Also by Andrea Dworkin Woman Hating Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics The New Womans Broken Heart Pornography: Men Possessing Women Right-wing Women ANDREA DWORKIN A Perigee Book Perigee Books are published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons 200 Madison Avenue New York, New York 10016 Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982 by Andrea Dworkin Copyright © 1983 by Andrea Dworkin All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. Published on the same day in Canada by General Publishing Co. Limited, Toronto. The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following sources to reprint material in this book: The University of California Press for the excerpt from “The Coming Gynocide, ” in Sappho: A New Translation, Mary Barnard, translator (1973), © copyright 1957 by The Regents of the University of California. New' Directions Publishing Corporation for six lines from “Canto 9 1” from The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Ezra Pound. Copyright © 1956 by Ezra Pound. Portions of this book have been published in slightly different form in Ms. and Maenad. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dworkin, Andrea. Right-wing women. Includes index. 1. Women’s rights— United States. 2. Con­ servatism— United States. 3. Right and left (Political science). I. Title. [HQ1426. D898 1982b] 305. 4'2'0973 82-9784 ISBN 0-399-50671-3 AACR2 First Perigee printing, 1983 Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgments Many people went out of their way to help me in different ways in the course of my writing this book. I owe sincere thanks to Geri Thoma, Anne Simon, Robin Morgan, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Karen Homick, Emily Jane Goodman, Rachel Gold, Sandra Elkin, Laura Cottingham, Gena Corea, and Raymond Bongiovanni. I am very grateful to Sam Mitnick for supporting this project and to all the people at Perigee involved in publishing it. This book owes its existence to Gloria Steinem, whose idea it was that I expand an earlier essay, “Safety, Shelter, Rules, Form, Love: The Promise of the Ultra-Right” (Ms. y June 1979), into a book. I thank Gloria not only for the idea but also for her insis­ tence on its importance. And I thank, once again, both John Stoltenberg and Elaine Markson, who sustain me. Andrea Dworkin New York City March 1982 For Gloria Steinem In Memory of Muriel Rukeyser Contents 1. The Promise of the Ultra-Right 13 2. The Politics of Intelligence 37 3. Abortion 71 4. Jews and Homosexuals 107 5. The Coming Gynocide 147 6. Antifeminism 195 Notes 239 Index 245 Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Noth­ ing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position. Conceding, then, that the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, and to conquer. Such are the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of individual sovereignty. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1892 1 The Promise of the Ultra-Right There is a rumor, circulated for centuries by scientists, artists, and philosophers both secular and religious, a piece of gossip as it were, to the effect that women are “biologically conservative. ” While gos­ sip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact. This particular rumor became dignified as high thought because it was Whispered-Down-The-Lane in formidable academies, libraries, and meeting halls from which women, until very recently, have been formally and forcibly excluded. The whispers, however multisyllabic and footnoted they some­ times are, reduced to a simple enough set of assertions. Women have children because women by definition have children. This “fact of life, ” which is not subject to qualification, carries with it the instinctual obligation to nurture and protect those children. Therefore, women can be expected to be socially, politically, eco­ nomically, and sexually conservative because the status quo, what­ ever it is, is safer than change, whatever the change. Noxious male philosophers from all disciplines have, for centuries, maintained that women follow a biological imperative derived directly from their reproductive capacities that translates necessarily into narrow lives, small minds, and a rather meanspirited puritanism. This theory, or slander, is both specious and cruel in that, in fact, women are forced to bear children and have been throughout history in all economic systems, with but teeny-weeny time-outs while the men were momentarily disoriented, as, for instance, in the immediate postcoital aftermath of certain revolutions. It is en­ tirely irrational in that, in fact, women of all ideological persua­ sions, with the single exception of absolute pacifists, of whom there have not been very many, have throughout history supported wars in which the very children they are biologically ordained to protect are maimed, raped, tortured, and killed. Clearly, the biological ex­ planation of the so-called conservative nature of women obscures the realities of women’s lives, buries them in dark shadows of dis­ tortion and dismissal. The disinterested or hostile male observer can categorize women as “conservative” in some metaphysical sense because it is true that women as a class adhere rather strictly to the traditions and values of their social context, whatever the character of that context. In societies of whatever description, however narrowly or broadly de­ fined, women as a class are the dulled conformists, the orthodox believers, the obedient followers, the disciples of unwavering faith. To waver, whatever the creed of the men around them, is tanta­ mount to rebellion; it is dangerous. Most women, holding on for dear life, do not dare abandon blind faith. From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protec­ tion from male violence. She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be. Sometimes it is a lethargic conformity, in which case male demands slowly close in on her, as if she were a character buried alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Sometimes it is a militant con­ formity. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obe­ dient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her. She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a per­ fect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person. But the militant conformist has given so much of herself—her la­ bor, heart, soul, often her body, often children—that this betrayal is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring. Women know, but must not acknowledge, that resisting male control or confronting male betrayal will lead to rape, battery, des­ titution, ostracization or exile, confinement in a mental institution or jail, or death. As Phyllis Chesler and Emily Jane Goodman make clear in Women, M oney, and P ow er, women struggle, in the manner of Sisyphus, to avoid the “something worse” that can and will always happen to them if they transgress the rigid boundaries of appropriate female behavior. Most women cannot afford, either materially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt of­ ferings of obedience they bring to beg protection will not appease the angry little gods around them. It is not surprising, then, that most girls do not want to become like their mothers, those tired, preoccupied domestic sergeants be­ set by incomprehensible troubles. Mothers raise daughters to con­ form to the strictures of the conventional female life as defined by men, whatever the ideological values of the men. Mothers are the immediate enforcers of male will, the guards at the cell door, the flunkies who administer the electric shocks to punish rebellion. Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to sur­ vive. A girl may, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in ac­ quiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment. It is the fashion among men to despise the smallness of women’s lives. The so-called bourgeois woman with her shallow vanity, for instance, is a joke to the brave intellectuals, truck drivers, and rev­ olutionaries who have wider horizons on which to project and in­ dulge deeper vanities that women dare not mock and to which women dare not aspire.