Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

art. She too was wrong. Men erase; misogyny distorts; the intelligence of women is still both punished and despised.

Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They

see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they

see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having

ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage

means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see

that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired,

sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not

make them independent of men and that they will still have to play

the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no

way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in

the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better

to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value

whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not

wrong. T hey fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and

promiscuity as values, w ill make them more vulnerable to male

sexual aggression, and that they w ill be despised for not liking it.

They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. T hey know that they are valued for their sex—

their sex organs and their reproductive capacity— and so they try

to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity;

through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through

submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“fem ininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” T heir desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. T hey see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence

realized in a woman is a crime. T hey see the world they live in and

they are not wrong. T hey use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. T hey use the traditional intelligence of the female— animal, not human: they do what they

have to to survive.

3

Abortion

I have never regretted the abortion. I have regretted

both my marriage and having children.

A witness on forced motherhood,

International Tribunal on Crimes Against

Women, * March 1976

Before the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the

United States, abortion was a crime. Some abortions were medically licensed, but they were a minute percentage of the abortions actually undergone by women. This meant that there were no records of the illegal abortions performed (each abortion was a crime, each abortion was clandestine), no medical histories or records, no

statistics. Information on illegal abortions came from these sources:

(1) the testimonies of women who had had such abortions and survived; (2) the physical evidence of the botched abortions, evidence that showed up in hospital emergency rooms all over the country

every single d ay— perforated uteruses, infections including gangrene, severe hemorrhaging, incomplete abortions (in which fetal tissue is left in the womb, always fatal if not removed); (3) the

physical evidence of the dead bodies (for instance, nearly one half

*See testimony on forced motherhood, forced sterilization, and forced sex

in Crimes Against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal , ed. Diana

E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes,

1976).

of the maternal deaths in New York State resulted from illegal

abortions); (4) the anecdotal reminiscences of doctors who were

asked for “help” by desperate women. These sources provide a

profile of the average woman who wanted and got an illegal abortion. Indisputably, she was married and had children: “. . . it has been repeatedly demonstrated that most criminal abortions today

are obtained by married women with children, ” 1 wrote Jerome E.

Bates and Edward S. Zawadzki in Criminal Abortion , published in

1964. An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal

abortions were married. * This means that up to two thirds of the

botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of

the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors

are married women. This means that most of the women who risked

death or maiming so as not to bear a child were married—perhaps

one million married women each year. They were not shameless

sluts, unless all women by definition are. They were not immoral in

traditional terms—though, even then, they were thought of as promiscuous and single. Nevertheless, they were not women from the streets, but women from homes; they were not daughters in the

homes of fathers, but wives in the homes of husbands. They were,

quite simply, the good and respectable women of Amerika. The

absolute equation of abortion with sexual promiscuity is a bizarre

distortion of the real history of women and abortion—too distorted

to be acceptable even in the United States, where historical memory

* Bates and Zawadzki, in their 1964 study of 111 convicted abortionists,

place the percentage of married women at 67. 6 percent. Other studies

range from the conservative 49. 6 percent (based on the records of two

abortionists in a single year, 1948; arguably, the figure is low compared to

other findings and estimates because women lied about marital status when

committing the criminal act of getting an abortion) to 7 5 percent (the sample being composed of women in charity hospitals from botched abortions). Bates and Zawadzki, who discuss both the 49. 6 percent figure and the 75 percent figure, conclude that they “could find no authority or piece

of research purporting to demonstrate that the majority of women undergoing abortion today are unmarried” (Criminal Abortion , p. 44).