women in universities the movement might be expected to find strong support. It is not surprising that exploited women workers might decide to hold the government to ransom at last. It is surpris- ing that women who seem to have nothing to complain about have begun to murmur. Speaking to quiet audiences of provincial women decently hatted and dressed, I have been surprised to find that the most radical ideas are gladly entertained, and the most telling criti- cisms and sharpest protests are uttered. Even the suffragettes could not claim the grass-roots support that the new feminism gains day by day.
We can only speculate about the causes of this new activity. Per- haps the sexual sell was oversell. Perhaps women have never really believed the account of themselves which they were forced to accept from psychologists, religious leaders, women’s magazines and men. Perhaps the reforms which did happen eventually led them to the position from which they could at last see the whole perspective and begin to understand the rationale of their situation. Perhaps because they are not enmeshed in unwilling childbirth and heavy menial labour in the home, they have had time to think. Perhaps the plight of our society has become so desperate and so apparent that women can no longer be content to leave it to other people. The en- emies of women have blamed such circumstances for female discon- tent. Women must prize this discontent as the first stirring of the demand for life; they have begun to speak out and to speak to each other. The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion. ‘Right on!’
We may safely assert that the knowledge that men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial and will always be so until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
John Stuart Mill
The organized liberationists are a well-publicized minority; the same faces appear every time a feminist issue is discussed. Inevitably they are presented as the leaders of a movement which is essentially leaderless. They are not much nearer to providing a revolutionary strategy than they ever were; demonstrating, compiling reading lists and sitting on committees are not themselves liberated behaviour, especially when they are still embedded in a context of housework and feminine wiles. As means of educating the people who must take action to liberate themselves, their effectiveness is limited. The concept of liberty implied by such liberation is vacuous; at worst it is defined by the condition of men, themselves unfree, and at best it is left undefined in a world of very limited possibilities. On the one hand, feminists can be found who serve the notion of equality ‘social, legal, occupational, economic, political and moral’, whose enemy is discrimination, whose means are competition and demand. On the other hand there are those who cherish an ideal of a better life, which will follow when a better life is assured for all by the correct political means. To women disgusted with conventional political methods, whether constitutional or totalitarian or revolu- tionary, neither alternative can make much appeal. The housewife who must wait for the success of world revolution for her liberty might be excused for losing hope, while conservative political methods can invent no way in which the economically necessary unit of the one-man family could be diversified. But there is another dimension in which she can find motive and cause for action, al- though she might not find a blueprint for Utopia. She could begin not by changing the world, but by re-assessing herself.
It is impossible to argue a case for female liberation if there is no certainty about the degree of inferiority or natural dependence which is unalterably female. That is why this book begins with the
Body
. We know what we are, but know not what we may be, or what we might have been. The dogmatism of science expresses the status quo
as the ineluctable result of law: women must learn how to question the most basic assumptions about feminine normality in order to reopen the possibilities for development which have been success- ively locked off by conditioning. So, we begin at the beginning, with the sex of cells. Nothing much can be made of chromosomal differ- ence until it is manifested in development, and development cannot take place in a vacuum: from the outset our observation of the female is consciously and unconsciously biassed by assumptions that we cannot help making and cannot always identify when they have been made. The new assumption behind the discussion of the body is that everything that we may observe
could be otherwise
. In order to demonstrate some of the aspects of conditioning a discussion follows of the effects of behaviour upon the skeleton. From
Bones
we move to
Curves
, which is still essential to assumptions about the female sex, and then to
Hair
, for a long time considered a basic sec- ondary sexual characteristic.
Female sexuality has always been a fascinating topic; this discus- sion of it attempts to show how female sexuality has been masked and deformed by most observers, and never more so than in our own time. The conformation of the female has already been described in terms of a particular type of conditioning, and now the specific character of that conditioning begins to emerge. What happens is that the female is considered as a sexual object for the use and appre- ciation of other sexual beings, men. Her sexuality is both denied and misrepresented by being identified as passivity. The vagina is oblit- erated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigour in the rest of her body are suppressed. The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate—timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity.
Body
ends with a look at the way in which female reproduction is thought to influence the whole organism in the operations of the
Wicked Womb
, source of
hysteria, menstrual depression, weakness, and unfitness for any sustained enterprise.
The compound of induced characteristics of soul and body is the myth of the Eternal Feminine, nowadays called the
Stereotype
. This is the dominant image of femininity which rules our culture and to which all women aspire. Assuming that the goddess of consumer culture is an artefact, we embark on an examination of how she comes to be made, the manufacture of the
Soul
. The chief element in this process is like the castration that we saw practised upon the body, the suppression and deflection of
Energy
. Following the same simple pattern, we begin at the beginning with
Baby
, showing how of the greater the less is made. The
Girl
struggles to reconcile her schooling along masculine lines with her feminine conditioning until
Puberty
resolves the ambiguity and anchors her safely in the feminine posture, if it works. When it doesn’t she is given further conditioning as a corrective, especially by psychologists, whose as- sumptions and prescriptions are described as the
Psychological Sell
. Because so many assumptions about the sex of mind cloud the issue of female mental ability, there follows a brief account of the failure of fifty years of thorough and diversified testing to discover any pattern of differentiation in male and female intellectual powers, called
The Raw Material
. Because the tests have been irrelevant to the continuing conviction that women are illogical, subjective and gen- erally silly,
Womanpower
takes a coherent expression of all such prejudice, Otto Weininger’s
Sex and Character
, and turns all the de- fects which it defines into advantages, by rejecting Weininger’s concepts of virtue and intelligence and espousing those of Whitehead and others. As a corrective to such a theoretical view of how valuable such female minds might be,
Work
provides a factual account of the patterns that the female contribution actually takes and how it is
valued.
The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a mas- culine-feminine polarity, in which men have
Draw near, woman, and hear what I have to say. Turn
your curiosity for once towards useful objects, and consider the advantages which nature gave you and society
ravished away. Come and learn how you were born the companion of man and became his slave; how you grew to like the condition and think it natural; and finally how the long habituation of slavery so degraded you that you preferred its sapping but convenient vices to the more difficult virtues of freedom and repute. If the picture I shall paint leaves you in command of yourselves, if you can contemplate it without emotion, then go back to your futile pastimes; ‘there is no remedy; the vices have become the custom.’
Choderlos de Laclos, ‘On the Education of
Women’, 1783
commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistatorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sado- masochistic pattern. This has meant the distortion of our concepts of
Love
. Beginning with a celebration of an
Ideal, Love
proceeds to describe some of the chief perversions,
Altruism, Egotism
, and
Obses- sion
. These distortions masquerade under various mythic guises, of which two follow—
Romance
, an account of the fantasies on which the appetent and the disappointed woman is nourished, and
The Object of Male Fantasy
, which deals with the favourite ways in which women are presented in specifically male literature.
The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage
records the rise of the most commonly accepted mutual fantasy of heterosexual love in our society, as a prelude to a discussion of the normal form of life as we understand it, the
Family
. The nuclear family of our time is severely criticized, and some vague alternatives are suggested, but the chief function of this part, as of the whole book, is mostly to suggest the possibility and the desirability of an alternative. The chief bogy of those who fear freedom is insecurity, and so
Love
ends with
an animadversion on the illusoriness of
Security
, the ruling deity of the welfare state, never more insubstantial than it is in the age of total warfare, global pollution and population explosion.
Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred. In extreme cases it takes the form of
Loathing and Disgust
occasioned by sadism, fastidiousness and guilt, and inspires hideous crimes on the bodies of women, but more often it is limited to
Abuse
and ridicule, expressed by casual insult and facetiousness. Rather than dwell upon the injustices suffered by women in their individual domestic circumstances, these parts deal with more or less public occasions in which the complicated patterns of mutual exploitation do not supply any ambiguous context. There are many subjective accounts of suffering to be found in feminist literature, so
Misery
deals with the problem on a broader scale, showing how much objective evidence there is that women are not happy even when they do follow the blueprint set out by sentimental and marriage guidance counsellors and the system that they repres- ent. Although there is no pattern of female assault on men to parallel their violence to women, there is plenty of evidence of the operation of
Resentment
in bitter, non-physical sexual conflict, usually enacted as a kind of game, a ritualized situation in which the real issues never emerge. This unconscious vindictiveness has its parallels in more organized and articulate female
Rebellion
, in that it seeks to characterize men as the enemy and either to compete with or confront or attack them. In so far as such movements
demand
of men, or
force
men to grant their liberty, they perpetuate the estrangement of the sexes and their own dependency.
Revolution
ought to entail the correction of some of the false per- spectives which our assumptions about womanhood, sex, love and society have combined to create. Tentatively it gestures towards the re-deployment of energy, no longer to be used in repression, but
in desire, movement and creation. Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people, which cannot be accomplished by denial of heterosexual contact. The Ultra-feminine must refuse any longer to countenance the self-deception of the Omnipotent Admin- istrator, not so much by assailing him as freeing herself from the desire to fulfil his expectations. It might be expected that men would resist female liberation because it threatens the foundations of phallic narcissism, but there are indications that men themselves are seeking a more satisfying role. If women liberate themselves, they will perforce liberate their oppressors: men might well feel that as sole custodians of sexual energy and universal protectors of wo- men and children they have undertaken the impossible, especially now that their misdirected energies have produced the ultimate weapon. In admitting women to male-dominated areas of life, men have already shown a willingness to share responsibility, even if the invitation has not been taken up. Now that it might be construed that women are to help carry the can full of the mess that men have made, it need not be surprising that women have not leapt at the chance. If women could think that civilization would come to matur- ity only when they were involved in it wholly, they might feel more optimism in the possibilities of change and new development. The spiritual crisis we are at present traversing might be just another growing pain.
Revolution
does little more than ‘peep to what it would’. It hints that women ought not to enter into socially sanctioned relationships, like marriage, and that once unhappily in they ought not to scruple to run away. It might even be thought to suggest that women should be deliberately promiscuous. It certainly maintains that they should be self-sufficient and consciously refrain from establishing exclusive dependencies and other kinds of neurotic symbioses. Much of what it points to is