These reforms will not empty mental institutions of women
put into them by male relatives who hate them for rebelling
against the limits of the female role, or against the conditions
of female servitude. They will not empty prisons filled with
women who, in order to survive, whored; or who, after being
raped, killed the rapist; or who, while being beaten, killed the
man who was killing them. These reforms will not stop men
from living off exploited female domestic labor, nor will these
reforms stop men from reinforcing male identity by psychologically victimizing women in so-called “love” relationships.
And no personal accommodation within the system of
patriarchy will stop this relentless gynocide. Under patriarchy,
no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother
children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past,
present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
Before we can live and love, we will have to hone ourselves
into a revolutionary sisterhood. That means that we must stop
supporting the men who oppress us; that we must refuse to
feed and clothe and clean up after them; that we must refuse
to let them take their sustenance from our lives. That means
that we will have to divest ourselves of the identity we have
been trained to as females—that we will have to divest ourselves of all traces of the masochism we have been told is synonymous with being female. That means that we will have
to attack and destroy every institution, law, philosophy, religion, custom, and habit of this patriarchy—this patriarchy that feeds on our “dirty” blood, that is built on our “trivial”
labor.
Halloween is the appropriate time to commit ourselves to
this revolutionary sisterhood. On this night we remember our
dead. On this night we remember together that nine million
women were killed because men said that they were carnal,
malicious, and wicked. On this night we know that they live
now through us.
Let us together rename this night Witches’ Eve. Let us together make it a time of mourning: for all women who are victims of gynocide, dead, in jail, in mental institutions, raped,
sterilized against their wills, brutalized. And let us on this
night consecrate our lives to developing the revolutionary
sisterhood— the political strategies, the feminist actions—
which will stop for all time the devastating violence against
us.
4
The Rape A tro city
and the Boy N ext Door
I want to talk to you about rape— rape—what it is, who does
it, to whom it is done, how it is done, why it is done, and what
to do about it so that it will not be done any more.
First, though, I want to make a few introductory remarks. *
From 1964 to 1965 and from 1966 to 1968, I went to Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington at that time was still a women’s school, or, as people said then, a girls’ school. It
was a very insular place—entirely isolated from the Vermont
Delivered at State University of New York at Stony Brook, March 1, 1975;
University of Pennsylvania, April 25, 1975; State University of New York
College at Old Westbury, May 10, 1975; Womanbooks, New York City,
July 1, 1975; Woodstock Women's Center, Woodstock, New York, July 3,
1975; Suffolk County Community College, October 9, 1975; Queens College,
City University of New York, April 2 6 , 1976.
*
These introductory remarks were delivered only at schools where there
was no women’s studies program.
community in which it was situated, exclusive, expensive.
There was a small student body highly concentrated in the
arts, a low student-faculty ratio, and an apocryphal tradition
of intellectual and sexual “freedom. ” In general, Bennington
was a very distressing kind of playpen where wealthy young
women were educated to various accomplishments which
would insure good marriages for the respectable and good
affairs for the bohemians. At that time, there was more actual
freedom for women at Bennington than at most schools— in
general, we could come and go as we liked, whereas most
other schools had rigid curfews and controls; and in general
we could wear what we wanted, whereas in most other schools
women still had to conform to rigid dress codes. We were
encouraged to read and write and make pots, and in general
to take ourselves seriously, even though the faculty did not
take us seriously at all. Being better educated to reality than
we were, they, the faculty, knew what we did not imagine—
that most of us would take our highfalutin ideas about James
and Joyce and Homer and invest them in marriages and volunteer work. Most of us, as the mostly male faculty knew, would fall by the wayside into silence and all our good intentions and vast enthusiasms had nothing to do with what would happen to us once we left that insulated playpen. At the time I
went to Bennington, there was no feminist consciousness there
or anywhere else at all. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique concerned housewives— we thought that it had nothing to do with us. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was not yet published. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was not yet published. We were in the process of becoming very well-educated women— we were already very privileged women—
and yet not many of us had ever heard the story of the movement for women’s suffrage in this country or Europe. In the Amerikan history courses I took, women’s suffrage was not
mentioned. The names of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, or
Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were never
mentioned. Our ignorance was so complete that we did not
know that we had been consigned from birth to that living
legal and social death called marriage. We imagined, in our
ignorance, that we might be novelists and philosophers. A rare
few among us even aspired to be mathematicians and biologists. We did not know that our professors had a system of beliefs and convictions that designated us as an inferior gender
class, and that that system of beliefs and convictions was virtually universal—the cherished assumption of most of the writers, philosophers, and historians we were so ardently
studying. We did not know, for instance, to pick an obvious
example, that our Freudian psychology professor believed
along with Freud that “the effect of penis-envy has a share. . .
in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value
their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority. ”1 In each field of study, such convictions were central, underlying, crucial. And yet we did not know that they meant us. This was true everywhere where
women were being educated.
As a result, women of my age left colleges and universities
completely ignorant of what one might call “real life. ” We did
not know that we would meet everywhere a systematic de-
spisal of our intelligence, creativity, and strength. We did not
know our herstory as a gender class. We did not know that we
were a gender class, inferior by law and custom to men who
were defined, by themselves and all the organs of their culture,
as supreme. We did not know that we had been trained all our
lives to be victims—inferior, submissive, passive objects who
could lay no claim to a discrete individual identity. We did not
know that because we were women our labor would be exploited wherever we worked—in jobs, in political movements
—by men for their own self-aggrandizement. We did not
know that all our hard work in whatever jobs or political
movements would never advance our responsibilities or our
rewards. We did not know that we were there, wherever, to
cook, to do menial labor, to be fucked.
I tell you this now because this is what I remembered
when I knew I would come here to speak tonight. I imagine
that in some ways it is different for you. There is an astounding feminist literature to educate you even if your professors will not. There are feminist philosophers, poets, comedians,
herstorians, and politicians who are creating feminist culture.
There is your own feminist consciousness, which you must
nurture, expand, and deepen at every opportunity.
As of now, however, there is no women’s study program
here. The development of such a program is essential to you as
women. Systematic and rigorous study of woman’s place in
this culture will make it possible for you to understand the
world as it acts on and affects you. Without that study, you
will leave here as I left Bennington— ignorant of what it
means to be a woman in a patriarchal society— that is, in a
society where women are systematically defined as inferior,
where women are systematically despised.
I am here tonight to try to tell you as much as I can about
what you are up against as women in your efforts to live decent, worthwhile, and productive human lives. And that is why I chose tonight to speak about rape which is, though no
contemporary Amerikan male writer will tell you so, the dirtiest four-letter word in the English language. Once you understand what rape is, you will understand the forces that systematically oppress you as women. Once you understand what rape is, you will be able to begin the work of changing the
values and institutions of this patriarchal society so that you
will not be oppressed anymore. Once you understand what
rape is, you will be able to resist all attempts to mystify and
mislead you into believing that the crimes committed against
you as women are trivial, comic, irrelevant. Once you understand what rape is, you will find the resources to take your lives as women seriously and to organize as women against the
persons and institutions which demean and violate you.
The word rape comes from the Latin word rapere, which
means “to steal, seize, or carry away. ”
The first definition of rape in The Random House Dictionary is still “the act of seizing and carrying off by force. ”
The second definition, with which you are probably familiar,
defines rape as “the act of physically forcing a woman to
have sexual intercourse. ”
For the moment, I will refer exclusively to the first definition of rape, that is, “the act of seizing and carrying off by force. ”
Rape precedes marriage, engagement, betrothal, and courtship as sanctioned social behavior. In the bad old days, when a man wanted a woman he simply took her—that is, he abducted and fucked her. The abduction, which was always for sexual purposes, was the rape. If the raped woman pleased the
rapist, he kept her. If not, he discarded her.
Women, in those bad old days, were chattel. That is,
women were property, owned objects, to be bought, sold,
used, and stolen—that is, raped. A woman belonged first to
her father who was her patriarch, her master, her lord. The
very derivation of the word patriarchy is instructive. 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. Paterfamilias means owner of slaves. The rapist who abducted a woman took the place of her father as her owner, possessor, or
master.
The Old Testament is eloquent and precise in delineating
the right of a man to rape. Here, for instance, is Old Testament law on the rape of enemy women. Deuteronomy, Chapter 21, verses 10 to 15—
When you go to war against your enemies and Yahweh your God
delivers them into your power and you take prisoners, if you see
a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable,
you may make her your wife and bring her to your home. She
is to shave her head and cut her nails and take off her prisoner’s
garb; she is to stay inside your house and must mourn her father
and mother for a full month. Then you may go to her and be a
husband to her, and she shall be your wife. Should she cease to
please you, you will let her go where she wishes, not selling her
for money; you are not to make any profit out of her, since you
have had the use of her. 2
A discarded woman, of course, was a pariah or a whore.
Rape, then, is the first model for marriage. Marriage laws
sanctified rape by reiterating the right of the rapist to ownership of the raped. Marriage laws protected the property rights of the first rapist by designating a second rapist as an adulterer,
that is, a thief. Marriage laws also protected the father’s
ownership of the daughter. Marriage laws guaranteed the father’s right to sell a daughter into marriage, to sell her to another man. Any early strictures against rape were strictures
against robbery— against the theft of property. It is in this
context, and in this context only, that we can understand rape
as a capital crime. This is the Old Testament text on the theft
of women as a capital offense. Deuteronomy 22: 22 to 23: 1—
If a man is caught sleeping with another man’s wife, both must
die, the man who has slept with her and the woman herself. You
must banish this evil from Israel.
If a virgin is betrothed and a man meets her in the city and
sleeps with her, you shall take them both out to the gate of the
town and stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry
for help in the town; the man, because he has violated the wife
of his fellow. You must banish this evil from your midst. But if
the man has met the betrothed girl in the open country and has
taken her by force and lain with her, only the man who lay with
her shall die; you must do nothing to the girl, for hers is no
capital offence. The case is like that of a man who attacks and
kills his fellow; for he came across her in the open country and
the betrothed girl could have cried out without anyone coming to
her rescue.
If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her
and lies with her and is caught in the act, the man who has lain
with her must give the girl’s father fifty silver shekels; she shall
be his wife since he has violated her, and as long as he lives he
may not repudiate her.
A man must not take his father’s wife, and must not withdraw
the skirt of his father’s cloak from her. 3
Women belonged to men; the laws of marriage sanctified that
ownership; rape was the theft of a woman from her own
er.
These biblical laws are the basis of the social order as we
know it. They have not to this day been repudiated.
As history advanced, men escalated their acts of aggression
against women and invented many myths about us to insure
both ownership and easy sexual access. In 500 B. C. Herodotus, the so-called Father of History, wrote: “Abducting young women is not, indeed, a lawful act; but it is stupid after the
event to make a fuss about it. The only sensible thing is to take
no notice; for it is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be. ”4 Ovid in the Ars amatoria wrote: “Women often wish to give unwillingly
what they really like to give. ”5 And so, it became official:
women want to be raped.
Early English law on rape was a testament to the English
class system. A woman who was not married belonged legally
to the king. Her rapist had to pay the king fifty shillings as a
fine, but if she was a “grinding slave, ” then the fine was reduced to twenty-five shillings. The rape of a nobleman’s serving maid cost twelve shillings. The rape of a commoner’s serving maid cost five shillings. But if a slave raped a commoner’s serving maid, he was castrated. And if he raped any woman of
higher rank, he was killed. ®
Here, too, rape was a crime
against the man who owned the woman.
Even though rape is sanctioned in the Bible, even though
the Greeks had glorified rape— remember Zeus’ interminable
adventures— and even though Ovid had waxed euphoric over
rape, it was left to Sir Thomas Malory to popularize rape for
us English-speaking folk. Le Morte d’Arthur is the classic
work on courtly love. It is a powerful romanticization of rape.
Malory is the direct literary ancestor of those modem male
Amerikan writers who postulate rape as mythic lovemaking.
A good woman is to be taken, possessed by a gallant knight,
sexually forced into a submissive passion which would, by
male definition, become her delight. Here rape is transformed, or mystified, into romantic love. Here rape becomes the signet of romantic love. Here we find the first really modern rendering of rape: sometimes a woman is seized and carried off; sometimes she is sexually forced and left, madly, passionately in love with the rapist who is, by virtue of an excellent rape, her owner, her love. (Malory, by the way, was
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