Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

kind is, she also knows that at the heart of the male system there is

a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that

is independent of the class definition or function, that cannot finally be perceived and justified as incidental to motherhood.

Had anyone thought seriously about how women “cease to be

altogether necessary, ” they might have thought in terms of population control: there are too many people; governments decide to feed all the people, which provides a certain incentive for finding ways

to see that there are less people; this is presented to the people as a

humanistic program to increase the quality of life for a smaller, less

burdensome, less troubled population; the women who were giving

birth to the teeming masses are not altogether necessary anymore.

There is lots of liberal hope and goodwill. The Right has reason to

be pleased too, since society operates largely according to its conception of value: poor, black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations would inevitably be the targets of state-run population-control programs; the teeming masses, so messy, so poor, so dark, would disappear, or significantly diminish in numbers, taking with them the poverty for which their color seems responsible. Get rid of those

dirty beggars in India. Get rid of the bastards those black women

on welfare keep producing. Get rid of the Jews too, the old and

sick, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the political dissidents—as the

Nazis did, often in the name of creating a better-quality population. But the Nazis did not just kill to get rid of the population garbage. They had a program of breeding. Himmler developed a

plan for a Women’s Academy of Wisdom and Culture: it would

give a degree called “Exalted Woman. ” Birth control advertising

was forbidden; birth control clinics were shut down; abortions

were forbidden and the Nazis were fierce enforcers of antiabortion

laws; all so that Aryan women would breed. In 1934, the Nazis

established the Mother Service Department. Its purpose was to educate women over eighteen to fulfill the duties of womanhood Nazi-style. “The program of our Nationalist Socialist woman’s

movement contains really only one single point, ” said Hitler in

1934. “This point is the child that must come into being and that

must thrive. ” 2 Fiancees of S . S. men had to take the training offered by the Mother Service Department. Pure German women were encouraged to bear the children of S . S. men and were sup-

ported by the Nazi state. Himmler established homes for these

women. No abortion, no birth control, no careers other than motherhood for the racially pure; imprisonment, rape, sometimes sterilization, and death for the others. The racially privileged woman is not free; the conditions of her survival are predetermined; she may

get rewards for meeting them but outside of them she has no

chance. While the racially inferior women are being used one way,

the racially superior women are being used in what appears to be

an opposite way: but it is not. These are two sides of the same

coin. The two sides travel together, materially inseparable and yet

unalterably divided. Neither side, in this case, has a life outside

totalitarian womanhood. In such a society, the racially privileged

woman has the best deal; but she is not free. Freedom is something

different from the best deal—even for women.

State-run population programs always have the racist tinge and

are sometimes explicitly and murderously racist. Population-con-

trol programs run by any state or state-controlled agency or beholden to any male interest or clique are very different from the ideology and practice of reproductive freedom. Reproductive freedom has as its basic premise the notion that every individual woman must control her own reproductive destiny. She has a right

to be protected from state intrusion and from male intrusion: she

has a right to determine her own reproductive life. Abortion on

demand, for instance, is at the will of the pregnant woman; sterilization of poor women is usually at the will of the male doctor who represents his race and class and is often paid by the state or acts

in accordance with the interests of the state. Sterilization abuse in

the United States has been practiced primarily on very poor black

and Hispanic women. Contraceptives are tested on the women in

Puerto Rico, which has the virtue of being a U . S. colony as well as

having a brown-skinned population. Contraceptive drugs known to

be highly toxic are tested systematically on women in the Third

World with that astonishingly familiar misogynist justification—

“They want it. ” The evidence of this collective will is that the

women line up for injections of such drugs. It is frequently not

mentioned that a chicken or other food is payment for taking the

shot, and the women are starving and so are their children. Those

who have seen institutionalized programs of population control as a

humane and sensible solution to some aspects of mass poverty have

been unable to face the problem intrinsic to these programs: the

poor are often also not white, and the enthusiasm of state planners

for population control is often based on this fact. Children of these

women long ago ceased to be altogether desirable; and these

women long ago ceased to be altogether necessary.

The marginality of these masses of women because of race has

obscured how much their expendability has to do with being

women. “Made in South America Where Life Is Cheap” read the

advertisements for the pornographic film Snuff\ which purported to

show the torture, maiming, and murder of a woman for the purposes of sexual entertainment: the removing of the woman’s uterus from her slit abdomen was the sexual act to which the man in the

film who was doing the cutting supposedly climaxed. Life is cheap

for both women and men wherever life is cheap, and life is cheap

wherever people are poor. But for women, life is in the uterus; and

the well-being of women—economic, social, sexual—depends on

what the value of the uterus is, how it will be used and by whom,

whether or not it will be protected and why. Whatever her race or

class—however much she is privileged or hated for one or both—a

woman is reducible to her uterus. This is the essence of her political condition as a woman. If she is childless, she is not worth much to anyone; if her children are less than desirable, she is less than

necessary. On a global scale, racist population programs already

exist that provide the means and the ideological justifications for