless with anger and grief; I think for the firsttime in months, of lying down with M for the warmth of his back: how
impossible a comfort.

11/4/75
Since I moved out two weeks ago, and after the NOW convention with S
in Philadelphia, I have felt more M's attempt to control me with thechildren. He has announced that I am to have them at Thanksgiving, but
he will probably drive with them to my mother's house for Christmas. I
indicated, as calmly as I could through a red fog, that if anyone went
down with them to Alabama to see my mother, I thought that I should.
M replied, "Well, you can come, if you want to."In M's moebius logic, I have forfeited, by my distaste for man's institution of marriage, by my sexual autonomy, by my love for women, any
claim for recognition in the eyes of the people who bore and raised me.
He becomes the son my mother never had, and I the prodigal daughter,
who can only return by the side of her husband. M constantly
reproaches me as the outsider, the unnatural one, the abnormal who
left, who must adapt to his pattern, to that of the 'family' --but I can dropin anytime I want.
His rage at my sexuality spewed out on Halloween when I went over totreat with the boys and bring them back to spend the weekend with me . I
planned to go out later after they were asleep and had dressed up .
Noting my velvet coat, M sternly withdrew his permission for their visit;
if I was to be so irresponsible and careless of them as to get a sitter, I
could not have them over. They were his family and he was responsible
for their well-being. To his unctuousness, smooth as baby-fat, I replied,"You are trying to possess the kids; they don't belong to anyone but
merely have two parents; you will ruin them by this control, this vampire
act." Then the stones fell: "Go fly all over the country with your queer
lover if you want to, but shut up and do what I say now or get out andcome back when you can talk like a civil person." I refused to go andrefused to shut up so he grabbed, shoved, and slammed me into the corner of the kitchen by the stove, which was fortunately not on, and thenhe threw me out the door onto the cement back porch . During those few
46

seconds, I screamed thoroughly, and thought: This is very like a scenefrom 'Woman Under the Influence' and also: I will scream so the boys
know that I am being hurt and that M is the one hurting me. And I
thought as I hit the cement with my back: He might kill me. However,
the knives, for once, had been put away in the utensil drawer.
Furious, I hopped up with my left knee and elbow and right hand
bleeding a bit through the black velvet, and jumped back into the kitchen
to refuse again to leave. The boys sawall of this and were screaming
also. B, standing between me and M, told him to stop and slapped M in
the face; R shrank back into the dining area, dazed, clearly seeing that M
had won. M, shouting, but in character in his righteous rage, fulfilled thedestiny of his stereotypical soul: "You goaded me into this; you are trying to rationalize your leaving me by making me hit you." This male obtuseness still astonishes me: I suppose my stiff elbow and darkening
bruises are inventions of my diseased imagination .

11/19/75
I'm inundated with tears and letters, from married friends, from aunts,
mother, grandmother. My friends tell me how wonderful their marriages
are; my mother can't understand how I can be so selfish as to abandon
M and the children; my 96-year-old grandmother prays for my soul andurges a psychiatrist. I don't think I can ever go home and see any ofthem
again.
Re-reading Jill Johnston's "Return of the Amazon Mother," which isright about people's non-acceptance of a mother giving up her children, I
have been suffering and grieving for them and for myself, for my not being free of M, for my not having the boys, for the impossibility of honest
love, since to be open about my lesbianism would mean that they could
be taken from me legally. I loathe having to be careful what and who thechildren see when they are with me. Last summer I had searing fights
with M over whether they would see S; I gave in, when I understood that
he wouldn't leave for Harvard, and leave me alone for a month, unless I'swore' not to 'expose' them to her. Now, terrified about giving him an
excuse to refuse them to me altogether, I have to be careful about all my. friends . Most of M's literary friends are male and gay but, as M so intelligently puts it, "The children don't see them doing anything illegal,"
while Rand B have actually seen S and me kiss and hold hands.
And now the fear about the children has frozen that lovely, sensuous
feeling that I had first for S. She feels that; she is afraid of sex with me. I
am too coldly separate, like a dead woman, or too angry, burning up
myself and anyone near me.

11/25/75
I had thought I'd gone to the bottom, but last night was mud. III andaching with the flu, I called my mother from the Cross Creek pay phone.
47

She said, "If the family collapses, so does society," in her usual
Southern voice of doom, and refused to come see me during Christmas,
and refused to forbid M to bring the children down there without me.
And refused to acknowledge my pain and ache of betrayal that she, mymother, has chosen to please him, rather than comfort me, herdaughter.
I can see the Christmas to come: everyone, D.G., Evie, Lethean, all theaunts, Mama, Grandma, the cousins, Bobby, Jack, Mary, their wives
and husbands, all there for sweet potatoes with marshmallows, jellosalad, with third generation cousins rolling around, Michael and two
Christophers, Laura, Rand B. They sympathize with M over his crazywife, and he moves through the crowded house, more confident of hisrighteousness, saving the family: mine.

12/17/75
The children are with me while M goes off to Durham; evidently I
become normal when he wants me to baby-sit. I'm nervous with Rand
B, afraid of them, afraid of hurting, not pleasing. R cried as we left
daycare because we were to get a Christmas tree for my house; hewanted me and the tree to be in Alabama with them, or wanted to takethe tree to M's house. After we decorated, they stayed up late, playing
and fighting. I yelled at them, we fell exhausted in bed, all three of us
finally, with R holding my hand. What are we all to one another?

12/22/75
Three days ago on B's birthday, he seemed so unlikely an inhabitant of
my swollen belly six years ago; B and I made a cake and cut it with M and
R. As I left, M toasted me with his bourbon, "It's our ninth anniversary;
don't you remember?" A victory of detachment at last: I didn't. He asked
plaintively, "Are you coming to Alabama?" Yesterday they drove off inthe van crammed with presents.
Since Christmas in Alabama now means to me the convergence of tradition, religion, and emotion around my neck in the smooth collar of
matrimonial reconciliation, I called my mother last night from the paybooth down the road and said that I was not coming. Trembling andfrozen in the open booth, I heard my mother crying at the other end, B
anxious, R angry, M silent.
After the call, I had a winter solstice party, with women, talk, wine, Meg
Christian, politics. I watched S and she caught me wanting her, and held
my foot. I think I learn from S because she listens to her own self, herbody, her ideas, and fights for them; I have ignored mine so now I must
listen to my self.
But to hear that self is hard when my mother is whispering, "You must
consider others to live. Go back to your family," when I know her ideal of
unselfish duty, that martyrdom, is all my past life of Southern consideration, womanly consideration. When my children cry, "You are selfish.
Hold us," it is hard to turn from their warm and transient caresses to embrace that steadfast self.
48

NOTHING SAFE IN CRABTREE MEADOW

When I wake, it is so cold that my cheeks are numb; all aroundme the night is thickly black under a starless sky. The soundcomes again--metal on rock. One of our cook pans is being moved at the fire pit. A marmot, I think, and lie listening. Squirrels
and chipmunks aren't big enough to move a pan like that.
Silence.
Then another noise. I listen with strained attention, trying to
identify it. Either it is the sound of my son Rob unzipping his
sleeping bag, or--and my scalp tingles--or it is the sound of claws
dragging across canvas.
Stealthily, a little at a time, I turn over on the ground inside mysleeping bag until I lie facing Rob . Now in his eighteenth year heis already broadshouldered and sturdily muscled. His big bodylies turned away from me. Fast asleep.
There is another scratching noise, loud in the night.
I turn over again, slowly, as quietly as possible, and when I amlying on my right side I unzip the top of my mummy bag and reacha careful hand out into the cold to close it around the flashlight. I
direct it at our packs, propped against the log near our feet, andflick the switch.
Looking straight at me in the circle of light are two yellow eyes
in a dark furry head. The animal is hunched over from behind thelog, his massive forelegs wrapped around my pack.
The light does not frighten him. He goes on ripping at the side
pocket of the pack, pulling things out the hole he's made.
My body is paralyzed for a few moments, while my mind leaps
back to a conversation with some campers in Junction Meadow.
"Make noise," they had advised, "yell. Jump up and down. Beaton pans. Only don't mess with a female bear who has cubs." How·can I know the sex of this beast who is pulling a tube of peanutbutter from the pocket of the pack, staring me in the eyes all thewhile?
I desperately want this not to be happening. Oh how I wish thiswere not happening.
Keeping the flashlight on him, I sit up, unzipping my bag farther, and I start to yell--a karate yell, from the diaphragm, deafening, terrifying. But all that comes out of my tight throat is
Eeeeeeeep, eeeeeeep, eeeeeeeep.
The creature goes on looting my pack. I keep moving
backwards as I try to yell, until I'm practically sitting on top of
Rob in his sleeping bag. He grumbles and rolls away.
49

Yellow claws pull a chocolate bar from the frayed hole in thecanvas. The small shiny eyes watch me, the enormous furryshoulders hunch tighter around the pack.
I struggle upright out 'of my warm covering and dance in mythermal underwear on top ' of my sleeping bag, shouting Hup,
hup, hup!
What the hell's wrong with my hardy teenage son? Why
doesn't he get up to help me?
I leap and stamp and throw one arm out like a pump handle, myyell getting louder now.
The little eyes watch me warily as the claws pull a bag oftrailfood from the hole and stuff it in the mouth, spilling peanuts
and sunflower seeds down the front of the pack as the plastic
splits.
I jump in the cold air, knees jerking up and down, shouting
Yow, yow, yow! I'm afraid to turn away from the bear to find out
what Rob is doing.
Out comes a tampax. The animal shoves it in his mouth, bites
into it, and one half is left dangling like a cigar butt down hischin.
God damn it! Here I am, dancing like a madwoman andscreeching not eight feet from him and he just goes on with his
midnight snack. "Throw something," they had said in Junction
Meadow.
All I have is the flashlight. I pull back my arm, aim, let fly.
It sails toward him and bounces off his head just above his
eyes, spiralling up, its beam of light looping crazily in thedarkness.
The bear stops all motion, stunned. And in that instant I know I
have made a terrible mistake, for something was illuminated by
the spinning flashlight beam, something small and furry moving
up behind 1he log. I just glimpsed it. Now I look around for a place
to run to. The bear's great body rears up clumsily off the pack,hesitates, and I get ready to go . Anywhere! Up the nearest tree-no. She can scramble up after me. Out through the underbrush in
the dark--but surely she can move in it faster than I. The creek is
too far down the slope. There is no place to go.
The moment seems endless as she teeters there on her hindlegs, her cub shuffling about in the weeds behind her. I understand fully what I've done, now. The knowledge paralyzes me.
And then with astonishing speed she has scrambled over thelog and CQmes thrasbing toward me. I turn to run just as she
lunges forward on mer hind legs. The raging weight of her drags
me down, claws tear at my back. I scream and struggle against
thick rough fur. She mauls me in the dirt, holds me in a crushingmurderous embrace, as the pain rips down my side from myshoulder. Her rank odor curls my nostrils. I see the black sky
above her black head, my mind filled with her roaring.

It has been a quiet morning . Earlier the garbage men thumped
their way through the basement and out again as their truck
grumbled in the street. But I was already awake. I don't sleep as I
did before, all night long.
Rob brought me some tea and toast. He stroked my face, heknelt before me and asked me how I am, does my shoulder hurt?
can he do anything to make me more comfortable? His darkredcurls fall down over his forehead, his eyes are a mottled greenish
brown in his sunburned face . I smile at him, wishing he were notso anxious.
On our first night here at home, I asked him to explain . Patiently he told me each of the thoughts that passed through his mind
as he °lay there almost asleep, each one giving him an excuse notto act or confusing ~im, until the final moment when he saw thelight wobble crazily in the darkness and thought it was a space
ship landing, or someone with a flashlight stumbling down uponus. He is goodnatured and big for his eighteen years; he has enormous feet, thick wrists, and a weird science-fiction-filled imagination. My beloved son. Perhaps there would have been
nothing he could have done that night. My anger at him passed
quickly. Still, he says he feels guilty, and I can see in the tentative
way he looks at me that he suffers.
He brings me books and magazines; he describes the movies I
could watch on TV. Today there will be " Flying Down to Rio" withFred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or maybe I'd like to flip the channel to Bogart and Bacall in "The Big Sleep." A star-filled afternoon. How about it, mom?
It seemed we were caught in a dream as Rob cut away theshreds of my thermal underwear top and bound a T-shirt aroundmy shoulder. Dawn light was arriving. Trees, branches began toappear out of the darkness. I sat propped against the log. I
remember how heavy my head felt, hanging down, as I stared at
the blood spreading on the white cotton of the T-shirt bandage.
Then there was the ordeal of .getting my trousers on, and myboots, for I would not let Rob go off by himself to get help. I
would not be left there alone in Crabtree Meadow, wounded andvulnerable. There was a ranger station just at the other end of themeadow. Rob got a belt, put it around my neck and rested my arm
in it like a sling. Then he wrapped a jacket around my shoulders
and lifted me to my feet. I tottered sideways, grabbing at him withmy good arm, as the pain engulfed me in a dizzying wave. He
wanted to try to carry me. But I told him I would walk. Just to feelthe ground under my feet, to move one leg forward, then theother, kept me connected to consciousness.
When we got to the ranger station, we found it locked anddeserted. I remember the padlock hanging on the door, with its
little key-shaped mouth .

51

I sat on the stoop, and it was then I noticed that my whole sidefrom shoulder to knee had turned scarlet. I'm finished, I thought,
all my body fluids are leaving me, I'll be dry inside soon, whiteand weightless. My brain will stop. My heart will go slower andslower until there is no more blood to pump.
A ragged whimpering sound came to me. I looked up to where
Rob leaned against the door of the hut, bent forward and shaking. Tears ran down over his dirty hands, making pale crooked
tracks in the dust on his skin.
The magazines are piled on the floor next to my chair. I'm notinterested in reading. If they'd let me, I'd go back to my job tomorrow. But instead I must stay in this room and receive the guilty
ministrations of Rob and the visits of Mrs. Linenthal who comes
down from 2B to see me. I'm not even sure Mrs. Linenthal likes
me; certainly I've never fulfilled her expectations for someone myage. I am a small woman, and even now in my fifties I am feisty
and quick. I don't mean that I seem younger than my age. No,
older even, if you look at my face. But I am the person I've
become.
Rob says, "1 think mom's tired now. She wants to. rest." And heleads Mrs. Linenthal out of my room, leaving me alone again.
I know I'm difficult for them to understand. They expect me toneed their comfort. But, as I said, I am the person I've become inall these years of living, and what engages me now is the mysteryof my actions that night. How, when it seemed I would surely bekilled, was I able to get my right arm free, bring up my fist, and hit
blindly at the one sensitive and unprotected spot on the animal's
body, the nose. And hurt or startled, she staggered away from me
and ran into the underbrush, her cub waddling after her.
I hear Rob and Mrs. Linenthal discussing me in the hallway
outside my door. Rob is telling her what a difficult patient I am,
how the doctor says I should rest more to let my dislocatedshoulder set, my wounds heal. Mrs. Linenthal is tsk, tsk'ing.
Their voices are like the voices talking around me, above me,
as I was carried out of the back country. Distant, for I was differently connected to life than I am now. The campers who arrived
in Crabtree Meadow that morning were two young men and awoman, all about Rob's age. They were carrying enormous
packs, and they had tanned legs under loose hiking shorts. While
the two men worked with Rob to cut poles and drape a poncho
over them to make a stretcher, the woman knelt before me. "Letme give you some water," she said. And she unscrewed the canteen for me and was going to hold it to my mouth until I took itfrom her with my good hand. When I tilted my head back to drink,
I saw a bluejay sitting on a low limb ' of a tree. The jay cocked its
head, regarded me for a few moments, and then began tosquawk. I stared helplessly up at it while it screeched insults atme, chiding and complaining. And I thought, I'm done for.
52

They loaded me carefully on the stretcher, and while one
young man ran off to try to locate the ranger, the woman and Rob
and the other man carried me out of the meadow on the trail going west. I shut my eyes against the sky's brightness. My bodyrolled in the poncho, limbs jiggling, until I felt the nausea pressing up out of my stomach. The men's and the woman's voices came-short utterances as they struggled to keep me level on a steep incline, as they waded through a stream. "Careful now." "Protect
her shoulder." "Watch out!" Their grunts and strenuous
breathing surrounded me.
My stomach roiled as I breathed the stink of bear musk clinging to my skin.
As we encountered each group of hikers on the trail, curious
faces appeared above me, staring at me. My rescuers gave hurried explanations. Once a · woman leaned over me and laid thepalm of her hand for a few moments over my eyes, shielding me.
And we went on. Tree branches against sky. Rock walls. My carriers' arms and shoulders. The sound of their boots stumbling onstones. The sun boring through my closed eyelids.
Now here in my room, under the murmured voices of Rob andMrs. Linenthal trailing off down the hallway toward the outside
door, I continue my enquiry. I try to go down the checklist, theway a doctor or an auto mechanic checks off the areas alreadymade sure of. I am a woman. A mother. I have a job. I know how to
get on and off buses. The tight soreness of my healing flesh
brings me back to myself. I am a human creature of a certain age.
Rob and I were hiking through Sequoia National Forest toward
Mt. Whitney in hot dry August.
That evening we had made it to Crabtree Meadow, where wewere the only people. The sun was behind the mountain, and aswatch of apricot-colored cloud hung above the ridge in a clear
blue sky. All was silent, except for the rush of Whitney Creek
below us.
After eating, we propped our packs against a log, spread out
the sleeping bags, not bothering with a tent. Normally we would
have hung our food supplies high up on a tree limb, but in oureight days of hiking we had seen no sign of bear, and this night
we let fatigue overcome our better judgment.
Exhausted and peaceful, we lay in our warm sleeping bags andtalked about the last few days, which had been tough ones.
Two nights before, only eighteen miles from Whitney, we had
been stopped by a forest fire across the Wallace Creek Trail.
Closing my eyes I could see it, burning quietly in the windlessnight, eating away at the trees and underbrush on the ridge
above Junction Meadow where we had been camped. Orange
flames crawled the treetrunks, bushes ignited, sizzled, flared up,
branches fell, spraying sparks. It burned with a curious soundlike paper crumpling.
53

To get around the fire, we had to go eight miles out of our way
up the Tyndall Creek Trail. That day we came up 2,880 feet ineight miles, on short switchbacks up a steep mountainside, withno shade. It was the hardest climb we'd done.
But hiking the next day was glorious. The trees on the slopes
up to Bighorn Plateau were yellow pines or sugar pines--dead but
still standing, without bark, in twisted spiralled shapes, theirwood the color of poured honey.
And then the plateau itself, where we had experienced that
great lift to the spirits, the elation of the high country. Eleventhousand feet high and perfectly bare, Bighorn Plateau offered aview of almost 360 degrees. We took off our packs and walked
across the wide dome to its center. Furry orange marmots cameout of their holes to peer at us, sneak up to examine our packs.
We sat on the rocks taking swigs of warmish water from the canteen, looking around us to blue distant peaks. West to the ranges
we had come from, north toward Forrester's Pass, and southeast
in the direction of Mt. Whitney.
It was delicious to let these pictures move through my mind, asI lay in my mummy bag, the muscles of my legs slowly relaxing,
the sound of the creek lulling me. We were safe in Crabtree
Meadow, and until morning there was nothing that had to bedone.
"I think we'll make it up Mt. Whitney tomorrow, after all," came
Rob's drowsy voice from his sleeping bag.
Those words were like a float bobbing on the surface of an ocean into
which I sank, farther and farther down, until they with everything else
had disappeared and I sank in exhausted, dreamless sleep.
When I woke, it was so cold that my cheeks were numb; all around me
the night was thickly black under a starless sky. The sound came again-metal on rock. One of our .cook pans was being moved at the fire pit.
And I lay still and thought, this is a dream, the dream is always like
this.
Another noise. I listened with strained attention, trying to identify it.
Either it was the sound of Rob unzipping his sleeping bag, or--and myscalp tingled--or it was the sound of claws dragging across canvas.
The dream is always like this, right up to that denser bulk of darkness
lumbering toward me, engulfing me, pulling me down farther into chaosthan I can stand to go, the ground made wet beneath me, my mind failing out the back of my head. Rob cannot enter between us now as I
wonder if in the muscles of that animal there is the memory of my bodycaught against it, whether my odor lingers in her nostrils or has made its
trace in her brain. Did she, cleaning herself the next day, lick my bloodfrom between her claws along with the twigs and moss and dried pineneedles lodged there?
I wake, my injured back throbbing, to stare up into the darkness of myroom, wait for morning light, for the day's requirements to assemble me
once again out of the night's vast disorder into my familiar, finite self.
54

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lV\y Mother was a Light Housekeeper
o story by THYME S. SEAGULL

Hello, Berkeley, your acid sparkled streets glistening through thesmog, heartland in the production of rhetoric, land of free boxes,
neighborhood warning systems, block dances, food conspiracies, andmy relatives. Aunt Riba and Uncle Roy's bright one-story stucco, cattycorner to a decaying mansion--where some of their children live communally..
Rosh Hashonah. I wonder why Jewish New Year begins in the Fall instead of the Spring. The Spring would feel more natural. I reach their
doorbell just as mom and dad drive up in their camper. Everyone on time
for the holiday dinner. Me, mom and dad have never been here before
because Aunt, Uncle, and Sarah, the Old Mother, have just moved toBerkeley to be near their children. Everyone very keyed up. Riba, Roy,and Sarah all answer the door. Excited talking, sharing information
about missing members of the clan. Showing family photos. I drift to therear and notice Sarah, the Old Mother, standing at the doorway to theback porch.
"We had a nice house in D.C.," Sarah says to me in familiar yet surprising Yiddish accents, a sound I have not heard for years. She is very
short and stooped, wrinkled, not older but ancient. "It had a lot of room,
big backyard, lots of flowers and trees." I can see into the backyard
here: tiny.
"Yes, but they left that house and moved here?""They wanted to be near the children.""Your great-grandchildren.""Yes, them especially, Lillakah and LiI'Umbiliakah."I look wonderingly at the Old Mother, a fantastic survivor. A Ukrainian. She is so short it is easy to overlook her wrinkled face. But I look at
her carefully. I had overlooked my own grandmother.
"You knew my Bubie?" (I ask after my grandmother.)"Yes," Sarah whispers. "A very progressive woman, very progressive. I knew her in Elsinore, when I lived in Los Angeles." The rest of
the family is floating towards us. I see mom's attention about to catch
onto our conversation. I tighten up and respond quickly, "Yesl I was
there too.""Elsinore is a Yiddishe shtetl," Sarah comments.
"Yes, I know," I whisper quickly, as mom interjects, "Yiddishe shtetl!
She doesn't know what you mean, grandma, these kids don't knowwhat it means--" Ha ha ha ha, they laugh about how these kids don't
understand.
"I know what it means," I say, but she and Sarah are talking awayin Yiddish. (Oy Gottenyu, she's auf tsurus, A Shaynim Donk in Pupik.) It
is true I don't understand much.
59

"It means Jewish ghetto," mom stops long enough to tell me.
"I know.""Well, that's better than the rest of these kids.""You only spoke Yiddish to each other, not to us. You and dad spokein your thick private flavors. We were outside of it; we spoke English inharsh unhappy tones, coping with public school in rural America .. . But I
was in Elsinore and I'm not a total idiot."
Mom blue-eyes me, smiling. Is it ok to come out with it like that? Did I
hurt her? A record in Hebrew I never heard before is playing on thestereo. "Anachnu Ve' Atem" is the refrain, a powerful chant from Israel.
"What's that, mom?""A song about Us and Them."
I don't know how to ask mom if I have hurt her. It is very beautiful
music so it catches us for awhile, then she wanders off to join a conversation with my aunt, who is setting the table. I turn back to the Old
Mother. "I know Elsinore is the West Coast shtetl. I could easily see that.
The only ones in the streets and the stores are elderly Jews.""Yes, and they have a community center," says Sarah.
"Yes, I know. Bubie and I went there. To a concert. A woman was
singing in an evening gown. Bubie started singing too.""Yes, she loved to sing. Such a good voice too."" The people who were running the show didn't think she should sing
because it wasn't her concert. A man came over and told her to stop
singing. She got really pissed-off. We had to leave. She was mad anddidn't want to stay anymore. As we walked out, she muttered resentful
curses at the people who ran the community center, all the way out, real
loud, everyone heard and turned around as we left.""She was an individual, very stubborn, very progressive."
The dinner table is covered with white paper, centered withcandelabra and dotted with red wine bottles. For a moment I recall theancient ceremonies, chanting in Hebrew for three hours around the table
before we could eat, the ancient ceremonies during which I stared at thematzoh crumbs and the red wine stains on the white paper. While thegrandfather chanted in a language I didn't learn, and all the relatives jabbered away in yet another language I did not learn. What does anything
mean? I long ago tired of asking, or maybe I never did ask. I am aforeigner in the ancient culture, the languages, the traditions. I am lightyears away. Or has it only been a generation? In me, the tradition of five
thousand years dies. I am the daughter who cannot carry on the family
name, practice the ceremonies. I am the daughter who searches for a
new tribe. Who searches for primitive solidarity in a new culture ofwomen. What was coherent for them has never been coherent for me.
"Maybe you'd want to write a book review for Freiheit?" asks Uncle
Roy. (Freiheit is a socialist journal whicp he edits, modeled after the old
Freiheit.)"No," I say, flatly and glumly. "I've done that already. Book reviews
are fine, but first I want a different space.""She doesn't want to do journalism anymore, Roy." Aunt Riba. I lookat her in surprised gratitude.
60

"What do you want to write? For whom? To be published in a book?
Magazine, where?" Uncle Roy demands.
"A book maybe.""What, a novel, fiction, what?""Something which emanates from the dream consciousness.
Freedom begins in the realm of dreams," I quote.
"Freedom is only in the realm of dreams," says Sarah, in Yiddish .
Mom translates to the rest of us, the yqunger generation.
A silence follows. Then Uncle Roy continues dominating the dinnerconversation with social, political issues. Mom, dad, and Aunt Riba
follow along avidly while the rest of us red diaper babies, in various
stages of dress and stress, delicately slurp and gobble the split pea soup,chicken and mushrooms.
"Do you think the working class is becoming more progressive?" asks
Uncle Roy of my father.
Dad clears his throat. "Well, I can tell you, from traveling around thecountry alot and living in trailer parks these last several years, I can tell
you they are still very reactionary," says dad, in his slow laryngitic voice.
"Or maybe it's the union leaders who are," adds mom.
Why is it that I am always surrounded by people speculating on thework1ng class--is it capable of transforming itself in the U.S.? can there
be a revolution? I am still in the heartland of theory, with my relatives. I
haven't seen mom and dad in a year; we've all been traveling around. I
want to talk about experiences.
"Who have you met lately? Who travels in these trailers?""We met some travelers in Montana who used to live down the roadfrom us," says mom.
"Really, who?""Oh, we never knew them when we lived there. They were on their
way to moving to Grants Pass, Oregon ..... We could never move to
Grants Pass," mom ends sharply.
"Why not?" I ask, still not getting it.
"Because we're Jews." (Get it, get it?)
"I can't just move anywhere I want either," I say. "I mean lesbians
can't." Mom looks at me, somewhat pained.
"Isn't that where you spent the summer, Cheike, around there? At afestival?" Dad.
"What kind of festival?" asks Uncle Roy, perking up.
"A women's spiritual gathering.""What's that?" he persists.
"Ummm, uh, uhmmm," I look around the table. Everyone is staring
down at their chicken, listening intently. What to say? "It was womengetting together on land, like a camp-out, to center ourselves as a group.
We're developing our own culture." Unfortunately, I get into it and goon. "But we didn't own the land, and the man who owned the land insisted on being there.""You've gone too far," says dad. "Why do you have to have allwomen gatherings and always say, Too bad there was a man there'? It's
like colored people when they got money at first they went out andbought Cadillacs but now some of 'em drive VW's."
61oI can't follow the logic of dad's remark so I turn to my aunt and mom,
who are sitting together, seeming to agree with dad. "You have to experience working with all women and being with all women. You've
been married for decades and decades, how would you know?""Oh, I have experience," answers mom, with a touch of hauteur.
"The women at B'nai B'rith used to get together every week," adds
Aunt Riba.
"It's not the same thing. You went home to husbands afterwards. Living with men and visiting or going to meetings is different than livingwith all women ... "At this point my uncle gets up, grandiosely announcing that he will
wash the dishes.
"I'm going to help him," says mom, with laughing emphasis.
"How long can a group of women stay together?" asks dad. "It's notlike you have kids to keep you together."I move my mouth to protest. Some lesbians have kids. Why do you
need kids to stay together? What does stay-together mean? How important is it? But how can I ask them? They don't know.
"Women living just with women, ay meshugge," continues dad. "It'sabsurd." Almost everyone laughs, thinking of the absurdity of it. Not
maliciously, though, it is just ludicrous to them. Nothing I say can makeit real; I don't have the answers, the experiences, five thousand years of
ritual at my fingertips, five thousand years of red wine at my lips, tomake them speak the words from beyond the heartland of rhetoric. I try
to imagine my tribe, we who will shout KinsWomanl to each other in atribal tongue. I imagine us in a dance to the light, our own festival oflight, into ourselves and into each other, dancing around candles on the
Solstice. I imagine saying to the children, "We have danced this danceand chanted this chant for five thousand years. It celebrates the eternal
return of the light."
These are the words, but I do not have them.
Walking along the streets of the colonial town where I went to highschool, I am with a very open being. A being who has just come into thecountry from Nepal or Ceylon. But I sense she is the same one from highschool, the mysterious Sing, who appeared those years to us in stately
silence, elegant, impeccable. Sing, forever the profile of the kiss nottaken. I am showing her Main Street.
Then the scene shifts to the farm: Nuovev Jasmine. She has a room
under our roof, like a nest in the eaves. We go up to my little bedroom
overlooking the pond, right under her nest. As we lie in bed together, we
can see the sun rising over the trees around the pond. We are touching, I
am touching her face, so tender and clear. She is open to me.
I ask her questions. I take off the last of my clothes and then she does
too, smiling, watching me. The softness of her caress across my breastis like silky seaweed on underwater skin. Everywhere I am opened, sensual.
Suddenly, the sense of another. Vashti is sitting hidden in the blankets
at the foot of the bed, staring at the sunrise. My younger sister. I feelaround the blankets. "So there you are. Why don't you open thedownstairs drapes?" (Same view.)
62

"That's OK, I'm going outside," she says, and goes. I lie back. We're
spending the whole day in bed together, timelessly. "1 don't know whattime it is because I don't have any clocks around, " I explain, although it
is not necessary. Then the dream changes, turns round. I'm waking up.
Cheike! Cheike! "Are you ready to face reality?" asks my mother, withher own brand of gentle sarcasm. The fragile film of the dream is dissolving. Oh, what was it? The feeling of spending the whole day in bed witha woman, a very large woman who holds me, with long thick red-goldhair. And cascading matzoh boxes at the very end.
Daylight streams into the trailer. Mom turns on the nine o'clock news.
Patty Hearst capture news . Reality. I am not lying with my lover. I have
no lover. I am with mom and dad in their trailer. California sunshine isbounoing off all the cement and metal in this trailer court.
"Can I turn off the radio?" I leap up, turning off the radio.
"Don't you want to hear what's really happening in the world?""I can't do anything to help Patty Hearst. I want to write in myjournaL"
Mom is washing the dishes, standing firmly in sneakers and anklets.
She glances over at the marbled cardboard notebook I open, like theones from grade school. Back on the farm, it hadn't occurred to me towrite in front of anyone, and I had never seen anyone else write. It was a
deep dark secret, like what happened behind closed doors in bathrooms
and bedrooms.
"Do you ever read it, or do you just write in ia" mom asks.
"No read, just write, ha ha ha ." No, I don't show my writing. What if I
opened my books to mom and dad, showed my whole self, dark green
and silent childhood? But my flippant manner has closed the subject.
"Yes, I re-read it sometimes. I learn from it." Whoever wrote in a journal on the farm? All I ever saw was a locked wooden box of mom anddad's love letters . And my older sister's locked diary, in which she vowed
never to tell a future husband she had lost her chastity. Nuovev Jasmine,a paradisical Jewish chicken farm in the forties and fifties, when adventuring into the interior was called "too subjective." Politics andeconomics were going to save the era. And politics was what got you introuble and made people hate you. The childhood faces of the
Rosenberg boys haunted my childhood from the back cover of. DeathHouse Letters. Which sat on their dresser for years, like apermanent fixture. I recall that bedroom, which looked out over the pond. The
double bed I had to cover so precisely--but never lie on. The night tablenext to it on mom's side, upon which sat The Well of Loneliness (inpaper) and a lamp, also for years.
"Why don't we ever share what it felt like to live at Nuovev Jasmine?"
Mom looks at me warily. I used to be so critical of her. She finishes
drying her hands on a dish towel. "What do you want to talk about?"
I feel shaky, on thin ice, but ready to skate--"I hear you calling myname. Like a shattering reverberation over fifty acres of corn stubbles,
rattling through the woods. 'Cheikkkkeeeeeeee .... .'63

"It is winter, the corn stubbles are frozen, my feet crunch in the snow.
I want to explore how the eastern woods look in the snow, the density,
the designs, the feeling of the snow transforming an already secretplace. It was not a place where anyone accompanied me. I could see dad
driving the pick-up on a far western cornfield, heading toward the garbage pit. You were calling from the porch, you wanted me to help withthe laundry .. . " Mom's tan face is frowning.
Is it ok to talk like this? Dad is outside the trailer, I can see him setting
up a vise-grip on the back of the camper, his new workroom. A condensation of the garage and feed room at Nuovev Jasmine. I can see hiswhite hair curling up the back of his neck as he bends forward in concentration. He is making earrings out of nickels. Mom gets up to sweep thefloor, commenting that what she does and what dad does is what ismost comfortable for each. There is no problem. As she moves around,the trailer shakes, the floor shakes, and the ceiling shakes. Reminding
me of dawn. (At dawn the rocking trailer woke mom up. "What's goingon?" she asked in a startled urgent voice. From my berth I stopped wiggling and didn't tell her what was going on. Just laughed that I had had a,farm dream again.)"So what? I was doing the laundry ... dad was dumping the garbage,
you were--""What? What was I?"
Mom's eyes light up to answer, "1 didn't want you to do the laundry,
Cheike. Actually, I wanted you to do the eggsl""Ah yes, you wanted moe to do the eggs. Remember when the bouncing trailer woke us this morning? I was having a dream of packing eggs!"(I still won't say I was masturbating.) "1 was bouncing in my dream." At
this point dad comes in and leans against the door frame, listening to us.
"Only I'm not packing eggs for Nuovev Jasmine, I'm packing eggs for
Amazonia. It's clearly printed in blue on the side of each thirty-dozen
box. The eggs are all packed strangely, all different sizes--jumbos andpee wees together, checked and cracked, flats and fillers not filled to theproper amounts ... "We all laugh. Yea, the egg room, grading and packing all those years,
a fragile egg myself, thin and unexposed, not like those hardy egos
developing in the outside world. Eggs falling off the machine andsmashing on the cement--eaten by wild chicken coop cats, darting in at
the sound--eggs crunched together on the way from the washer to thegrader, squeezed and falling, eggs outside crunched by tractor tires,
eggshells in the mud. Huge white eggs and little inverts, soft-shelled
eggs, malleable in fingers, floppy, lacking--calcium? Lacking the rightsupport ... The Large go in the large, the Mediums go in the medium, thePullets go in the pullet ... Experiences rolling down the blue runways ofthe grader table, and you pack them away fast, so they don't pile up, andship them in caseloads to the Cities ...
But the soft ones, maybe they didn't smash as hard and fast as thefirm ones. Eggshells in Amazonia, which exists in our northwoods minds
like an Atlantis on land. Like the new continent of Mu. The trick is to64reach Amazonia without these old, almost fatal wounds. Might thistrailer understand Amazonia--understand it as the total space, separate
culture, the earth and sky. And eggs, mom and dad understood: eggs,
seeds, and ponds.
"I want to ask you something, Cheike ." Mom, in a serious tone. Oh,
no! What is it? "Why did you change your name?"
Reflex: defense. "Because these Anglos can't pronounce Cheike properly.""It doesn't make sense to me. People will mispronounce your newname too.""It's a tribal name. I belong to a different tribe now. But I have many
names. To you I am still Cheike.""To me, you are still Baby." She laughs. I don't mind her laugh, but I
bring her up to date. "I'm not a baby anymore though, you know, I'm alesbian woman ... ""Why do you always have to bring up being a lesbian?""I hardly ever do--that you hear.""Like last night.""Because it fit in. You always think you're different and can't fit inanywhere in small town America, and that's true, but there are lots ofreasons why people don't fit in and can't move anywhere they like. It
goes double for me. There are very few places I can live. You wonder
why I don't settle down, and that's why. I have to find a women's community I can live in ... " I look up at dad, who is shaking his head . "What,no?""Tell me, Cheike," his old hoarse voice, "do you have to be a lesbian
to be a feminist?"
Oh no, that question again. I can pretend I don't know. "I don't know.
I did--have to become a lesbian before I could be anything but a feminist
literary critic. But that was because my ideas were years ahead of mybehavior. Some of my ideas.""Don't you think women can oppress other women?" pursues dad. "Iknow some very domineering women.""Yea, sure. The difference is in a group awareness. Now we try to
avoid the roles that reinforce oppression.""That's you and your friends. There are domineering women."'.'I'm talking about what lesbians all over the country are trying to dothese days ... Let's go to the beach!" I say in sudden inspiration, myfingers almost burning against the hot silver metal outside the opendoor.
It is our last day together. Mom and dad are heading for Arizona intheir trailer and I to Oregon in my VW bug. Everyone agrees to the trip tothe beach. We do not rush.
"Tell me, what are you going to do from here? Are you going to settle
down?" mom continues.
"You sound like Bubie.""We're worried about you."65

"I see my life as a story: at first I was very threatened. I escaped byrunning into the pond and going underwater. I held out for a long time,long enough, although once when I did pop up I got shot at. I went
under again--Iong enough to be in a later age, a different time and place.
I come up. It feels quiet now, safe now. I go to a house where I feel attracted; a woman is there I want to see. To leave, we have to climb out
the second story window down an escape, because of her husband, whowants to continue to possess her. But I want to leave, and she follows
me. We go out on a road, which is a ledge, a narrow ledge of ourselves.
To the right is an enormous drop; to our left, a sheer cliff wall. We arefollowing the path to Amazonia.""Where's Amazonia?"
lilt's an erotic hillside in Brazil. It's a scenario.
"A scenery? A Brazil scenery?""Huh. It's women, all kinds of women, egg women, crying young egg\,lirls growing up in so many shapes and sizes, checked and cracked, whogrew up in so many conditions but together at last. Not sorted out into'
hierarchies, you might say ... or I might say, anyway ... anarchy and variety are our beginning characteristics.
Silence. Then, "Your generation has had a much better opportunity to
associate with each other from different social, religious, and economic
backgrounds." Wow! She understands. "Then there's psychologicalbackgrounds and astrological backgrounds ... !" I have to add.
"Let's go."On the way we stop to pick up Daro, a young woman who wants aride with me to Oregon. Mayas well start early. Although I don't know
Daro at this point, I know that with her along, I won't be outnumbered. I
associate her as one on my path.
Daro smiles calmly and swings in the front seat of my bug. Mom anddad are in back . Her vibrant brown eyes beam familiarity.
"Why do women wear beards these days?" asks dad. Oh no, he has
noticed Daro's strong stray chin hairs. Daro looks at me suddenly and ,then turns around to the back seat. "Why don't you?"
Mom comes in here, rendering a textbook lecture on hormonalbalances in each sex. She remembers a dark-haired girlfriend from highschool who had had chin hair. I glance over at Daro's shoulder, covered
with glistening reddish-dark hair. "Was that the one who didn't want
you to get married, mom?" I pipe up. "Yes, that was the one."lilt's defiance," says dad. Dad still believes in some of the hierarchiesof family and society.
"Defiancel It takes courage to be ourselves in a society with its overpowering demands for a certain lookl"
Mom agrees. Dad goes on, "You'd be safer on the streets if your appearance conformed. That's why ,the Jews got away from wearing
payess [side curls], yarmulkahs, and black robes. Why do you think? I
see some women walking around in ripped dirty jeans. People aren'ttolerant. They'll attack you if you look different."
I can tell dad is recalling his boyhood 'in eastern Poland. He knows
what it is like to be hated because of how you look. He is trying to warn
II

II

66

us compassionately, but I am pretty sure he is offending Daro, whostares down at her velvet jeans patches.
"How you look is not reason for men to attack women," says mom .
"Yes, but it makes you stand out, that's when people attack you,when they think you hate them .""We're into love, not hate, dad .""The world isn't ready for love."
I stare out along the gorgeous coastline. What is the world ready for,
then?
"Let's pull over," I say, and I pick a beach, a pull-in near an artichokefield. Beyond that, there is a promontory with a lighthouse on the end.
" Can you pick any beach?" "Yes," I assure them, "that is what I
always do." They have not been to a Pacific beach before. Daro bounds
out over the dunes as soon as we stop. Mom and dad settle faces down
on a blanket. Dad goes to sleep, and mom reads a Country Womenmagazine I gave her. She unzips the back of her sun-dress. Only the skinaround her neck is freckled and tan. Dad's whole back is dark-red
bronze, like their faces. The contrast with their white hair strikes me .
Mom's blue eyes sparkle out to me. Together with t hem at last on a
Pacific beach, we are a flock of water-sharers. No one else is on thebeach, just us refugees from the East--and Daro. Here the ocean is notblocked into swimming areas like the Middle Atlantic, no boardwalks, nosaltwater taffy stands, no screaming rides. Just dunes, wildflowers, cliff
walls, spun sponge rocks, phosphorescent caves. A freshwater stream-flowing through a crater of sand nearby. Around us--trails of seagull
feathers and transparent sacs of jelly.
Daro reappears, examining the purple sac inside one, a glob of jelly
fish, watching the bubbles blow within it. She hands me a feather andsinks down on the blanket, resting her hand on my knee. Mom on myother side reaches her hand around me to touch Daro. Her hand doesn't
quite reach so she wiggles around and moves up an inch so she canreach. Daro's self-absorption is like soft tissue wrapped around a sharp
object. Mom wants to make up for the car conversation . Dad decides totell a joke. "Once there was a kid who dared her father to eat half aworm: 'I'll eat half if you eat half.' The father takes up the dare and eats
half the worm. He gives the other half to the kid, but the kid says, 'You
ate the wrong half!'" Daro likes this story and laughs, bowing her headover my lap, laughing.
"1 didn't mean anything before about how you look, honey, I was justtalking." Dad's laryngitic kindly voice. He has a cold. Daro looks at him
and relaxes. He is a grandfather, and tired, smiling inside his thinning
curly mop of white hair, his red skin criss-crossed with lines.
"Mom and dad used to be farmers, Daro, now they are gypsies, likeus." I want her to know them, to feel safe and accepted with them , as Ido, because I feel how suspicious she is of parents. Later, I discover she
is more like them than I will ever be. Those three are of the earth, and I
am of the air. For years I resisted mom and dad, not just their parental intonations, but as representatives of the material plane itself. The
maintenance of a real farm . They had long ago freely admitted to not be67

ing philosopher-poets--my one requirement for the people I live with--but
bread-and-butter folks, the people who keep the home front repaired . I
was a little Rimbaud monster hatched from the cosmic egg, seeking visions. Later, I learned that air needs the protection of earth, and theearth needs the air to breathe. We unite in the sight of the water and thefire. It would be neat to stay and have a camp fire on the beach.
"1 wish I hadn't felt so separated from you two for so long. We could
have shared alot more.""You wouldn't unlock your door," says mom.
"You didn't ask the right questions.""We didn't realize you felt separated . Parents assume they can tell
what's going on, they don't ask questions," says dad.
"Your father didn't converse with you, draw you out, did he, dad?"
Dad exhales sharply, like Are you kidding? His father was a rabbi fromthe Old Country, not attentive to the psychology of childhood.
"You know," says mom, "my mother always asked alot of questions
and I resented it. I kept my distance from you. I didn't want to intrude
like that.""Oh, I'm a bird, I love like a bird," I say. What is the use of going overthe past, the years I spent behind a closed door, a little alcove where I
wrote things I never admitted to and gazed at the pond from my attic
window. "1 was a bird, trapped in an attic." I laugh. And then lapse intobroody silence. Daro smiles brightly sparkling brown eyes at me andreaches around, tentatively touching my shoulder. I reach around mom
and knead her shoulders. Smooth the little knots. Imagine she is~doing
the same to me. Dad goes back to sleep. I concentrate on breathing inand out. Mom looks over the Country Women magazine I gave her, anissue on "older women." After awhile she says, "What about older
men? I don't want to leave my boyfriend." And puts her arm around
dad's sleeping form. I don't know; I don't know. My eyes feel tired,either from the sun or from uncried tears. When am I going to be withwhomever I should be with? And when am I going to be wherever I
should be? And they, who have each other only, where can they settle
down, their new Jerusalem? Not in the same direction as Amazonia. We
are cultural refugees together for only a few weeks each year, on our
separate roads. Nuovev Jasmine is gone, the pond a swamp again. I
haven't been back, but I saw that in a dream . Never again can we skinny
dip, boat, or skate on it. The pond is shrunk and dirty, receded from thepier, ukky. The man who bought it turned it into a sewage disposal for
his trailer park.
I jump up, facing the vast expanse before us. I want to swim; I rip off
my clothes and run down into the tide. Raising my arms high and jumping, a tremendous wave crests beneath me. There is only the Adventure
left, only the quest for a new native land. Look at them on the shore,
here for only one moment do we inhabit the same reality, here at land'send, mom, dad, Daro and me in the same shot, the same frame. Click!
Over the dunes a man in street dress appears. He says, "This isn't a
public beach, it's my beach." So we have to leave here. Dad wants to go
anyway, he's not feeling that well. I slip into my soft gym pants, but the68waist drawstring is lost down its slot. I feel tired, I want to flop down, notleave. I feel like a baby, wanting to cry in frustration because I can 't get
the string to come through the slot. To scream and cry like a baby .
"Mom ... 7""You do it with a safety pin. Here. " She stands in front of me, patiently threading the knot through the opening. I stand silently watching , likea pacified toddler. I can see the lighthouse behind her, at the edge of thepromontory. Victorious, finished, she stands straight and smiles . Sardonically, she says, "Your mother is a light housekeeper ... "Virgo woman, steadiness and continuation in seas of change, I saluteyou.
© Thyme S. Seagull

Openings
For Carolyn and Marianne

The three of us sit
by the river,
the windblows across our blouses,
our breasts,skims the waterglintof waves,
fills round sails of small boats
that passthat leanacross the water.
Our laughing is partof the wind and talk;you talk of the men you will leavefor each other;when you kissyour breasts touch
like lips and tender hands.
Clouds blow across the sun,air skims my skin,and there is something unseen
in the windthat fills me.

-Melanie Perish

69

The Double Pink Sphinxes(after a painting of my twinsister and i my mother madefor her mother, 1951)
i am not afraid to tell you this: i sucked her thumb
thru the bars, she mine/ 'til we tumbled into mother lap
i lived with her as fast and muteas Siamese cherries
blood on the same day/neither spoke ofthe spoil of tongue
the man rape of our world
we were not the birth fat son
and i am almost sexless for what i have learnedof the womb/ the doubleedge of death in this life
i moved first to her/crawl chub crawl
she to me as mother laugh til cried to see thedelight
i have found no man who understoodand women as hard put
to not fear what my life thru my eyes showsthat i could have let her kill herself
my guilt, murderer as wellor is it madness to presume
it was out of my head:i was not capable of stopping
what rape had touched the chemicaltransformation. womb crazed - the father's drug
to suicide
i know now / i felt the same swell
but could not name at seventeen
i lived enclosed virginal as deathi moved towards her flying home
at Easter, knowing something dead wrong
but mother thought it me
making life size men in the sandwatching the waves eat them up
she stood removed/ i could not speak
our tongues stood between us
my feelings of not being a twin
it was too latethose who knew spoke nothing out
those who heard her did not trust the wordand our mother heard nothing
who had lived it before and before
heard nothing i tell you
heard nothing-mh north70

Sisters(for Sharon)
you might come into my house and not know this, but
i will tell you because i may come into your houseand someone, a stranger to me
susceptible, kind
will say, "is this your sister?"you will not have thought, having conjured
a mother, not your mother, but a motherof specifications fulfilling to you as
your mother's were lacking
but a sister?
and i, because i had a perfect sister
am thought to be your sister oras in the special case of Sharon.
am wanted by her as a sisterand in the first instancelike with Janet, this happens:
Janet, much taller
larger boned than i, not in anyway resembling each otherthough both Aries, and i went to get milk and butter
at a neighbor's housein the kitchen that kind black woman asked
was i her sisteri, overwhelmed,
wanted to stay, ask her why she had asked
wanted to hold to the momentthat issued my sister again
Janet said no
we did not talk of it
but my sister is stilla constant changeling i am just discerning
telling me something about sisters
i am trying to grasp
her identical shape taking other shapes,
fooling the susceptible eye.

-mh north

Jean-Paul Sartre as a NO
to Womenby Peggy Holland

Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look thetruth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity.
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that wemust draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.
-Simone de Beauvoir

Jean-Paul Sartre has for the past thirty years been in the forefront of
the French existential movement. Through his liberal political stance andhis much publicized relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre has
gained the reputation of being a politically astute and conscious man.
His declaration of support for the French women's movement has contributed to this reputation, and no doubt influenced some women in his
favor. Women's acceptance of Sartre has gone so far that, at times, his
philosophy has been uncritically included in Feminist Studies courses.
In this article I would like to show that though one might gain afavorable impression of Sartre through a knowledge of his politicalassociations, when one looks at his philosophy a wholly different picture
emerges. I will rely primarily on Being and Nothingness, Sartre's main
philosophical treatise, in which he discourses on the obscenity of thefemale sex and describes women as "holes" and as "the slimy." I will
also show that though Simone de Beauvoir in her philosophical work
The Ethics of Ambiguity partially agrees with Sartre's philosophy, in her
monumental feminist work The Second Sex she opposes the kind of objectification which misogynism represents..
The following quote in which Sartre succinctly describes the relationship of the oppressors to the oppressed leaves no doubt as to his
understanding of the implications of 'Oppression. He writes:
In a prohibition or a veto, for example, the human being denies a futuretranscendence .. . lt constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility
which another human reality projects as its possibility . For that reason it must arisein the world as a No; it is as a No that the slave first apprehends the master, or thatthe prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching him. There areeven men (e.g. caretakers, overseers, gaolers), whose social reality is uniquely that
72 of a No .. .'It is my contention that the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre is, forwomen, essentially a No.
In his philosophy Sartre divides being into two categories. Being-foritself is that being which is what it is not and is not what it is; in otherwords, it is simply being which is always moving and transcending. To
this he contrasts being-in-itself, which coincides with itself and does notdesire or incorporate change. Being-in-itself is the being of mere things.
Obviously, within these categories, women's being is best described as
being-for-itself. However, men, acting in bad faith and under the guiseof nature, have made a patriarchal world 2 within which the situation of
women is that of the Other. We have been prohibited the exercise of our
freedom, cut off from our transcendence, denied the "power to nameourselves [and] the world,"3 and given such debilitating names as"passive." This has occurred because men, seeing women as the Other,have attempted to lock us into this mode of being (actually non-being),
trying to make us like being-in-itself. t
Sartre, in his philosophy, which reflects the historical reality of patriarchy, has attempted to make women appear as objects and to push ourexistence out of the realm of transcendent being. He presents man as
The Human, compares woman to him, realizes that she is different, andasserts that this difference is a lack in woman--naming her the Other. Bymeans of this philosophy, Sartre presents a resistance to women's
authentic becoming which is very different from the nothingness, absurdity, ambiguity, and. responsibility of the human situation; it is manmade. In promoting this philosophy of oppression through denial, he has
substantiated a lie.
Sartre claims that his philosophy is "a doctrine which makes humanlife possible."4 As I pointed out above, he divides being into being-initself which is glued to itself, and being-for-itself which is the being of
consciousness and does not coincide with itself. Because being-for-itself
is free it sets up projects and through action is always transcending its
situation. As he says in Being and Nothingness, "human reality ... is achoice of being,S and "Human reality is its own surpassing toward what
it lacks; it surpasses itself toward the particular being which it would be if
it were what it is."6 This human freedom is based on the belief thatessence does not precede existence; to presume otherwise would be to
Imply a human nature and determinism.
On this point Simone de Beauvoir agrees with Sartre. For she points
out in The Ethics of Ambiguity that "freedom can not will itself without
aiming at an open future."7 As it is, individuals are thrown into theworld, surrounded by nothingness, and make themselves. All areresponsible to engage themselves in the world, to make choices, to set
up projects, and to act in a way that is continually disclosing their being.
However, some may try to escape the anguish of this re$ponsibility. SartSartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 111. Sartre writes, "So far as my being is concerned,
there is no difference between being and non-being if I am cut off from my project."73tre calls this attempt to flee being "bad faith." Essentially, bad faith is alie to oneself about the ambiguity which characterizes humanness.
THE OBSCENITY OF THE FEMALE SEXWhat I am suggesting is that from reading Sartre's philosophicalworks one can see that, for him, this human existence and the freedom
which characterizes it apply to men only. Women's situation issomething quite different. In Being and Nothingness when presenting
his psychoanalysis of "things," Sartre writes:
It is only from this standpoint that we can pass on to sexuality . The obscenity of thefeminine sex is that of everything which 'gapes open.' It is an appeal to being as allholes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her intoa fullness of being by penetration and dissolution [italics mine]. Conversely woman
senses her condition as an appeal precisely because she is 'in the form of ahole' .. . Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours
the penis--a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration .. .the hole ... is anobscene expectation, an appeal to the flesh .'For Sartre, the physical difference between men and women becomesa physical lack in women, and from there slides into an ontological difference and lack in the female. In referring to "the obscenity of thefeminine sex," Sartre implies that obscenity is intrinsic to being female,that the obscene precedes or coincides with female existence. Thus forthe female, existence does not precede essence, since it is not that we
make ourselves obscene or take on the form of a hole, but rather that weare in the form of a hole, and are therefore obscene by our natures.
In the passage cited above Sartre claims that being "in the form of ahole" renders women" an appeal to being as all holes are." He thereby
throws women out of the realm of being-for-itself (transcendent being)by contending that women must rely on an existent outside of ourselves,
namely men, for being.
This philosopher not only believes the female to be lacking, but
believes that this lack is her very "being." Could the female exist without
the male? It appears not since we require "a strange flesh" to"penetrate" us in order to be transformed "into a fullness of being." Or if
we did exist without the male our existence would not be that of a complete being; rather we would be a form waiting to have life blown into
us.t However, what would this life, this being that women are toreceive, consist of? Sartre uses the words "penetration and dissolution"
to describe that which is required to transform women into "a fullness."
Webster's New World Dictionary describes penetration as "the depth towhich something penetrates, as a projectile, into a target, or a militaryforce into enemy territory." Sartre's language, then, evokes the comparison of a woman to a "target" and "enemy territory." Could it be that
Sartre is describing the war of the 'sexes with a new twist? Is he insinuating that women should see men/projectiles/military force as ourtThis is not really an original idea if one recalls the myth of the male god creating thefemale form and instilling life in her with his breath.

74

saviors, our hope for "fullness of being"? Just what kind of transformation is wrought by "penetration"? Could Sartre be creating a philosophy
corresponding to the rapist "It's what every woman wants / needs" mentality?
One may find clues through understanding the other word he uses to
describe the transformation into a "fullness of being" which women require:
Dissolution--a) a breaking up or into parts; disintegration . b) the termination as of a.. . union . c) the ending of life; death .'Indeed it appears that the result of transformation through penetrationand dissolution is dismemberment and death. Deceitfully, Sartre has advocated the destruction of women under the guise of "being."
So here one finds Sartre's "No" to women. By claiming that womenrequire "transformation" through "a strange flesh," he has lied about
our being, our nature, and our form. His aim is prevention--preventing
women from realizing our freedom; his method is deceit, for he attempts
to deceive us about our nature by asserting that we are obscene. Sartre
does not merely place women's transcendent potential in question. He
abolishes it. Insidious as this is, he is not satisfied with expressing his
negative views. His object is to have women internalize this negation.
For he goes on to say that not only do men see women as an appeal tobeing--but that women too see ourselves as an appeal--("Wo01an senses
her condition as an appeal", etc.; see quotationS).
In opposition to this Simone de Beauvoir has pointed out that:She does not experience this absence as a lack; evidently her body is, for her, quite
complete; but she finds herself situated in the world differently from the boy; and aconstellation of factors can transform this difference, in her eyes, into an
inferiority .•0

One of the factors in this constellation is the sort of attitude revealed in
Sartre's philosophy of female reduction. If a woman sees herself as alack or an obscene appeal, it is because she has internalized phallic
ideology of this type.
Moreover, what is to be said of Sartre's claim that the female being " inthe form of a hole" is "above all" the' cause of the castration complex . It
seems that he is skipping a step here. The castration complex can only
occur in a man since his penis is a protrusion which can be cut off. If thiswere not the case the vagina could not appear to him as a voracious
mouth. Furthermore, there is no reason for the vagina to appear as avoracious mouth or as an appeal to the female since it is not going todevour any part of her body, but is, rather, a part of it.
Sartre degrades female existence to that of a gaping open hole. According to his philosophy we are not beings who, through a relationshipto ourselves, make ourselves; indeed, it seems that we are not selves. Instead we are an expectation which requires the male . As Simone deBeauvoir has pointed out, within patriarchal ideology, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute--she is the Other. "11 By degrading women, Sartre is boosting his (and men's) opinion of himself.
75

THE HOLE, THE SLIMY AND LOVE
In approaching this section on "sexuality" Sartre describes the modeof being of the female as opposed to that of the male. He begins bydiscussing "holes" and "the slimy." Both of these, for him, represent
the female . Concerning the former he writes:
The hole is originally presented as a nothingness 'to be filled' with my own flesh; ... lt
presents itself to me as the empty image of myself. I have only to crawl into it inorder to make myself exist in the world which awaits me. The ideal [italics mine] of
the hole is then an excavation which can be carefully moulded about my flesh insuch a manner that by squeezing myself into it and fitting myself tightly inside it, I
shall contribute to making a fullness of being exist in the world . Thus to plug up ahole means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude ofbeing may exist.. . 12

Once again Sartre refers to the threatening mouth and the castration
complex in general. He claims there is a sacrifice and some fear involved
for the male in filling up these holes; however, there are also rewards.
The hole gives itself in order to help him exist in the world. He becomesby using it. By filling holes, he is able to be fulfilled. Indeed, "the ideal of
the hole" is that which will make men's being exist in the world. Since anideal is a "model or archetype," Sartre is persisting in his project tomodel archetypal females; that is, women who are useful to men.
Pursuing his slick theme further, Sartre writes the following edifying
description of "the slimy" which for him is:... like the flattening of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back ... theslimy gives us .. .the impression that it is a being which can be possessed."

Further on he writes that "the slimy":... gives me the impression I am perpetually destroying it.. .lt is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking ... it draws me to it as the bottom of a precipicemight draw me. "Again the negative side of the world is personified by the female. Alignedwith the slimy, the hole, and a precipice, she represents nothingness. By"internal negation"t Sartre has set up a situation in which the woman isnamed empty, though through a man she may hope to become complete. If this ruse is successful, the woman, believing that she requires aman, will abdicate her freedom and replace her project of authentic
becoming with a project of union with him. Indeed, this is what Sartre
defines as love:
He wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom
should no longer be free ... he wants this freedom to be captured by itself, to turnback upon itself, as in madness, as in a dream, so as to will its own captivity. This
captivity must be a resignation that is both free and yet chained in our hands . .
tlbid., p. 243. Sartre writes, "By an internal negation we understand such a relation between two beings that the one which is denied to the other qualifies the other at the heart ofits essence--by absence ... the denial itself comes to influence the inner structure of thepositive being who has been denied the quality ... lt characterizes me within; as negative it isa real quality of myself.. .and this negative quality will explain my melancholy as well as, forexample, my failures in the world ."76

Further on he draws the obvious conclusion that:... if the Other loves me then .. .
I must be the absolute end .t

Sounds like Story of 0 does it not? Half the human population has now
been assigned the role of this captive Other whose transcendence projects itself toward the lover who is set up as her limit. This relationship issimilar to that of the slave and master though it is more insidious andmay be more demanding. Because it is under the guise of love, nature,and choice, it becomes the resignation of self, mind, and body. The
woman, thinking that salvation lies in union with a man, will focus all her
energy on him. However, her efforts at transcendence will be turned toimmanence when he uses this same energy to make a world without andagainst her.
AN ANESTHESIA OF DETERMINISM
Simone de Beauvoir has said of woman, "If she did not exist men
would have invented her. They did invent her."ls Indeed, I think this iswhat Sartre, and men in general, have done. Aided by their brand of
preventive medicine (prevention of freedom, subjectivity, etc. in women)males have performed an operation on women by which they remove
what is fearful to them and replace it with what will be useful to them.
Dulled under the influence of an anesthesia of determinism, women accept the prescribed antidote to femaleness, thereby relinquishingthemselves under the false hope of something better, more fulfilling.
Through this manipulation it becomes possible for men to use women inorder to lay hold of the world and nature.
As Sartre said in Existentialism and Human Emotions:Love is Cl fundamental relation of the for-itself in the world ... the woman represents
only a conducting body which is placed in the circuit. t

His use of the passive voice is telling; for example the phrase "a conducting body which is placed" certainly does not inspire an image of an active woman . Rather, having heen rendered helpless and hopeless, she ismerely an inert utensil for his appropriation. If a woman is "only a contSartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 479, and 481 .
This concept of love in Sartre's presentation holds some very interesting similarities tothe relationship of oppressor and oppressed which Simone de Beauvoir develops in The
Ethics of Ambiguity. She shows that it is the activity of the oppressor to continuously feed
himself on the transcendence of the oppressed.
tSartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, p. 60.
Men use women as connections to the natural world . At the same t ime men makesociety in such a way that in order for women to be part of it, t hey must use men as a connection. "At the same time I present the world to the beloved and I try to constitute myself
as the necessary intermediary between her and the world; I manifest by my acts infinitely
varied examples of my power over the world (money, position, 'connections,' etc .). In thefirst case I try to constitute myself as an infinity of depth , in the second case to identify
myself with the world." from Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p . 485. If women accept men
as the "intermediary," the place they will have is the one assigned to them .

nducting body" it is because the patriarchs have had the power to destroy
her, or as Sartre has misnamed it--"to transform" her into a "fullness of
being."An understanding of the dynamics of internal negation is essential to acomprehension of Sartre's method (see +page 77):
By an internal negation we understand such a relation between two beings that theone which is denied to the other qualifies the other at the heart of its essence--byabsence .

Sartre has qualified and defined women in terms of men. Women, forhim, equal non-men. It is our not being men that defines us, it is our lackof maleness that limits us. Naturally if one is defined in terms of what one
lacks, one is also defined in terms of what one needs. Men equal being,
women are not men therefore women need men for being. Sartre's
definition of women describes us in terms of "is not" and tends to produce the same effect he describes when discussing the homosexual. The
friend/critic who says:' He's just a paederast,' removes a disturbing freedom from a trait and aims athenceforth constituting all the acts of the Other as consequences following strictlyfrom his essence. 16

This "just" accompanies every "she," "her," and "woman" into theworld. This "just" attempts to qualify us at the core of our being.
Through a malicious distortion Sartre has, in his writings, reduced all
female being to (only) an appeal, the docile, the slimy, a hole, a body;(only) a woman. He has created a philosophy in support of a
misogynistic society.
This expression of misogynism behind the facade of aphenomenological ontology which accepts no human nature, is a classic
examp'le of deceit and bad faith.
To deceive is to use the other as an object, for it is to make him [sic] an instrument
to an end he [sic] has not chosen . 17

Since the individual would never will the suppression of her own consciousness and freedom, this suppression must originate as a deception
and ruse outside of herself. And as Sartre has pointed out, the deceivermust be conscious of exactly what is being suppressed:
I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in mycapacity as the one deceived ... 1must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal
it more carefully . .. '·The truth which Sartre is turning away from is that women are not holes
for men to use in order to make themselves; neither are we conducting
bodies to be used as connections in their appropriation of the world; nor
are we appealing to men in order to be made into a fullness of being. If
men have made us serve these purposes, it has been by disconnecting us
from our own projects. They have u~ed their freedom to deny ours.
Sartre's philosophy is a blatant expression of the prevailing false
mythology about women, our nature and our existence. It is a negative78

mythology, and the image it creates amounts to a determinism. It has
been a No, a prohibition and a veto to women. Sartre has described us
negatively and he has negated us . He has ascribed limits to us whichhave their source in lacks which he has assigned to us. He has done thisunder the guise of a philosophy of freedom. However, once one has thecourage to look, the concealment, like the emperor's new clothes, turns
out to be transparent and one sees a man who hates and fears women .
As this man has said:
Every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, every man who sets
up a determinism, is a dishonest man . I.
IJean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology,translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York : Philosophical Library, 1956; Pocket Books,
1975), pp. 86-87.
' Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women 's Liberation(Boston : Beacon Press, 1973),
On p. 15, Daly writes , " The roles and structures of patriarchy have been developedand sustained in acco~d3nce with an artificial polarization of human qualities into the tradi tional sexual stereotypes. The image of the person in author ity and the accepted
understanding of 'his' role has corresponded to the eternal masculine stereotype, wh ich
implies hyper-rationality (in reality, frequently reducible to pseudo-rationality) , 'objectivity,'
aggressivity, the possession of dominating and manipulative attitudes towards persons andthe environment, and the tendency to construct boundaries between self (and those identified with the self) and 'the Other.' The caricature of human being which is presented bythis stereotype depends for its existence upon the opposite caricature--the eternalfeminine . This implies hyper-emotionalism, passivity, self-abnegation, etc ."For an excellent history of the social degeneration from matriarchy to patriarchy see,
Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (New York : Putnam, 1971).
'Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 8.
'Jean -Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York : PhilosophicalLibrary, 1957), p. 10.
' Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p . 768.
"Ibid., p. 139.
' Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, translated by Bernard Frechtman(Sacaucus, N.J . : Citadel Press, 1972) , p. 71 .
'Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 782.
'Webster's New World Dictionary, 1974, s.v . " dissolution ."10 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H.M . Parshley (New York : Knopf,
1971), p . 272.
"de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p . xvi.
"Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 781 .
"Ibid., p. 775.
14Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 776.
"de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p . 186.
16Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 108.
" Hazel E. Barnes, " Personal Pronouns," in An Existentialist Ethics; ed. Hazel E. Barnes(New York : Vintage Books, 1967), p . 357.
taSartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 89.
19Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, pp . 44-45.

79

o

/\ .

carof'> 'H

drawing by caron

80

WHAT IS A LESBIAN?

Excerpt fromBERRIGAN
by GINGERLOX"Linda Framer's parents will crap, Evelyn, absolutely keel over!""Good . We'll give them a new 'Family Forum' topic. Maybe we' ll evenend up in their Christmas letter. I can see our blurb now: ' Dear Friends :we've spent the better part of this year incredulous and disgusted overthe unexpected relationship between Evelyn Walker and a very questionable Bingham woman, Berrigan . And to think Linda and Evelyn used
to be in the same swim club! Whatever happens to all the good girls
these days?'""You were really in the same swim club?""Are you kidding? Linda and I were the water wizards of Hartford's
Country Club! We got breasts before anyone else did and so we were
better floaters. Being an aqua-deb has made me what I am today!""What you are today is in hot water. You've been branded a dyke
sympathizer, which is much worse than being an Indian giver or even a
commie pinko. Evelyn, aren 't you worried about this affecting yourheavy dater reputation?""I'm more worried about how it affects my allowance from my father,his honor The Mayor!"
Despite the rumors and gossip and questions, Berrigan and Evelyn had
made an instant connection and were determined to develop a friend ship . They became kite flying beer buddies, sharing 3-dip sundaes andattempted tune-ups on Evelyn's old VW. Evelyn loved any hint of adventure; Berrigan was drawn into her risk-taking schemes . The women offered each other an unassuming support and insulation from collegiate
trivia. At once friends and comrades in no cause larger than good times,
they were not afraid to touch but dispensed with further analysis of it ....
*****

Berrigan located the name and address of a women 's bookstore in
New York and from their mailing list obtained copies of several popular
political newspapers. These she shared with Evelyn, whose natural intellectual curiosity led her to devour this new kind of writing perspective.
They marveled at the many issues-with in-issues they had never considered, and the sophistication obvious in some of the more "slick"
literary magazines. Their favorite section of these public.ations were the"coming out" stories. All manner of techniques were exhibited in these,from maudlin melodrama to terse accounts of the "pain and searching"
to candid remembering of the bliss of first love.
81

In reading a particularly graphic coming out story, Evelyn admitted tohaving been naive about some lesbian sexual practices which weredetailed in the story. Berrigan chided her, disbelieving her lack ofknowledge.
"I never claimed I was an expert on lesbians, you know. To know one
is not to know all things on the subject!""As a matter of fact, you've never told me how you learned about lesbians, Evelyn. So fess up! Was it hinted at darkly in a psychology class?
Or giggled about in P. E. ?""No, nothing as perverse as that. Frankly, as I recall, I had a girlfriend
when I was 8 and we loved to spend the night together. We'd hug andkiss and spend hours in the shower trying to snap each other with a wet
towel. That's probably the only unconditional trust I've ever felt withanother person and I didn't even know it! It's too bad I was not thegenius at 8 that I am today ... ""But the first time I actually found out about the word lesbian was during my sophomore year of high school, when I joined a drama group.
Pep club and cheerleader weren't for me. Too much sweating for a
debutante, after all! Debate was a prestige ultimate, but I couldn't makethat grade so I went into duet acting and giving readings ... 1 had a personal battle going with two junior debaters: Christie Fargess and Anatole
Benchley. Christie touted her good looks to everyone and Anatole
th ought she was hot shit because of her name. They were gooddebaters, but they were such snipsl""Anyway, they used to tease me because"I thought I was hot shit overmy breasts and swim club but I hadn't made it into debate . We were all
talented but obnoxious as hell in our struggles with pubescent urgencies,zits, and prestige.
"Talk about competitive! Drama and debate was all part of the sameclass and sabotage ran high: we stole each other's notebooks rightbefore a test, and Anatole even went so far as to put a sack of sour garbage in my locker. I'm sure she paid a freshman to do that--she herself
would never handle garbage, not even for revenge on mel But ourfavorite trick was to try and run each other's hose. One time, Christie
and Anatole grabbed me just as class dismissed and the hall filled withstudents. In the rush, no one could see them give my garter belt two
quick scissor snips. In the aftermath, I was standing red-faced in thehallowed hallway of the Hartford Academy for Girls with my hose coiled
merciless around my ankles ."Berrigan, laughing, commented, "God, I bet you were embarrassed!"
Evelyn nodded.
"Luckily I was not the only underdog in the drama class. I had a friend
in misery, Holly Marple, daughter of a Westinghouse VP. She was moreexperienced than I in the matter of boys, and so when we weren't busy
preguessing the next act of sabotage Anatole and Christie might try, wewere discussing sex and how far to go. Holly was on the verge of going
all the way, despite my counsel that she hold off.

82

"After an evening of insistent jostling in the back seat of a car with aguy she thought she loved, Holly came to me upset and weepy . We
stepped into a stairwell so our conversation would not be intercepted byany of our teachers, those ardent guardians of our proper growth anddevelopment.
"Who should appear to witness this exchange of compassion but ourarch-rivals, Christie and Anatole. Sighting us in our cubbyhole of
distress, they chanted, 'Thesbians, thesbians, you two are thesbians! ' A
tearful Holly grew indignant and challenged them.
'''You don't even know what a thesbian is, so go blow off!'"Anatole snorted. 'You're the ignorant ones! If you knew what thesbians were, you wouldn't be hugging in the stairwell!''''We weren't hugging!' I stormed. 'Holly's upset about ... ' whereupon
Holly's hand clapped securely over my mouth.
'''Thesbians had to live on an island away from everyone else because
they were so dirty,' Christie told us in a 'nyeah-nyeah' voice . 'Ails they
did was wear gowns and su ck grapes. That's why people call themfruits! They just laid around kissing each other and playing on lutes !''''Yeah, lutes!' Anatole agreed. 'They were burned in England for being nasty and kidnapping children and robbing old ladies! In mythology,
Zeus found out his own daughter was a thesbian and turned her face into
a bunch of snakes!""I thought then that Holly might forget all her well-coaxed manners
and jump on Anatole and pull her hair. But the juniors figured they'dmade their point and ran up the stairs, echoing back at us, 'Thesbians,
thesbians, faces full of snakes!'"I asked Holly if there was such a thing as a thesbian but she wasn't
sure. 'But I don't think you better ask anyone either.' Knowing me, I
wasn't about to ponder long. Just as Holly ignored my advice not tosurge into womanhood too soon, I ignored her advice to keep the tauntof thesbian to myself.
"I went to the source of answers for all my questions, my mother. She
was good about not making me feel stupid, even though I'm su re I jolted
her by discussing such things as farting in the movies. I wasn't sure she
was ready to decipher thesbians to me but I had to know. I knew I could
count on that secret liberal part of her to enlighten me. Underneath thatwell manicured, golf-at-nine/bridge-at-four society matron burned aspark of free thought! This aspect of herself she shared with me only
when we were completely alone and my father was nowhere in sight. In
such rare moments, I found out wonderful things about her: she believedin reincarnation, loved unicorns, and avidly read history books about
frontier settlement. 'How do you think our French Regency furniture
would have looked in a sod house?' she once joked with me.
"When I related my encounter with Christie and Anatole to her, omitting of course the true nature of Holly's dismay, Mother patted me withher cool hand.
'''Evelyn, girls will probably be jealous of you all your life. So you must
expect that they may be cruel . Envy has a way of making one short83

sighted . A thespian is a person who acts, like you, in drama. A lesbian isa woman who loves other women. Anatole and Christie have managed
ably to confuse the two: she told me.
"My mother's cool hand upon me was benediction for complete
resolve and safety. I asked her if lesbians were dirty and nasty lute
players and if it was true they were burned. Were they still burned? I'll
never forget what my mother told me .
'''Some people view anything different as evil and nasty: she told me.
'I don't know about the lutes; ttiey are a unique instrument with abeautiful sound. Lesbians probably were burned as witches and I guessthey still are, in a way. You know, burned by insults and judgments.
'''Sarah Bernhardt was a thespian, very famous and successful. She
had great strength as a dramatic artist, but was not made masculine by astrenuous career. I would be proud if you were like her. But I'm proud of
you anyway. '"Evelyn sat quietly for a moment when she finished her story, savoring
the memory of the conversation with her mother. Berrigan respected hersilence, saying nothing to interrupt her thoughts. Finally Evelyn said,"So that's my story on lesbian thespians.""There's a nice story there about mothers and daughters, too.""Uh huh . Come on. Let's 1=10 fly a kite!"
Berrigan by Gingerlox will be published by Naiad Press, September, 1978. Order from
Naiad Press' new address : 7800 Westside Drive, Weatherby Lake, Mo. 64152; $5.50 +15% postage / handling .

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84

The Priscilla Poems
Cresting
Ambushedby the night
Our open mouths
stripping moon silver
bodies spinning
light
angles going roundthe particulars of you
my tongue
remembers
Asleepthe air
pulsing between us
NamingEarly
you wake me:a mischievous
spark of orange dawn
claiming I've palmed slivers of color
from every cornerof the room
I'm being hugged by

After Autumn

the sunit's yourNo
mouth wet with lighthuing my body

CarefulNote the firstsmall bruises takecolor:
the upstart
voice you don 't swallow
my unready hands
Behind the casual rhythmsof ritual wait
silentreservoires :the two of us
will spring with the rain

-Jennifer Turner
85

RESPONSE:

Coercive Consensus
by Sarah L. Hoagland

In Sinister Wisdom 5 (Winter, 1978) Leigh Star named Lesbian
feminism the alter state of consciousness, a naming which focuses Lesbian feminism's opposition to patriarchy. She named consensus reality(the "normal," patriarchal state of consciousness) socially created andcoercively maintained. I want to explore this second naming further. I
pass through this speaking to clarify my perception so I'll know better
when I'm being dragged/lulled by (patriarchal) structures back into
(patriarchal) logic. l While Lesbian feminists realize an alter state of consciousness, we engage in a deadly minuet with madness. I and Leigh andmany others poise over an abyss with one foot in patriarchy and one in
Lesbian Nation. We face a precarious situation, all the more precarious
because we create a new reality; it does not yet exist in its entirety. I passthrough this speaking to regain my balance.
If patriarchal descriptions of reality persist as a matter of consensus (ifobjectivity is nothing but a collection of perceptions which agree), how
are these descriptions coercively maintained?

A TRAP
We face punk rock: The Sex Pistols, The Dead Boys, Elvis Costello,
The Runaways, The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads ... merely moreblatant than other male and male-identified rock. We face pornography:
snuff movies. (My blood runs cold as I think to myself, once a womyn is
tied up, what could she do to stop them?) We face the liberal defense ofsnuff movies or of Hustler Magazine as the ERA rides to defeat. We face
John Wayne characters who "know" that when a womyn says yes she's
a slut and deserves it, and that when a womyn says no, she means yes-to masculine is to abuse wimmin. Men name us objects of violence.
Men also name us objects of protection . The boys depict us asneeding special protection. But of course, someone in need of protection must first be made conceptually "vulnerable" (impotent). 2 Malerhetoric sets us up. Men perform the Glual role of protector/predator-pseudo opposing activities. These activities appear opposite because
they stand at opposite ends of a very narrow continuum within patriarchal framework, a framework of male power, control, potency. But theyeach depend on the other for existence. A man cannot be a predator
86unless there is something in need of protection. And he cannot protect
unless there is something "vulnerable" to predation . These concepts
structure reality and our understanding. 3 The boys appear to describe
reality when they talk of measures they must institute to "protect" us,but in fact they create a particular conceptual framework.
Any time the subject of wimmin arises, that conceptual framework
surfaces. When we demand equal rights, we engage in defending
ourselves. Yet our very demand contributes to the consensus : the"selves" we wind up defending are the product of patriarchal naming,
description, perception, and we soon discover they cannot be defended .
When a womyn says, "I have a right to defend myself against rapists,"or "I have a right to the control of my body," that "I" becomes a function of the language of patriarchal description, buried in the frameworkof violence and protection. In defending ourselves, we ask men to grant
the rights and responsibilities of autonomy to one they think dependent,passive, impotent--to one from their viewpoint incapable of autonomy .
To prove we do not fail into th3 category of wimmin deserving predation, we must seek male protection and approval. Black wimmin areespecially trapped by the pseudo-dichotomy of protection / predation :Daniel P. Moynihan formalized the theory of the Black Matriarch who
undermines the "Negro" family by "castrating" Black men .· Black wimmin are told that Black people will be subjugated so long as Black men
do not masculine Black wimmin. And Black feminists are accused ofdividing the Black community. But taming Black wimmin is the businessnot only of the Black .community but also of the dominant white maleculture. One sees efforts in every aspect of the mass media todomesticate Black wimmin, to capture their power, lest it continue to inspire white wimmin.
Any womyn, whether or not she attempts to attract a protector, may"attract" a predator. In"light of the facts of wife abuse and so-called incest (daughter rape), we now know that we cannot distinguish a protector from a predator save by what a man actually does at a given moment.
Nor can society in general: A womyn is regularly and without shame
held liable for her own rape. She is considered guilty until proven innocent. Even when she is "legally innocent," i.e., when the rapist is convicted, men around her hold her responsible, forcing her to deal defensively with her immediate situation, keeping her from understanding it inperspective. A womyn is the object of male passion and thus considered

the cause.
This confusion of object with cause of male passion pervades ourlives. A womyn who is the object, the target of male action, is notthereby the cause. In other areas of their lives, men maintain the distinction. They distinguish between object and cause when the object of theirattention is Mr. P. and a business deal, whereas the "cause" is their"good business sense" plus a desire for a deal, a desire not caused by
Mr. P.
Abused wives are the targets, and so considered the cause, of malepassion. Thus the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Women87blocked efforts last fall to establish battered wives' centers, arguing that
any increase in wife abuse results from the feminist movement which encourages wives to be "uppity" and so to incur the (deserved) wrath oftheir husbands.
Two hundred thousand Bengali wimmin felt the full force of male confusion/patriarchal substitution of cause for object. Bengali men held
their mothers, their sisters, their grandmothers, great-grandmothers,
wives, daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, aunts, great
aunts, nieces, grand-nieces, daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law, andmothers-in-law . all responsible for their own rapes in the Bangladesh
War. 5 In light of this evidence, we are tempted to say (agree) that wimmin need special protection.

CONSENSUS
Perception of reality is a matter of consensus in that certain "presuppositions," the foundation, go unquestioned, held in place by what surrounds them. They have no ultimate justification, nor do they justify, as
the conservative scientific approach suggests.
The conservative scientific approach holds that (1) fact ultimately
justifies our explanations (descriptions) of human behavior, (2) fact iscapable of exposing "errors" in our descriptions, and (3) scientists
achieve objectivity by removing all human valuation from their descriptions/ explanations.
Scientists who fall obviously short of objectivity are accused of"observer bias." But the majority of the members of the social science
community hold that "observer bias" is accidental rather than essential
to observation. And to achieve objectivity, scientists aim at impartiality:
They work to see themselves as qualitatively diff~rent from the objects of
their investigation. As a result, science establishes as objective andauthoritative the perspective of the scientist while, in the name of impartiality, excluding any reference to the perspective of the subject.
Consider the historical picture of slaves as irresponsible, lazy, shiftless,clumsy and so on. It does not include the perspective of Harriet Tubman
or Sojourner Truth. They are ignored as exceptions. Nor has it room for
explanations such as that of Lunsford Lane who said that in front ofwhites, he never appeared as intelligent as he really was. 6 Furthermore,certain presuppositions underlie the historical picture of slaves, for example, the idea of slaves as unintelligent, dull-witted beings-presuppositions which color the way we read fact. The act of breaking atool will be perceived one way if intelligence is attributed to the person
and another way if it is not.
Someone backed into a corner, trapped in servitude with no chance of
escape (the Underground Railroad operated only in the northern most of
the Southern states), acts to let herself know that at least she exists, acts
to assert her will as independent of that of her master. If nothing else,
she can slow him down (by breaking tools, for example). Her reaction to
her situation mayor may not be a planned act of survival, but it succeeds
88as an act of (immediate) survival only if her master does not perceive it assuch. Yet in the name of impartiality, white historians have avoided naming the acts of slaves which lend themselves to slave stereotypes,
Sabotage.
Perception of reality is a matter of consensus in that the foundation of
our judgment is not fact; rather, what counts as fact and what counts aserror is embedded in our judgments. We see behavior as qualitatively different depending on whether we attribute it to slaves or masters, anddepending on whether we attribute it to females or males. We've allcome across the list of corporate qualities: a businessman is aggressive,a businesswomyn is pushy; he's confident, she's conceited; he's enthusiastic, she's emotional. .. etc. 'To help me grasp some of the implications of the concept of consensus reality, one of Wittgenstein's remarks has proven invaluable: A foundation goes unquestioned', like an axis, held in place by what surrounds
it.7

On the traditional building block theory, a foundation is like a bedrock; itholds up, it justifies, all else.

scientific experimentation
scientific determination of fact
accurate (scientific) perception of fact
perception of fact

~

I

"'Z

fact
~- I
'--_ _ _ _ _ _ _~ _______ foundation

We can discover the foundation of patriarchy by attending not to fact
but to what goes t,mquestioned--our male-identification, the male mythof femininity. "Femininity" and "masculinity" are not empirical con89

cepts. They are not based on fact, they are not subject to refutation. a
Rather, they tell us how to read fact, they function as conceptual
categories to determine (for the unquestioning observer) our perceptionof female and male behavior. And they are held in place by what surrounds them .
For example, those who argue that wimmin have been conditioned tobe the way we are hold the male myth of femininity in place, like an axis.
The whole nature/nurture controversy fails to question that "way weare," accepting without challenge the male naming of wimmin as
passive. The burning issue concerns whether we are that way because of
our genetic makeup or because of our social conditioning. (In a sense, I
find myself, drawn to the geneticists; they imply that wimmin and Third
World men will forever remain wimmin and Third World men while thesocial conditionists hope that one day, with proper conditioning, we'll all
be white males.) Both sides of the nature/nurture dichotomy approachwimmin as a curious phenomenon, different from men , who need little
or no explanation, rather than investigating our behavior in terms of theandrocentric bind characterizing our situation, and with the presumptionthat wimmin are rational. Consequently, a patriarchal foundation goes
unnoticed, held in place, like an axis, by what surrounds it, by investigations designed to settle the controversy one way or the other. Withoutcertain presuppositions which stand fast for us and on which everythingelse turns, without this consensus, the controversy makes no sense.

COERCION
In Beyond God the Father Mary Daly noted that wimmin have had thepower of naming stolen from us. 9 The descriptions that pass for descriptions of wimmin's behavior are not our descriptions. These descriptions,which label men the norm and wimmin deviant,IO which define wimmin
in relation to men or not at all, II do not come from us. I reject accountsof wimmin's behavior as passive (just as I deny accounts of slave
behavior as clumsy, docile, etc.) These are not our names, our perceptions, our processes.
As Kate Millett pointed out 10 years ago, the categories of femininity
and masculinity are "based on the needs and values of the dominantgroup and dictated by what its members cherish in themselves and findconvenient in subordinates."12 We forget that Jewishness was once
named feminine. And not long ago, British anthropologists depicted
South African Blacks as feminine. "Femininity" is a conceptual category
which perpetuates existing power relationships, channeling energy ofthe "powerless" into the masculine ego. Nietzsche openly admits this,arguing that when a womyn demands power (Le., reclaims her own
power), she sheds her femininity and " vnlearns" her fear of man. Whensuch a womyn emerges, "the man in man ... is no longer desired by socie-ty."uConsensus reality is coercive in that the androcentric traps we face
throw us into the arms of predators to seek protection, thereby giving90

over our gynergy/power. Secondly, it is coercive in that our naming is
not our own. Thirdly, it is coercive in that language limits t hought tosome extent, and our language is androcentric and male supremacist.
Muriel Schulz traces the ways in which most neutral words for wimmin eventually acquired "debased connotations or obscene references
or both ."14 Julia Stanley proves that the terms for wimmin who relatesexually to men can be mapped on a semantic field with length of con tact and cost as parameters. As she points out, the stereotype of thesexually available womyn (1) provides a "model against which to judge
all wimmin good or bad, " based on our availability to men , and (2)asserts that wimmin relate only to males. 15 Julia Stanley and Susan Robbins show how androcentric perception operates in language,
perpetuating cultural values through sex-marked predicates assigned"on the basis of cultural assumptions regarding 'appropriate' behaviors
for [wimmin] and men," yielding cognitive gaps and negative semantic
spaces. 16 We haven't the vocabulary to express, exchange, develop certain ideas. The consensus thus becomes a conspiracy of silence .
To some extent, language limits thought.1 7 It institutionalizes t heperceptions and fantasies of those who control it. In learning t helanguage we internalize these perceptions and fantasies, the "presuppositions" of patriarchy. If we fail to detect and question them, we contribute to the consensus even in our speech . On the other hand, when
we do question the presuppositions, we do not (necessarily) shake theconsensus.
If we attempt to prove the presuppositions false, if we attempt to prove the stereotypes false, we snap back into patriarchal logic. As Julia
Stanley points out, the "truth or falsity of the stereotype is irrelevant, themere act of naming is sufficient in itself.18 For example, if we argue that
Blacks are not less intelligent than whites or that wimmin are not morepassive than men, we imply these statements make sense--that eventhough false, they are coherent and can be investigated.
Alternatively, if we simply reject the presuppositions, we do notundermine the consensus, instead men in power undermine our credibility. This is the fourth and most forceful way consensus reality is coercive:Those who have perceptions which would undermine the consensus arelabeled mentally ill. If we reject the presuppositions of consensus reality,
we may at first be treated as if we're mistaken. Those in power may evenmarshal "evidence," "fact," to prove our "error." However, because wequestion the foundation which colors perception of fact, the "facts" failto address the issue. As we continue to resist "correction," as we refuse
their "explanations," we are labeled mentally ill because we reject"fact." While objectivity is nothing but a collection of perceptions which
agree, only certain perceptions count--namely, those of white maleheterosexuals. (As Florence Rush points out, Freudian theory isparadigmatic of the "gaslighting" of wimmin's perceptions by men in
power--in this case the perception that fathers, protectors, arepredators. 19)

91

Patriarchal consensus is a trap. If we resist the consensus in isolation,
we may lose ou r sanity, i.e. , the confidence of our perceptions. Passing
into the collective political process of Lesbian feminism involves a quantum leap, one I take without effort every time I enter the pages ofSinister Wisdom. Lesbian feminism as an alter state of consciousness
creates an entirely different foundation, a radically different consensus,
and brings us to the brink of madness. As Mary Daly astutely pointed out
in another cont ext, our tactic must be one of transforming the collective
imagination so that male perception, distortion, fantasy loses its
credibllity.20 Our task is to render the concept of a male-identified
woman , the concept of rape,21 senseless.
' My love to two warm fuzzy dykes, Julia Stanley, who held my hand while I first worked
through much of this . Also, my love to Diane Hugaert who gave me gynergy as I workedon th is.
21 put quotation marks around the word vulnerable because within a womyn-identified
space, a womyn who opens herself up does so from a position of strength, able to take thechanges that come. However, under patriarchy, where males realize power in the form ofcontrol, vulnerability can only mean weakness . In this paper, my reference to vulnerability
is to its patriarchal manifestation .
' See also Barbara Ruth's fine discussion of the politics behind "aesthetic" judgments
about fat wimmin , Lesbian Connection, III , 8 (Mar. 1978), p . 4.
'Jean Carey Bond and Pat Peery, " Is the Black Male Castrated?" The Black Woman, ed .
Toni Cade (NY : New American Library, 1970)' pp. 113-19.
' Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1975), pp . 78-86.
"Gilbert Osofsky, ed ., Puttin ' On Ole Massa (NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), p . 9.
' Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed . G.E.M . Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (Oxford :Blackwell , 1974), remark 152.
'Sarah L. Hoagland, "On the Status of the Concepts of Masculinity and Femininity," Tran-sactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences, Vol. 4, Aug . 1977, pp. 169-172.
' Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 9.
"Ibid., p . 65.
"Conversation with Julia P. Stanley.
"Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (NY : Doubleday, 1969), p. 26.
" Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, transl. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co ., A Gateway Edition, 1955), pp . 161 -170. Quotation from p. 167.
"Muriel Schulz, " The Semantic Derogation of Woman," Language and Sex, ed. Barrie
Thorne and Nancy Henley (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers, Inc., 1975), pp.
64-76" Julia P. Stanley, " Paradigmatic Woman : The Prostitute, " Papers in Language Variation,
eds. David L. Shores and Carole P. Hines (Birmingham , Ala .: University of Alabama Press,
1977), pp. 303-321 .
'"Julia P. Stanley and Susan W . Robbins, "Sex-marked Predicates in English ," unpublished paper.
" This is a thesis emerging from the work of Julia P. Stanley, and she and I have been working on it . We plan to expand and develop it in the future.
"Julia P. Stanley, op. cit.
"Florence Rush, " The Freudian Coveru p: The Sexual Abuse of Children ," Chrysalis, 1.
" Mary Daly, op. cit. , p. 19.
"Conversation with Leigh Star.
© Sarah L. Hoagland

"It's hard to play the flute whenyour lip is quivering ... "interviews with DEIDRE MCCALLA
and LLENA DE MADRUGADAInterviews edited by MAS SEGRESTFirst Interview with Deidre McCalla. Chicago, January, 1978.
Interviewers Sarah Hoagland and Joanna Spilman.
Q: When you are writing music, do you set aside a certain amount oftime? What's your creative process like?

Deidre: I'm a great procrastinator, so I do my best not to set up a certain
amount of time, because then I just sit there staring at the walls, thinking, "What an interesting crack that is on the ceiling." It is really badwhen I realize I am reading the yellow pages to avoid doing it. I find I doneed a time and a space to myself, but those spaces more or less turnout to be accidental. I mean, I could have a lot of time and space tomyself but not an idea in my head to do anything, in which case nothing
happens. It changes. Sometimes I get an idea in the night, and if I don't
get up and work on it right then, I don't remember it in the morning.
That's been helped a lot, now that I finally got a tape recorder. Once, if
the idea caught and I didn't deal with it then, it was lost. So that's getting better. An idea catches me somewhere and it just has to get out. I
can either save it on the tape recorder, hopefully, if it's a melody, or aline, chord, lyric idea. Or a lot of times it's an emotion, in which case I
have to deal with it right away. It's like walking around and you have toshit and you don't go to the bathroom. (I'm into body processes.) You
are walking around and you're constipated or something when it's anemotion, and that more or less works itself out.
Q: I've seen you play alone, but I understand you had a band in Lincoln.
What were some of the good points and difficulties in forming the bandand in playing with it, then arriving in Chicago and playing alone? Are
you thinking about having a band again?

Deidre: There are a lot of good points to working with other musicians.
It's not fun, really, after a while, being up there by yourself. It's very hard
to experiment and try new things because you're totally responsible for93-

every aspect of the performance. I couldn't practice or experiment withdoing lead work, because it's very hard to do lead while required to playrhythm on the guitar. If someone else, a piano player, is up there taking
care of the rhythm section, then I can play lead over it and experiment inthat way too. Trying new lines. Also working with other people. It's a different input. There's a thousand different lines that can go on
simultaneously that add to that song or give impetus to another songand. give you more experience. So it's more desirable to work with aband. The problem that I had in Lincoln was finding people who play well
but don't want to. Which is entirely their option. But it's very hard for me
to just let lie. I play because I have to. I live by it. So what it amounted towas me running around telling people that they should play and pullingthem out of closets and beating them over the head and rearranging mywhole life to fit the one time they could show up for rehearsal. And
maybe they'd be there. And my wanting to push them. My not being ·really directive. Which in a situation where no one really knows what
they're doing just turns into chaos. I'd spend a lot of energy wondering if
they were going to show up. It wasn'! really a concept because there
wasn't that commitment there. So it was basically a back-up band situation. And instead of being responsible for one hundred percent of what
was happening I was responsible for ninety percent, which for me was

94

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the same thing. It showed me that I really would like to work with aband, but I need people who are committed to music. Not necessarily to
my music but to some idea of what we could do. Which is why I started
working with Llena. And we're more and more working toward solidifying our commitment to each other. I think what I'm going to do now is tolet that happen. And I think eventually someone's going to come alongand say, "Hey, I play bass," and then we'll have a bass player. Thensomeone will come along and say, "Hey, I play piano." Then there'll befour of us. And the commitment will be there initially, which I think is themost important thing. I like to play with people who are better at their instruments than I am, because I can really learn in that situation. And I
think I will get those type of people. Once they see that there is definitely
something they can plug into that is happening.
Q: If you could play one concert, just one super-fantasy concert, what
would it be?

Deidre: This is my total fantasy. I went to this private school. The day
before graduation I walked around the campus crying, looking at a tree
and dissolving into tears, seeing the Hudson River Liner train goingchoo-chooing down the track and realizing how many times I'd ridden onthat train. I went to see my eighth grade teacher and dissolved into a
total mess. I stood on the athletic field, bawling in tears at the universe,and swore that one day I'd come back and give a concert on the athletic
field of my high school. My own little Woodstock. That would be my
fantasy.
Q: Women only?
Deidre: Yeah, probably. My high school was women only. Why not?
Second interview, May, 1978, Madison, Wisconsin. Deidre Mc- .
Calla & Llena de Madrugada. Interviewer Sarah Hoagland.
Sarah: Llena, what is your musical background? How have you related
your politics and your music?
Llena: My background is playing in orchestras ...
Sarah: First chair?
Llena: Yes, first chair mostly. I felt very lost in that medium, in that I felt
very unable to express what I had to say. The way I always felt was theway baby robins look in a nest--one worm dangling out and everybody
reaching for the worm and competing, and the orchestra was very muchthe same way. All the principal players fighting to be heard over the din.
Don't get me wrong, I think orchestral music can be really beautiful. But
I didn't feel that I was able to personally express what I had to say. The
fact that I'm playing with Deidre and I'm livriting my own songs now andplaying Deidre's music--playing with a woman, primarily to women audiences, is political. It's wonderful. I do feel now as if my music and mylife and my politics and my feelings about what are important to me inboth my life and music have all come together in one thing when I play.
All the elements merge when I'm playing women's music.
Sarah: How does your lesbianism relate to what you're doing?
Llena: I couldn't have played women's music when I was straight. I was
too much into competing with men, accepting their terms, their standards, their judgments. My whole musical life was competition . Auditioning for this, beating someone else out for that, getting to play thesolo. The music business in general is competitive, but especially in orchestral playing or training for competitions. The whole thing was set upthat way all through the schools I went to.
Sarah: Did you actually try to beat people out?
Llena: Oh, yeah, definitely. It was real important. In high school--andthis is something that is really hard for me to admit--I would cast spellson the women I was competing against. I'm sure I would have cast themon men but at that time no boys played the flute in high school. And I did
win . It never got to the point with me where I was unable to relate to theother flutists as musicians. I was always thought to be weird because I
developed close friendships with flute players. Very unusual, because of
the competition that got between women a lot.
Sarah: Do you see your identity as a lesbian as getting you out of yourcompetitiveness?
96

Llana: I pretty much got out of competitiveness in college. Way before I
became a lesbian. But I would definitely put it down to--which is so close
to being a lesbian anyway--being able to relate to the women, being able
to develop friendships with the women I was playing with. My beginningto view music as an expressive thing, and completely noncompetitive,
was being able to relate to individual women.
Sarah: Do you still nevertheless feel competitive with men?
Llana: I do. I was at the conservatory practicing the other day and foundmyself not wanting to play the things I needed to work on, but wanting
to play the things I already played well, in the practice room, because I
knew men would probably hear. I didn't want to make a mistake or practice something I wasn't really good at yet . I couldn 't experiment. I wasn 't
free to transcend and get down to practicing. When we play in a completely male atmosphere, i playa lot of notes. I show off my technique. I
find myself not being able to transcend and lay back. I'm not worried
about the music, I'm not into the music, I'm worried about impressing
somebody. And that's not music.
Sarah: Would both of you talk some about your playing together--thecommunication, vibes, your feelings about what happens when you're
playing? You two just got together in December--six months ago,right?--and you've been working in the same house together twomonths. How has your relationship musically evolved?
Daidra: I think for the first couple of months that we were practicing anddoing stuff together, I always had in my head that we were practicing fora specific gig or purpose, and the practice was always tainted by that.
Now what I find is happening, and it didn't really happen until Llena
moved up here, is that we're practicing because the music is good. And
all of a sudden it doesn't matter if we perform. We're having fun and
we're finding out things about the music and each other. That's a realdifferent approach for me. Now, when Llena and I practice, it takes along time. She'll play two notes, and I'll start crying.
Llana: Yes, and it's very hard to play the flute when your lip is quivering.
Sarah: Talk some about performances. Deidre, you mentioned thatwhen you were a solo act you really wanted someone up on stage withyou. Is that different now?
Daidra: Yes, it is. Of the people I've played with, Llena is the most proficient with her instrument. She's the first person I've played with I
haven't had to worry about on stage. The people I've worked with havebeen very good but they have always looked to me for direction. What I
was looking for was the support so that I wouldn't have to be directing
everything that was happening. Llena and I are able to tune in to eachother without laying a burden of "You're in charge." I don't have toworry about if she's going to miss a beat, or if I need to repeat a line.
She's versatile enough.
Llana: What she's saying is that I'm competent. That I'm professional.
There's something that I noticed that's more for me on a spiritual level
97and that's when we' re playing--when we first got together I was anxIous
about playing the right thing. I wanted to fit into the music. I wanted
what I was playing to be complementary to what the song already was . I
was playing above the music, flittering around on top. The more we playt ogether, the more I sink in, the deeper the level, the more I transcend
and relax and settle into the music and just am able to listen and play at
the same time and try and capture the mood and the feeling, listen to thewords, make what I'm playing more appropriate. When we were playing"Rippling Water" and "Mountain Moving" suddenly I was just listening
to the words. I was seeing the images in the song, and it took over myfingers. It was a unified thing, it wasn't my fingers, my instrument, mymind. Everything was working together and the flute was really playing
itself. It was really, really nice.
Sarah: What kind of commitments, then, musical/y, have you made?
Llana: My commitment to women's music started when I came out. I
was considering giving up music altogether after free-lancing for three
years in Chicago, to become a feminist therapist. I felt that I needed to
do something with women and I thought maybe that's how I could be
most effective. Then I realized there was women's music and I didn't
have t o do that to be effective and to do something that was meaningful
to me. My freelancing kind of dwindled after that. I refused to play any
more weddings. I weeded out my male flute students and really stopped
orchestral jobs altogether. I'm not playing any music that I don't consider women's music now at all. So I guess I'm real committed to that.
My commitment to Deidre is very, very strong. When I first heard you
play I got really excited and could hear a flute in your playing. I got
together with you soon afterwards to play, and it felt really right to me.
The original plan was that you were going to come down from
Milwaukee and we'd play some gigs together. That was real frustrating
to me. We'd get something going, then you'd leave and come back, andI was forgetting the music a lot because I didn't know it that well . I wasreally fed up with Chicago. My move up here is part of that commitment.
I'm here primarily for music. I'm here and I'm able to play all day andthere's a piano in the house and there's music around and there's theconservatory, and we can rehearse more often. And there's music onand constant reacting to music and talking about music and sifting over
new songs and going to concerts . I think I'm real committed. I am amusician anyway, and now I'm defining myself as a musician in women's
music anyway. So, as opposed to the other people who played with you,
you have a lot less to worry about.
Deidre: That's the difference . You are a musician, where I'd been running into people who just play, who never feel like they could makemoney to make a decent Iiving .... You did slide up to me on the couchthe other day and say, "You know, it's not a bad life, playing, foodstamps, school. You know, it's not a bad life."

98

Solitude
Solitude grew to be a woman
never once knowing
a moment's peacetaken from her motherto serve .as slave girlat someone's feetwhile the wild bird within her
struggled to be free.
I will not drink your waters, sir
I will not speak your tongue
I will not bear your burden, sir
I will not be the one
I will not be the one.
Solitude took flight at midnightvanished like twilightinto dawn
and each time they thought they'd found her
they'd look and Solitude
would be gone
leaving only her silent laughterthat seemed to always linger on.
I was born in the golden age
when my people could walk through our homelands
without fear
I am the child of a noble race
dying in disgrace in your foreign
hemisphere
Do what you will
but I will not
be kept here.
Some say she knew the devil
Some say that Solitude
merely knew her mind
And the day they finally caught her
the sight of Solitude
nearly struck them blind
and as they led her to the gallows
the people heard her cry ...

© 1976 Deidre D. McCalla
PHOTO BY IRENE YOUNG

99

the snake woman
she is a snake woman
she has no eyelids
she wears the skins of dead animals
they always smell like deathwhen she enters the room, the air parts like a river
her hands are too large, and always roaming
what they touch shrivels a little
and when light touches her skin, it does not yield
do you recognize this woman?
the snake woman has a pet lizard named Muerte(that's Spanish for Death)she crawls on the belly of nightu doing everything
and all of her dances are deadly
if she makes love to you
your body will burn like a night torch
but if you sleep in her arms
by morning you will be all huskbone-dry, skin empty
do you know this woman?
the snake woman lives underthings
when she builds fires they are for burningwhen light strikes her reptile eyes
she turns slowly, the light dying
gathers the jungle around her, and leaves
but we can hear for days the sounds of animals crying
and the scent in the air is of ancient rain
do you recognize this woman?
look in the mirror
under candlelighttrace with your finger your eyelids
find what lies under the skinfeel your own blooddance rising
this woman is bad
her name begins with your initials
her face is very familiar
this woman moves the way your body does
crawling toward morning
do you know this woman?
do you know her?
do you know?

-martha courtot
100

Our Lives Tangle

The moon fell on top of me,
I was dreaming of blood pacts.
When I woke, the shape of the room
sailed by me like some ghostly kite,
dust was everywhere
your hairrushes by mesoft like wool against my facetonight you will wrap the children in bedquilts
take up the broom over your left shoulder
slip out under the moon rays
walk down Burnside till you reach the bridge
where old men sleep with bottles
and sick smells. their faces under the moonshow white. you pass them silently,
they don't wake.
the concrete steps are crusted with garbage,
vegetable bones, broken glass.
you climb them, silent
as your cloud of hair, only your coatmakes whoosh sounds in the wind.
at the top of the bridge you
turn to the water
lower your broom and begin
to sweep the stairs.
you look down into the moon staring up from the river,your face gives light like the moon.

-Melanie Kaye

101

102

photograph by Amy Christine Straayer

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTESMadeline Tiger Bass' latest book of poetry is Keeping House in This Forest, publishedlast year by Farleigh Dickinson University.
Sandy Boucher is the author of a book of short stories Assaults and Rituals, published in1975 by Mama's Press.
Caron is a printer, living in Charlotte, N.C. She does many different things, all characterized by Lesbian imagination .
Martha Courtot "I struggle daily with the roles of poet, mother, lesbian in a culture wh ich
supports none of them. I believe in the power of women, and want for my daughters aworld in which they can be strong, loving and whole. I would like for myself and all women
to look at the Snake Woman in themselves, feel her power and beauty and accept t heresponsibility this power entails." Martha has published two books of poetry, Tribe andJourney, with PearlChild Productions.
Mary Daly teaches Feminist Ethics in the department of theology at Boston College .
Marilyn Frye teaches feminist philosophy at Michigan State in East Lansing.
Vicki Shanamary Gabriner is a free-floating dyke who lives in Atlanta, Georgia most of
the time . She is the author of Sleeping Beauty, a lesbian fairy tale.
Gingerlox lives in Denver, Colorado. Berrigan is her first novel.
Sarah Hoagland teaches philosophy at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
Peggy Holland lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. This is the first article she has published .
Melanie Kaye lives in Portland, Oregon.
Audre Lorde's latest book of poetry is Coal (W.W. Norton, 1978).
Judith McDaniel lives in upstate New York . She and Maureen Brady have recently
started a feminist press called Spinsters, Ink.
Jan Millsapps lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina . "Parthenogenesis" is one of 8 animatedfilms she has produced and shows under the name" Janimations."
mh north "As a child i wanted to be a writer--at the death (suicide by gun) of my identicaltwin shortly after our seventeenth birthday i began writing poems. Sarah Lawrence offeredstrength--Muriel Rukeyser, Jane Cooper and Grace Paley--and finally after eight years ofmarriage and two sons i realize acutely how much communication with other womenmeans to me ... "Melanie Perish is a lesbian feminist who lives in New York City. A chapbook of her work
Notes of a Daughter from the Old Country is available through Motheroot Publications (214Dewey Street, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15218l.
Minnie Bruce Pratt teaches English and Uves with Emma, Ti-Grace, June, and Rita, her
cats.
Adrienne Rich's MLA talk, published here in a slightly revised and expanded version, has
become the germinating point for a longer essay on feminism and racism, on which she is
now working. She sees the present version as a kind of work-in-progress.
Susan Robbins is a stand-up comic, as well as a linguist, and lives in South Dakota .
Thyme Seagull "I am derived from Judaism and am headed by Amazonia ."Julia Stanley is a Lesbian dreamer-schemer, as well as a linguist, and lives in Nebraska.
Arny Christine Straayer lives alone but loves to receive cards with pictures of women on
the front. She has been in jail once for shop-lifting, is constantly cutting her short red hair,
and will always revere her mother, Mona .
Jennifer Turnor "I am a lesbian poet living and working in New York City, and a recent
graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where last year I won the' Academy of American
Poets Poetry Contest."

103

In Sinis ter Wisdom Issue 5, we listed Diana Press books in print
as of January, 1978. The collection of Elsa Gidlow's Lesbian love
poetry Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy was mistakenly
omitted . As of June, 1978, Sapphic Songs should be ordered from
Women in Distribution, Box 8858, Washington , D.C . 20003 .

FEMINARY: A LESBIAN FEMINIST JOURNAL FOR THE SOUTH
Feminary, one of the oldest surviving feminist publications in theSoutheast, announces a shift in focus, from a local feminist magazine toa lesbian feminist journal for the South .
Feminary is produced by a lesbian feminist collective in the Piedmontof North Carolina . As Southerners, as lesbians, and as women we needto explore with others how our lives fit into a region about which wehave great ambivalences--to share our anger and our love .
W e want to hear Southern lesbians tell the stories of women in theSouth--our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and friends. We feel
we are products of Southern values and traditions but as lesbians wecontradict their most destructive parts. We see the good and want to get
rid of the bad; and we feel it important to explore how this Southern ex perience fits into the American pattern.
We are committed to working on issues of race because they are vitalto an understanding of our lives as they have been, as they are and couldbe; and to understanding and overcoming differences of class and age
among lesbians as well.
We want to encourage feminist and lesbian organizing in a region
whose women suffer greatly in their lack of political power.
We want to provide an audience for Southern lesbians who may notthink of themselves as writers but who have important stories to tell -stories that will help to fill the silences that have obscured the truth about
our lives and kept us isolated from each other.
We want to know who we are.
We want to change women's lives .
*****We are soliciting manuscripts in the following categories:• news and events--of local lesbian communities• storytelling--sketches, journal entries, interviews about growing up
Southern and living in the South today• articles on political theory and organization--with emphasis on practical tools and problems• poetry and short fiction--toward establishing a network of Southern
lesbian writers striving for "a language not yet known to man" (V.
Woolf)• feminist scholarship and criticism--essays on the Southern experiencefrom a radical perspective in a non-academic style; reclaiming our past
• humor--especially satire and parody• graphics.
Subscriptions: $5.00 (3 issues/year). FEMINARY, Box 954, Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, 27514.

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