Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

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The Promise of the Ultra-Right

There is a rumor, circulated for centuries by scientists, artists, and

philosophers both secular and religious, a piece of gossip as it were,

to the effect that women are “biologically conservative. ” W hile gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or

idea, or fact. T his particular rumor became dignified as high

thought because it was Whispered-Down-The-Lane in formidable

academies, libraries, and meeting halls from which women, until

very recently, have been formally and forcibly excluded.

The whispers, however m ultisyllabic and footnoted they sometimes are, reduced to a simple enough set of assertions. Women have children because women by definition have children. This

“fact of life, ” which is not subject to qualification, carries with it

the instinctual obligation to nurture and protect those children.

Therefore, women can be expected to be socially, politically, economically, and sexually conservative because the status quo, whatever it is, is safer than change, whatever the change. Noxious male philosophers from all disciplines have, for centuries, maintained

that women follow a biological imperative derived directly from

their reproductive capacities that translates necessarily into narrow

lives, small minds, and a rather meanspirited puritanism.

This theory, or slander, is both specious and cruel in that, in

fact, women are forced to bear children and have been throughout

history in all economic systems, with but teeny-weeny time-outs

while the men were momentarily disoriented, as, for instance, in

the immediate postcoital aftermath of certain revolutions. It is entirely irrational in that, in fact, women of all ideological persuasions, with the single exception of absolute pacifists, of whom there have not been very many, have throughout history supported wars

in which the very children they are biologically ordained to protect

are maimed, raped, tortured, and killed. Clearly, the biological explanation of the so-called conservative nature of women obscures the realities of women’s lives, buries them in dark shadows of distortion and dismissal.

The disinterested or hostile male observer can categorize women

as “conservative” in some metaphysical sense because it is true that

women as a class adhere rather strictly to the traditions and values

of their social context, whatever the character of that context. In

societies of whatever description, however narrowly or broadly defined, women as a class are the dulled conformists, the orthodox believers, the obedient followers, the disciples of unwavering faith.

To waver, whatever the creed of the men around them, is tantamount to rebellion; it is dangerous. Most women, holding on for dear life, do not dare abandon blind faith. From father’s house to

husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a

woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be. Sometimes it is a lethargic conformity, in which case male

demands slowly close in on her, as if she were a character buried

alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Sometimes it is a militant conformity. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her.

She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary

Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par

excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person.

But the militant conformist has given so much of herself—her la­

bor, heart, soul, often her body, often children— that this betrayal

is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring.

Women know, but must not acknowledge, that resisting male

control or confronting male betrayal w ill lead to rape, battery, destitution, ostracization or exile, confinement in a mental institution or jail, or death. As Phyllis Chesler and Emily Jane Goodman

make clear in W omen , M oney , and P ow er , women struggle, in the

manner of Sisyphus, to avoid the “something worse” that can and

w ill alw ays happen to them if they transgress the rigid boundaries

of appropriate female behavior. Most women cannot afford, either

m aterially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection w ill not appease the angry little gods around them.

It is not surprising, then, that most girls do not want to become

like their mothers, those tired, preoccupied domestic sergeants beset by incomprehensible troubles. Mothers raise daughters to conform to the strictures of the conventional female life as defined by men, whatever the ideological values of the men. Mothers are the

immediate enforcers of male w ill, the guards at the cell door, the

flunkies who administer the electric shocks to punish rebellion.

Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become

very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion

therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts

directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any

number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her

mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl m ay, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different

pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept

abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with

rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment.

It is the fashion among men to despise the smallness of women’s

lives. The so-called bourgeois woman with her shallow vanity, for

instance, is a joke to the brave intellectuals, truck drivers, and revolutionaries who have wider horizons on which to project and indulge deeper vanities that women dare not mock and to which women dare not aspire. The fishwife is a vicious caricature of the

small-mindedness and material greed of the working-class wife who