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Remember the dignity

of your womanhood.

Do not appeal,

do not beg,

do not grovel.

Take courage

join hands,

stand beside us.

Fight with us. . . .

The fight began, many women were saying, with the body, which seemed to be the beginning of the exploitation of women—as sex plaything (weak and incompetent), as pregnant woman (helpless), as middle-aged woman (no longer considered beautiful), as older woman (to be ignored, set aside). A biological prison had been created by men and society. As Adrienne Rich said (Of Woman Born): “Women are controlled by lashing us to our bodies.” She wrote:

I have a very clear, keen memory of myself the day after I was married: I was sweeping a floor. Probably the floor did not really need to be swept; probably I simply did not know what else to do with myself. But as I swept that floor I thought: “Now I am a woman. This is an age-old action, this is what women have always done.” I felt I was bending to some ancient form, too ancient to question. This is what women have always done.

As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant, I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty. The atmosphere of approval in which I was bathed—even by strangers on the street, it seemed—was like an aura I carried with me, in which doubts, fears, misgivings met with absolute denial. This is what women have always done.. . .

Rich said women could use the body “as a resource, rather than a destiny.” Patriarchal systems, she said, whether under capitalism or “socialism,” limited women’s bodies to their own needs. She discussed the training of passivity in women. Generations of schoolgirls were raised on Little Women, where Jo is told by her mother: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.”

Male doctors used instruments to bring out children, replacing the sensitive hands of midwives, in the era of “anesthetized, technologized childbirth.” Rich disagreed with her fellow feminist Firestone, who wanted to change the biological inevitability of childbirth, because it is painful and a source of subordination; she wanted, under different social conditions, to make childbirth a source of physical and emotional joy.

One could not talk of Freud’s ignorance of women, Rich said, as his one “blind spot,” which implied that in other matters his vision was clear; such ignorance distorts all. There is a dilemma of the body:

I know no woman—virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate—whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves—for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings.

Her reply to this: the “repossession of our bodies . . . a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body” as a basis for bringing forth not just children but new visions, new meanings, a new world.

For most women who were not intellectuals, the question was even more immediate: how to eliminate hunger, suffering, subordination, humiliation, in the here and now. A woman named Johnnie Tillmon wrote in 1972:

I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare. . . . I have raised six children. . . . I grew up in Arkansas . . . worked there for fifteen years in a laundry . . . moved to California. . . . In 1963 I got too sick to work anymore. Friends helped me to go on welfare. . . .

Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.

And that is why welfare is a women’s issue. For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare it’s a matter of survival.

Welfare, she said, was like “a supersexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. . . . The man runs everything