by Robin Morgan
Going Too Far
The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist
Robin Morgan
For
the Snow Queen
and the Robber Girl,
but especially for Little Gerda.
Contents
Preface to the 2014 Edition
Preface
INTRODUCTION: Rights of Passage
I LETTERS FROM A MARRIAGE
II THE EMERGENCE OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Women Disrupt the Miss America Pageant
Take a Memo, Mr. Smith
Three Articles on WITCH
WITCH Hexes Wall Street
WITCH at the Counter-Inaugural
WITCH Hexes the Bridal Fair
Being Reasonable: Two Letters to Men
How to Freak Out the Pope
The Media and the Man
The Wretched of the Hearth
Barbarous Rituals
III FEMINIST LEANINGS: ARTICLES FOR A WOMEN’S NEWSPAPER
Goodbye to All That
On Violence and Feminist Basic Training
A Country Weekend: Three Prose Poems
A Brief Elegy for Four Women
A Day in the Life (of a Woman)
IV RADICAL FEMINISM
On Women as a Colonized People
Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape
Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?
The Proper Study of Womankind: On Women’s Studies
International Feminism: A Call for Support of the Three Marias
A New Fable of the Burning Time
V BEYOND THE SEVENTH VEIL: RECENT WRITINGS
Letter from a War
The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies
Paranoia: Paradigm and Parable
Art and Feminism: A One-Act Whimsical Amusement on All That Matters
Metaphysical Feminism
AFTERWORD: Going
Germinal Reading List
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
PREFACE TO THE 2014 EDITION
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED in 1977, Going Too Far still surprises me. Where did it come from, the fool’s courage in that young woman who dared employ methods ranging from parable to memoir to prophecy for her scribbles? She shifted between epistolary, journalistic, theoretical, polemical, elegiac, confessional, and dramatic techniques. She invented her voices as she wrote them, as if no single tone or approach could convey her awe at the enormity of her discovery: the emergence of a political self held in common with other women and the simultaneous development of a personal self coming into its own power. The result was this chronicle.
Going Too Far marked the first time that I allowed my relationship problems at home to make it onto the page—in prose, that is, because they had already become evident in my poetry. Women were bravely sharing deep, private truths in small consciousness-raising groups, so—given the intimacy I have always felt with the reader—the page seemed a logical step. I decided, with my then-husband’s agreement, to risk including my “Letters from a Marriage.” They were an exercise in irony, exposing the private subjugation of a public fire-breathing activist, the projection of intellectual mastery onto my husband, the classic self-blame endemic to that situation. (Feminists had not yet coined the slogan “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” but I had come up with “We are the women men warned us about.”) The letters offered a tender bonus, however: They revealed details of the birth of our son, Blake, who was wanted and beloved. When published, these unsent missives had a political as well as literary impact, as did the entirety of the book’s last section, “Beyond the Seventh Veil: Recent Writings,” which contains chapters on sexual fantasies, dreams, journal entries, and a one-act play on art and feminism featuring the nine Muses. Honest to god. Little wonder I titled the book as I did.
The journalist here is busy describing the arc of the contemporary Women’s Movement, from my Miss America Pageant protest essays in the late 1960s through the formation and happy contagion that was WITCH, to growing intimations of international feminism by the end of the book—intimations that would become the impetus for my compiling Sisterhood Is Global. The political theorist surfaces in such chapters as “On Women As a Colonized People,” the rather audacious “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” and “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape.” This last was one of the earliest articulations of that connection, and the phrase “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice” is among the most often-quoted lines from my work.
But then there’s what’s happening behind the scenes.
Going Too Far lends insight into what was taking place offstage in the 1970s, as the Left—the hippie flower-and-love movement, peaceful protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and the counter-culture—finding itself unable to deliver swift societal change to impatient youth, gave way to more militant tactics. Anti-intellectualism was ascendant, and the descent into violence began; nothing else had worked, so activists thought, Why the hell not? But the subtext vibrating beneath this political combativeness—whether among the Weathermen, Black Panthers, or nameless “affinity groups”—was “manhood.” A decade later, I would write about this in greater depth in The Demon Lover, but these earlier signs point in that direction. One such indication was the white-hot energy of “Goodbye to All That”—which, like my poem “Monster,” written in the same period, seemed to articulate the pain and anger of women on the left, and naming this made it real. The essay landed like an explosion, setting off chain reactions in the public and private lives of activists. I had named names of abusive male leaders and numbered myself, along with other swaggeringly “liberated” women, among the oppressed. This was Just Not Done—but once I’d done it, imagine my shock to find it was possible to breathe and act more freely. Astoundingly, “Goodbye to All That” had the same effect on other women. Looking back, I realize that though it takes courage to speak truth to power, it takes as much or more courage to speak truth to powerlessness.
I’m proud of certain small acts of courage in this book. In an era of leftist intellectual downward mobility and correct-line thinking, it was a challenge to reclaim one’s own art and aesthetics, in fact to unapologetically affirm art itself. I’m proud that as far back as the mid-seventies I was drawn to what I termed metaphysical feminism: “the refusal to simplify or polarize, the insatiable demand for a passionate, intelligent, complex, visionary, and continuing process … which dares to celebrate contradiction and diversity.”
The humor in this book also pleases me, like my parody of my own poem “Monster,” satirized here in a piece of light verse entitled “Muenster,” about the world of political big cheeses. I’m proud that I learned to prick my own pomposity with humor, which always blesses one with perspective. Central-committee types were and are lamentably bereft of a sense of humor—a clue not to trust them.
In the original preface to Going Too Far, I mentioned that the dialogue between present, past, and future selves at first unsettled me but that I’d come to respect it. All this time later, I’ve come to realize that there is no past or future, not really; the sole continuity is dynamic change, which vibrates perpetually in the present. And that means, no matter how far you think you’ve come, it’s necessary to go further.
Robin Morgan
October 2014
New York City
PREFACE
The contents of this book tell a story which covers the last decade and a half. In selecting the pieces assembled here I have chosen those which seemed best to represent my own evolving political/personal thought of a given period. These writings were map notations in the journey of an individual woman through uncharted territory, via t
he intertwined roads of daughterhood, artistry, marriage, motherhood, radicalism. The interior terrain was one of ambivalent love, of dreams and fantasies, an exploration of “madness,” and an affirmation of the artistic process. The exterior reality was of the 1960’s: reform and then revolutionary politics, militant tactics (and rhetoric), and the emergence of feminist consciousness. The progress is revealingly reflected, I think, in that basic measure of human communication: language.
By 1962, I was a professional writer, one who loved and was addicted to words—and the subsequent changes in content and consciousness would be shown most clearly in the changes of style. Sand, Koestler, Camus, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Fanon are only a few of the many writers who have explored the problem of style for the artist who is also an active political person of her/his time. Does one retain (indeed, strive to heighten) the subtle and elegant possibilities language has to offer in one’s work, even at the risk of appearing dense, elitist, or irrelevant perhaps to the very people one wants most to reach? Does one dare write “down” for the sake of accessibility? If so, how far can the words be simplified before the ideas themselves begin to lose the integrity of their own complexities? How do urgencies of the time, pressures by one’s political peers, feelings of guilt for a private joy found in the so-called individualistic act of writing—how do all these affect one’s work? The essays in this book show, I think, part of the effect on one such writer’s development. My “pre-political” respect for words was driven underground, so to speak, not so much by the civil-rights movement beginning in the late 1950’s, as by the New Left in the 1960’s; the very tools which were my best offering to the politics of my own generation were often regarded with contempt. Right and Left anti-intellectualism united when middle-class guilt drove my contemporaries into rebellion not only against educational institutions (which highly deserved such a revolt), but against education itself. Television had replaced books for many; rhetoric, in time, replaced thought. Or is this last an occupational hazard of all dedicated idealogues, an expedient if tragic inevitability?
I myself, then in my twenties, careened between my own fierce and often melodramatic individuality and a surrender to the intense pressure we radicals mutually exerted upon one another—all of us eagerly conforming to the dogma of nonconformity. I remember more than one demonstration of revolutionary sisters and brothers standardized in the regalia of psychedelic splendor and chanting in unison some slogan that conveyed our rejection of a society which processed people into identical robots. Irony (perhaps alone) still lives.
As feminist consciousness trickled into my life, however, another shift in my attitude toward language came about. It was not mere coincidence. Many of us began to recognize that we as women were trying to communicate hitherto unspeakable truths about our condition in the very language and concepts of the patriarchal culture (of the Left or Right) which caused that condition. Alma Graham and other feminist lexicographers and linguistic scholars explored the biased usage of everyday language, and began to devise new ways of freeing our speech. Synchronistically, an awkward but intrepid feminist culture was born, making it possible, among other things, to use in a poem words previously considered unpoetic, such as menstrual, dishcloth, diaper. Meanwhile I was finding my own way, as these essays reflect, back to that original concern for language, but a concern informed and transformed by the political consciousness gained in the interim. No revolution has yet dared understand its artists. Perhaps the Feminist Revolution will.
Some words are necessary on the structure of this book. I have collected these “documentary papers” in sections corresponding to their period and to my outlook at that time. Accordingly, I have restricted my editing of content to two areas: clarification of original intent and some unavoidable cutting to lessen redundancy. A selective process was necessary; there are articles that belong in this book which cannot be included, for legal and other reasons—their place is in a future volume. Only time can make definitive such a documentary record. Nevertheless, I have tried to be as comprehensively—and representatively—inclusive as possible of the years covered herein.
Each section, or part, has an introductory note placing the pieces that follow in their proper context. In many instances, an individual article required its own prefatory comments as well, providing background detail or explanation vital to the full comprehension of that essay. In most of these cases, I found a dialogue emerging between my voice today and my voice at the time of the piece’s writing. At first this dialogue between present and past selves unsettled me, but I have come to respect and learn from it, and so have left it to be shared with my readers. If the present voice sometimes seems overly judgmental of the past one, defensive for her, amused by her, or pitying of her, I can only trust that from this public conversation across the space of my own private growth something will emerge recognizable to other women and, I hope, of use.
Robin Morgan
New York City, 1977
INTRODUCTION: RIGHTS OF PASSAGE
THE WOMAN is a writer, primarily a poet. She is thirty-five years old, a wife, mother of a seven-year-old son. She is white, apostately Jewish, and of that nebulous nonclass variously referred to as “artists” or “intellectuals”: words of floating definition meant to describe those persons possessed of intense vocations, educational riches, and financial insolvency—a study in contradictory classlessness. And she is a radical feminist. In fact she is an “oldie”—one of the women who helped start this wave of feminism back in the Pleistocene Age of the middle and late 1960’s—a rare species characterized by idealism, enthusiasm, and round-the-clock energy. It is a species now endangered: often burnt out, weary, cynical, embittered, and prone to seizures of matronizing advice for younger sisters. Yet this particular specimen is still active, hopeful even, and the face that looks out from beneath a few more proudly exhibited gray hairs each day, the face is almost—good grief—mature.
The face looks out from a mirror. It is my face, and I am that woman.
I wanted to write this Introduction as a sort of “personal retrospective” on the Women’s Movement: where we’ve been, where we are, where we might be going—all this in a classically theoretical style, preferably obscure, yea, unintelligible, so that people would be unable to understand what in hell I was saying and would therefore label me A Brilliant Thinker. But the risk-taking, subjective voice of poetry is more honestly my style, and so, to look at the Women’s Movement, I go to the mirror—and gaze at myself. Everywoman? Surely a staggering egotism, that! I hardly believe “Le Mouvement, c’est moi.” I do still believe, though, that the personal is political, and vice versa (the politics of sex, the politics of housework, the politics of motherhood, etc.), and that this insight into the necessary integration of exterior realities and interior imperatives is one of the themes of consciousness that makes the Women’s Movement unique, less abstract, and more functionally possible than previous movements for social change.
So I must dare to begin with myself, my own experience.
Ten years ago I was a woman who believed in the reality of the vaginal orgasm (and had become adept at faking spiffy ones). I felt legitimized by a successful crown roast and was the fastest hand in the East at emptying ashtrays. I never condemned pornography for fear of seeming unsophisticated and prudish. My teenage rebellion against my mother had atrophied into a permanent standoff. Despite hours of priming myself to reflect acceptable beauty standards, I was convinced that my body was lumpy, that my face was possessed of a caterpillar’s bone structure, and that my hair was resolutely unyielding to any flattering style. And ten years ago my poems quietly began muttering something about my personal pain as a woman—unconnected, of course, to anyone else, since I saw this merely as my own inadequacy, my own battle.
I’ve thought a lot recently, while assembling the essays in this book, about that intervening decade and the startling changes it brought about. Going Too Far is more than a collection of my prose writings on feminism dat
ing back to the early 1960’s; it is also a graph of slow growth, defensiveness, struggle, painful new consciousness, and gradual affirmation. My decision to leave each piece in this book unretouched—warts and all—has necessitated an editorial self-discipline as redolent with embarrassment as nostalgia, the two alternating in waves, like chills and fever.
There were the years in the New Left—the civil-rights movement, the student movement, the peace movement, and their more “militant” offspring groups—until my inescapably intensifying woman’s consciousness led me, along with thousands of other women, to become a refugee from what I came to call “the male-dominated Left” and what I now refer to as “the boys’ movement.” And it wasn’t merely the mass epidemic of bursitis (from the continual cranking of mimeograph machines) which drove us all out, but the serious, ceaseless, degrading, and pervasive sexism we encountered there, in each man’s attitude and in every group’s structure and in the narrow political emphases and manhood-proving tactical styles themselves. We were used to such an approach from the Establishment, but here, too? In a context which was supposed to be different, to be fighting for all human freedom?
That was the period when I still could fake a convincing orgasm, still wouldn’t be caught dead confronting an issue like pornography (for fear, this time, of being “a bad vibes, uptight, un-hip chick”). I could now afford to reject my mother for a new, radical-chic reason: the generation gap. I learned to pretend contempt for monogamy as both my husband and I careened (secretly grieving for each other) through the fake “sexual revolution” of the sixties. Meanwhile, correctly Maoist rice and vegetables filled our menus—and I still put in hours priming myself to reflect acceptable beauty standards, this time those of a tough-broad street fighter: uniform jeans, combat boots, long hair, and sunglasses worn even at night (which didn’t help one see better when running from rioting cops). And my poems lurched forth guiltily, unevenly, while I developed a chronic case of Leningitis and mostly churned out political essays—although Donne and Dickinson, Kafka, Woolf, and James were still read in secret at our home (dangerous intellectual tendencies), and television was surreptitiously watched (decadent bourgeois privileges).
