wildfire/05_chap1.html

<h1>CHAPTER 1</h1>
<h2>Who's Afraid of the Supreme Court?</h2>
<p>After one of my workshops at the Michigan Women's Music Festival in the summer of 1987, a woman came up to talk to me. She told me she had been working frantically day and night to for the preceding two months to keep Bork off the Supreme Court. She had been writing letters and organizing others to write, holding publicmeetings, distributing flyers, talking to the media, setting up telephone networks - desperately doing everything she could think of. Her panic drove her into insomnia and depression and began to affect her health.</p>
<p>So she had come to Michigan to try to relax and rest but until my workshop had not been able to do so. As she listened to me, however, she thought, "What if she's right? What if it really doesn't matter who's on the Supreme Court?" Immediately, she felt as if an enormous burden had fallen from her shoulders. Her body felt light and buoyant, full of energy and zest. Feeling as if she hadn't breathed for two months, she filled her lungs with clear rain-washed air. The world that had appeared a uniform gray for so many weeks now glowed richly with color. She felt peaceful and happy - and this worried her.</p>
<p>"Do you think I'm just being <i>irresponsible?</i>" she asked nervously.</p>
<p>I know there are feminists who would have answered without hesitation, "Yes, I think you are!" But it seemed obvious to me that this woman, by daring to open herself to a seemingly fantastic possibility, had slipped through a crack in her programming and lived for a few precious moments in a free, nonpatriarchial world. I understood that for as long as she could stay outside her old beliefs and remain in the feeling of freedom she would be engaged in the actual creation of that new world. I told her I found her behavior eminently responsible, perhaps the only responsible behavior possible for women at this time in history.</p>
<p>It seems to me that to understand this, much depends on how we view the nature of reality. One of the most insistent messages from my inner voice in the last few years reaffirms the feminist revelation that among the myriad hoaxes of men, the biggest and most basic is what we are socialized to perceive as real. Since every second of my life is focused upon transforming "reality," I have had to think long and hard about that lie.</p>
<p>As I have asked myself: how does reality come into being? Why does it persist or die? I have known, of course, that there have always been voices among us insisting that what we perceive as reality has no objective existence. Though I have found this interesting, I didn't understand how it translated into daily life until I came across the following story.<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></p>
<p>Several hundred years ago, Magellan and his men sailed into a harbor in the Tierra del Fuego islands in their tall ships, put down their anchors, and rowed ashore in rowboats. A few days later, the shaman called the islanders together and she<a href="#fn2">[2]</a> said, "I'm going to tell you something preposterous, so get ready. Those men couldn't have come across all that open sea in the little boats they landed on our beach in. That means - and this is the preposterous part - that there have to be big, big boats out there in the harbor." Everyone turned to look - and got goose bumps; all they could see was the shimmering blue water. "Really?" they asked. "Really," she answered.</p>
<p>Because I am tired of using examples about men from men's books, I occasionally ask women in my audiences to give me another example of this phenomenon, one with women as its main characters. Here is a Lesbian story with the same theme:</p>
<p>Heather and Ruth (not their real names) had lived together as lovers for many years in an otherwise straight neighborhood. Because of their jobs, they had chosen to remain deeply closeted. Even those neighbors with whom they were close believed they were merely house-mates.</p>
<p>For their bang-up fifteenth anniversary celebration, Heather hung a huge sign <i>in lights</i> above the front door, a sign so big and dazzling that it nearly bowled the arriving guests over: "Ruth darling, 15 wonderful years together! I love you. Heather."</p>
<p>Heather and Ruth's property was surrounded by a fence that blocked a view of the shining love letter from the street and from their neighbors' places. But that night, their married friend from next door, not realizing they were having guests over, decided to come around for a chat. She walked up the path to the front door, knocked, and found herself in the midst of a party. It soon became apparent that she wasn't just pretending out of embarrassment, she really did not even suspect the reason for the celebration. The woman who told me the story assured me that it was fact that the neighbor had looked directly at the blazing sign for 50 yards as she came up the walk, had stood ringing the doorbell directly beneath it, and <i>hadn't seen it at all</i>.</p>
<p>Of course we ask how the Tierra del Fuegans could <i>not</i> see the ships, with their tiers of white sails sparkling in the sun, billowing in the wind? How could Heather and Ruth's neighbor <i>not</i> see their sign? The ships, the sign-they were so obvious, so "real."</p>
<p>But they were not real to those who had no place for them in their world view. They could not see them because reality is what people <i>expect</i> to see in the harbor or on the front of their neighbor's house. Reality is what we <i>believe</i> we will see when we look there, what we think is possible, what we have been told to believe is true, very strong, inevitable, unchangeable, irrevocable. Reality is what we are conditioned to value, and therefore <i>what we pay attention to</i>. Reality is what we are taught to think god plunked down in front of us and we have no choice but to learn to live with the best we can. It is what is called "natural."</p>
<p>Reality, then, is an internal construct, and it is defined and controlled by the dominant group.<a href="#fn3">[3]</a> The moment we internalize men's propaganda, their reality comes to live in our hearts and minds. Then, projecting it out onto our external screen, out onto the harbor or our friend's front door, we proceed to interact with it in ways that make it concrete, that institutionalize it, that real-ize it. In order for it to continue, all of us have to wake up every morning and project again what we believe is real out onto our external screen and immediately begin again to connect with it in reciprocal ways. This is how we are intimately and every moment involved in its creation and perpetuation.</p>
<p>The implications of this are that by interacting with a totally different world right now, we can bring <i>it</i> into focus. Women's world never left this planet. It is still here, right in front of our noses. We recreate it as we learn to see it and to live in it.</p>
<p>Though a basic lie of patriarchy is that "reality" is outside us, that it is someone else's creation and that therefore someone else has to change it, my hunch is that we, along with every living thing in the universe (and all is alive), are the creators of the world and that we daily recreate it from the stuff of our expectations and beliefs, from what we perceive as possible.</p>
<p>The question of the existence of "objectivity" is now before the worldwide scientific community. I have been much entertained by the uproar. For several hundred years now science has been almost synonymous with the Newtonian/Cartesian model of the world as machine - an object external and independent of us, ticking along like a great clock. The job of science has been to discover, describe, and use to advantage the laws by which the clock operates - laws, it has been assumed, that are entirely unaffected by human desire.</p>
<p>Now, of course, some scientists out on the fringes of credibility (but perhaps less and less so) are recognizing that results of experiments thought to be free of investigator bias are, in fact, <i>dictated</i> by that bias. That what develops in a petri dish, for instance, does not reveal the laws that govern the substances therein so much as it reveals the investigator's expectations and beliefs about what must inevitably develop there under certain conditions. In short, scientists are whispering with wide eyes that objectivity doesn't seem to be possible.</p>
<p>Sitting on a plane reading this, I smiled and murmured under my breath, "No kidding!" Women, who have always been belittled for our lack of "objectivity," have known in some deep, intuitive, and conclusive way that objectivity was a figment of men's fevered necessity to be in all things "not women," a phantom spawned by their panic to find their own male and superior ways of verifying truth, a way of being in control.</p>
<p>If the genesis of all reality is internal and subjective, all systems are internal systems, including patriarchy. Patriarchy does not then have a separate existence outside us; it exists inside us and we project it daily onto our external screen, onto our harbor the world, and then interact with it in ways that keep it functioning as we are taught to believe it must inevitably function.</p>
<p>The wonderfully hopeful part of this is that reality's being within us obviously makes it very much under our control. So much under our control, in fact, that the instant patriarchy dies in our hearts and in our minds, it dies everywhere. When women cease to believe that patriarchy is very strong, when we stop being afraid of it, when we stop believing that we must do everything through and in relation to men and their system, when we stop thinking of men's control as power, when we deprogram ourselves from the belief that we cannot build a new world without first getting men's approval (trying to get them to legislate it for us, for instance), and when we stop believing that we have to do any piece of our lives as society dictates, then patriarchy is over. The instant enough of us detach from patriarchy and stop facilitating it, that is the instant tyranny will cease.</p>
<p>We are learning how to look, how to see. We are not on our way to a new world, we are there already and must simply recognize it. Though we began by seeing our oppression, now we must see beyond it, see that our freedom is as real as our bondage, and that we can - and often do - live in it right now.</p>
<p>Once, to a group of friends, I talked about how, with my current understanding of my role in perpetuating patriarchy and because of my love for myself and women and all life, I had to let go, to detach, to cut the umbilical cords of belief and feeling. To illustrate what I meant, at least in part, I quoted my friend Sheila Feiger:</p>
<blockquote>I'm not interested in doing less than changing the world. But I've been in the movement - in NOW - for 12 years. I've carried the picket signs and gone to the conferences, been in the demonstrations, and spoken, and written letters, and watched Congress, and worked for candidates, and done all the things we thought would change the world. And I know that that is not the way to change the world and I'm not going to do those things anymore.</blockquote>
<p>"And neither am I," I said to my friends.</p>
<p>"Oh, Sonia," one of them sighed, "that's just not practical!"</p>
<p>"Practical," I repeated thoughtfully. "Isn't that an interesting word." I thought to myself how for 5,000 years women have been resisting patriarchy in all the ways that have been called practical, resistance itself held to be the only practical avenue to change. Some say that women weren't always aware enough to resist or didn't know anything was wrong. But I say that if we want to know how women were down through the centuries, all we have to do is look at ourselves. <i>We</i> are how women have been: brilliant, brave, strong - magnificent. All through history women have known, intuitively when not cerebrally, that patriarchy was deadly to everything we loved, and we have <i>always</i> resisted it in every way, overt and covert, private and public, that presented itself - the most creative, inventive, imaginative ways possible (and there are countless ways to resist, as we know) on all its levels. Women have resisted patriarchy with unsurpassed cunning, craft, and passion for at least 5,000 years.</p>
<p>I don't want to be hasty, but it seems to me that 5,000 years is long enough to try any method, particularly one that doesn't work. Women want above all else to be fair, and we have given resistance a fair trial. In all fairness then, it is time to try something different.</p>
<p>It should have been obvious to us, and would have been if we hadn't been so deeply conditioned to believe otherwise, that resistance <i>doesn't</i> work. When we look at the world, what we see is patriarchy at its nadir, in its decadence, patriarchy most fully itself, so ripe it is rotten. I think this is not <i>despite</i> women's resistance but <i>because</i> of it. There are women who want to believe that if we had not resisted, patriarchy would be even worse, that our resistance has been a sort of holding action. But nothing can be put on "hold"; all is constantly changing, as patriarchy grown obscenely, putrescently patriarchal, attests.</p>
<p>Then these women say, "My life is so much easier because of the women who fought before me. How can I not do the same for my sisters?" But men give starving women crumbs to distract us from their escalating violence. They point out how they have improved women's lot. How women can now get men's jobs, can now attend the universities. What they are saying is that they have seen to it that we have a larger stake in their system. It is called co-optation.</p>
<p>What if the women who went before us had, instead of fighting against patriarchy, made a different world? If  they had, the heritage they would have left us would be <i>no patriarchy at all</i>. That's the heritage I'm interested in leaving behind. More than that, that's what I want for myself right now.</p>
<p>From the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming comes a useful rule for resisters: "if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. So if you want change, do <i>anything</i> else!"<a href="#fn4">[4]</a></p>
<p>As I thought about resistance being the most powerful, albeit the most subtle, form of collaboration possible, and speculated about the mechanics of it, into my mind sprang a picture of a fortress on a hill - patriarchy! - with its pennants flying, its great bulwarks, its massive gate, and all the men ranged behind its walls being male-ly supreme.</p>
<p>Looking down the hill a short distance, I saw the women, thousands of them, a huge battering ram in their arms, crying "We've got to get through to the men! We've got to make them stop! We've got to get them to understand that they're destroying everything!" They run at the gate with the ram: Whoom! And again: Whoom! Over and over again, for five long millennia: Whoom! Whoom! Whoom! Some women are polevaulting over the walls, shouting as they leap: "If we can just get in there, we can change everything!" Through the centuries, women fall by the way but others quickly take their places and the desperate siege goes on, Whoom! Whoom!</p>
<p>With my mind's eye, I looked to see what was happening <i>behind</i> the gate during all this and I could see it as clearly as if I were actually there: the men, drunk with adrenalin, are being spurred by the assault to incredible heights of creativity. They have invented bionic metals to reinforce the gate and walls wherever the ram reveals a weak spot, gradually making the fortress impregnable, impenetrable - ah, the sexual terms we have in English for not being able to get through! The assault, by forcing them to strengthen, refine, and embellish the original edifice, serves to entrench patriarchy further with every Whoom!</p>
<p>I should have learned from this image - and from my experience of being a woman in patriarchy - what Susan Horwitz called to my attention about this scenario. "It's obvious," she said, "that resistance is an acknowledgment and an acceptance of powerlessness. And if we perceive ourselves as powerless, presto, we <i>are</i> powerless."</p>
<p>Motherhood should have taught me that resistance only causes deeper entrenchment. Any woman who has had teenagers will testify that when kids are doing something they shouldn't be doing and Mother nags about it, lectures about it, pleads about it, attacks it - in short, when she makes a federal case of it - the behavior only gets worse, often very creatively worse.Mothers finally learn that resistance is not the way to change kids' behavior. But being the least credible people in patriarchy, to ourselves as well as to others, we have a hard time believing that we, in our lowly kitchens, have stumbled upon a principle of human interaction that has cosmic implications.</p>
<p>Talking to my friends that day about disengaging, part of what I knew was that if I were serious about "disappearing" patriarchy, I could never again work to get laws passed in the system. I finally understood that men, who own all laws - since they make, interpret, and enforce them - will never manipulate their legal system in a way that threatens their privilege.</p>
<p>I remembered what happens when women finally <i>do</i> persuade men to pass laws for us: how women's hard work in California, for instance, finally produced a no-fault divorce law that, though it quickly proved disastrous for them, they couldn't get rid of because it was so profitable for men; how women in many states, by dint of extraordinary dedication and labor, got child support payment laws passed only to see them succeed primarily for men in extorting child support from <i>women</i>; how the same holds true for custody laws - men are using the laws we worked for to take our children away from us. Men use the laws we get them to pass as daggers to stab us in the back. How many lessons do we need before we learn the simple facts of gender-based control? I have decided not to be an accomplice in my own oppression any longer, never again to hand men weapons with which to kill me.</p>
<p>Often when I say that laws are not worth warm spit<a href="#fn5">[5]</a> in patriarchy, those women who are frightened by the revolutionary implications of that statement often counter with the argument that <i>Roe v. Wade</i> is incontrovertible evidence that women <i>can</i> go through men and their system to win freedom. I reply that, unfortunately. <i>Roe v. Wade</i> is incontrovertible evidence not of freedom but instead of one of the most blatant cooptations, or re-enslavements, of women by patriarchy in its history. I go on to tell them how I think <i>Roe v. Wade</i> saved and continues to serve patriarchy.</p>
<p>I wasn't a feminist at the beginning of the second wave of feminism in this country in the late 60s and early 70s, but I have talked with hundreds of women who were. From them and from the literature written then, I can almost <i>feel</i> the incredible excitement of the Movement in those days. Despite, or perhaps partly because of, very legitimate and healthful anger, women were fairly bursting with energy and enthusiasm. Euphoria and elation might best describe the general atmosphere. It was a very heady time. Every woman I have spoken to who was an active feminist then looks back at that time with nostalgia: those were the halcyon days, the Golden Age.</p>
<p>There were many reasons for that feeling but chief among them, it seems to me, was that liberation seemed not only possible, but imminent. In addition, many feminists had a basic understanding of women's enslavement that has since been lost in a general way: that women are men's colonized lands; that just as the English "colonized" - a racist euphemism for conquered - Nigeria and India, for instance, men have colonized women. The English declared themselves owners of these countries and their people, made all the laws that governed them, and pocketed the profits themselves. Britannia "ruled" by plundering and
raping the colonials and their lands.</p>
<p>The Indians, the Nigerians, the other "colonized" peoples of the world (and colonization takes firmest hold in the feelings and perceptions of a people) tried to make the usurpers' system work for them. They struggled to get laws passed that would give them more leeway, and they managed in some instances to infiltrate low- and even middle-level government echelons and to attain a few managerial and supervisory jobs in the industrial/corporate world. A token handful got into the educational institutions reserved for themasters. Some of them regarded these inroads as progress.</p>
<p>But enough of them eventually realized that it did not matter what else they seemed to achieve, if they did not have home rule, they could never be free. They came to the understanding that freedom was simply not possible for them - ever - in the colonial system. Freedom meant owning themselves, owning their own lands, using their resources for their own enrichment, making their own laws. The revolution began with their feelings and perceptions of themselves as people who not only <i>should</i> but <i>could</i> govern themselves.</p>
<p>Women were the first owned, the first "ruled" people in every race and class and nation, the first slaves, the first colonized people, the first occupied countries. Many thousands of years ago men took our bodies as their lands as they felt befitted their naturally superior, god-like selves and our lowly, animalistic natures. Since this takeover, they have made all the laws that governed our lands, and have harvested us - our labor, our children, our sexuality, our emotional, spiritual, and cultural richness, our resources of intelligence, passion, devotion - for their own purposes and aggrandizement. These have been men's most profitable cash crops.</p>
<p>Occasionally, some feminist objects to my insistence that men literally own women. I usually discover that as she was growing up her family were Protestants - e.g., Methodist, Presbyterian - or Unitarians, or atheists, or liberals of some stripe, and that therefore as a child and young woman she didn't hear with her actual ears the sort of propaganda those of us reared in Fundamentalist religions heard.</p>
<p>I remember clearly, for instance, visiting girl cousins in another town when I was little and taking a bath with one of them under her mother's supervision. As we were washing, my aunt carefully instructed us not to touch our genitals but instead to spread our legs and with one hand repeatedly splash water upon them. When we asked her why, since that seemed a very
ineffective way of getting clean, she answered that we had to save those parts for our husbands, for marriage.</p>
<p>My husband at the time was about five years old and living in Wisconsin. I'm sure he had no interest whatever in the fact that he owned some little girl's reproductive organs in Utah. But I can remember the feeling that experience gave me about my relationship with my body, and I can best describe it as housesitting until the landlord comes home. When one is housesitting someone else's property, one does not rummage through his private things, intimately handle his personal possessions. One behaves circumspectly, carefully, respecting the invisible "no trespassing" signs.</p>
<p>After my speech at the International Women's Book Fair in Montreal in the summer of 1988, Margaret Hecimovich, a young ex-Catholic woman from the midwestem United States, told me that her childhood conditioning had been much fiercer even than mine. When she was a little girl, she was forbidden to <i>see</i> herself naked, even in the bathtub. Saving herself for her future lord and master, she washed her body under cover of a long flannel nightgown.</p>
<p>Although most women apparently did not hear the words spoken, every woman bom gets the message subliminally, repeatedly and strongly, from her earliest days that she does not belong to herself. And the evidence that we have believed it until now has been our acceptance that men had a right to control our bodies and our lives. Every time we lobbied them for the right to choose whether or not we will have children, we acknowledged that men owned us.</p>
<p>The burgeoning women's health movement of the early 70s was evidence of women's awareness of our physical colonization and of our realization that no matter what else we did, no matter how many laws we got men to pass, no matter how many low-echelon government and corporate positions we won, like the Nigerians and the Indians and all other colonized peoples, unless we had home rule, everything else we did to try to free ourselves was meaningless.</p>
<p>So we were saying "howdy" to our cervixes for the first time in our lives, our own and our friends'. We may have been the 17th person to see them and the first 16 may have been men, but finally we were meeting them face to face. In doing so, we realized that it didn't take a man's eye to see a woman's cervix, it didn't take an American-Medical-Association, male-trained mind to diagnose the health of our reproductive organs or to treat them. We were shocked to remember how "natural" it had seemed to go to male gynecologists, and realized that, in fact, men's being gynecologists was <i>perverted</i>, gross, and sick and that our accepting them as experts on our bodies - when they had never had so much as one period in their lives, never experienced one moment of premenstrual psychic clarity, never had one birth pain, never suckled one child - was evidence of our ferocious internalized colonization. It began to appear as obscene to us as it truly is.</p>
<p>As obvious as this may seem now, it hadn't been obvious for a very long time.</p>
<p>So in learning to examine our own sexual organs, to diagnose and treat our own cervical and vaginal ailments, to do simple abortions, to deliver babies, and in beginning to think seriously about developing our own safe, effective, natural contraceptives and getting the word out, women were moving out of colonization, out of slavery. We were taking back and learning to govern our own countries.</p>
<p>In those days, the movement was called The Women's Liberation Movement, and that, in fact, was what it was. Women were breaking the contract that exists between all oppressed people and their oppressors, in our case our agreement to allow men to own us and to exploit us as their resources. Though we agreed to it under the severest duress imaginable<a href="#fn6">[6]</a>, in order, we thought, to survive, we nevertheless agreed.</p>
<p>Those who do not understand how the thirst for home rule among women at the beginning of the second wave of our Movement in this century rocked the foundations of patriarchy woridwide simply do not understand the necessity of women's slavery to every level of men's global system. Perhaps even many of the women at that time did not fully understand the revolutionary nature of what they were about. But in establishing a new order in which women owned our own bodies and were not men's property, they were destroying the very foundation of patriarchy. Since any power-over paradigm is totally dependent upon those on the bottom agreeing to stay there, men's world organization was in grave peril. If women would not be slaves, men could not be masters.</p>
<p>The men who control the world are not intelligent, as is evident to even the most casual observer, but they are crafty, particularly about maintaining privilege through control. Over their thousands of years of tyranny, they have acquired a near-perfect understanding of the psychology of the oppressed - if not consciously, then viscerally. They knew precisely what to do when women began refusing to honor the old contract, and I am absolutely convinced that their move was conscious, plotted, and deliberate.</p>
<p>They sent an emissary after the women as they were moving out of the old mind into a free world. Hurrying after us, he shouted, "Hey, girls! Wait up a minute! Listen! You don't need to go to all this trouble. We already know how to do all the things you're having to learn. We know your bodies and what is good for you better than you do. Trying to learn what we already know will take too much of your time and energy away from all your other important '<i>issues</i>.'"</p>
<p>Then he used men's most successful lie, the hook we had always taken in the past because men are our children and we need to believe they value us, that we can trust them. "You know we love you and want your movement to succeed," he crooned. "So do you know what we're prepared to do for you? If you'll come back, we'll <i>let</i> you have legalized abortion!"</p>
<p>How could we refuse such a generous, loving offer? We had listened to men's voices and trusted them for so long - in the face of massive evidence that they had never been trustworthy, had had so little practice in hearing and trusting our own, that we lost our tenuous bearings in the new world and turned around and walked right back into our jail cell. We allowed them to reduce liberation to an "issue." We forgot that anybody that can <i>let</i> you, <i>owns</i> you.</p>
<p>So the men let us have legalized abortion. Some women protest that women <i>won</i> the right to it, forgetting that the legal system is set up to keep patriarchy intact, which means to keep women enslaved, and that men <i>own</i> the law. They will never use it to free us. As Audre Lorde states clearly, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."<a href="#fn7">[7]</a></p>
<p>You know how pityingly we have looked at the benighted woman who says, "I don't need the Women's Movement. My husband <i>lets</i> me do anything I want." But our pity has been hypocritical: <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, the "glory" of the movement, is exactly the same sad phenomenon - our husband the state <i>letting</i> us, and our feeling grateful for it. But, of course, like a husband the men "let" us not because it is good for us but because it is necessary for them. It keeps us colonized, our bodies state property and our destinies in their hands, and it rivets our attention on them.</p>
<p>So the men let us have legalized abortion, and almost instantly the energy drained from the movement, like air from a punctured balloon. Instead of the Women's Liberation Movement, we became simply the Women's Movement, because liberation is antithetical to letting men, <i>depending</i> upon men to, make the laws that govern our lands. For the last 15 years we have been nailed to the system by <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, our mighty energy and hope and love channeled into begging men in dozens of state and national bodies not to pare away cent by cent the truly miserable allowance they promised us for abortions for poor women.</p>
<p>If we hadn't trusted them again, if we had kept on going in the direction we were headed, with the same time and money and energy we have since expended on groveling, we could by this time have had a woman on every block in every city and town who is an expert on contraceptives, women's health, birthing, and abortion. We could have educated the women of this country in countless creative ways about their bodies and their right to rule them. We would have learned how to govern ourselves, discovering a whole new way for women - and therefore everyone - to be human.</p>
<p>And, significantly, a Bork could have been appointed to every seat of the Supreme Court, men could have been spewing laws aimed at controlling our bodies out of every legal orifice, and all their flailing and sputtering would simply be irrelevant. Having removed ourselves from their jurisdiction, we would have settled the question of abortion and birth control, of women's individual freedom, blessedly and for ages to come. When the Nigerians and Indians got ready to rule themselves, the English had no choice but to go home. Tyranny is a contract. Both parties have to stick to it.</p>
<p>But in the early 70s women hadn't had time to complete the necessary internal revolution in how we thought and felt about ourselves that was necessary for us to be free. Evidence of this is that we took as models for our movement the movements that had preceded ours, all of which were reformist because they involved men. Since our own internal, authentic women's voices were still very weak and difficult to hear and when heard still without sufficient authority, we didn't take seriously enough the fact that women and men are in wildly different relationships to the system. We didn't realize that since the entire global system of laws and governments is set up with the primary purpose of keeping women of every color and class enslaved by men of their own color and class, and often by other men as well, talking about civil rights for women was oxymoronic. We had still to learn how colossally brainwashed we are by patriarchy to do in the name of freedom precisely those things that will further enslave us.</p>
<p><i>Roe v. Wade</i> was very smart politics for the men; now, regardless of what party is in power or who is on the Supreme Court, the groundwork has been laid. The hopes of thousands of dedicated feminists are bound firmly once more to the husband-state. And we are all a dozen years further away from trusting women and finding a lasting non-male-approvalbased solution to the problem of our physical and emotional colonization.</p>
<p>It is time for us to remember that no one can free us but ourselves. Time not to try to get the men to do it for us - which reinforces their illusion of godhood and ours of wormhood and perpetuates the deadly power-over model of reality - but to do it ourselves. Time for thousands of us to learn to perform abortions and to do all that needs to be done for one another in so many neighborhoods throughout the country that our liberation cannot be stopped. Time to manage our own bodies, heal our own bodies, own our own bodies. It is time for home rule.</p>
<p><i>This</i> is how I want women to spend our prodigious intelligence and energy.</p>
<p>Obviously, <i>Roe v. Wade</i> doesn't stand alone; it simply models patriarchy's subversive tactics most clearly.<a href="#fn8">[8]</a> Almost all segments of our Movement have suffered such cooptation. Many women who have been active in the shelter movement for years, for instance, have pointed out to me the similarities in strategy and effect between <i>Roe v. Wade</i> and government funding for shelters.</p>
<p>To obtain funding for shelters in the first place, women must tone down their feminism and conform to male officials' standards and expectations. To keep the money, the women who work in the shelters as well as those who come there for help are required to do masses of paper work, the purpose of which seems to be to keep women from helping and receiving help. In some areas, when women are in crisis and call a shelter, before their feelings and needs can even be addressed they must be asked a dozen questions and informed at length about the conditions under which the shelter will accept them (they can have no weapons, for instance).<a href="#fn9">[9]</a> Many women simply hang up in total frustration and anger. In other instances, funders won't allow discussions of racism or homophobia or of battering among Lesbians. They also often control who is hired. Funders regularly split women's organizations apart by clouding the issues of who is going to define the group, what their work is, what their analysis is, and even what the issue is.<a href="#fn10">[10]</a></p>
<p>In addition, nearly every funder's prerequisites are designed to keep women powerless, thinking and behaving as victims. One state, for example, requires shelters to use only professional counselors, specifically prohibiting peer counseling. Peer counseling, I am told by women with much experience, is the only counseling that has yet been seen to have any significant effect upon battered women.</p>
<p>Because of the scope and depth of the subversion of our purposes by funders, local and national, many shelter workers agree with Suzanne Pharr who concluded her brave speech at the 1987 National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference in Los Angeles with these words: "From my experience, my strongest urge is to say, DO ANYTHING - BEG, BORROW, STEAL - BUT DON'T TAKE GOVERNMENT FUNDING!"<a href="#fn11">[11]</a></p>
<p>Trapped in the victim/rescuer/persecutor loop,<a href="#fn12">[12]</a> we continue to believe that men will rescue us - even knowing that among the men who grant funds for shelters and rape crisis lines are many who rape and brutalize their wives, daughters, and other women. "But that's just the point," some women expostulate. "Those are precisely the ones who <i>should</i> be paying for shelters!" But we can never forget for a moment that such men will only pay guilt money in a way that ensures their violent access to women. I think we have to be constantly aware that, like other colonized people, we cannot get free, we cannot change our oppressed reality, through the colonists' system.</p>
<p>"Well, then, Sonia," women say to me at this point, "if trying to change laws, or to amend the Constitution [the greatest document for freedom <i>for men</i> in the history of the world], and if civil disobedience and protests and lobbying and campaigns and voting<a href="#fn13">[13]</a> aren't the ways to change reality, then what <i>is</i>? What <i>shall</i> we do?"</p>

<hr>

<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Lawrence Blair, <i>Rhythms of Vision: The Changing Patterns of Belief</i>. Schocken Books: New York, 1975, p. 22.</p>
<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> This is the only change I've made in the story, but the men changed it first; I am merely restoring authenticity.</p>
<p><a id="fn3">[3]</a> Andra Medea, "Medea's Laws of Conflict", from the text of a speech given at the 1987 annual Chimera conference and teacher training in Chicago, p. 9. This material is the basis of a forthcoming book tentatively titled <i>The Corporate Chimera</i>.</p>
<p><a id="fn4">[4]</a> Correspondence from Rain On The Earth, Clearlake. CA, January 6, 1988; also letter from Kate Martin, St. Louis, Mo, January 15, 1988.</p>
<p><a id="fn5">[5]</a> Suzette Haden Elgin's so-apt phrase in her short story, "Lo, How An Oak Ere Blooming," <i>Fantasy and Science Fiction</i>, February 1986, p. 109.</p>
<p><a id="fn6">[6]</a> It is instructive about men that they call the three hundred years in European history during which they massacred nine million women the "Renaissance." The inquisition concluded the process of taming women. Until now we have been good draft horses as Marilyn Fry so brilliantly points out to us in <i>The Politics of Women's Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory</i> (The Crossing Press: Trumansburg, NY, 1983, p. 58) and good prostitutes in our marriages, our churches, and our political systems. But now as fear leaves our hearts, the fires of our passion and power have space to blaze unimpeded <i>inside</i> us. Our sisters the elements are at last able to befriend and aid us, instead of as in former times made to turn against and destroy us, as all things female and biophilic have been terrorized to turn against and destroy one another.</p>
<p><a id="fn7">[7]</a> Audre Lorde, essay by that name in <i>Sister Outsider</i>. The Crossing Press: Freedom, CA 1984, p. 110.</p>
<p><a id="fn8">[8]</a> I use war terms such as "strategy" and "tactic" only when talking about actual war, as I am here in addressing men's war against women.</p>
<p><a id="fn9">[9]</a> I learned much about this situation in a meeting with women law students in Madison, Wisconsin, April, 1988.</p>
<p><a id="fn10">[10]</a> Suzanne Pharr, director of the Women's Project in Little Rock, Arkansas, "Do we want to play faust with the government? Or, how do we get our social change work funded and not sell our souls?" speech at the March 1987 National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference in Los Angeles.</p>
<p><a id="fn11">[11]</a> Suzanne Pharr, speech at the March 1987 National Lesbian and Gay Health Conference.</p>
<p><a id="fn12">[12]</a> Diana Rabenold, <i>Love, Politics, and "Rescue" in Lesbian Relationships</i>. Lesbian-Feminist Essay Series, No. 2, HerBooks: Santa Cruz, CA.</p>
<p><a id="fn13">[13]</a> Women didn't even get the vote until it no longer mattered. One of the major characteristics of a hierarchy is that it goes pyramidally up and up until there are only a few at the top. A handful of men - totally behind the scenes - already owned the world by 1920 and no matter who anyone voted for after that, those few men won. As the bumper sticker sums it up, "If voting could change things, it would be illegal."</p>