Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

natural and social worlds. Literacy, like fire, is a tool that must be

used by intelligence. Literacy is also a capacity: the capacity to be

literate is a human capacity; the capacity exists and it can be used

or it can be denied, refuted, made to atrophy. In persons socially

despised, it is denied. But denial is not enough, because people

insist on meaning. Humankind finds meaning in experiences,

events, objects, communications, relationships, feelings. Literacy

functions as part of the search for meaning; it helps to make that

search possible. Men can deny that women have the capacity to

learn ancient Greek, but some women w ill learn it nevertheless.

Men can deny that poor women or working-class women or prostituted women have the capacity to read or write their own language, but some of those women will read or write their own language anyw ay; they will risk everything to learn it. In the

slaveholding South in the United States, it was forbidden by law

to teach slaves to read or write; but some slaveowners taught, some

slaves learned, some slaves taught themselves, and some slaves

taught other slaves. In Jew ish law, it is forbidden to teach women

Talm ud, but some women learned Talmud anyw ay. People know

that literacy brings dignity and a wider world. People are strongly

motivated to experience the world they live in through language:

spoken, sung, chanted, and written. One must punish people terribly to stop them from wanting to know what reading and writing bring, because people are curious and driven toward both experience and the conceptualization of it. The denial of literacy to any class or category of people is a denial of fundamental humanity.

Humans viewed as animal, not human, are classically denied literacy: slaves in slave-owning societies; women in woman-owning societies; racially degraded groups in racist societies. The male slave is treated as a beast of burden; he cannot be allowed to read or

write. The woman is treated as a beast of breeding; she must not

read or write. When women as a class are denied the right to read

and write, those who learn are shamed by their knowledge: they

are masculine, deviant; they have denied their wombs, their cunts;

in their literacy they repudiate the definition of their kind.

Certain classes of women have been granted some privileges of

literacy—not rights, privileges. The courtesans of ancient Greece

were educated when other women were kept ignorant, but they

were not philosophers, they were whores. Only by accepting their

function as whores could they exercise the privilege of literacy.

Upper-class women are traditionally taught some skills of literacy

(distinctly more circumscribed than the skills taught the males of

their mating class): they can exercise the privilege of literacy if they

accept their decorative function. After all, the man does not want

the breeding, bleeding bitch at the dinner table or the open cunt in

the parlor while he reads his newspaper or smokes his cigar. Language is refinement: proof that he is human, not she.

The increase in illiteracy among the urban poor in the United

States is consonant with a new rise in overt racism and contempt

for the poor. The illiteracy is programmed into the system: an intelligent child can go to school and not be taught how to read or write. When the educational system abandons reading and writing

for particular subgroups, it abandons human dignity for those

groups: it becomes strictly custodial, keeping the animals penned

in; it does not bring human life to human beings.

Cross-culturally, girls and women are the illiterates, with two

thirds of the world’s illiterates women and the rate rising steadily.

Girls need husbands, not books. Girls need houses or shacks to

keep clean, or street corners to stand on, not the wide world in

which to roam. Refusal to give the tool of literacy is refusal to give

access to the world. If she can make her own fire, read a book

herself, write a letter or a record of her thoughts or an essay or a

story, it will be harder to get her to tolerate the unwanted fuck, to

bear the unwanted children, to see him as life and life through

him. She might get ideas. But even worse, she might know the

value of the ideas she gets. She must not know that ideas have

value, only that being fucked and reproducing are her value.

It has been hard, in the United States, to get women educated:

there are still many kinds of education off limits to women. In

England, it was hard for Virginia Woolf to use a university library.

Simple literacy is the first step, and, as Abby Kelley told a

women’s rights convention in 1850, “Sisters, bloody feet have

worn smooth the path by which you came here. ” 8 Access to the

whole language has been denied women; we are only supposed to

use the ladylike parts of it. Alice James noted in her diary that “[i]t

is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined aw ay from one! ”9

But it is in the actual exercise of literacy as a tool and as a capacity that women face punishment, ostracization, exile, recrimination, the most virulent contempt. To read and be feminine simultaneously she reads Gothic romances, not medical textbooks;

cookbooks, not case law; m ystery stories, not molecular biology.

The language of mathematics is not a feminine language. She may

learn astrology, not astronomy. She may teach grammar, not invent style or originate ideas. She is permitted to write a little book about neurotic women, fiction or nonfiction, if the little book is

trite and sentimental enough; she had better keep clear of philosophy altogether. In fiction, she had better be careful not to overstep the severe limits imposed by femininity. “This then, ” wrote V irginia Woolf, “is another incident, and quite a common incident in the career of a woman novelist. She has to say I w ill wait. I will

wait until men have become so civilised that they are not shocked

when a woman speaks the truth about her body. The future of

fiction depends very much upon what extent men can be educated

to stand free speech in women. ” 10 The constraint is annihilation:

language that must avoid one’s own body is language that has no

place in the world. But speaking the truth about a woman’s body is

not the simple explication of body parts— it is instead the place of

that particular body in this particular world, its value, its use, its

place in power, its political and economic life, its capacities both

potentially realized and habitually abused.