sheer irresponsibility, but when the stake is life and freedom, and the necessary condition is the recovery of a will to live, irresponsib- ility might be thought a small risk. It is almost a hundred years since Nora asked Helmer ‘What do you consider is my most sacred duty?’ and when he answered ‘Your duty to your husband and children’, she demurred.
I have another duty, just as sacred…My duty to myself…I believe that before everything else I’m a human being—just as much as you are…or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have a warrant for it in books; but I can’t be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what’s in books. I must think things out
for myself and try to understand them.
2
The relationships recognized by our society, and dignified with full privileges, are only those which are binding, symbiotic, econom- ically determined. The most generous, tender, spontaneous relation- ship deliquesces into the approved mould when it avails itself of the approved buttresses, legality, security, permanence. Marriage cannot be a
job
as it has become. Status ought not to be measured for women in terms of attracting and snaring a man. The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquillity and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating. Life is not easier or more pleasant for the Noras who have set off on their journey to awareness, but it is more interesting, nobler even. Such counsel will be called encouragement of irresponsibility, but the woman who accepts a way of life which she has not knowingly chosen, acting out a series of contingencies falsely presented as destiny, is truly irresponsible. To abdicate one’s own moral under- standing, to tolerate crimes against humanity, to leave everything to someone else, the father-ruler-king-computer, is the
only irresponsibility. To deny that a mistake has been made when its results are chaos visible and tangible on all sides,
that
is irrespons- ibility. What oppression lays upon us is not responsibility but guilt. The revolutionary woman must know her enemies, the doctors, psychiatrists, health visitors, priests, marriage counsellors, policemen, magistrates and genteel reformers, all the authoritarians and dog- matists who flock about her with warnings and advice. She must know her friends, her sisters, and seek in their lineaments her own. With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she
undertakes, the more radical.
The way is unknown, just as the sex of the uncastrated female is unknown. However far we can see it is not far enough to discern the contours of what is ultimately desirable. And so no ultimate strategy can be designed. To be free to start out, and to find compan- ions for the journey is as far as we need to see from where we stand. The first exercise of the free woman is to devise her own mode of revolt, a mode which will reflect her own independence and origin- ality. The more clearly the forms of oppression emerge in her under- standing, the more clearly she can see the shape of future action. In the search for political awareness there is no substitute
for confrontation. It would be too easy to present women with yet another form of self-abnegation, more opportunities for appetence and forlorn hope, but women have had enough bullying. They have been led by the nose and every other way until they have to acknow- ledge that, like everyone else, they are lost. A feminist elite might seek to lead uncomprehending women in another arbitrary direction, training them as a task force in a battle that might, that ought never to eventuate. If there is a pitched battle women will lose, because the best man never wins; the consequences of militancy do not dis- appear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. It is not a question of telling women what to do next, or even what to want to do next. The hope in which this book was written is that women will discover that they have a will; once that happens they will be able to tell us how and what they want.
The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradict- ing authorities, an age of conformism without community, of prox- imity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we ima- gined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to elim- inate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistat- orial.
Hopefully, this book is subversive. Hopefully, it will draw fire from all the articulate sections of the community. The conventional moralist will find much that is reprehensible in the denial of the Holy Family, in the denigration of sacred motherhood, and the in- ference that women are not by nature monogamous. The political conservatives ought to object that by advocating the
destruction of the patterns of consumption carried out by the chief spenders, the housewives, the book invites depression and hardship. This is tantamount to admitting that the depression of women is necessary to the maintenance of the economy, and simply ratifies the point. If the present economic structure can change only by col- lapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible. The nation that acknowledges that all labourers are worthy of their hire and then withholds payment from 19.5 million workers cannot continue. Freudians will object that by setting aside the conventional account of the female psyche, and relying upon a concept of woman which cannot be found to exist, the book is mere metaphysics, forgetting the metaphysical basis of their own doctrine. The reformers will lament that the image of womanhood is cheapened by the advocacy of delinquency, so that women are being drawn further away from the real centres of power. In the computer kingdom the centres of political power have become centres of impotence, but even so, nothing in the book precludes the use of the political machine, al- though reliance on it may be contra-indicated. The most telling cri- ticisms will come from my sisters of the left, the Maoists, the Trots, the IS, the SDS, because of my fantasy that it might be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline. But if women are the true proletariat, the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system. The weapon that I suggest is that most honoured of the proletariat, withdrawal of labour. Nevertheless it is clear that I do not find the factory the real heart of civilization or the re-entry of women into industry as the necessary condition of liberation. Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labour, and even more, free labour exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favour.
This book represents only another contribution to a continuing dialogue between the wondering woman and the world. No ques- tions have been answered but perhaps some have been asked in a more proper way than heretofore. If it is not ridiculed or reviled, it will have failed of its intention. If the most successful feminine parasites do not find it offensive, than it is innocuous. What they can tolerate is intolerable for a woman with any pride. The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.
It is true that the sex of a person is attested by every cell in his body. What we do not know is exactly what that difference in the cells means in terms of their functioning. We cannot even argue from the observed difference in the cells to a significant difference in the tis- sues composed of those cells. To make any assumptions about su- periority or inferiority on this basis is to assume what is very far from being proved. Perhaps when we have learnt how to read the DNA we will be able to see what the information which is common to all members of the female sex really is, but even then it will be a long and tedious argument from biological data to behaviour.
It is an essential part of our conceptual apparatus that the sexes are a polarity, and a dichotomy in nature. Actually, that is quite false. The animal and vegetable worlds are not universally divided into two sexes, or even into two sexes with the possibility of freaks and indeterminate types; some lucky creatures are male and female by turns; some fungi and protozoa have more than two sexes and more than one way of coupling them. The degree of distinguishab- ility between the sexes can vary from something so tiny as to be al- most imperceptible to a degree of difference so great that scientists remained for a long time ignorant of the fact that species classified as distinct were in fact male and female of the same species. Nazi anthropologists maintained that the secondary sexual characteristics are more highly developed in more highly evolved species, pointing out that Negroid and Asiatic types frequently had less defined sec-
ondary characteristics than Aryans.
1
In fact many simple forms of life are more strikingly differentiated sexually than humans are. What we do notice however is that the differentiations between the human sexes are stressed and exagger- ated, and before justifying the process we must ask
why
.
We can see the differentiation which is essential to human sex if we magnify a body cell so much that we can see the chromosomes, say 2,000 times. Along with forty-five other chromosomes in the male body cell, there is one tiny one, called the Y-chromosome. It is not in fact a sex chromosome at all, and because of its isolation it has peculiar problems.
Since mutation within a chromosome can only be tested in different combinations when they can be freely distributed by crossing over, suppression of crossing over prevents mutations occurring within the Y-form being so tested. Since crossing over does not occur, the Y cannot undergo any structural interchange by means of interchange of parts. The Y-chromosome, therefore, during its evolution, would come to lose its effectiveness in the matter of sex determination and
its place would be taken by the autosomes interacting with X.
2
The autosomes are the chromosomes which are neither X nor Y, and of them there are twenty-three pairs in the body cells. Female sex is assured by the presence alongside them of a pair of chromo- somes which look exactly like them, but are in fact sex-determining, and are designated as XX. Instead of an XX pair added to his twenty- three pairs of autosomes the male has XY. The Y-chromosome has a negative function: when a Y-carrying sperm fertilizes an ovum, it simply reduces the amount of femaleness which would result in the formation of a female foetus. Along with his maleness, the foetus then inherits a number of weaknesses which are called sex-linked, because they result from genes found only in the Y-chromosome. Strange deformities like hypertrichosis, meaning excessive growths of hair mainly on the ears, horny patches on hands and feet, bark- like skin and a form of webbing of the toes are some which
are less well-known than haemophilia, which is in fact the result of a mutant gene in the X-chromosome which the Y-chromosome cannot suppress, so that it is transmitted by females, but only effective in males. Colour-blindness follows the same pattern. About thirty other disorders are to be found in the males of the species and seldom in the females for the same reason. There is much evidence that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male; she lives longer, and in every age group more males than females die although the number of males conceived may be between ten and thirty per cent more. There is no explanation for the more frequent conception of males, for female-producing spermatozoa are produced in the same number as male-producing ones. It is tempting to speculate whether this might not be a natural compensation for the greater vulnerability
of males.
3
While woman remains nearer the infantile type, man approaches more to the senile. The extreme variational tendency of man expresses itself in a larger percentage of genius, insanity and idiocy; woman remains more nearly normal.
W. I. Thomas, ‘Sex and Society’, 1907, p. 51
Recently, criminologists have come up with another disconcerting observation about the Y-chromosome. They found that there was a high proportion of males with the XYY-chromosome, that is an extra Y, among those men in prison for crimes of violence, and it seemed
to be linked to certain deficiencies in mental ability.
4
The development of the sexual characteristics is not simply de- termined by the chromosomes: these constitute the primal difference, but the development of the different physical characteristics involves the whole endocrinal system and the interaction of various hormones. Women have been made especially aware of their hormones