On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own...as if her politics were simply an outburst of personal bitterness or rage.

A woman I know was recently raped; her first—and typical—instinct was to feel sorry for the rapist, who held her at knife-point. When we begin to feel compassion for ourselves and each other instead of for our rapists, we will begin to be immune to suicide.

[Virginia Woolf’s] answer was that [the patriarchy] is leading to war, to elitism, to exploitation and the greed for power; in our time we can also add that it has clearly been leading to the ravagement of the nonhuman living world.

Yet the very concept of "professionalism," tainted as it is with the separation between personal life and work, with a win-or-lose mentality and the gauging of success by public honors and market prices, needs a thorough revaluation by women.

It will be objected that this is merely “reverse chauvinism.” But given the intensive training all women go through in every society to place our own long-term and collective interests second or last and to value altruism as the expense of independence and wholeness-and given the degree to which the university reinforces that training in its every aspect—the most urgent need at present is for women to recognize, and act on, the priority of recreating ourselves and each other, after our centuries of intellectual and spiritual blockading.

Certainly a major change will be along the liens already seen in women’s studies: a breakdown of traditional departments and “disciplines,” of that fragmentation of knowledge that weakens thought and permits the secure ignorance of the specialist to protect him from responsibility for the application of his theories. It is difficult to imagine a woman-centered curriculum where quantitative method and technical reason would continue to be allowed to become means for the reduction of human lives, and where specialization would continue to be used as an escape from wholeness.

…a man experiences the violation of some profound “right” when a woman leaves him: the “right” to her services, however lacking in mutuality the relationship. Through patriarchal socialization, men learn to think in terms of their “rights” where rights are not actually the issue: in areas like sexual behavior, maternal behavior, which are seen, not as springing from a woman’s choice and affections but as behavior to which the male is entitled to as a male.

We do not "save" men by bending to violence, nor do we "save" our children by letting them see, in their own homes, their first community, violence prevailing as the ultimate recourse in human relations, and victimization accepted in the name of "love."

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text form a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

For young adults trying to write seriously for the first time in their lives, the question “Whom can I trust?” must be an underlying boundary to be crossed before real writing can occur. We who are part of literary culture come up against such a question only when we find ourselves writing on some frontier of self-determination, as when writers from an oppressed group within literary culture, such as black intellectuals, or, most recently, women, begin to describe and analyze themselves as they cease to identify with the dominant culture. Those who fall into this category ought to be able to draw on it in entering into the experience of the young adult for whom writing itself—as reading—has been part of the not-me rather than one of the natural activities of the self.

And beyond the exchange and criticism of work, we have to ask ourselves how we can make the conditions for work more possible, not just for ourselves but for each other. This is not a question of generosity. It is not generosity that makes women in community support and nourish each other. It is rather what Whitman called the “hunger for equals”—the desire for a context in which our own strivings will be amplified, quickened, lucidified, through those of our peers.

To do this work takes a capacity for constant active presence, a naturalist’s attention to minute phenomena, for reading between the lines, watching closely for symbolic arrangements, decoding difficult and complex messages left for us by women of the past. It is work, in short, that is opposed by, and stands in opposition to, the entire twentieth-century white male capitalist culture.

For us, to be “extraordinary” or “uncommon” is to fail. History has been embellished with “extraordinary,” “exemplary,” “uncommon,” and of course “token” women whose lives have left the rest unchanged. The “common woman” is in fact the embodiment of the extraordinary will-to-survival in millions of obscure women, a life-force which transcends childbearing: unquenchable, chromosomatic reality.

Our struggles can have meaning and our privileges—however precarious under patriarchy—can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts—and whose very being—continue to be thwarted and silenced.