Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

female nature; women accept the duties of sexual and reproductive

submission to men. The far-Right solution translates the presumed

biological destiny of women into a politics of orthodox religion:

even in a secular republic, far-Right women live in a theocracy.

Religion shrouds women in real as well as magical grace in that the

sex-class functions of women are formally honored, carefully

spelled out, and exploited within clear and prescribed boundaries.

The second solution is offered by feminists. It proposes, in the

words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “the individuality of each human soul. . . In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny. . . ” 13 This is simply a recognition of the human condition, in which women are included. It is also the precondition for the realization of Marx’s greatest ethical

idea: from each according to her ability, to each according to her

need. It is the imposition of the sex-class definition of women on

women—by any means necessary—that devastates the human capacities of women, making them men’s subordinates, making them

“women. ” Feminists have a vision of women, even women, as indi­

vidual human beings; and this vision annihilates the system of gender polarity in which men are superior and powerful. T his is not a bourgeois notion of individuality; it is not a self-indulgent notion of

individuality; it is the recognition that every human being lives a

separate life in a separate body and dies alone. In proposing “the

individuality of each human soul, ” feminists propose that women

are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing— a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life— including each woman’s life— must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself.

Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of

women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.

In the face of advancing reproductive technology, there w ill be

even fewer women who dare claim their right to human life, human dignity, and human struggle as unique and necessary individuals, fewer and fewer women who will fight against the categorical disposition of women. Instead, more and more women w ill see

protection for themselves as women in religious and devotional ideologies that formally honor the special sanctity of motherhood.

This is the only claim that women can make under the sex-class

system to a sacred nature; and religion is the best w ay to make that

claim— the best available w ay. Against the secular power of male

scientists women w ill try to pit the political power of misogynist

males in religion. Women w ill try to use male theology and religious tradition wherever and however it sanctifies the mother giving birth. Women w ill hide behind theology; women w ill hide behind orthodox religious men; women w ill use conservative religious ideas against the science that w ill make women less necessary than they have ever been.

The power of the reproductive scientists w ill be advanced, how­

ever, precisely through the political and legislative initiatives of the

theocrats: prohibiting abortion and then mandating forced sterilization will establish absolute state control of the uterus. The clash between reproductive scientists and male theocrats in terms of absolute values—especially the orthodox formulation of what constitutes the family—only appears to be irresolvable. When these two schools of unconditional male power over women have to negotiate public policy to the mutual benefit of both, the men of theology, with that remarkable resourcefulness that allowed for the

burning of the witches, will find great virtue in any program in

which fertilized eggs truly do supersede women in importance.

They will also enjoy having both sex and reproduction on their

own terms: being God in the concrete rather than worshiping him

in the abstract. They will also enjoy— for its own sake—the extraordinary control they will have over women: more than Leviticus gives; more than Christ mandates; more than men have ever had, though no doubt still less than men deserve. Women will argue like the true believers they are for that old-time religion, but male theocrats will discover that God intended men to be the sole

creators of life all along: did not God himself create Adam without

female help and is not baptism the religious equivalent of being

born of a male God? This is not farfetched for those who justify

the subordination of women to men on the ground that God is a

boy.

Ironically, cruelly, so typical of history ineluctably moving on,

Right to Life groups are the only organized political opposition to

reproductive technology, especially in vitro fertilization, * and are

also the agents of its ascendancy in engineering legislation that

would give the uterus and the fertilized egg to the state to protect

and control. Even in giving the state the right to define when life

begins, which Right to Life groups insist on doing, Right to Life

*Each fertilized egg in a petri dish is regarded as a human life; each time

one is thrown away or “dies, ” murder has been done.

groups are taking that power from religion and transforming it into

a police power of the state. For the sake of religion, they are taking

from religion its moral authority to demand obedience from the

faithful and turning that authority over to a soulless state apparatus

incapable of moral discernment. They are taking from God what

no atheist would dare and giving to Caesar what he has never dared

claim for himself. The women in Right to Life groups want to

protect not fertilized eggs but motherhood and their own worth as

women in God’s eyes as well as man’s. They will learn the crudest

lesson of history: “Every decent End consumes itself. You kill

yourself trying to reach it, and by the time you get there it’s been

turned inside out. ” 14 The words were written by Soviet dissident

Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), but every passionate political activist of conscience—whatever the “decent End”—has had occasion to say them, in trouble and in grief. What one means to do goes

wrong, it becomes what one abhors. Right to Life women will see