Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

earned. Women are paid significantly less than men for doing comparable work. It is not easy to find comparable work. The consequences of this inequity— however the percentages read in any given year, in any given country— are not new for women. Unable

to sell sex-neutral labor for a living wage, women must sell sex.

“To subordinate women in a social order in which she must work in

order to l i v e ” Jenny D’Hericourt wrote French socialist Joseph

Proudhon in the mid-1800s, “is to desire prostitution; for disdain

of the producer extends to the value of the product;. . . The

woman who cannot live by working, can only do so by prostituting

herself; the equal of man or a courtesan, such is the alternative. ” 26

Proudhon’s egalitarian vision could not be stretched to include

women. He wrote D’Hericourt:

. . . I do not admit that, whatever reparation may be due to

woman, of joint thirds with her husband (or father) and her

children, the most rigorous justice can ever make her the

EQUAL of man;. . . neither do I admit that this inferiority of

the female sex constitutes for it either servitude, or hum iliation, or a diminution of dignity, liberty, or happiness. I maintain that the contrary is true. 27

D’Hericourt’s argument constructs the world of women: women

must work for fair wages in nonsexual labor or they must sell

themselves to men; the disdain of men for women makes the work

of women worth less simply because women do it; the devaluation

of women’s work is predetermined by the devaluation of women as

a sex class; women end up having to sell themselves because men

will not buy labor from them that is not sex labor at wages that

will enable women to divest themselves of sex as a form of labor.

Proudhon’s answer constructs the world of men: in the best of all

possible worlds—acknowledging that some economic discrimination against women has taken place—no justice on earth can make women equal to men because women are inferior to men: this inferiority does not humiliate or degrade women; women find happiness, dignity, and liberty in this inequality precisely because they are women—that is the nature of women; women are being treated

justly and are free when they are treated as women—that is, as the

natural inferiors of men.

The brave new world Proudhon wanted was, for women, the

same old world women already knew.

D’Hericourt recognized what Victoria Woodhull would not:

“disdain of the producer extends to the value of the product. ”

Work for wages outside sex labor would not effectively free women

from the stigma of being female because the stigma precedes the

woman and predetermines the undervaluing of her work.

This means that right-wing women are correct when they say

that they are worth more in the home than outside it. In the home

their value is recognized and in the workplace it is not. In marriage, sex labor is rewarded: the woman is generally “given” more than she herself could earn at a job. In the marketplace, women are

exploited as cheap labor. The argument that work outside the

home makes women sexually and economically independent of

men is simply untrue. Women are paid too little. And right-wing

women know it.

Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal

work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence.

But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating

social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all

their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual

subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays

women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for

working outside marriage or prostitution, since women work hard

for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that

punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low

wages contributes significantly to women’s perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman’s life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for

equal work is a simple reform, whereas it is no reform at all; it is

revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay

for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-

wing women have refused to forget it. Devaluation of women’s

labor outside the home pushes women back into the home and encourages women to support a system in which, as she sees it, he is paid for both of them— her share of his wage being more than she

could earn herself.

In the workplace, sexual harassment fixes the low status of

women irreversibly. Women are sex; even filing or typing, women

are sex. The debilitating, insidious violence of sexual harassment

is pervasive in the workplace. It is part of nearly every working

environment. Women shuffle; women placate; women submit;

women leave; the rare, brave women fight and are tied up in the

courts, often without jobs, for years. There is also rape in the

workplace.

Where is the place for intelligence— for literacy, intellect, creativity, moral discernment? Where in this world in which women live, circumscribed by the uses to which men put women’s sexual

organs, is the cultivation of skills, the cultivation of gifts, the

cultivation of dreams, the cultivation of ambition? Of what use is

human intelligence to a woman?

“Of course, ” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the learned women were

very ugly; but then they were very poor. She would like to feed

Chuffy for a term on Lucy’s rations and see what he said then

about Henry the Eighth. ” 28

“No, it would not do the slightest good if he read my manuscript. . . , ” wrote Ellen Glasgow in her memoir. “T h e best advice I can give you, ’ he said, with charming candor, ‘is to stop writing, and go back to the South and have some babies. ’ And I

think, though I may have heard this ripe wisdom from other men,

probably from many, that he added: T h e greatest woman is not

the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who

has had the finest babies. ’ That might be true. I did not stay to

dispute it. However, it was true also that I wanted to write books,

and not ever had I felt the faintest wish to have babies. ” 29

Woodhull thought that freedom from sexual coercion would

come with work in the marketplace. She was wrong; the marketplace became, as men would have it, another place for sexual intimidation, another arena of danger to women burdened already with too many such arenas. Woolf put her faith in education and