Andrea Dworkin, “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals—Feminism and the ‘Radical’ Left,” 1977
Feminist revolution has been patronized far too long now
This piece includes an introduction preceding the text of the 1977 pamphlet version of Dworkin’s 1973 “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals—Feminism and the ‘Radical’ Left.” My research documents the original publication of the article in American Report, its historical context, and the continued relevance of Dworkin’s social and political theory to analyzing war. Dworkin argues that the relations between women and men form the basis for all social relations, women as the original capital in how “oppression begins where life begins.”
How essential it is that we should realize that unity the dead bodies, the ruined houses prove. For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.
- Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas1
Andrea Dworkin’s “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals—Feminism and the ‘Radical’ Left,” printed here from the 1977 pamphlet, first appeared in a November 1973 supplement for American Report. Like other underground newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s, American Report published work opposing the Vietnam War and fighting the New Left’s many -isms: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism. Covers featured caricatures of Nixon—“July 4, 1973: From King George to King Richard” (vol. 3, no. 2, July 7, 1973)—and pieces about the Middle East like “The Fourth Middle East War: Digging More Graves” (vol. 4, no. 1, October 15, 1973).
American Report mostly covered anti-war topics, with typical leftist attention to labor issues—minus women’s housework as work, of course. Seriously acknowledging male violence against women likely appeared divisive to a unified left, many know today, and men from right to left have relied on women’s unpaid, exploited labor. Seldom, then, did the publication give women’s issues serious political analysis, so women got an eight-page “special supplement” in which Dworkin’s essay appeared. Mostly, however, the serious list of -isms made the covers, and the women, so it seemed, had no real issues that could not be fixed by the end of the above -isms, namely capitalism. Seriously, not too much has changed in half a century—from the No Kings protests to the perpetual Middle East war and the men waging the wars because their wealth depends on their warmongering.
By 1977 when “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals” appeared in pamphlet form by the Frog in the Well collective, Dworkin had two books—Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality in 1974 and Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics in 1976. Radical feminist writing during the 1970s and 1980s did not appeal to mainstream interests, contrasting work that stroked bourgeois academic sensibilities, as seen in the shift toward psychoanalysis by the 1980s and postmodernism by the 1990s. Analyses like Dworkin’s did not fit what mainstream publishing wanted, so collectives like Frog in the Well published work by outsiders to dominant ideologies, where radical feminism has continuously existed at the margins. Two examples include her 1977 pamphlet, as reprinted here, and her 1980 short story collection titled the new womans broken heart. Dworkin’s struggle for publication underscores why independent feminist publishers came into being—which happened because of the women’s movement, because of feminists, because of women’s work.
Introducing both the supplement and Dworkin’s essay, Esther Cohen and Debrah Wiley, editors for the women’s supplement, describe it as “provocative because it provoked emotional, involved discussion within our staff.” Dworkin argues that war follows the model of dominance and submission in the supposedly “natural” relation of man to woman, which is a distinct social relation with a material basis in history. In her view, ending war necessitates ending the sex roles that have reproduced imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and racism throughout the world.
The man—artist and husband, wanting to be a saint, on the path toward the renunciation of all power, all wealth, all violence—managed not to cut off his nose to spite his face.
- Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse2
At the beginning, Dworkin quotes passages from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, dated 1938, followed by a quote from Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell dismissing the connection between women’s rights and war. Dworkin describes Woolf’s Three Guineas as “the first feminist analysis of what war is and how to stop it,” the work of “a serious revolutionary thinker” subjected to condescension. Woolf connects “the tyranny of the patriarchal state” with “the tyranny of the Fascist state,” her actual phrasing in 1938: the patriarchal state as the fascist state.
According to Woolf, as Dworkin quotes, “the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” Here is Dworkin summarizing Woolf: “She insists that the Nazis and the Englishmen who despise them are a brotherhood with a shared appetite for illegitimate power war games, uniforms, wealth, conquest: in a word, dominance.” Dominance in private, man’s sexual relation to woman—or, rather, his unjust dominion over her—ultimately extends to the dominance of one nation over the other.
Right or left, a defense of patriarchy is a defense of what Dworkin calls “that imposing leftist litany: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and, for the ladies, sexism.” As much as the left theoretically or symbolically opposes its evil -isms, even making some effort to acknowledge “sexism,” it holds onto its unquestioned patriarchal alliances in practice. What explains revolutions from the French Revolution to the Iranian Revolution making lofty promises of justice but not fulfilling them for women as for men? The women participated and led in active roles in resistance to monarchy—and the men forgot political equality for the women after the climax of each revolution. If simply addressing the relations of imperialism and capitalism has been the solution, tried and tried and tried, then why has it not worked? Like capitalist regimes, communist ones have devolved into totalitarianism beneath the patriarchal state as the fascist state. How did “trans women are women” and “sex work is work” occupy the modern left in the reassertion of women as sex commodities? Patriarchy has social, political, and economic conditions observable throughout history, cross-cultural in women’s historical situation as a distinct class with distinct interests. Women come last if they ever do.
Dworkin’s “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals” appeared before Woman Hating, and both reference Woolf for epigraphs. However, only Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, dated 1929, appears in the 1974 book. There is Woolf’s creation of Judith Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s sister of equal talent and imagination, who suffers from sex-class-specific disparities of a systemic kind rather than experiencing a sex-neutral world. Whereas Dworkin’s 1973 article deals very explicitly with the connection between patriarchy and war, no such critique appears in Woman Hating, implying such analysis did not make the cut for publication by Dutton in 1974. Recognition of what happened in Vietnam as genocide, as Dworkin acknowledges, was no doubt still controversial by the early to mid-1970s for the masses in denial. Connecting the oppression of women to Dachau, Hiroshima, and Vietnam, too, would have been heretical in the eyes of virtually all publishers at the time. Like Woolf’s Three Guineas, Dworkin’s analysis was—and still is—revolutionary.
If we were not invisible to ourselves, we would also see that we have always had a resolute commitment to and faith in human life which have made us heroic in our nurturance and sustenance of lives other than our own. Under all circumstances—in war, sickness, famine, drought, poverty, in times of incalculable misery and despair—women have done the work required for the survival of the species. We have not pushed a button, or organized a military unit, to do the work of emotionally and physically sustaining life. We have done it one by one, and one to one. For thousands of years, in my view, women have been the only exemplars of moral and spiritual courage—we have sustained life, while men have taken it. This capacity for sustaining life belongs to us. We must reclaim it—take it out of the service of men, so that it will never again be used by them in their own criminal interests.
- Andrea Dworkin, “The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage,” 1975, in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics3
Going from 1973 to now, analyses of war and militarism have remained the same: Everything comes down to imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism—always these -isms—and women and men should unite against these evils, and everything will be fixed. When the relations between women and men do not improve, it seems like it always gets put onto “nature,” the profound complexity of human relations, or some other -ism—capitalism, for instance, an easy catch-all.
Conveniently, the failures of male-dominated communist regimes around the world, totalitarian and oppressive—starvation and murder of millions under Mao, for instance—remain the fault of capitalism. Anti-capitalist solutions forget communist outcomes like Mao’s Great Leap Forward killing between twenty and forty million of his own people between 1959 and 1961.4 When resistance to imperialism throughout the Middle East has devolved into totalitarianism and oppression, worse for women, it remains the fault of Western imperialism. Anti-racist struggle in the United States has been marred by splits, including between women and men, remaining the fault of racism, also very conveniently. Political theorists neglect that men’s tyranny over women going unaddressed has poisoned every social movement on earth, transfiguring life to come into mass death.
Despite the title being “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals,” neither Marx nor Gandhi appears quoted or discussed in Dworkin’s article, so the text does not explain the title in detail. Marx and Gandhi have interesting sexual histories, despite being understood as “feminist.” While married to his wife Jenny, née von Westphalen, Marx fucked their housekeeper Helene Demuth in 1850, impregnating her with a son. At the time, Jenny was pregnant with their fourth child and seeking money to support Marx’s work—since his writing made no sufficient income. Marx’s collaborator Engels kept the secret by claiming paternity of the child, which meant lying to Jenny to keep her in the marriage. Biographical accounts indicate that Jenny did remarkably thankless labor to support her philandering philosopher husband, who fathered children he could not even support financially. Marx and Jenny had seven children together, but only three daughters lived to be adults, two of whom—Eleanor and Jenny Laura—died by suicide.
While few know of Marx’s sexual history, Gandhi’s has been more widely known, including sleeping naked beside naked women and girls—like his grandniece in her late teens—for “celibacy tests.” He would even say that “he was half a woman,” with historian Vinay Lal describing “Gandhi’s vulva envy.” Sexually, Gandhi was like Tolstoy in his revulsion for intercourse, which translated to envy and contempt for women as sexual beings.5
Woman hating is, as Dworkin writes, “the warp and woof of the world,” this historical situation of sex-class antagonism between women and men known as patriarchy. To quote Gerda Lerner, in “the conviction, shared by most feminist thinkers”: “The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end.”6 In a pattern so widely pervasive yet strategically ignored, men against oppression become oppressive themselves and then mysteriously escape responsibility for how they fail women and children sacrificed to men’s superficial appeals to freedom. Why has it not worked? From over fifty years ago, Dworkin’s article communicates a terrible truth: Past and present, so-called “revolutionary” thinking has continued to nurture the pathology of woman hating.
“Revolutionaries,” she writes, “are out to destroy that system of oppression, the source of a million tyrannies, called patriarchy.” Reactionaries protect its machinery on the basis of distortion, mistaking any -ism for the whole story rather than a part of it and denying reality itself when most convenient. Platitudes about just telling men and boys to be more respectful and for women and girls to develop a better sense of agency become the equivalent to arguing the rich should just respect the poor. The feminist analysis of patriarchy has been about power. Thinking positive thoughts will not overthrow this system any more than it will end those -isms treated as the real issues. But refusing to question the system of patriarchy and the ideological denigration of women and girls throughout man-made civilization may as well be collaboration perpetuating worldwide atrocities. Our history continues to be what it has been in the past—Dachau, Hiroshima, Vietnam, man’s dominion over woman reproduced in seemingly endless dead bodies and ruined houses.
Every woman raped during a political nation-state war is the victim of a much larger war, planetary in its dimensions—the war, more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage against women.
- Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality7
On the Epigraphs
Apart from the initial epigraphs from Woolf and her nephew Quentin Bell in the first section, Dworkin includes epigraphs from poets like Sylvia Plath, Marge Piercy, and Adrienne Rich—with no specific poem titles or their collections named in the pamphlet. For the reader, I have identified the poems Dworkin includes. The second section references Piercy, “In the men’s room(s),” 1972, in To Be of Use, 1973; and Rich, “August,” 1972, in Diving into the Wreck, 1973. The third section references Plath, “Three Women,” 1962. The fifth section’s two poetry epigraphs come from Rich, “Phenomenology of Anger,” 1972, also in Diving. Finally, the sixth section references Piercy, “Address to the players,” 1969, in Hard Loving, 1969.
Other than shorter poetic works, a few longer ones appear in Dworkin’s epigraphs as well: R.D. Laing’s 1967 The Politics of Experience and Phyllis Chesler’s 1970 Women and Madness. Her novel references include Monique Wittig’s 1969 Les Guérillères in section four and Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude in section five.
Beyond the more identifiable works, Dworkin gives us hard-to-find treasures. For instance, I could not find the original location of the line from the man speaking to nineteenth-century English suffragist Emily Davies. When she appealed for possible funding to women’s education, the reluctant industrialists—all of them being men—would insist they were not enemies of women. These men would add they find women useful “as labourers or in other menial capacity”—the latter being the home, women’s unpaid domestic labor in the private as men work for wages in the public. Women seeking education would hear about serving best as mothers, that labor not considered labor, but men seeking education did not hear the equivalent about fatherhood.
Another less easily identifiable text is the epigraph from Robin Morgan. It resembles part of her 1970 “Goodbye to All That” piece: “Two evils pre-date capitalism and have been clearly able to survive and post-date socialism: sexism and racism.” The text, as printed in Morgan’s Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (1977) and earlier versions printed in Rat (February 6-23, 1970) and It Aint Me Babe (vol. 1, no. 5, April 7, 1970), does not match Dworkin’s quotation from Morgan. In “Goodbye to All That,” Morgan discusses what Dworkin quotes, but the text quoted here does not come from that work. Comparing these texts, the quotation in the pamphlet may come from a personal correspondence between Dworkin and Morgan rather than a published essay.
I note these works for the reader because, now decades later, these 1960s-1970s texts seem unread today—with the exception of Márquez’s novel more frequently assigned on high school and college literature syllabi.
Rich’s Diving into the Wreck and Chesler’s Women and Madness appear understood as “feminist classics,” but I would not say many students do seriously read them anymore in university. Judith Butler takes precedence on course syllabi. Many younger readers only know of Piercy through her poem “Barbie Doll,” if they know of her, but virtually no readers know of “The Grand Coolie Damn” from Sisterhood Is Powerful—now distant from second-wave feminism. Wittig’s novel seems very rarely, if ever, assigned for reading, although her shorter works, like “The Straight Mind,” have been appropriated within the domain of “queer theory.”
Women’s literature appears increasingly misrepresented when not ignored entirely, as does women’s pioneering work—which is to say, the original, the innovative, the experimental. Courses taken after 1990 can seldom be called “Women’s Studies,” baptized in the so-called “feminism” of “queer theory,” à la “gender performativity.” Into the 1990s, this ideological takeover coming from academia has been significant with the postmodernist war against women knowing about their own lives and the lives of women before them. Reading Dworkin’s 1973 essay over half a century later, readers find a map of influences and ideas looking into her epigraphs. We learn about what she had been reading, considering how not only Woolf but also contemporaries, such as Piercy and Wittig, contributed to Dworkin’s theoretical framework.
We are told women’s liberation is a secondary issue, to be dealt with after the war is won.
- Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Damn,” 1969, in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan, 19708
Here is the text of Dworkin’s “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals—Feminism and the ‘Radical’ Left,” as it appears printed in the 1977 pamphlet from Frog in the Well.
Dedicated to the memory of Virginia Woolf
To the extent that Leftists do not recognize the real dimension of their patriarchal alliances, that is, to a very great extent, they cannot help but perpetuate patriarchy, that system of male ownership which is the parent form of fascism.
1. The Problem
They [feminists] were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you were fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state. . . . And abroad the monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain, is now apparent to you.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
‘Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon employers giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.’ Place beside it another quotation. ‘There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.’ One is written in English, the other in German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the Dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison . . . in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr Wells again, that ‘the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis’ will spring? And is not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, secretly and without arms fighting the Fascist or the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms . . .? And must not that fight wear down her strength and exhaust her spirit? Should we not help her to crush him in our own country before we ask her to help us to crush him abroad? And what right have we, Sir, to trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries when we can shake out from our most respectable newspapers any day of the week eggs like these?
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
It is the figure of a man, some say, others deny, that he is Man himself, the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations. He is a man certainly. His eyes are glazed; his eyes glare. His body, which is braced in an unnatural position, is tightly cased in a uniform. Upon the breast of that uniform are sewn several medals and other mystic symbols. His hand is upon a sword. He is called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies— men, women, and children. . . . [I]t suggests a connection and for us a very important connection. It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. . . . It suggests that we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure but are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Three Guineas was published in June 1938. It is the product of a very odd mind and, I think, of a very odd state of mind. It was intended as a continuation of A Room of One’s Own, but it was written in a far less persuasive, a far less playful mood. It was a protest against oppression, a genuine protest denouncing real evils and, to the converted, Virginia did not preach in vain. A great many women wrote to express their enthusiastic approval; but her close friends were silent, and if not silent, critical. Vita did not like it, and Maynard Keynes was both angry and contemptuous; it was, he declared, a silly argument and not very well written. What really seemed wrong with the hook—and I am speaking here of my own reactions at the time—was the attempt to involve a discussion of women’s rights with the far more agonising and immediate question of what we were to do in order to meet the ever-growing menace of Fascism and war. The connection between the two questions seemed tenuous and the positive suggestions wholly inadequate.
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography
I have quoted at some length from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas because it is unlikely that those on the Left who consider the causes of war and act to end it know the book. It was maligned as silly drivel by Leftists in 1938 and today it is, let us be polite, ignored by most political people. In 1938, Virginia Woolf was a prominent (though endlessly condescended to) artist of the first magnitude. Even though her formal preoccupations allied her with James Joyce, as a woman she was placed without effort at the end of a very short list: the Brontë sisters, Austen, the two Georges, Woolf. Even though her political preoccupations entitled her to recognition as an original mind, as a serious revolutionary thinker, both the quality and the content of her analysis went ignored. In 1938 Woolf was 3 years away from her last conscientious act, suicide, the last resort of many a prophet without any real community.
Three Guineas is the first feminist analysis of what war is and how to stop it. Woolf is relentless in her insistence that war is a male activity not only because men make war, but because war is a direct extension of masculine values and behavior. She outlines, relentlessly, the total exclusion of women from all the institutions of decision-making and power in a patriarchy. She describes what machismo is (though she did not use the word), and how its public manifestation in war-making is a somber accurate reflection of its presence in what she calls “the private house,” the house where men rule and women serve. She shows how the heterosexual man-woman model is the basic model for patterns of dominance and submission which we characterize in the public sphere as tyranny. She demonstrates that the Führer and Il Duce are Husbands, violating without conscience nations of women. She insists that the Nazis and the Englishmen who despise them are a brotherhood with a shared appetite for illegitimate power war games, uniforms, wealth, conquest: in a word, dominance. She says that to stop war men must change the behavior of men. In her analysis, humankind must destroy patriarchy itself.
It is no wonder then, that Keynes and other prominent Lefties of that time were angry. After all, a crucial part of the war dynamic is the conviction that there are good guys and bad guys. Woolf made clear that, in fact, there were bad guys and worse guys. Life under the bad guys was bad, and under the worse guys it would be worse.
The attitude of the Left has not changed very much since 1938. Sexism, it is true, is affixed with liberal good will onto the tail end of that imposing leftist litany: imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racism, and, for the ladies, sexism. Woolf’s original analysis and subsequent feminist analyses go, let us be polite, ignored, not assimilated, not acted upon. The citizens of the male-dominated Left are still complicit in the institutions which oppress women, still accept the phallic identity of dominance (maleness) which demands, in order to continue to exist, submission (femaleness); still actively perpetuate the patriarchal forms of husband-wife, family headed by a father, church, and state; still demand privilege and confuse it with freedom. To the extent that the Left is committed to patriarchal forms, that is, to a very great extent, it cannot help but perpetuate the values it purports to oppose. To the extent that the Left is not consciously and conscientiously feminist, that is, to a very great extent, it cannot help but perpetuate the same forms of dominance and submission that it purports, in other areas, to oppose. To the extent that Leftists do not recognize the real dimension of their patriarchal alliances, that is, to a very great extent, they cannot help but perpetuate patriarchy, that system of male ownership which is the parent form of fascism.
As feminists, we must view the nonfeminist Left as a reform movement. We must marvel at its moral bankruptcy at the poverty of its revolutionary consciousness. Humankind is still, for that movement, mankind most literally. The Worker is still, or increasingly, a metaphor for phallic hero muscle, the center of the leftist preoccupation with images of virility. Women are ignored, or patronized. Liberal gestures of good will are made, when we are shrill enough or where we are fashionable enough, as long as we do not interfere with the “real revolution.” Increasingly, we understand that we are the real revolution.
Ending forever the war of the powerful against the powerless—and ending the smaller wars of bad men against worse men—means dismantling the machinery of patriarchy.
2. Patriarchy and Sexism
Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh
watch who they beat and who they eat,
watch who they relieve themselves on,
watch who they own.
The rest is decoration.
Marge Piercy
[my nightmare] looks like a village lit with blood
where all the fathers are crying:
My son is mine!
Adrienne Rich
Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands . . . [F]or the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church.
Ephesians 5:22-239
Sexism is a new word, one which has been assimilated with remarkable ease into common usage. It is meant to refer to systematic cultural, political, and psychological prejudice against women. It denotes biological differentiation/inferiority, just as racism denotes racial differentiation/inferiority It was coined so that we could refer to the general cultural, political, and psychological conviction that women are inferior to men, and that womanly or female, qualities (as a male-supremacist culture defines them) are inferior to manly, or male, qualities. Since in our culture homosexual men are associated with femaleness, or femininity that is, in being penetrated they take on female stigma, the word “sexism” early on came to denote prejudice against homosexual men. In fact, the word is used so promiscuously that its meaning has become entirely vague: most often it denotes prejudice against a person on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, with no intrinsic reference to male supremacy or female inferiority. As a result, “I hate all men,” or “I hate all faggots,” or “Women? I guess they ought to exercise Pussy Power” are all in some sense sexist.
This wonderfully confuses things, and we can begin to understand why the word “sexism” is affixed without pain to the list of leftist no no’s. Properly manipulated, the word is meaningless because it no longer makes any reference to the actuality of power. Anyone can be against it, and not many are for it. One can be against it without changing one’s identity or behavior as the oppressor—which is, of course, what we mean when we talk disparagingly about liberals. Just as liberals are against racism but refuse to give up power which derives from their own white supremacy, so Leftists are against sexism but refuse to give up power which derives from their own male supremacy. How then do we separate the feminists from the boys?
Men are powerful and women are powerless because we live in a patriarchy. Pater means owner, possessor, or master. The basic social unit of patriarchy is the family. The word “family” comes from the Oscan famel which means servant, slave, or possession. Pater familias means “owner of slaves.” Common fathers and ordinary priests derive their authority as paters.
“Patriarchy” is the name of the political and cultural system which oppresses women. To be for the liberation of women is to be against patriarchy—no lesser commitment is a serious one. In a patriarchy all civil and religious authority (power) belongs by birthright to men. Patriarchy is a system of ownership wherein women and children are owned. Patriarchy is the original authoritarian model, the molecular totalitarian model, and every tyrannical form is derived from it. To be against tyranny and for freedom is to oppose, to resist, to refuse to be complicit in, patriarchal institutions. The destruction of the master-slave political scenario, however we describe it (capitalist-worker, white-black, rich-poor, etc.), requires the destruction of the source of that scenario: patriarchy. The destruction of the psychologies and behaviors which we call dominant (master male) and submissive (slave, female), or aggressor-victim, demands the destruction of the source of those mental sets and behaviors—patriarchy. Ending forever the war of the powerful against the powerless—and ending the smaller wars of bad men against worse men—means dismantling the machinery of patriarchy.
Liberals, god bless them, are against sexism and for some measure of positive reform. They want the bad men to stop fighting worse men here and there; they want The Workers, men mostly, to control the means of production. Revolutionaries are out to destroy that system of oppression, the source of a million tyrannies, called patriarchy.
It is incredible to feminists that the notion of violence as a function of male sexual identity is not of pressing, burning concern to those who are against, they say, violence.
3. Patriarchy and Violence
I am the center of an atrocity.
Sylvia Plath
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
R.D. Laing
We talked of the League of Nations and the prospects of peace and disarmament. On this subject he was not so much militarist as martial. The difficulty to which he could find no answer was that if permanent peace were ever achieved, and armies and navies ceased to exist, there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed, and that human physique and human character would deteriorate.
from the biography of Anthony (Viscount Knebworth) by the Earl of Lytton
Violence is interwoven into the social fabric because it is the substance of sexuality as we know it. Dominance and submission, he and she. Aggression, conquest, and brutality are the defining masculine characteristics. War, feminists believe, is a function of masculine (phallic) identity. The vocabulary of war—aggression, conquest, dominance—is the vocabulary of “healthy” male virility. We talk of the rape of a country, and it is not an accident that when soldiers rape a country, they also rape its women. The Viet Nam genocide was characterized by massive, repeated attempts to defoliate the earth, Mother Nature herself. Nixon’s Christmas bombing message used language which was highly sexual and sexist. We know that these connections exist, and anyone who is concerned with violence and ending it as the substance of human relation must speak to them.
It is incredible to feminists that the notion of violence as a function of male sexual identity is not of pressing, burning concern to those who are against, they say, violence. How we ask, can one be against violence without being against the common, daily violence which defines male-female relation? How can one be against war there and celebrate it here, on our bodies? Real opposition to violence would necessitate specific attention to crimes of violence against women. Wife-beating and general physical assault by men against women are endemic in Amerika as elsewhere. Wife-beating, in particular, is a crime which remains invisible, sanctioned by laws which give the husband authority over the wife. Violent rape is rife on city streets, epidemic; and it is also common in so-called private, personal relationships between men and women. Women are raped, and women are forced to prostitution, and women are assaulted, and acts of violence against women everywhere on every level are common, so common that they are not worthy of notice, so common that they are called “normal” and romanticized as love.
How is it possible, we ask, to act against war without acting against violence? And how is it possible to act against violence without acting against male violence against women? Feminists do not think that it is possible and yet when we look for those on the Left who oppose violence, they say, in our ranks, we do not find them.
Here the classic concern of the Left for the poor and unemployed vanishes—women are not thought of as poor or unemployed on their own; no, they are thought of as the wives of the poor and unemployed or they are not thought of at all.
4. The Means of Production and the Original Capital
We know that two evils clearly pre-date corporate capitalism, and have post-dated socialist revolutions: sexism and racism—so we know that a male-dominated socialist revolution in economic and even cultural terms, were it to occur tomorrow, would be no revolution, but only another coup d’etat among men.
Robin Morgan
I assure you I am not an enemy of women. I am very favourable to their employment as labourers or in other menial capacity.
an industrialist to Emily Davies, who wanted help in funding a school for women10
In one world the sons of educated men work as civil servants, judges, soldiers, and are paid for that work; in the other world, the daughters of educated men work as wives, mothers, daughters—but are they not paid for that work? Is the work of a mother, of a wife, of a daughter, worth nothing to the nation in solid cash?
Virginia Woolf
The women say, shame on you. They say you are domesticated, forcibly fed, like geese in the yard of the farmer who fattens them. They say, you strut about, you have no other care than to enjoy the good things your masters hand out, solicitous for your well-being so long as they stand to gain. They say, there is no more distressing spectacle than that of slaves who take pleasure in their servile state. They say, you are far from possessing the pride of those wild birds who refuse to hatch their eggs when they have been imprisoned. They say, take an example from the wild birds who, even if they mate with the males to relieve their boredom, refuse to reproduce so long as they are not at liberty.
Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères
On the Left, bright young men are fond of saying that women will be liberated when workers control the means of production. It is very hard for us to explain, though it does seem perfectly obvious, that sexism is not a function of capitalism. Corporate or monopoly capitalism is this era’s manifestation, sophisticated and virtually uncontrollable, of patriarchal ownership. Men owned women, women were capital; men owned women and the children that women produced; men owned women as wives, concubines, slaves, and whatever women produced, men owned. There was one man and he owned several women and their children and whatever they all produced. There was one man and he owned families who worked his land, and in those families women were owned first by the man who owned the families, then by the man who headed her particular family. He was the master, and master became his title, then a common form of address. Women were capital; later other commodities, then money, substituted for women occasionally, then more often. Today there is corporate capitalism in Amerika and state capitalism in Russia. When we look at the failure of the socialist revolution in Russia, we see clearly the inability of patriarchs to give up the ownership of women. When that basic totalitarian form of ownership survives, wherever it survives, the whole motley gamut of totalitarian behavior survives with it.
When we look at the Left in Amerika here and now, what we see strikes terror in our hearts: mostly there is capitalism—the private ownership of women with token reform in the division of labor; where there is socialism, there is the collective male ownership of women, usually without even token reform in division of labor.
I am convinced, as I ponder why Leftists are so absolutely and blissfully stuck on the notion that freedom for all is when the workers control the means of production, that the Left has an almost pathological attachment to the mythic notion of The Worker as a figure of virility. There, think intellectuals, he is: driving trucks, laying bricks, building roads, working heavy equipment—a real man—The Working Man. Certainly it cannot be denied that he is the left-wing hero, and if we have learned anything it is to keep our distance from left-wing heroes.
How does one come to such a conclusion? I begin with the proposition that the means of production must be in the hands of the people; that freedom, dignity, and nonalienated work are the rights of all people. I look to those who articulate those propositions. But in fact, or in effect, they say: the means of production must be in the hands of men; work must stay in the hands of men; money must stay in the hands of men; freedom, dignity, and nonalienated work are the rights of men. They say: men have these rights and if there is anything left over—jobs, or money, or some excess freedom or dignity—we will parcel it out among the women. Needless to say, there is nothing left over, ever.
We must consider here women who work, women who do not work, and “women’s work.” Women who work are underhired, underpaid, first fired, excluded from trade unions, not given promotions or raises or training, are discriminated against in every way. Let working men make these complaints and the Left is involved, concerned, yea, outraged—picket lines are joined, books are written. The fact that the Left is mute on the wretched situation of working women is not accidental. On the contrary, it is a manifestation of male alliance to protect male power and male privilege: however poor men are, women must be poorer and thus dependent on male favor, in a state of economic, and therefore sexual, bondage.
Many women do not work at all in the labor market, particularly poor women who are imprisoned by the welfare system, children, lack of marketable skills. Here the classic concern of the Left for the poor and unemployed vanishes—women are not thought of as poor or unemployed on their own; no, they are thought of as the wives of the poor and unemployed or they are not thought of at all.
What is most astounding is how left-wing economists totally ignore, as if it did not exist, so-called “women’s work.” Most women do domestic labor and are not paid for it. Most women do child rearing and are not paid for it. Women do slave labor, unrewarding, repetitive, involuntary, unskilled, unvalued, menial work that the poorest man will not do. Where are the left-wing writings on how women are the most viciously exploited labor force on the planet? We do not support capitalism (women’s identity is not invested in capitalism), but we too must survive under it. To survive, we must be paid for the work we do.
That, of course, is not enough. Domestic work and child rearing are not women’s work—we reject that precious birthright along with the bullshit male rhapsodies which sentimentalize it. Scrubbing floors and washing shit off babies and out of diapers are not functions of gender fate or identity, unless only women have hands.
Last, the Left, its economists, historians, and philosophers, have seemingly not yet noticed that we are the means of production. We are, in our bodies, the worker and the means of production. Never has there been such alienated labor. For us, control over our bodies is control over our lives. We are deprived of that control by a system of laws, customs, and habits which exploits us so viciously and absolutely that the real exploitation of The Worker pales by comparison. Why, we must ask, is his situation crucial to you, and ours invisible? It could not be because The Worker is poorer, or more exploited, than, for instance, his wife who either works or does not work at paid labor, and in either case does domestic labor and child rearing for no money and is herself the means of production. It must be that he is a real man, that working class hero. She, as ever, is only a real woman. Clearly, self-proclaimed Marxists and communists of all ideologies remain capitalists, bosses, and shameless exploiters until they develop serious feminist consciousness and commitment.
We say, oppression begins where life begins, in the act of fucking, and revolution must begin in the same place, or it has not begun at all.
5. Feminism and Fucking
‘The only real love I have ever felt
was for children and other women.
Everything else was lust, pity,
self-hatred, pity, lust.’
This is a woman’s confession.
Now, look again at the face
of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali,
the Judith of Chartres
with her so-called smile.
Adrienne Rich
Every act of becoming conscious
(it says here in this book)
is an unnatural act
Adrienne Rich
. . . I’m a lesbian, right? And I don’t have to love ’em, I don’t have to fuck ’em, and I damn sure don’t have to depend on ’em, and that is freedom . . .
Shirley, from Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness
The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Women’s oppression, body and soul, takes place every day. It is the fabric of daily existence, unceasing, unrelenting, built into law, custom, and habit. Women survive by submitting, by learning the slave mentality and glorying in it. Women advance in this society by being good women (i.e., cunts, chicks, pieces of ass, etc.) just as blacks advance by being good niggers.11
When one stops playing the slave’s game, the world falls apart. Nothing is left. Nothing that one learned before works anymore. How does one walk, talk, dress, play, think, love, differently? Each minute, how and what does one do? The world becomes a very dangerous place. When one stops playing the slave’s game, one must start to invent every minute of one’s life. There are no forms which already exist to show how, and there are no liberated communities where exemplary people lead exemplary lives. One lives on the edge of a personal world collapsed, in direct opposition to the whole world of reality and power, and what then can one do except invent?
The point here is that we do not have the luxury of being able to abstract our protests or resistances—we must live in our bodies and our bodies must live in patriarchy, subject to continuing violation, harassment, and contempt. There are no neutral areas—areas in which “sexism” does not matter. In particular, sex, the home, and “romance” are not neutral areas. Nothing is more political to a feminist than fucking—nothing is less an act of love and more an act of ownership, violation; nothing is less an instrument of ecstasy and more an instrument of oppression than the penis; nothing is less an expression of love and more an expression of dominance and control than conventional heterosexual relation. Here the war mentality makes a visitation on our bodies and the phallic values of aggression, dominance, and conquest are affirmed.
To transform the world, we must transform the very substance of our erotic sensibilities, and we must do so as consciously and as conscientiously as we do any act which involves our whole lives. There are two emerging feminist erotic models: lesbianism and androgyny. Lesbianism is a celebration of womanhood, the core erotic act in an emerging women’s culture. Androgyny has to do with the obliteration of gender distinctions and sex roles, and ultimately of gender itself. Both of these models must compel those who understand that systems of oppression are cancers which grow from and originate in the twisted sexual model, which is the patriarchal notion of normalcy, called dominance and submission. We say, oppression begins where life begins, in the act of fucking, and revolution must begin in the same place, or it has not begun at all.
The pathology of being anti-woman, or woman hating, is the warp and woof of the world.
6. Conclusion
There is only one choice. Call it freedom.
Marge Piercy
Grace Paley was telling me about her trip to Russia and she said—
anti-Jewishness is the pathology of Russia, and of the whole of Western Europe, just as anti-blackness is the pathology of Amerika, and being anti-woman is the pathology of the world.
The pathology of being anti-woman, or woman hating, is the warp and woof of the world. Cure it, and the world as we know it—its cruel and systematized oppression, the suffering of its wretched multitudes—must collapse. Cure it, and we transform human life and create human community. Continue to nurture that same pathology, to call it love and normalcy, and our history will be in the future what it has been in the past—Dachau, Hiroshima, Viet Nam; rape, sexual torture, women in chains.
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Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, 1929 and 1938 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 215.
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1987 (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 5. Known for works like War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878), Tolstoy’s late novella—The Kreutzer Sonata—advocates the end of heterosexual intercourse to keep men like himself from murdering women like his wife Sophia. Readers of Intercourse would know by the tenth page, but the popular misattribution of Tolstoy’s view to Dworkin continues on the basis of willfully malignant illiteracy.
Andrea Dworkin, “The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage,” 1975, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1976 (New York: Perigee Books, 1981), 63-64
See Vaclav Smil, “China’s Great Famine: 40 Years Later,” British Medical Journal (BMJ) 319 (1999): 1619-1621. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.319.7225.1619.
See Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011), 194: “As Jenny was in Holland humiliating herself, Marx was in London betraying her; while she pleaded with his family for assistance, he was having sex with Lenchen on Dean Street.”
See Ian Jack, “How Would Gandhi’s Celibacy Tests with Naked Women Be Seen Today?” The Guardian, October 1, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/01/gandhi-celibacy-test-naked-women. After his wife Kasturba died in 1944, Gandhi invited naked young women and girls decades younger than him to share his bed for the purpose of being a “temptation.” According to Jack, Gandhi believed resisting arousal over the nakedness demonstrated “brahmacharya, a Hindu concept of celibate self-control.”
In Dworkin’s Intercourse, she analyzes Tolstoy’s work, particularly The Kreutzer Sonata, dated 1889, with reference to his and his wife’s autobiographical writings about their marriage. Here is Dworkin: “The story is autobiographical, as is much of Tolstoy’s fiction; and in The Kreutzer Sonata he uses the details of his sexual intercourse with Sophie . . . to show his feelings of deep repugnance for the wife he continues to fuck—and for the sex act itself” (p. 4). Despite his revulsion for intercourse with her, Tolstoy fucked Sophia—impregnating her with thirteen children, only eight of whom survived into adulthood. See Dworkin, Intercourse, 1987 (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 3-24.
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6, 228.
Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (New York: Plume, 1974), 94.
Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Damn,” 1969, in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 437.
The 1977 pamphlet has the biblical reference as “Ephesians 5:23-24,” seemingly a typo, but the reference is actually Ephesians 5:22-23: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body” [King James Version (KJV)].
This name in Dworkin’s text appears spelled as “Emily Davis,” but Dworkin seems to be referring to Emily Davies (1830-1921), the English suffragist who founded Girton College, Cambridge, in 1869.
Although flagged as “racist” today, not to be written much less spoken, this language was typical for underground newspapers and 1970s publications related to the New Left, and it had symbolic use in articulating oppression. There has been a tendency, however, to cry racism about language and claim a position of moral superiority over authors writing fifty years ago. Even coming from Black radical activists, however, the language obscure how sexual oppression related to racial oppression and their interrelatedness.
Beyond Yoko Ono’s 1968 “woman is the nigger of the world,” referenced in Dworkin’s Woman Hating, Black radical feminist Flo Kennedy used interestingly colorful variations throughout her speeches. For instance, here is Kennedy in 1974: “[W]hether you’re talking about women as niggers, niggers as niggers, homosexuals as niggers, students as niggers, prison inmates as niggers, city people as niggers, American taxpayers as niggers, consumers as niggers—niggerization has a certain symptomatology.” Kennedy was speaking to students at Salem State College in Massachusetts, and this kind of phrasing was typical in her university talks—campus language hardly imaginable now. She writes that using slurs and obscenities in university lectures seems to ignite more concern morally than war, starvation, and poverty destroying human lives. See Flo Kennedy, Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 89.
Perhaps more interestingly, in 1986, Bayard Rustin, a Black gay man and civil rights movement organizer with Martin Luther King Jr., used a variation of this phrasing when he said, “The new ‘niggers’ are gays.” Rustin was speaking to the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black and White Men Together (BWMT), a gay multiracial organization founded in San Francisco in 1980. His lesser-known use of racism-as-symbol referring to Black and white gay men—lesbians “implied” loosely, as usual—seems even more controversial than Ono’s, although virtually unknown. See Bayard Rustin, “The New ‘Niggers’ Are Gays,” 1986, in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, eds. Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise, 2nd Ed. (New York: Cleis Press, 2015), 275-276.