Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

making masses of women extinct because their children are not

wanted. The United States, a young, virile imperialist power compared to its European precursors, has pioneered this kind of reproductive imperialism. The United States was the perfect nation to do so, since the programs depend so much on science and tech­

nology (the nation’s pride) and also on a most distinctive recognition of precisely how expendable women are as women, simply because they are women. Obsessed with sex as a nation, the

United States knows the strategic importance of the uterus, abroad

and at home.

Inside the United States, gynocidal polices are increasingly discernible. The old, the poor, the hungry, the drugged, the mentally ill, the prostituted, those institutionalized in wretchedly inhumane

nursing homes and mental hospitals, are overwhelmingly women.

In a sense, the United States is in the forefront of developing a

postindustrial, post-Nazi social policy based on the expendability

of any group in which women predominate and are not valued for

reproduction (or potential reproduction in the case of children).

Public policy in the United States increasingly promises to protect

middle-class or rich white women owned in marriage who reproduce and to punish all other women. The Family Protection Act— a labyrinthian piece of federal legislation designed to give

police-state protection to the male-headed, male-dominated, fe-

male-submissive fam ily— and the Human Life Amendment, which

would give a fertilized egg legal rights adult women are still without, would be the most significant and effective bludgeoning instruments of this public policy if passed. Along with already actual cutbacks in Social Security, Medicaid, and food programs, these

laws are intended to keep select women having babies and to destroy women who are too old to reproduce, too poor or too black or brown to be valued for reproducing, or too queer to pass. This, in

conjunction with the flourishing pornography industry in which

women are sexually consumed and then shit out and left to collect

flies, suggests that women will have to conform slavishly to right-

wing moral codes to survive; and that, too poor or too old, a

woman’s politics or philosophy however traditionally moral will

not make her life a whit more valuable. The use the state wants to

make of a woman’s uterus already largely determines— and will

more effectively determine in the future— whether she is fed or

starved, genuinely sheltered or housed in squalor, taken care of or

left in misery to pass cold, hungry, neglected days.

The association of women with old age and poverty predates the

contemporary Amerikan situation, in which women are the bulk of

both the old and the poor. In 1867, Jean Martin Charcot, known

primarily for his work with the institutionalized insane, did a systematic study of old age. The population he studied was old women in a public hospital in Paris—female, old, poor, urban.

Since that time, many psychological and sociological generalizations about the old have been framed as if the population under discussion were male, even when it was exclusively female as in

Charcot’s study. Many observations about the old were made by

professional men about poor women. As if to signal both the symbolic and actual relationship between old age and women, the first person in the United States to receive a Social Security check after

the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 was a woman, Ida

M. Fuller. Now in the United States, when there is no doubt

whatsoever that the old are primarily female, that the poor are prim arily female, that those on welfare are primarily female, that those in nursing homes are primarily female, that those in mental

institutions are primarily female, there is still no recognition that

the condition of poverty is significantly related to the condition of

women; or that the status of old people, for instance, is what it is

because the bulk of the old are women. “Indeed, ” writes one writer

on old age, “relatively recent trends in the aging of America may

have changed the status of older Americans. It is conceivable, for

instance, that the elderly have become a much larger burden to

society since World War I. After all, women, very old persons,

and those ‘stuck’ in deteriorating locations now constitute a greater

proportion of the aged population than ever before. ” 3 Women,

very old persons, and those “stuck” in deteriorating locations:

women, women, and women. “After all, ” women, women, and

women “now constitute a greater proportion of the aged population

than ever before”—the status of the old has changed, gone down;

they are more of a burden; “after a ll, ” they are women. In 1930,

there were more men over sixty-five than women; by 1940, there

were more women. In 1970, there were 100 women to 72 men over

sixty-five. In 1990, for every 100 women there w ill “only” be 68

men (as the experts put it). The situation is getting worse: because

the more women there are, the fewer men, the worse the situation

gets. Old women do not have babies; they have outlived their husbands; there is no reason to value them. T hey live in poverty because the society that has no use for them has sentenced them to death. Their tenacity in holding on to life is held against them.

Cuts in Social Security and food programs for the old directly issue

from the willingness of the U . S. government to watch useless

females go hungry, live in viciously degrading poverty, and die in

squalor. On the television news, social workers tell us several times

a week that old people are going hungry: “they have just enough

food to keep them alive, ” one said, “but they never eat enough to

stop them from being hungry. ” Then we see the interviews with

old people, the cafeterias where old people who can walk go to get

their one meal of the day. T hey are mostly women. T hey say they

are hungry. We can observe, if we care to, that they are female and

hungry.

W ithin this population of the old, there are the people in nursing

homes. “There are more than 17, 000 nursing homes in the United

States— as opposed to roughly 7, 000 general hospitals— and their

aggregate revenues exceed $12 billion a year, ” writes Bruce C.

Vladeck in U nloving Care: The N ursing Home Tragedy. “T hey have

been described as ‘Houses of Death, ’ ‘concentration cam ps, ’ ‘warehouses for the d yin g. ’ It is a documented fact that nursing home residents tend to deteriorate, physically and psychologically, after