Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

women and children; to get black families back into the patriarchal

mode, that is, headed by males, for reasons of traditional morality

or economics; to force black men to marry black women and be

legally responsible for the children. From the antiracist side, w elfare policy has been seen as a blanket effort to destroy black men or the black fam ily, which, when headed by a woman, is seen as inherently degraded. The absent black male is the political focus and priority. But neither side penetrates to the real meaning of welfare

policy because both sides keep their eye on the man as the significant figure in the drama. The state, obviously, does not intend any economic dignity for that man or that same state would not promote black male unemployment in its economic policies and create a situation, through welfare, in which husbands are forced to abandon women and children so as to be sure they do not starve. From the antiracist perspective, the efforts of welfare have been deeper

and far more malevolent than can be realized if its impact on men

is seen as prim ary, because the effort has been to stop or significantly diminish reproduction through social control of women.

The notion that the state has acted to promote the conventional

male-dominated fam ily (by persecution of unmarried mothers, for

instance) is only superficially viable. If that were its real interest,

other state policies would support that same goal. Instead, welfare

policy has directly concerned itself with controlling women. The

most intrusive and degrading regulations back from the beginning

of welfare all have to do with women as women: all have to do with

a gender-specific regulation of motherhood and sex. These policies

all articulate the reproductive worth of women on welfare to the

state, and that value is almost entirely negative. *

The causes of the need for welfare (from the human, not the

state, point of view) are in the systematic economic discrimination

against women, with black women suffering the most stark eco­

*The one positive value is that the women and their progeny are cheap

labor, as discussed previously in this chapter.

nomic deprivation, and in the systematic sexual degradation of

women. Welfare is the barest maintenance for those who, being

female and poor, would otherwise slowly die. Those kicked off the

welfare rolls in the endless quest for those who are poor but pure

get jobs where they are paid less than welfare provides; and welfare

provides shit. They work, keeping those upholders of the Protestant work ethic happy, and go hungry at the same time. The poverty of women is appalling. As of December 1981, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment for females who

headed households was nearly twice that of males who headed

households: 10. 6 percent for the women; 5. 8 percent for the men.

Gay Talese, who wrote about the sex industry, found it meaningful in terms of sexual liberation that the women in massage parlors giving him handjobs were college graduates and even Ph. D . ’s. It is

meaningful—but in terms of what women have to do to earn

money, even with college educations and advanced degrees. The

welfare system that seeks to control women, and ultimately to destroy expendable women (black and poor white women, Hispanics, the females of any marginal groups), can count on the continuing

poverty of these women as women; they are never going to do

better because they are women and there are no social means to

enable them to do better, except marriage upward. The poverty of

these millions of women is assured; and so is the state’s continued

access to them; and so too is their continuing sexual humiliation by

state intrusion, the welfare agencies being thus far the major enforcement arm of state policy. Since reproductive containment (at best) has been the goal of welfare, there will be continued state

intrusion into the reproductive lives of poor women—with the endemic racism of the United States putting black women consistently at the highest risk. The intrusion will be under the guise of morality, as it has always been, a morality applied exclusively to

women, a morality that no right-wing senator or congressman

would ever think of using the state to apply to men. It will also be

disguised— by those more secular—as concern for the black fam­

ily: controlling the sexual promiscuity of the woman, reinstating

the black man in the master’s bedroom, such as it is on his block.

Under the surface, there w ill be a different truth: the state,

through the welfare system as a whole, wants to control the fertility of the woman and w ill not ever let the black man come in out of the cold. The state regulates the sexual use of non welfare women

for the benefit of men as a class, and it attempts to control the

fertility of nonwelfare women in cooperation with the men whose

interests it represents: the men who are lovers, fathers, husbands,

rapists, and police all at the same time. But the state directly ow ns

the sexuality of women on welfare— at least from its point of view

it does— and it wants to own their fertility outright too. Sometimes

the state explicitly exercises the ownership it has in enforcing so-

called moral standards for a subject group of women: sometimes it

punishes women for having had children against its w ill. The slow

starving and degrading of these women is not yet w idely viewed as

genocidal; genocide is not articulated as state policy. That is because the political and legal tools available to welfare in its pursuit of reproductive control of poor women have been crude. But illegal

abortion, which looms large on the horizon in the form of the monstrous Human Life Amendment, and forced sterilization, practiced sporadically so far but lurking for decades as what the government

really wants to do, w ill make a genocidal policy practical, effective,

and frankly inevitable. When abortion is illegal, black women, H ispanic women, and poor women get slaughtered. * Allowing the government to regulate the uterus— as in the Human Life Amendment— w ill directly preface an overt policy of forced sterilization.

Forced sterilization cannot be explicit state policy until a measure

like the Human Life Amendment is adopted: until abortion is absolutely reckoned murder legally and is punished as murder, so that the state is empowered literally to investigate the woman’s womb,

her menses, her discharges. Once every fertilized egg must be

*See chapter 3, “Abortion, ” pp. 9 8 -9 9 .