Women of the world unite--we have nothing to lose but our men (1968).

Martinez, Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland ; Hanisch, Carol

The following is a "conversation" put together from various comments made by women and men on the subject of women's liberation. "Women's liberation doesn't have the immediate importance of black liberation or ending the war in Vietnam--the revolution."

That statement shows you have no concept of the oppression of women. It's true that women are not being killed off as a group in the great numbers that black people and Vietnamese are, or in such obvious ways. But 10,000 women die each year from abortions * because the men who run this country have decided that a women may not control her own body. Women are dehumanized and put into service roles like black people. More of us can make it economically if we are willing to prostitute ourselves as wives of upper or middle-class men. House niggers. But basically we are economically exploited, psychologically oppressed, and socially kept in "our place" by men and by a capitalist system that has institutionalized male supremacy-- in a more subtle way than the caveman but just as destructively.

"But other people are more oppressed than you."

That may or may not be. It seems rather futile to argue about who is the most or more oppressed. If you're being stepped on, you don't stop to argue about whether the foot on your neck is heavier than the one on the neck of somebody else. You try to free yourself. And where it's the same foot, you work together. There may be several things holding you down at once. If you're a woman, it's men and the capitalist system. If you're a black woman, it's also racism.

"Are you saying that women shouldn't fight in other struggles?"

Of course not. Women will never be free in this country as it now exists because nobody can be. So you have to fight to change the whole thing. But we could change the economic system and women could still be victims of male supremacy, just as black people could still be victims of racism. To assure that this doesn't happen, women have to organize themselves to fight male supremacy.

"You make a lot of analogies to the black movement. How do you see your relationship to black women?"

At the moment, our group is largely white. Occasionally a black woman will come to meetings and that's great. Our meetings are open to all women. However, there is a reluctance on the part of white women to assume that black women want to be part of an "integrated" group. Black women may want to get together themselves first. Furthermore, we're all sisters but some of our problems are different. Many militant black women see their struggle as a fight alongside their men for survival; some say that only middle-class white women can afford to worry about their freedom as women. Some nonwhite women are beginning to organize on the woman issue, however, so apparently there isn't complete rejection of the idea. Hopefully all women will eventually be able to get together and fight for certain programs. This should result in a lessening of white supremacist attitudes, too, as white women get together with non-white women around similar needs. We will fight such racist practices as using maids to do the personal dirty work that men should share equally with us.

"But women don't have it so bad. There are women doctors, lawyers, architects. Women are in almost all the fields open to men."

Almost is a big word. Besides, the number of women in creative and well-paying jobs is very limited. There are black legislators, lawyers, doctors, and even a black man on the U.S. Supreme Court, too, but that doesn't make the masses of black people less oppressed. Also, women get lower pay for the same jobs and they have to work harder to rise in those jobs--just as black people do.

"Don't you know that women control most of the wealth in this country? They also control individual men, not overtly but indirectly. Women have the real power, baby."

First of all, we don't want to wield power as it is wielded under the present system--to oppress, to destroy people's humanity. But even if we did, we don't have anything like real power. Much of that wealth is held by women nominally, for tax purposes. They don't make decisions about it. They aren't on the corporate boards of directors. They don't run industry, the military machine, the governmental structures. It may be true that women exert forms of indirect control over individual men, and it's an ugly phenomenon. Women manipulate "behind the scenes" and use "feminine wiles" because most of them have been denied the chance even to think of themselves wielding power openly. Look how managers go through all sorts of changes with male workers if they put a woman in a position of authority. "Feminine wiles" is a product of women's struggle for survival--it's a plastic sword, a paper tiger, phoney, nothing. It's devoid of self-respect.

"But men are exploited, too. They do mostly unrewarding work. They are not allowed to be full human beings either."

True. But men still oppress women. So in addition to fighting to change the capitalist system, women must also fight men for recognition of their humanity.

"It sounds like you hate men."

When a man says that, it's a self-defense tactic--trying to put feminists in a hate bag, the way whites do to black militants. When a woman says it, it's usually because she doesn't see her own oppression. She doesn't see that she lives in a world of male supremacy, not limited to the U.S.A. or to the capitalist system. From the beginning of history, women have usually been seen by men--and therefore by themselves--as the lesser of the sexes. In periods of economic necessity, women have been allowed out of the home but quickly put back when that need ended, and told that's where they always belonged. The ideas are so old that it's no surprise women cannot see what has happened to them.

"Are you trying to be like men, then?"

Our demand is not for equality. Who wants to be like men! We are trying as women to define ourselves. We not only reject the definitions that men have given us, but reject becoming like men.

"Your ideas may be all right for you personally, but why must you impose a particular life style on other women? Some women really want to serve a man in the traditional way, they just naturally want to be housewives."

That sounds like the "happy slave" argument for the South--a great rationalization for continuing oppression. There are at least two things wrong with your point. First, no woman in a modern Western society has grown up in the absence of lifelong pressure to seek submissiveness, to want to be a housewife, to define herself in the terms of the dominant male society. So no one can say for sure that such attitudes and goals are innate in women, that they come "naturally." Women have never had a chance to find out what they really want; no one knows what a woman would choose if she were free psychologically and technically.

In the second place, it doesn't seem really probable that anyone would want to be no more than a housewife if all other avenues were open. Housework is uncreative, no matter what the mass media say about it in their relentless drive to sell a new cake mix or floor wax. Anyone who has ever done that kind of work for an extended period knows it is endless, repetitious drudgery with--worst of all--no relevance to the larger human community. It provides a pathetic sense of being needed, of identity, to many women. But anyone who thinks she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn't being "natural"; she's literally lost her mind.

"Hey, I know a lot of men who wash dishes. Haven't you ever met a henpecked husband? Or just a nice guy who believes in helping?"

Man, that dish-washing argument has moth-holes by now. The point is that such actions, no matter how much better than the man who won't do anything in the house, don't alter the assignment of roles. Housework remains the woman's job and then the man "helps." If men started staffing nursery schools that might reflect a real change in attitudes and roles. But the same man who will wash dishes wouldn't be caught dead in a job taking care of very young children--unless he could dress it up as some kind of sociological experiment. Listen, children should have alternatives also--to be cared for by men or women, or both.

"If giving women all possible alternatives includes the choice never to have children, what happens to the human race?"

Society cannot lay the responsibility for continuing the race solely on women. If there is any responsibility here, it's the responsibility of society to offer women all possible choices by developing new technology for continuing the species in other ways--so that the task need not be unilaterally imposed on women.

"But what about the women who say that giving birth was the most extraordinary experience of their lives. Would you deny them that?"

It's true that some women say that. Others find childbirth exciting but no more so than various other experiences. Some women begin to enjoy children only when the kids attain a more developed humanness. It seems possible that those who find childbirth their most outstanding experience haven't yet had access to other experiences. Again, what we want is a society in which women who want to try it can do so and those who don't can not try it without being made to feel guilty, inadequate, unfulfilled.

"Are you also advocating an end to families by putting all kids in nurseries? Kids need mother love or they'll grow up neurotic."

"Love" is a word screaming for redefinition. In sexual relationships, it often means dependency, it's a weapon for control, it's someone making an object out of someone else in order to satisfy ego and security needs. People become a kind of very elaborate, expensive furniture in each other's lives. "Mother love" can usually be translated as a woman finding her identity through another person. That's a terrible burden on the child, with each generation transferring the burden on to the next. It's also a paralysis of the woman's human development.

We believe that there is such a thing as humanistic love; that everyone needs to experience it; that you cannot love if you have not had the experience of being loved. But there is little social history to prove that the conventional, nuclear family produces such love or that it produces the happiest people. It usually turns out lonely runners in a rat race rather than members of a human community. Its essence is like that of capitalism; it projects children as possessions and as the responsibility of individuals. But children are as much the possession and responsibility of the community as the land, the waters, the air, and the recourses available to man through nature.

Just what new forms should replace today's nuclear family--a combination of social and private child care, totally socialized care, the extended family or whatever--is not for us to determine. Men too have a responsibility for working that out. More important, we reject the idea that women must come up with a perfect formula for the human race before their demands for liberation are met. We want to get The Man off our backs; don't expect us to guarantee him a comfy chair to sit in afterward.

"Well, even if that's all true, don't you think life would be duller without the spark of sexual difference? Don't you secretly dig the kinds of little tensions between men and women?"

Yeah, yeah, flirting is fun. A man opens a door for me, I thank him, he smiles and electricity ripples through us both. A year later I'm flushing out a diaper and he's opening other doors.

"No, I don't mean only lovers--just men and women working together, for example. There's something special about the relationship which doesn't exist between two people of the same sex unless they're homosexual." That's still the undercurrent of possible conquest. Of course there are differences between men and women. But when men bring them up, it's usually with some form of inferiority in the back of their minds.

"Ho hum. Well, what's your program?"

If there is anything we can learn from the black liberation movement, it is that the primary job is consciousness-raising. Malcolm X said it about black people in 1964 and it's equally true for us:

   You can't give a people a program until they realize they need one,
   and until they realize that all existing programs aren't ... going
   to produce ... results. What we would like to do ... is to go into
   our problem and just analyze ... and question things that you don't
   understand so we can ... get a better picture of what faces us. If
   you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that
   confronts them, and the basic causes that produce it, they'll
   create their own program.

It is amazing how quickly we have been able to affect the consciousness of some women already. They see themselves as members of a group for the first time instead of believing their problems to be individual. Then they say, "Hey, I like women!" And that's a real breakthrough.

"Well, I still think most women want things the way they are. They may demand equal pay or less drudgery but they still want to have the same kinds of personal relationships with men that people have had for centuries. It's in nature."

A lot of women who say they just want to play the traditional roles are simply fearful--or unable to imagine other ways of being. Old roles can seem to offer a certain security. Freedom can seem frightening if one has learned how to achieve a certain degree of power inside the prison. We don't seek to impose anything on women but merely to open up all possible alternatives; we do seek choice, as one of the functions which makes people human beings. We want to be free people, crippled neither by law or custom or our own chained minds. If there is no room for that in nature, then nature must be changed.

"Well, all I can say is you must be a bunch of lesbians."

That's the one people always pull out last. It's the kind of tactic the ruling class uses when it feels threatened by anyone who challenges it. Queer-baiting is no different from Red-baiting. Let's deal with the issues.

* Coauthored with Carol Hanisch and published by New York Radical Women in Notes from the First Year. Thanks to Carol Hanisch for permission to reprint.

** This figure of 10,000 deaths per year was commonly used at the time by groups working to legalize abortion. Experts today claim it was about 200 in 1968 [Carol Hanisch].