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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

A-Mazing World-Traveling:
The Pluralist Future -of Racical Feminism

presented by

Amber L. Katherine

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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PhD . degree in Philosophy

 

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A—MAZING WORLD-TRAVELING: THE PLURALIST FUTURE OF RADICAL
FEMINISM

By

Amber L. Katherine

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
' Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Philosophy

1 997

ABSTRACT

A—MAZING WORLD-TRAVELING: THE PLURALIST FUTURE OF RADICAL
FEMINISM

By

Amber L. Katherine

Contemporary white U.S. feminist theorists have not, to date, responded
adequately to the challenges of racism and ethnocentrism in feminism raised by
U.S. feminists of color in the late seventies and early eighties. To understand
this widespread failure I suggest a return to a critical moment of exchange
between Mary Daly and Audre Lorde. In 1978, philosopher Mary Daly published
(Syn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, in which she argued, the
contemporary radical feminist movement must be understood in historical
context as a global, ontological, epistemological, metaethical, “Metapatriarchal
Journey.” In Part I, I present Daly’s project in Gyn/Ecology, from the perspective
of the Western gynocentric tradition of Matilda Joselyn Gage and Virginia Woolf.
in response to (Syn/Ecology, poet and essayist Audre Lorde published “An Open
Letter to Mary Daly,” in which she argued, the white European perspective of
Gyn/Ecology erased and distorted the traditions of nonwhite, noneuropean
women. Daly never responded in kind to Lorde's letter. In Part II, I read Lorde’s
letter, drawing insights from her other writings and from the political writings of
other radicals at the time, including Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and
Robin Morgan. I conclude that Lorde's letter is an attempt to effect a shift in

Daly's thought which would strengthen Syn/Ecology and help realize the radical

feminist vision they share. Daly’s failure to respond in kind has left the
misguided impression with many that Lorde's challenges call for the
abandonment of Syn/Ecology and radical feminism generally. In Part III,
drawing from Lorde’s criticisms, I argue that while the racial and ethnic politics of
the text are “color evasive” and ethnocentric, Lorde’s challenges call for a
“reconstruction," rather than an abandonment of Gyn/Ecology. Part IV charts a
new “Metapatriarchal Journey” which I call 'Radical White Western Feminism.“
My contribution to this reconstruction, what I call “A-mazing World-Traveling,” is
offered toward the development of an anti-racist, anti-imperialist radical feminism
that can be practiced by white Western women in complex consciousness of

their/our historical, cultural and racial locations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to all the radical thinkers, in the academy and on the streets,
living in the present and the past, who have inspired me to want, above all,
radical change. Especially, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones and Marilyn
Frye. There are four womyn who made it possible for me to give shape to that
inspiration in the form of this dissertation. Since 1988, Marilyn Frye has been my
ally, teacher, advisor, mentor, respectful critic, colleague and model of how to do
philosophy. As my advisor, Marilyn’s most awesome act was to encourage me
to think for myself and to discover what I would in my philosophical
investigations. Kathryn Phillips, my friend, mother and model of how to quest,
has been there for me since my beginning. Martha Gass, my friend, first love
and model of lesbian-loving perception, has supported me in multiple and
profound ways. My sou/mate, my lover, intellectual and political comrade, Kim
Leverton, has taught me more about integrity, perseverance, how to play instead
of stress, how to be a radical mother, and how to think theory and “real life”

together, than anyone in my life.

iv

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1

PART 1
THE RADICAL FEMINIST TRADITION BEHIND MARY DALY'S
GYN/E COL OGY ................................................................................................. 23
Daly's Radical Feminist Theory in Historical Context ............................... 23
Re—membering Daly's Radical Feminism in Woman's Time .................... 28
Reading Daly's feminism in the tradition of Matilda Joselyn Gage 28
Reading Daly's feminism in the tradition of Virginia Woolf ............ 35
The theoretical relation between Daly’s feminism and
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex ........................................ 71
PART II
AUDRE LORDE'S 'AN OPEN LETTER TO MARY DALY" AND DALY'S
DECISION NOT TO RESPOND IN KIND ........................................................... 76
Lorde's First Two Criticisms ..................................................................... 91
The Context of Daly's Decision Not to Respond in Kind ........................ 109
What Daly's 'Qualitative Leap" Reveals About the Context ................... 110
From Civil Rights to Black Nationalism .................................................. 116
New Left Meets Radical Feminism ......................................................... 128
Black Feminism ...................................................................................... 144
Why Didn't Daly Respond in Kind to Lorde's Letter? ............................. 160
PART III
THE RACIAL AND ETHNIC POLITICS OF GYN/ECOLOGY ........................... 180
Daly Uses White Western Patriarchal Tools, Without Awareness,
Against Sisters ....................................................................................... 188
How the Journey of Radical Feminism Charted in Syn/Ecology
Fails to Provide a Liberating Path for Women of Color .......................... 213
PART IV
RADICAL WHITE WESTERN FEMINISM: TOWARD A RECONSTRUCTION OF
SYN/ECOLOGY ............................................................................................... 240
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 278

INTRODUCTION

In the introductory essay of Feminist Epistemologies (1993) Linda Alcoff
and Elizabeth Potter offer the following story about the development of the field.
Feminist philosophers began work in the applied areas because
feminism is, first and last, a political movement concerned with
practical issues, and feminist philosophers understood their
intellectual work to be a contribution to the public debate on crucial
practice issues. At first, the more abstract areas of philosophy
seemed distant from these concrete concerns. But from the
applied areas we moved into more central ones as we began to
see the problems produced by androcentrism in aesthetics, ethics,
philosophy of science, and finally and fairly recently, in the “core”
areas of epistemology and metaphysics. (2)
”The history of feminist epistemology is,” they write, “the history of the clash
between the feminist commitment to the struggles of women to have their
understandings of the world legitimated and the commitment of traditional
philosophy to various accounts of knowledge -- positivist, postpostivist, and
others -- that have consistently undermined women’s claim to know.” (ibid.) With
regard to the feminist epistemology of Mary Daly, as presented in Syn/Ecology:
The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), the story offered by Alcoff and
Potter strikes me as both accurate and inaccurate in certain respects. While it is
true that Daly's Syn/Ecology was, first and last, an intellectual contribution to the

political movement of women, her commitment was most definitely not to gaining

legitimacy for women’s understandings of issues being debated in the public

2
sphere. On Daly’s view, a movement committed to deep social change must be

a quest, not for legitimacy on the patriarchal terms assumed in public debate, but
rather for criticism and refusal of patriarchal standards of legitimacy altogether.
According to Daly, women have no privileged epistemological position as
women: to be a woman is to have been made a patriarchal subject. Daly
argues, as feminists, our first task must be to change our womanly ways of
knowing and being, that is, to re-make ourselves something “Other” than
women. Hence, her feminist philosophy began in the late seventies with
epistemology and metaphysics in order that we might realize this metapatriarchal
possibility.

The year after Syn/Ecology was published, Audre Lorde published an
“Open Letter to Mary Daly,” criticizing the white Western perspective of Daly’s
Syn/Ecology. On most feminist interpretations of the letter, Lorde's critique
called for a complete dismissal of Daly’s project. However, as Lorde herself
notes in the letter, she agreed with much of what Daly was up to in Syn/Ecology.
They shared the vision that feminism must be about liberatory transformations
starting with how we think and live. If we are going to survive, they agreed, we
must expand our epistemological possibilities, which necessarily involves
becoming something Other than patriarchal women. On my reading, Lorde’s
letter calls not for a dismissal of Daly’s feminism, but for a reconstruction. In this
dissertation I bring Mary Daly’s "A-mazing' epistemology together with Maria
Lugones's idea of “world-traveling” in an effort to respond constructively to the

challenges raised by Audre Lorde. My contribution, what I call “A—mazing World-

3
Traveling,” is offered to further the development of an anti-racist, anti-imperialist

radical feminism that can be practiced by white Western women in complex
consciousness of their/our historical, cultural and racial locations.‘

We must, Daly insists, make ourselves something Other than patriarchal
women because our survival depends on it. The practices which have made us
women condition us to think and imagine in ways which draw us into complicity
with our own thingification, that is, self-destruction. Daly argues that for women
in the patriarchal “foreground,” our thinking is conditioned both through language
-- specifically, “the all-pervasive language of myth, conveyed overtly and
subliminally through religion, 'great art,’ literature, the dogmas of
professionalism, the media, grammar," and scholarship -- and by rituals of
bodily violence; with each promoting our acceptance of the other. (3)

For example, she says in a chapter on African genital mutilation, that the
perpetual pain experienced by women subjected to the rituals of excision and

infibulation so effectively preoccupies their minds, emotions, imaginations, and

 

‘ In the dissertation I name this politic “Radical White Western Feminism.” This reconstruction
of radical feminism entails a shift which I describe using Ruth Frankenberg’s (1993) language of
racial discourses. Whereas the dominant race discourse operative in Syn/Ecology, and in other
theory generated by white Western feminists in the seventies and eighties, was “color and power
evasive,” I argue for the development of a radical feminism which emerges from and creates a
“race cognizant” discourse. I add to Frankenberg's framework “colonial cognizance.” I propose
operationalizing this discourse through the practice of A-mazing World-Traveling. I italicize the
word “white” in the title to signal it is not functioning descriptively, is. not referring to a feminism
that can only be practiced by white women, or that feminism is white. Similarly, “Western" is
italicized to indicate that I am notdescribing a feminism which affirms a Western standpoint in the
same way, for example, “Chicane Feminism” affirms a Chicane standpoint or “Black feminist
thought” affirms a politicized African-American standpoint. Rather, the italics should be read as a
performance of awareness in a world where “white" and “Western" are unmarked cultural
categories. “Radical” and “Feminist" describe the critical perspective and practice which take
shape from and give shape to this awareness. Hence, the title announces something like, “T his
is a radical " hi, I ’m aware and critical of my racial and imperialist placement and it's significance
to my activity of theorizing“ feminism."

4
sensations, it prevents a sense of Self.2 (159) Similarly, she argues,

gynecologists and psychiatrists in America “keep many women in the state of
perpetual patients whose bodies and minds are constantly invaded by foreign
objects -- knives, needles, speculums, carcinogenic hormone injections and pills,
sickening self-images, festering fixations, [and] debilitating dogmas.“ (230)
Under these conditions it is almost impossible to think critically about what is
happening and creatively about how to resist it. To make matters worse the
language of myth used to represent patriarchal rituals constitutes a maze of
deception leading women to believe that participating in such rituals is the
pathway to sacred existence. Daly points out, for example, that according to
Mircea Eliade, myths express “intuitive insights“ about meaningful human activity
which “open up depths of reality and the self otherwise closed to us.“ (44) In her
chapter on sati Daly shows how Joseph Campbell employs this language in his
description of the Indian widow. The woman who “throws herself“ on the funeral
pyre of her husband is, in his words, “the female who really is something in as
much as she is truly and properly a player of the female part: she is not only
good and true in the ethical sense but true and real ontologically. In her faithful
death, she is at one with her own true being.“ (118) In these terms, “to be killed
is 'good and true,‘ and to cease to exist is to be.“ (119) Hence, Daly argues, the

“insights“ expressed through patriarchal myth actually close off depths of reality

 

’ Daly explains, “Self is capitalized when I am referring to the authentic center of women’s
process, while the imposed/intemalized false ‘self,’ the shell of the Self, is in lower case. In
writing of the deep Background which is the divine depth of the Self, l capitalize, while the term
foreground, referring to surface consciousness, generally is not capitalized.” (26) Where
apprOpriate I follow Daly's capitalization practices.

5
and of the Self otherwise opened to women, by “deceiving us into believing that

these are the only doorways to our depths and the fathers hold the keys.“ (46)

To endure the physical pain of the various patriarchal rituals which make
one a woman and to think the experiences through the language provided by
such scholars as Eliade and Campbell requires, Daly argues, a radical “splitting“
of one' self-perceptions. Following Monique Wittig, Daly argues, women are
“broken“ by the fact that we must enter patriarchal language in order to speak or
write. “As the 'l' is broken,“ says Daly, “so also is the Inner Eye, the capacity for
integrity of knowing/sensing.“ (19) Dazed in the maze, in this epistemological
state of “brokenness,” the possibility of autonomyfintegrity -- of thinking for
oneself, of acting on one's own initiatives -- is not apparent.

On Simone de Beauvoir's view, the situation of being made a woman has
included “the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing.“ If women are to
become free subjects, she insists, we must assume, like men, the metaphysical
risks of transcendent existence. But Daly follows Virginia Woolf, who argued
twenty-five years before Beauvoir, that following in the processions of educated
men makes one, not a free subject, but “only a cripple in a cave.”3 Becoming a
man cannot be the path to that something Other we must seek to become. On

Daly's view, there is no difference in kind between thinking like a patriarchally

 

’ In Three Guineas (1938) Woolf writes, “if people are highly successful in their professions they
lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no
time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversations. They lose their sense
of proportion - the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. Money making
becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so
competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more
than they can do themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound,
and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.“ (72)

6
constructed man and like a patriarchally constructed woman. “Robotitude,“

Daly's name for the state of the modern patriarchal subject, is living reduced to
mechanical motion. We are all programmed to think -- without our emotions,
imaginations, and sensations -- like machines. Patriarchal men parading in their
sartorial splendor -- “spacesuits, priestly and judicial robes, professional and
surgical gowns“ -- Daly argues, are robotized, the sons of their own machines,
more controlled than controlling, and above all, not free. (52) The only
difference Daly claims is that “fatherly fixes are essentially ego-inflating for men,
whereas those administered to women are depressants.“ (54) Following in the
transcendent processions of educated men, then, cannot be the path for women
with genuine Otherly ambitions.

Still, Daly acknowledges, the “kingdom of male-authored texts“ has
appeared to many of us “an appealing escape“ from the “realm of the distaff
which has literally been the sweatshop and prison of female bodies and spirits.“
(5) What is not immediately apparent to would-be Others who pursue this
avenue of “escape“ is the relationship between the ritual. atrocities of patriarchy
and the rituals of patriarchal scholarship. In the order of Western scholarship, at
least since Descartes, thinking clearly about something has meant distancing
oneself from it, separating itfrom its context, and breaking it down into
analyzable parts. One consequence of this “objective“ process is to make

objects of subjects.‘ Not coincidentally, she argues, this is the objective of the

 

‘ Recently Lorraine Code has argued, along these lines, “Women and other 'others' -- are
produced as 'objects of knowledge-as-control' by S-knows-that-p epistemologies and the
philosophies of science/social science that they inform.“ See “Taking Subjectivity Into Account,“
in Alcott and Potter (1993), 32.

—

7
ritual atrocities. What connects Campbell as a representative Western scholar

with the perpetrators of sati and other patriarchal violences, argues Daly, is their
failure to identify with the victim. Like the traditional Indian patriarch, the
Western patriarchal scholar emotionally distances himself from the victim,
separates the materiality of the ritual from its “soul“ or symbolic meaning, and
attaches all value to the latter. The problem, from Daly's perspective, is that this
way of thinking makes it appear as if there are no victims. Western patriarchal
scholarship -- which both generates and legitimates patriarchal violence --
constitutes a maze of deception which keeps those of us who are trained and
practiced in this mode of thinking from knowing the women who are erased by
the ritual atrocities. (131) When we participate in the “meta-rituals“ of
scholarship we run the risk, Daly warns, of “shrinking into the mold of the
mystified Athena, the twice-bom, who forgets and denies her Mother and Sisters,
because she has forgotten her original Self.“ (8)

Becoming something Other than women or pseudo men, Daly argues,
must begin with “Spinning“ our minds and bodies back together. “Spinning“ is
the way “through“ and “beyond“ the phallocratic mazes of deception within which
self-destruction and objectifying other women make sense. As a cognitive mode
of resistance “Spinning“ begins from the “Gyn/Ecological principle that
everything is connected with everything else.“ (11) In contrast with the
mechanical thinking which separates things from their contexts and break them

down into independent parts, Spinning involves dis-covering and repairing the

lost threads of connectedness within our Selves and the cosmos. “It erases

 

8
implanted pseudodichotomies between the Self and “other“ reality, while it

unmasks the unreality of both “self“ and “world“ as these are portrayed,
betrayed, in the language of the father's foreground.“ (6) Insofar as this holistic
process of knowing enables one to “see through“ the mazes which obscure the
possibilities of Self-affirming metapatriarchal movement, it is what Daly calls an
“A-mazing“ process.

The Second Passage of Syn/Ecology is intended to engage the would-be
Other in this A-mazing process, making of her a Spinster. The Spinster who
traverses the mazes within the “kingdom of male-authored texts“ is, in Daly's
lexicon, the “Searcher.“ In the Second Passage the Searcher examines five
patriarchal rituals, including Indian sati, Chinese footbinding, African genital
mutilation, European witchburning, and American gynecology with the intention
of making it possible to see the victims through the mazes. As the Searcher
moves through the passage she connects these practices which are represented
in the texts of Western scholars as apparently disparate and isolated
phenomena by identifying the basic patterns among them. For example, she
finds in all the rituals an obsession with purity, a total erasure of responsibility,
compulsive orderliness, obsessive repetitiveness, a fixation upon minute details
which divert attention from the horror, and a readjustment of consciousness, so
that otherwise unacceptable behavior becomes normative. (130-3) Together the
patterns constitute a global phenomenon which she names the “Sado-Ritual
Syndrome.“ Within this gyn/ecological analysis which she has spun she is able

to see with her “Inner Eye“ the horror patriarchal violence on a global scale.

9
In this A-mazing process the Searcher is transformed from one who is

split or broken within the mazes of mechanical thinking to one with a growing
capacity for integrity of knowing/sensing. In her discussion of the process she
quotes Adrienne Rich, “in bringing the light of critical thinking to bear on her
subject, in the very act of becoming more conscious of her situation in the world,
a woman may feel herself coming deeper than ever into touch'with her
unconscious and with her body.“ (6) This is exactly what happens to the
Searcher as she becomes increasingly knowledgeable about the gynocidal
implications of patriarchal practices. Her sensory perception is enhanced
enabling her to see/hear/feel the deceptive tricks of patriarchal texts. She
develops, according to Daly,
a kind of multidimensional / multiform power of sensing/
understanding her environment. This is a Self-identified
synaesthesia: it is a woman-identified gynaesthesia. It is a
complex way of perceiving the interelatedness of seemingly
disparate phenomena. It is also a pattern-detecting power which
may be named positive paranoia. (316)5
This mode of knowing, Daly argues, enables the Searcher to “find the focus of
her anger, so that it fuels and no longer blocks her passion and her creativity.“

(112) Unlike the Western scholar who assumes the “objective“ standpoint and

fails to identify with the victims of patriarchal violence, the Searcher is outraged

 

5 “Synaesthesia” refers to the experience of the concomitance of disparate sensation. For
example, in one published case wall-paper patterns were read as syllables and words. These
“unusual and idiosyncratic“ phenomenal experiences are thought to be caused by “an aggressive
and persistent association dominated in some cases by a community or analogy of emotional
tone.“ They are related to the associations at work in the personification of inanimate objects.
Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Edited by James Mark Baldwin (NY: Macmillian, 1928).

10
on their behalf! Because she identifies with them as victims she is compelled to

stand up and speak out against the practices which make them women.

In “Poetry is Not A Luxury“ (1977) Audre Lorde argues, along the same
line as Daly, that our survival depends on fundamental transformations in our
ways of knowing. She condemns the mode of living “defined by profit, by linear
power, by institutionalized dehumanization,“ which she claims, is the historical
result of acting on the white Western belief that “the head will save us, the brain
alone will set us free.“ (38) She proclaims,

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother

within each of us -- the poet -- whispers in our dreams: I feel,

therefore I can be free. (ibid.)
In response to charge that she is contributing to the dualist construction of the
rational white male and the emotional dark female, Lorde responds, if such a
dualism exists it is the white man who has constructed it by taking “a world
position, a position throughout time“ against what is not strictly rational within
themselves and others. (101) Like Daly, Lorde calls for an holistic knowing
process which fuses thinking and feeling. Since, in Lorde's words, “poetry coins
the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand“ it must not be
dismissed as a luxury. (38) Thus Lorde's work suggests that Daly's rejection of a
Cartesian starting point puts the Searcher on the right track to becoming that
something Other than a patriarchal subject.

So what does Lorde mean, in her “Open Letter to Mary Daly,“ when she

claims that in Syn/Ecology Daly is “dealing only out of a patriarchal western

european frame of reference“? (68) Some interpreters find in the letter a

11
postmodern sort of critique. For example, Christine DeStephano reads it as an

attempt to undermine gender as an analytic category. And Nancy Fraser and
Linda Nicholson read it as a challenge to metanarratives. I do not think these
readings can be supported by Lorde's work.‘3 As I read the letter, Lorde is
attempting to push Daly's gyn/ecological thinking further in order to strengthen
her work and help realize the radical vision of transformation they share.
Lorde is concerned, on my reading, that despite Daly's best efforts to
subvert the “objective“ standpoint of Western scholars, she does make objects of
subjects in her studies of sati, footbinding and genital mutilation. In the chapters
which deal with nonEuropean women, Lorde points out, Daly represents them
“only as victims and prayers-upon each other.“ (67) It is not enough, Lorde is
saying, for the Searcher to identify with African women as victims of genital
mutilation. And while Lorde acknowledges that the “inclusion of African genital
mutilation was an important and necessary piece in any consideration of female
ecology,“ she wonders, “Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa?
Where were the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and
the warrior-women of Dan?“ (67) By analyzing the rituals of excision and
infibuation out of the context of the heritage and mythic traditions represented by
these symbolic figures, Lorde argues, the Searcher did the what the Western
patriarchal scholar does. In Lorde's words, she “denied the real connections that

exist between all of us.“ (68)

 

' In my view these readings make the same mistake in their use of Lorde's work that Lorde finds
in Daly's use of her work in Gyn/Ecology. In the letter Lorde asks, “Did you ever read my words,
or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an
already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?“ (68)

12
One might argue, in Daly's defense, that in all of the chapters of the

Second Passage, including those which deal with European and American
rituals, Daly represents the women subjected to the rituals as victims; that one of
the tasks of the Searcher is to make it possible to see the victims of patriarchal
violence through the deceptions of Western scholarship. While it is true that
Daly reveals European and American women as victims of patriarchal violence in
the last two chapters of the passage, there is an asymmetry which distinguishes
Daly's representations of Western and nonWestern women.7 In chapter on the
European witchburnings the woman who is burned as a witch is represented as
a victim of patriarchal violence, but also as a symbol of female knowledge and
power which threatens the patriarchal order. The European witch in this chapter
-- unlike the victims of the previous chapters who believed ritual participation was
a path to sacred existence -- is represented as a menace who threatens
patriarchy by acting on her own initiative. Here, for the first time in the Second
Passage, Daly addresses the question, just who were the women who were
tortured, maimed or killed? (193) According to Daly,
The situation of those accused of witchcraft was somewhat
different from that of the footbound Chinese girls and of the
genitally maimed girls and young women of Africa, for these were
mutilated in preparation for their destiny -- marriage. It was also
somewhat different from the situation of the widows of India, who
were killed solely for the crime of outliving their husbands. For the
targets of attack in the witchcraze were not women defined by
assimilation into the patriarchal family. Rather, the witchcraze
focused predominantly upon women who had rejected marriage

(Spinsters) and women who had survived it (widows). The witch-
hunters sought to purify their society (The Mystical Body) of these

 

’ Taken together the chapters on European and American rituals (114 pages) offer the reader
almost twice as much analysis as the chapters on Indian, Chinese, and African rituals (64 pages).

13
“indigestible' elements -- women whose phySical, intellectual,

economic, moral, and spiritual independence and activity

profoundly threatened the male monopoly in every sphere. (184)
On Daly's analysis, the witches were victimized not to make them into patriarchal
women, but because they threatened the foundations of modern patriarchal
society. (185-193) Those accused of witchcraft were, Daly argues, herbalists,
healers, alchemists, midwives, and counselors who “earned the respect of the
people“ on the basis of their spiritual and medical practices and knowledge.
(193)‘3 The witchcraze differs from other atrocities in the Second Passage in that
it was a “primal battle of principalities and powers [which] was at heart
concerned with the process of know-ing.“ (194) Hence, in this chapter Daly
presents the victims of the witchcraze in a context which reveals that they were
not only victims, but also wise warriors.

‘ In the final chapter of the Second Passage on American gynecology, Daly
clearly intends to present the American woman who believes “doctor knows
best“ and who faithfully follows his orders as another victim of patriarchal
violence. (224) However, unlike the other chapters of the Second Passage,
which all begin with the first element of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome (obsession
with purity), this chapter begins with a section entitled, “A Brief Crone-ology.“ It
is useful to note that Daly developed her “Crone-ological analysis“ during the
years Foucault was developing his first genealogical analysis in Discipline and

Punish (1977). Their analyses are similar in several respects, perhaps most

notably in their efforts to reveal the emergence of modern subjectivities at the

 

' Carolyn Merchant (1980) makes a compelling case along the same lines.

14
intersections of knowledge and power. Daly argues that patriarchy in the West

has taken different shapes in connection with struggles for power in three
different historical moments: early modern, nineteenth century, and late
twentieth century. It is no coincidence, on Daly's Crone-ology, that “the
massacre of the wise women/healers during the witchcraze was followed by the
rise of man-midwives who eventually became dignified by the name
“gynecologist.“ (224) Neither was it a coincidence, she argues, that the
specialized treatment for women known as gynecology arose in the nineteenth
century at the same time first wave feminists began the struggle for women's
rights. (227) Finally, she argues, “there is every reason to see the mutilation and
destruction of women by doctors specializing in unnecessary radical
mastectomies and hysterectomies, carcinogenic hormone therapy,
psychosurgery, spirit-killing psychiatry and other forms of psychotherapy as
directly related to the rise of radical feminism in the twentieth century.“ (228)
This Crone-ology provides a context for seeing the victimization of European and
American women as part of an historical struggle. The Searcher comes to
understand the crimes against Western women as responses to female
knowledge and power, rather than crimes perpetrated against helpless victims.
A connection is established for the first time in the chapters on the European and
American rituals between the Searcher and victims of the Sado-Ritual
Syndrome. In Syn/Ecology the feminist Searcher is unrelated to the Indian
woman, the Chinese woman and the African woman, but she is the symbolic

descendant of the witch. The Searcher does epistemological battle with Western

15
scholars today in the tradition of her ecologically-minded foresisters who did

battle with the Cartesian mechanists of the early modern period.

Daly is dealing out of a Western patriarchal frame of reference insofar as
she views the ritual atrocities she dis-covers in India, Africa and China as
“barbarous“ attacks on helpless victims rather than patriarchal responses to
buried gyn/ecological traditions and Other knowledge/power relations. Because
the Searcher separates the nonEuropean women subjected to patriarchal rituals
from their own gynocentric contexts she fails to see and identify with them as
subjects. On my reading, then, the “Open Letter to Mary Daly“ identifies two
related epistemological problems in Syn/Ecology. First, the Searcher fails to
know herself in relation to the Indian, Chinese and African women who are the
objects of patriarchal rituals and scholarship. In the A-mazing process of her
individual transformation she becomes in significant ways a gyn/ecological
knower, and yet she does not recognize that she has denied the connections
between her Self and Others from India, Africa and China. Second, the
Searcher fails to know the Indian, Chinese and African women in “Crone-logical“
contexts which reveals their full subjectivity. In “Playfulness, World-Traveling,
and Loving Perception“ (1987) Maria Lugones offers a strategy which, I will
argue, is helpful with regard to both problems.

“World-traveling,“ Lugones explains, is a way-of being and living which
involves shifting one's self-perception and perception of others as one moves
among various socially constructed “worlds.“ As she defines a “world,“ a “world”

may be an “actual society given its dominant culture's description and

16
construction of life, including a construction of the relationships of production, of

gender, race, etc.“ (10) Or, a “world“ may be “such a society given a non-
dominant construction.“ (ibid.) In the “world“ within which one feels most at
home, or “at ease,“ -- that is, confident because she is fluent in the language and
norms, and because she is bonded with others in virtue of a shared history --
one is constructed, and knows oneself, as a person with a particular set of
character traits. In a “world“ within which one is not at ease, Lugones explains,
one may be constructed, and know oneself, as a different person who lacks
some or all of the particular traits she had at home. “The shift from being one
person to being a different person“ is what Lugones calls “travel.“ (11) For
example, Lugones suggests, one who “travels“ can be sure that she is a playful
person and simultaneously positive that she is not playful based on her self-
perceptions in two different worlds. Similarly, one who travels can know
someone from another world as a playful person and a serious person
depending on whether she sees them from the perspective of her world or theirs.
In order to grasp Lugones's idea of a single individual being different people, one
must abandon the Western idea that each of us is a unified self, for the idea that
we are plural. Those who experience an underlying “l,“ on this view, are people
who have never been required, or inclined, to “travel“ beyond the “worlds“ within
which they feel completely at ease. The willingness to give up the singular self
and animate constructions of ourselves in different worlds is a move in the
direction of identification across differences because, according to Lugones, “by

traveling to their 'world' we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to

17
be ourselves in their eyes.“ (17) Only then, she says, are we fully subjects to

each other.“ (ibid.)

Notice there is a sense in which Daly's Searcher has been doing
something akin to traveling. In the patriarchal foreground she was a woman
complicit, dazed and broken; she becomes critical, Self-affirming, and enraged --
in Daly's words -- a Positively Revolting Hag. This should count as “a shift from
being one person to being a different person.“ What made this shift possible
was the A-mazing process of spinning mind and body together in a pattern
detecting project which provided a new feminist understanding of social reality
and the motivation to act out of this knowledge. However, I want to suggest that
the shift from patriarchal “foreground“ to feminist “Background“ does not
constitute “travel“ in an important sense. While it is true that “foreground“ and
“Background“ constitute dominant and non-dominant constructions of life, it is
also true that even on Daly's view they are intertwined Western constructions of
life. One of the central arguments of Syn/Ecology is that androcentric myth and
ritual are constructed out of “stolen” and, in complex ways, “reversed”
antecedent and suppressed gynocentric traditions. (47) Therefore, in Lugones'
sense, “foreground” and “Background” constitute two dimensions of one “world.“
This explains why the Searcher who moves through the Second Passage a-
mazing the lies in the texts of the Western scholars is able to discover among
the representations of Western women a buried gynocentric tradition of knowers
and resisters, but finds no similar traditions in the cases of nonWestern women:

she never really leaves home.

18
Traveling beyond this Western patriarchal frame of reference to

nonWestern worlds means, for the Searcher, Willfully shifting her self-perception
and perception of others. She has come to understand herself as a radical
feminist who stands against patriarchal oppression and for all women including
her nonWestern “sisters“; she must also come to recognize the person she is in
one or more nonWestern worlds -- an ethnocentric racist or imperialist whose
practices and views alienate nonWestern women. In Syn/Ecology Daly refuses
the latter construction.
I have chosen to name these practices for what they are: barbaric
rituals/atrocities. Critics from Western countries are constantly
being intimidated by accusations of “racism,“ to the point of
misnaming, non-naming, and not seeing these sado-rituals. The
accusations of “racism“ may come from ignorance, but they serve
only the interests of males, not of women. This kind of accusation
and intimidation constitutes an astounding and damaging reversal,
for it is clearly in the interests of Black women that feminists of all
races should speak out. (154)
From Daly's white Western radical feminist perspective, “[i]t is truly racist to keep
silent in the face of these atrocities, merely 'studying' them, speaking and writing
deceptively about them, applying different (male-centered) standards to them,
failing to see and name the connections among them.” (172) Like Daly, Lorde
held that it was the responsibility of all feminists to transform the silence

shrouding oppressive rituals into the language and action of resistance and new

feminist creation.9 She explicitly names circumcision a crime against Black

 

' On this point, see the papers presented by Lorde (1978b) and Daly (1978b) on the 1977
Modern Language Association Convention panel entitled "The Transformation of Silence into

Language and Action.”

1 9
women and acknowledges that a critique of it belonged in Syn/Ecology.10 But it

seems to Daly, as it does not to Lorde, that the rituals are either patriarchal
crimes committed against women, in which case the women subject to them are
victims, and the Searcher is a feminist on their side; or the rituals are ethnic,
religious or national customs, in which case Indian women make themselves
good and true through participation in the rituals, and the Searcher who speaks
out on their behalf is an agent of racism and/or imperialism. Daly's refusal to
understand her self as plural makes it impossible for her to see how both are
true. World-traveling enables the Searcher to recognize that she might speak
out about patriarchal violence against African women in a racist or ethnocentric
manner.

Consider Daly's chapter on Indian sati. The primary source behind this
account is Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927)." From Daly's perspective
Mayo is the “startling exception among scholars who have written about women
in India“ because of her courage to condemn the murdered and mutilation of
Indian women and young girls. (127, 121) Certainly she is unlike of patriarchal
Western scholars like Campbell. Mayo’s account enables the Searcher to break
through the deception of foreground scripts, scholarly and religious, to see the
victims of sati. However, Mayo (or Daly) looks rather different from the eyes of

Indian nationalists struggling for self-rule against British imperialism. Indian

 

‘° In the “Open Letter" Lorde says to Daly, “Your inclusion of African genital mutilation was an
important and necessary piece in any consideration of female ecology, and too little has been
written about it." In another essay, she asserts that female circumcision “is not a cultural affair as
the late Jomo Kenyatta insisted, it is a crime against Black women." (1984, 120)

" For compelling account of the debate over widow-buming in early colonial India from a feminist
post-colonial perspective see Sinha (1994).

20
nationalists see white Western feminists such as Mayo and Daly in the context of

British imperialism.12 From this perspective, the Searcher’s stand for the Indian
woman, victim of “barbarous” violence, bears a close family resemblance to the
“white man’s burden.” Hence, Gayatri Spivak (1985) argues Daly's analysis
situates her squarely in the tradition of “white men saving brown women from
brown men.“ (121) Shifting to this construction of the Searcher means
recognizing that in her efforts to make herself Other than a patriarchal woman
she has employed, inadvertently, what Lorde calls “the Master's Tools” against
her “sisters” in nonWestern worlds. The Searcher, grown up in an (unmarked)
imperialist world, easily assumes that by saving her “sisters,” by standing up for
them, she acts in their interests. Because she never really leaves home she
does not see how her interest in making herself something Other than the
“objective” scholar gets intwined with an imperialist interest in constructing a
nonWestern world full of victims in need of missionaries, rulers, and
“enlightened” Western ideas. If she could grasp this, it would make less sense
to her to talk about the “barbaric” nature of circumscision and the “ignorance” of
those who would accuse her of racism in the same breath. World-traveling
provides the insight which enables her to see that she must be vigilantly and
self-consciously critical about the bridges she attempts to build with women from
other worlds lest she inadvertently serve the interests of Western racists and/or

imperialists, not women.

 

‘2 For a comprehensive study of Mayo’s intimate relationship with the British Raj see Manorenjan
Jha's Katherine Mayo and India (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1971).

21
The point of traveling, however, is not to just to understand the

construction of oneself as racist and/or imperialist, but to see it in order to
change it. As feminists committed to the liberation of all women it becomes clear
that our first task must be making ourselves something Other than white Western
women. We must become Radical White Western Feminists.‘3 Toward this end
I recommend the process of A-mezing World-Traveling. For the white Western
feminist, “A—mazing” adds to “World-traveling” a process for moving from
foreground constructions of self and others in a particular world to Background
constructions, that is, to genuinely Other ways of thinking and living. World-
Treveling enables the A-mazing Searcher to know herself in relation to the
Indian, Chinese and African women. By getting out of the texts of the traditional
Western scholarship and into the texts of those in other worlds the Searcher
comes to see how in the process of discovering victims and standing up on their
behalf she has faithfully carried out the agenda of those she most wants to
resist, re-establishing oppressive relations. Traveling to the world of Indian
women also enables her to see how their interest in resisting Western
imperialism gets intwined with their thinking about what it means to be a good
woman. Writing about this complex Indian construction, Mrinalini Sinha (1994)
points out, “Women, as the preservers or guardians of tradition or 'culture,’
became the embodiments of that inner spirituality which lay at the core of
national identity.” (7) The Searcher who world-travels also comes to know more

about those in other worlds who are, in historical process, making worlds where

 

'“ See footnote 2.

22
they can become something Other than colonized patriarchal women. Only from

the perspective of these relations will the Amazing World-Traveler be able to
see and hear with her “Inner Eyes and Ears,” as Daly would say, the connections
among apparently disparate patriarchal phenomena and to spin a context within
which she can know nonWestern women as plural, as survivors, resisters and
descendants of gynocentric traditions, as well as victims of patriarchal violence.
If the white Western feminists' project of knowledge and liberation is to be
global in scope and significance, we must find our way through the mazes of
androcentric language which distorts our thinking, resist the self-destructive
practices which language generates and masks, and seek with the “Inner Eye”
the possibility of becoming something Other than patriarchal women. The
practice A-mazing World-Traveling enables us to recognize that one cannot
become Other in an anti-patriarchal sense without simultaneously becoming
Other in an anti-racist and anti-imperialist sense. An essential part of
transforming this possibility into feminist language and action must be
connecting with other Others. In order to connect we must come to know
ourselves not only as victims and resistors, but also as agents of oppression,
and we must come to know nonWestern women and women of color not only as
victims, but as resisters in struggle against complex systems of domination. We
must come to know ourselves and others as plural. This is pluralist future of

radical feminism.

Part I

THE RADICAL FEMINIST TRADITION BEHIND MARY DALY'S
GYM/ECOLOGY

Daly's Radical Feminist Theory in Historical Context

Today in the United States, radical feminist theory is commonly
associated with the theses that patriarchy, a socially constructed sex-class or
castelike system perpetuated through ideologies of male supremacy, Is the root
and model form of oppression; and that women's liberation will be achieved
through a revolutionary feminist struggle to overthrow the system which begins
with the reclamation and revaluation of women's experience. Robin Morgan
identified herself as a radical feminist along these lines. She explains,

I call myself a radical feminist, and that means specific things to me. The
etymology of the word “radical“ refers to “one who goes to the root.“ I
believe that sexismis the root oppression, the one which, until and unless
we uproot it, will continue to put forth the branches of racism, class
hatred, ageism, competition, ecological disaster, and economic
exploitation. This means, to me, that the so-called revolutions to date
have been coups d' états between men, in a half-hearted attempt to prune
the branches but leave the root embedded -- for the sake of preserving
their own male privileges. This also means that I'm not out for us as
women to settle for a “piece of the pie,“ equality in an unjust society, or for
mere “top-down“ change which can be corrupted into leaving the basic
system unaltered. I think our feminist revolution gains momentum from a
“ripple effect“ -- from each individual woman gaining self-respect and yes,
power, over her own body and soul first, than within her family, on her
block, in her town, state, and so on out from the center, overlapping with
similar changes other women are experiencing, the circles rippling more
widely and inclusively as they go. (Morgan 1977, 9)

23

24

It is possible to think of Mary Daly's radical feminism in Glyn/Ecology (1978)
along these lines too. Daly does argue that patriarchal gynocide is “the root and
paradigm for genocide,“ (Daly, 298) and she is explicit that “the oppression of
women knows no ethnic, national, or religious bounds.“ (111) On her view
ethnicity, nationalism, religion, and race are patriarchal phenomena which serve
to keep women separated from each other.1 She provides a systematic critique
of patriarchal ideology, including an analysis of masculinity and femininity as
constitutive elements in a patriarchal symbolic, which legitimates and
perpetuates women's oppression. (65-69). Like Morgan's, Daly's vision of "a
world other than patriarchy,“ is not an effort “to buy another ticket for women of
the world on the merry-go-round of feminine constructions.“2 Rather it is an
effort to break out of the “Playboys' Playground“ through the creation and
discovery of a multitude of radical feminist constructions. (7)

Despite the fit between Daly's work and Morgan's formulation of radical
feminism, I believe that a reading such as this obscures the radical dimension of
Daly's feminism. In this chapter I propose Daly's theory be read in historical
context rather than as a categorical instantiation. Of course, the category
“radical feminism" sketched above emerged out of a particular historical

moment. Sara Evans locates the origins of second wave feminism in the civil

 

1 She says this explicitly in the thirteenth statement of “The Qualitative Leap Beyond Patriarchal
Religion,“ “13. The ethos of Judeo-Christian culture is dominated by The Most Un-holy Trinity:
Rape, Genocide, and War. It is rapism whichspawns racism. It is gynocide which spawns
genocide, for sexism (rapism) is fundamental socialization to objectify 'the other. "‘ In Quest, vol.l,
no.4, Spring 1975.

I am contesting this position attributed to Daly by Linda Alcoff in “Cultural Feminism Versus
Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,“ Signs, 1988, vol.13, no31, p.414.

25

rights movement and the new left. (Evans, 1980) Josephine Donovan argues
that radical feminist theory has its theoretical roots in Marxist theory as it was
elaborated in the United States during the sixties. (Donovan, 1992) On these
sorts of historical readings radical feminism becomes a category built on a
theoretical analogy. Like Marxists who argued that capitalism was the root and
model form of oppression and that only workers constituted a revolutionary class
capable of ushering in a revolutionary society within which all oppressed people
would be free, radical feminists argued patriarchy was the root and model form
of oppression and that only a feminist struggle could usher in a revolutionary
society within which all oppressed people would be free. Daly's work was not
immune to the construction of “radical feminist“ in this particular historical
moment. Quite the opposite, I think radical feminist theoretical projects of the
seventies had a big influence on the development of Daly's thought, and this
point will be treated in depth in chapter 4, “The Racial and Ethnic Politics of
Syn/Ecology.“

A classic attempt to articulate a radical feminist theory by importing a
leftist theoretical framework is Barbara Burris's 1970 appropriation of Franz
Fanon's work in her essay, “The Fourth World Manifesto.“ (Burris, 1971) Burris
argued, “women are a colonized group in relation to men all over the world, in all
classes and races, including the Third World.“ (325) Within this theoretical
framework, women's bodies are the territory colonists subjugate and control;
rape is an imperialist act which defies women's self-determination; marriage is a

colonial institution designed to turn women's bodies into property; advertising

26

and pornography are exploitation of raw materials for the colonizer's sexual
gratification; and the denial of women's culture and history is the destruction of
their indigenous culture and history. (335) It cannot be denied that Burris, with
skill and imagination, used Fanon's framework to give shape to a strong radical
feminist analysis. However, it is not difficult to see the problems with
appropriating this framework.

Robin Morgan was aware, as were other radical feminists at the time, of
the problems associated with trying to stuff women's experiences into conceptual
frameworks developed to articulate very different experiences. The problem, as
Morgan noted, was that radical feminism badly needed conceptual resources to
articulate a theory of patriarchy and women's liberation. The need was most
pressing among activists. As late as 1977, Morgan reports radical feminists
were seeking “a handle, a lever, a way of translating into generally understood
and accepted terms of political philosophy 'what it was we wanted'.“ (Morgan,
160) Borrowing from available theoretical frameworks seemed to offer the
additional promise of Iegitimizing the highly suspect claims radical feminists were
attempting to advance on behalf of women. However, Morgan laments,
“borrowing“ also created the dilemma of “trying to communicate hitherto
unspeakable truths about our condition in the very language and concepts of the
patriarchal culture (of the Left or Right) which caused that condition.“ (xii) This
story helps explain, I will show in chapter 3, how it is that radical feminism has
come to be identified with a category of thought which bears a such a strong

family resemblance to radical leftist theories.

27

On my view, this sort of historical reading of Daly which seeks to
illuminate Daly's radical feminism in terms of its roots in the male-dominated
political thought of the period is fundamentally misguided. It presupposes in
typical patriarchal fashion that all history is patriarchal history. Daly claims this
“time-honored trick of patriarchs,“ i.e. expropriating memory through possession
by “the past,“ effectively deprives women of a past. (Daly, 348) But what other
history might radical feminism have grown from? After all, French feminists
since Beauvoir have insisted that women have no past, no history of thought. If
this were true there would be no other history through which Daly's radical
feminism might be read. Daly suggests that it not true. There is, however, rich
common ground beneath Daly and the French from Beauvoir to Cixous, Kristeva
and Irigaray. They share the view, that women's silence/erasure has been the
condition of men's history. However, Daly parts with her French sisters who find
in this position a feminist absence or void, leading to the imperative that they
trace their own intellectual roots through the patriarchal genealogy of the
Western Fathers. Daly argues for what might be called a “Copernican
revolution“ in our thinking about the relationship between patriarchal time and
Women's Time. Without denying that patriarchal genealogies have been created
through the systematic use, abuse, distortion and erasure of women, Daly insists
that her thought must be read in the historical context of a gynocentric tradition
which exists “behind“ patriarchal traditions, that is, the “Tradition of Great Hags
and Crones.“ (Daly, 14-17) In order to see “through the Dirty Joke“ that women

have no past, women must travel into “feminist space/time“ which is “truly

28

Prehistoric in relation to patriarchal history.“ (16) Hence, I propose the following
strategy for drawing out the “radical“ project of Daly's feminism. Rather than
attempting to fit Daly into a feminist category constructed in patriarchal time, I will
read Daly's radical feminism through an exploration of its roots in the gynocentric
tradition Daly uncovers in feminist time/space. This strategy makes especially
good sense in view of Daly's central claim, “the process of inventing/creating our

Selves and our works is re-membering the past.“ (350)

Re-membering Daly's Radical Feminism in Women's Time
Reading Daly's feminism in the tradition of Matilda Joselyn Gage
In Josephine Donovan's study of the intellectual traditions of American
feminism, the feminist theory of Matilda Joslyn Gage is remembered as part of
the nineteenth-century feminist project of “cultural feminism,“ which grew up out
of the anti-Enlightenment tradition of European Romanticism. (Donovan, 1992)
In contrast, Daly re-members Matilda Joslyn Gage as “a major radical feminist
theoretician and historian whose written work is indispensable for an
understanding of the women's movement today.“ (Gage, 1980, vii) In her
forward to the Persephone Press edition of Gage's Woman, Church and State,
Daly makes the following case,
Gage is one of the great foresisters of contemporary feminists. In her
writing she transcends the boundaries of time and becomes our
contemporary. The qualities which make this possible are the depth of
her daring and the a-mazing scope of her analysis. She made the
connections which others feared to make. She prophesied, and she

named the enemy. Consequently, of course, her stature has never been
acknowledged. (ibid.)

29
In this section I proceed under the assumption that an understanding of what
Daly finds radical about Gage's work is indispensable for understanding what is
radical about Daly's feminism in Syn/Ecology.

On Daly's view, one of the radical aspects of Gage's work is evident in the
“amazing“ scope of her analysis. In Daly's lexicon, “a-mazing“ is a process of
breaking through or decoding patriarchal “mazes“ of thinking, speaking and
acting. An “a-mazing“ analysis is one which “brings together apparently
disparate phenomena, unveiling an astonishingly coherent pattern.“ (Daly, vii-viii)
Gage's book brings studies of matriarchal societies, female sexual slavery,
witchcraft, and marriage, together with critiques of civil and ecclesiastical law in
order to reveal the systematic nature and the consequences of patriarchal
oppression. Her analysis unveils a pattern which suggests, in her words,

The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that

of the church towards women, a robbery that has not only taken her self-

respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her
opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment, her own

conscience, her own will. (Gage, 238)

It is interesting to note, contra Donovan's categorization of Gage as a romantic,
the central value in Gage's theory of independent thought. Because she
understands the relationship between independent thought and agency, she
dedicates the book to “all Christian women and men, of whatever creed or name
who, bound by Church or State, have not dared to Think for Themselves.“ (2)

It is not difficult to see how Daly's Syn/Ecology developed in the tradition

of Gage's a-mazing analytic method. In this text Daly brings studies of Indian

30
Sati, Chinese footbinding, African genital mutilation, European witchburings and
American gynecology together with critiques of scholarship and christian myth in
order to “expose the atrocities perpetrated against women under patriarchy on a
planetary scale and to show the profound connections among these Goddess-
murdering atrocities.“ (Daly, xxv) Her analysis connects these seemingly
disparate atrocities in order to reveal a pattern she calls the “Sado-Ritual
Syndrome.“ This syndrome is a set of seven interconnected components of
patriarchal practices, or “sado-rituals,“ around the world. Among the
interconnected components of the sado—rituals Daly studies are, for example, (I)
obsession with purity, (ll) erasure of male responsibility, (IV) use of women as
scapegoats and token torturers, and (VI) normalization of otherwise
unacceptable behavior. The pattern Daly reveals suggests that sado-rituals
recreate and reinforce the primordial patriarchal mythic event --the
murder/dismemberment of the Goddess within women and all be-ing;
rituals devised to accomplish and legitimate the dis-spiriting and
devastation of the Wild; rituals designed to destroy the integrity of Life and
creative divine powers in women. (Daly 1987, 94)
Throughout Syn/Ecology Daly develops this thesis that sado-rituals are intended
to effect a condition of “mind/spirit/body pollution“ which breaks down and
destroys women's capacity for independent thought and judgment. One of the
radical effects of the practice of a-mazing is transformation of the a-mazer, who
becomes more and more capable of independent thought and action. Hence,

Daly opens the book with the claim that “this book is about the journey of women

becoming, that is, radical feminism.“ (Daly, 1) Through making sense of the

31

world from the a-mazer's life experience a radically new way of looking at and
being in the world becomes possible. What connects the work of Gage and
Daly, and makes their work radical, is a method of thinking about the diverse
experiences of women under patriarchy which is transformative. Radically, the
practice of a-mazing transforms and empowers the a-mazers, contributing to the
creation of a context within which new possibilities emerge, enhancing agency.3
(Daly, 2) As Bonnie Mann points out in the “Appendix to the New Introduction“
to Syn/Ecology, “a cultivated practice of making connections“ enables a woman
to “weave a new context in which to understand her life and live it.“ (Mann in
Daly, xxxvii, xxxv)

The other “radical“ dimension of Gage's feminism is “the depth of her
daring.“ In her analysis, Daly points out Gage “made the connections others
feared to make.“ A good illustration of an a-mazing analysis which is also deeply
daring is Gage's chapter, “Witchcraft.“ In this chapter Gage draws from a variety
of sources including Michelet's La Sorciere, scientific and psychic literature of the
late 19th century, church documents including the Bible and The Malleus
Maleficarum, as well as juridical documents in an effort to remember a coherent
and compelling account of “witchcraft.“ Gage's project in this chapter is to a-
maze (again, to decode, reveal what is beneath) the commonly held view of a
witch. On the common view, a “witch“ was,

a woman who had deliberately sold herself to the evil one; who delighted
in injuring others, and who, for the purpose of enhancing the enormity of

 

3 “Our game is pattern perception.“ (Marilyn Frye) “A paradigm for the turning of women to
women may be articulated by a reflective description of one mode of female existence: sinuosity.
Sinuosity is a pattern of connectedness that constitutes women's experiences of being in the
world.“ (Jeffner Allen)

32

her evil acts, choose the Sabbath day for the performance of her most

impious rites ...“ (94)
Among the connections which others feared to make are, first, the connection
between the fact that it was women who were accused of witchcraft and the
christian doctrine of Original Sin. Prior to Christianity, she claims, witches might
have been women or men, “but as soon as a system of religion was adopted
which taught the greater sinfulness of women [...] the persecution for witchcraft
became chiefly directed against women.“ (97) Second, she connects the
accusation that witches sold themselves to the devil and delighted in harming
others with dominant economic and political interests. The persecution of
witches, she points out, proved a great source of emolument to the church,
which grew enormously rich by its confiscation to its own use of all property of
the condemned.“4 (98) In addition, she reports on a multitude of other ways in
which the state and malicious individuals grew fat on the burning of witches.
And third, she connects the knowledge and practices of many of the accused
with the church's interest in maintaining its unqualified authority. Gage supports
her claim that “the so-called 'witch' was among the most profoundly scientific
persons of the age,“ with evidence that many of the accused were practicing

healers, midwives, physicians, and chemists. The idea that the church

 

4 In addition, forfeitures of the property and wealth of all who were related to the accused were
common. It is interesting to reflect on the connection between this practice and the recent
supreme court decision on forfeitures in which the Justices ruled against a woman who was the
co-owner of a car which was confiscated by the state in conjunction with the arrest of the
woman's husband, the other owner, who had engaged in illegal activiteis with a prostitute in the
car. The Supreme Court suggested that it is a good reminder that everything which is just is not
always desirable. National Public Radio, March 4, 1996.

33

perceived this knowledge, in women's hands, as a serious threat is seen, claims
Gage, in the fourteenth century decree that “any woman who healed others
without having duly studied, was a witch and should suffer death.“ (Gage, 104)
So what is “daring“ about this a-mazing analysis? There are two dimensions to
her daring, epistemological and political. First, she dares to break with
patriarchal traditions of thought, looking instead at these disparate phenomena
with “fresh eyes“ giving shape to a gynocentric perspective. And second, she
takes a stand, on the basis of what she uncovers, against church and the state
which have robbed women of our “Self-centering“ capacities. In her own words,
Gage is committed to the bold idea that “woman herself must judge of woman.“
(Gage, 238) In Daly's terms, this is the Courage to identify with the Other.
Gage is probably the single most important source in Daly's chapter on
the European witchburnings. Among the scholars of the witchcraze who Daly
surveys in this chapter, only Gage's exemplifies a “Hag-identified vision.“ 5
(Daly, 216) In this chapter, Daly develops Gage's claim that many women were
persecuted as witches because of the threat they presented to the church in her
thesis: the witchcraze was a “primal battle“ between “an aspiring 'intellectual'
elite of professional men“ and “a spiritual/moraI/know-ing elite cross-section of
the female population of Europe,“ which “was at heart concerned with the
process of know-ing.“ (194) Daly suggests, Gage “names the game correctly“:

because the church feared and hated women's knowledge and power it tried to

 

5 According to Donovan, Gage is “the first to see the witches as bearers of alternative feminine
traditions, which established them as community powers feared by the church,“ p. 41.

 

 

 

 

34

erase their healing power “not only by killing them, but by denying that they
healed of their own power,“ attributing their power to a pact with the “devil.“6
(217-8) Hence, following Gage's a-mazing insight about the knowledge and
“scientific“ practices of those accused of witchcraft Daly argues, the witchcraze
“masked a secret gynocidal fraternity, whose prime targets were women living
outside the control of the patriarchal family, women who presented an option --
an option of “eccentricity“ and of “indigestibility.“ (186) This is not to say on
either Gage's or Daly's view, however, that the only women persecuted were
eccentric or scientifically minded. On the contrary, the threat of being accused of
being a witch functioned to keep all women inside the control of the patriarchal
family. Hence, Daly pulls a genealogical thread from “witchcraft“ through
woman-identified time/space to radical feminism.7 (186) This a-mazing analysis
exemplifies the “daring“ that makes Daly's work radical. What Daly found daring
about Gage's Woman, Church and State was her will to think critically about
women's history and experience from the perspective of a “new woman-
ldentified time/space.“ ‘

Not only does Daly devote a chapter to the European witchburnings,
witches are everywhere in Syn/Ecology. They are in the “acknowledgments“ for

Syn/Ecology, right after Matilda Joslyn Gage and Virginia Woolf, and right before

 

6 A difference between the patterns Gage and Daly a-maze: Gage finds the mythic script of the
sado-ritual in the doctrine of Orignal Sin, whereas Daly locates it in the doctrine of the Mystical
Body of Christ.

It is interesting to note that Daly is not alone in making this connection. Witness the American
Civil Liberties Union case in defense of “a library aide in Montana who was fired for helping
students with an approved project because parents believed the books she loaned them
'reflected feminism and satanism." ACLU letter recieved March 1996.

35

the last to be thanked, “her Self.“ (Daly, Iii) They are among the central symbolic
figures in the text. Witches (among other Hags and Crones), together with
Amazons and Goddesses constitute most of the population of Syn/Ecologys
symbolic Background. The life activities of witches provide metaphorical
resources throughout the book. “Speaking,“ “Sparking,“ and “Spinning,“ the

titles of the last three chapters which constitute the Third Passage of the book,

 

were among the daily practices of “witches“ during the middle ages. Daly
explains in her preface that the “[entire book] is an invitation to the Wild Witch in
all women who long to spin.“ It is an invitation to those Selves within each of us
who can identity, through remembering and inventing, with the myth and symbol
of the women who were called witches. Deeply Daring, indeed.
Reading Daly's feminism in the tradition of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was probably the single most important influence on Daly's
thought in Syn/Ecology. Woolf, 1882 - 1941, was the radical feminist who lived
between Matilda Joslyn Gage and Mary Daly. Interestingly, Woolf was eleven
years old when Women, Church and State was published in the United States;
Daly was ten years old when Three Guineas was published in England. It Is
notable that the index of Syn/Ecology contains fifteen reference to Virginia
Woolf, three time as many as for Simone de Beauvoir, who is considered by
many to be the most important feminist philosopher of the twentieth century.

More significant, Daly repeatedly identifies Woolf along with Gage as her

36

Foresisters in feminist time/space.8 Plainly evident in Gyn/Ecology are the roots
of Daly's thought in Three Guineas (1938), A Room of One's Own (1929) and
Moments of Being (1976). In this section I will outline Woolf's philosophy and
feminism in order to reveal how Daly's radical feminism in Gyn/Ecology is rooted
in Woolf's a-mazing gynocentric method and her revolutionary feminist strategy.
Consider the context within which Woolf wrote Three Guineas. Mid-
thirties, England. Throughout the book Woolf provides insight into this
time/space by drawing from daily news examples which inform and support her
arguments. For example, in support of her claim that men and women share the
same sensations, specifically “horror and disgust,“ when faced with the
“barbarity“ of war, she offers the following “crude statement of fact addressed to
the eye.“
Here then on the table before us are photographs. The Spanish
Government sends them with patient pertinacity about twice a week.“
They are not pleasant photographs to look upon. They are photographs
of dead bodies for the most part. This morning's collection contains the
photograph of what might be a man's body, or a woman's; it is so
mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those
certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a
house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a bird cage hanging
in what was presumably the sitting room, but the rest of the house looks
like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid air.
* Written in the winter of 1936-7. (21)
Clearly this was a time/space of war and holocaust. It was also the end of
Victorianism and European Empires, the dawn of psychoanalysis. And it was a

time -- 20 years after women secured the right to vote and “mysteriously“ along

 

8 Recall that, with the exception of women burned as witches, they are the only Foresisters to
be thanked in the acknowledgements of Syn/Ecology.

37

with it “the right to earn one's living“ -- when the daughters of educated men,
such as Woolf, were beginning to ask themselves questions which had only
come to make sense through their own struggles and those of their foresisters.
As Woolf describes this moment, the educated man's daughter “issues from the
shadow of the private house, and stands on the bridge which lies between the
old world and the new, and asks, as she twirls the sacred coin in her hand, 'what
shall I do with it? What do I see with it?" (30)

In order to get a sense of the place Woolf was writing from and the
philosophical views which she developed out of reflection on her life experience
consider her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past.“ (Woolf, 1976) In
this essay she explicitly names as her “philosophy“ the idea that “behind the
cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we -- I mean all human beings -- are
connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the
work of art.“ (72) “Cotton wool,“ she tells us, is her term for “non-being,“ that
level of existence constituted by the moments “one does not remember,“
moments “not lived consciously.“ For example,

One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken

vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing;

cooking dinner; bookbinding. (70)

In contrast, Woolf describes “moments of being“ as engaged, satisfying, highly
conscious experiences which are “embedded“ in the “nondescript cotton wool.“
For example, she offers the activities of her previous day, including enjoying her
writing, walking along the river, noticing the country very closely, reading

Chaucer with pleasure, and starting a book of memoirs that interested her.

38

Taken together, Woolf is saying, there is a pattern to these moments in one's life
which constitute what she calls the “scaffolding in the background;“ that is, the
“conceptions“ one lives one's life in relation to; and, the “intuition“ of what one
should be doing which is “far more necessary than anything else.“ (73)

Since these moments are embedded so deeply in the cotton wool, Woolf
suggests, it is difficult to remember “things that must have been, one would have
thought, more memorable.“ (70) The significant moments she can remember
vividly have often come with a “sudden violent shock.“ She gives several
instances from her youth. One was a fight on the lawn with her brother Thoby,
which as she put it, involved “pommelling each other with our fists.“ When she
raised her fist to hit him she was struck with the question, “why hurt another
person?“ followed by a blow of “hopeless sadness.“ (71) In another instance,
she experienced a shock at the discovery of the interconnectedness of flower
and earth when looking upon a flower in the bed by the door and said to herself,
“That is the whole.“ Analyzing these instances, she identifies a difference: the
former ended in a dis-empowering state of despair due to her inability “to deal
with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other,“ while the latter ended in
an empowering state of satisfaction due to her intuitive grasp of a discovery
which seemed “likely to be very useful to [her] later.“ As a writer, she explains,
she has developed a capacity to receive these shocks, Which from the
perspective of a child, seemed like “a blow from an enemy hidden behind the
cotton wool of daily life.“ In her words, she now receives these shocks as,

a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind
appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by

acce

Css

”lust

39

putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has

lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take

away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps

this is the strongest pleasure known to me. (72)
It is through this “shock-receiving capacity“ Woolf explains that she has reached
her philosophy about the foreground and background dimensions of experience.

In contrast with “the scaffolding in the background“ Woolf describes the
“foreground“ as a life populated with people who “were very much like the
characters in [a novel by Charles] Dickens.“ (73) To return to Woolf's idea that
the world is a work of art, one might think of the “scaffolding in the background“
of our lives as one thinks about the formal elements of a work of fiction, including
narrative structure, voice, character development, plot and so on, in contrast with
the “foreground,“ which might be thought of as its representational content. Her
analogy should not be confused with the view of God as a master artist and the
world as his canvas. Woolf is explicit on this point,

Hamlet or Beethoven is the truth about this vast mass that we call the

world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and

emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are

the thing itself. And I see this when l have a shock. (72)
Moments of being, on this view, are windows to the multidimensional cosmos,
access to the matrix of the whole. They are the insights which A-mazing makes
possible.

In the midst of writing Gyn/Ecology, the publication of this riveting sketch

must have appeared to Daly as time capsule from a radical feminist pastl In this

essay Woolf illustrates her practice of “putting the severed parts together“ by a-

4O
mazing her Self,9 offering a view of her life from the perspective of her
philosophy, a view she notes, which “is left out in almost all biographies and
autobiographies, even of artists.“ (73) After laying out this philosophy she offers
a series of “scenes“ through which she reconstructs her past. The fact that
these scenes have stayed with her, she suggests, is an indication that they are
clues to a bigger picture. In her words, they confirm her sense that “we are
sealed vessels afloat in what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments,
the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes.“ (122) The first
scenes she reconstructs revolve around her mother, Julia Jackson. Now it
becomes more obvious why Woolf is concerned with the question of why we
forget the seemingly more memorable things in life. Julia Jackson -- mother to
seven children and wife to a Victorian man who was “fifteen years her elder,
difficult, exacting, [and] dependent on her“ -- died at the age of forty-three
without leaving a particular impression of herself on Woolf's mind, and “without
leaving a book, or a picture, or any piece of work“ through which Woolf might get
such an impression. (83, 85) In an effort to grasp her mother in some concrete
sense Woolf searches for clues from the facts and relationships of her life.
Julia's only education was received in the home, where she was taught “to take
such part as girls did then in the lives of distinguished men; to pour tea; to hand

them their strawberries and cream; to listen devoutly, reverently to their wisdom.

(88) Since Julia died when Virginia was a child of thirteen, Virginia reports she

 

9 Following Daly's practice, I have capitalized “Self“ in order to indicate that Woolf is amazing a
Background Self, rather than a foreground self, in this essay.

41
can only remember a mother who seemed “typical, universal, yet our own in
particular“ (82), but cannot remember her as an individual. (83) In her search for
a particular impression of this woman in her memory, Woolf is straining to find
her behind in the cotton wool. Julia Jackson was, according to her daughter,

Very quick; very definite; very upright; and behind the active, the sad, the

silent. And of course she was central. I suspect the word “central“ gets

closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in her

atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a

person. (83, my emphasis)

Woolf remembers her embedded in the crowded foreground as the “generalized;
dispersed; omnipresent“ as the keeper of “the panoply of life“ in the private
world of their home; as the “creator of that crowded merry world which spun so
gaily in the centre of [her] childhood.“ (84) Without some concrete artifact -- a
book, a picture, some evidence of work -- the only trace of her background is in
Woolf's memory, “but there is nothing to check that memory by; nothing to bring
it to ground with.“ (85) Julia Jackson, the person, is “the sad, the silent“ in
Woolf's memory.

Next Woolf turns to her memories of her sister, Stella Duckworth. Stella,
who took on her mother's duties in the years following her death, was the one
who “lifted the canopy again“ letting a little light creep back into their house.
Woolf knows nothing of her sister's youth, since she was born when Stella was in
her teens. What she can recall revolves around Stella's suitors and her
engagement to Jack Hills, who she eventually married. Upon their return from a

honeymoon in Italy, Stella took ill, and died pregnant in 1897, of a “mismanaged“

case of appendicitis. Following completely in her mother's footsteps all the way

42

to an early grave, Stella left nothing to remember her life by. Significantly, Woolf
notes in the midst of her memoir, “How many people are there still able to think
about Stella on 20th June 1939? Very few.“ (95) This pattern of sad and silent,
which emerges from Woolf's efforts to connect her memories, sheds light on the
world Virginia was born into. It was a world circumscribed by the private house
and Victorian conceptions of womanhood. The only tradition handed down to
her by the women of her family was a ruling-class tradition of marriage and
motherhood. The fact that neither Julia nor Stella left behind any work through
which Virginia might glimpse the scaffolding of their backgrounds provides a clue
about the struggle Woolf would face in the project of creating her Self: it would
be a struggle which called for a method or practice of pattern identification and
creativity capable of reconstructing a past through which she might discover and
invent her present and future Self.

A different story emerges from Woolf's memories of her brothers and her
father. The first thing she says about her brother Thoby, who was almost two
years older than her, is that he “dominated“ his four younger siblings. This role,
on Woolf's view, followed from his birthright. His education, the finest money
could buy, offered him Shakespeare, a symbolic figure which gave him a
“measure of his daily world“ and his bearings for a journey into a world beyond

the private house. As Woolf remembers, Thoby the schoolboy had the look

of one equipped, unperturbed, knowing his place, relishing his inheritance
and his part in life, aware of his competence, scenting the battle; already
in anticipation, a law maker; proud of being a man and playing his part
among Shakespeare's men. (119)

 

43

He, “aloof, judicial, conventional“ and she, “sequestered,“ shared “no
confidences; no compliments; no kisses; no emotional scenes.“ (120) While she
spent long days at home with her sister Vanessa, he “passed from childhood to
boyhood and from boyhood to manhood under [their] eyes.“ (ibid.) Had he not
died an untimely death at twenty-six, Woolf speculates about the future he might
have had. He would have been,

privately a lover, a husband, a father; and publicly a Judge for sure: Mr.

Justice Stephen he would have been today; with several books to his

credit, I suppose: some on law; one or two on birds; [...] some essays on

literature; and history; public matters; some attacks on abuses; and by

this time he would have been a figure much liked, a typical Englishman?

(120)
This is not an unlikely speculation based on Woolf's observations. Every day,
she reports, she and her sister, Vanessa witnessed their male relatives coming
from and going to their respective worlds beyond the private house. (123) In the
end, she observed, they all learned to play the game. They earned the grades,
the honors and degrees with very little effort because it was expected of them.
Each one was “stamped and moulded by the patriarchal machinery.“ (132) Each
one was “shot into that machine and came out the other end, at the age of sixty
of so, a Headmaster, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, a Judge.“ (ibid.)

Woolf's eldest step-brother, George Duckworth, on her view, was a
paradigm of Victorian manhood. Unsuccessful in his efforts to gain admittance
to the machine, he mastered the game of Victorian high society, from which “he

emerged at age sixty with a knighthood, with an aristocratic wife, with a sinecure,

a country house and three sons.“ (132) In her youth George took over what

44

would have been their mother's role, bringing the family out in society. This
meant attending parties which evoked in Woolf a “dazed, elated, frozen feeling,“
the effect, she explains, of the “paralysis“ and “unreality“ she experienced in the
limelight of the parties. (133) At one such party George criticized the dress she
had worn. She remembers,
He was thirty-six when l was twenty. He had a thousand pounds a year
and I had fifty. Those were reasons that made it difficult to defy George
that night. But there was another element in our relationship which
affected me as I stood there that winter's night exposed to his criticism in
my green dress. I was not wholly conscious of it then. But besides
feeling his age and his power, I felt too another feeling which I later called
the outsider‘s feeling. When exposed to George's scowling, I felt as a
tramp or a gypsy must feel who stands at the flap of a tent and sees the
circus going on inside. (131-2)
Interestingly, in this encounter, Virginia identifies not only the structural features
of her situation which made it difficult for her to defy her brother, but also the
seeds of her adult radical feminist Self, the founder of the “Outsider's Society.“
Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was a “failed“ philosopher and writer, who
she describes as “the most imminent obstacle and burden“ in her and her sister
Vanessa's attempts to make a world for themselves “inside the big world.“
Among the scenes she reconstructs in remembering him was his Wednesday
afternoon breast-beating tirades over the accounting books. The direct brunt of
these “brutal“ rages was felt by Vanessa, who he -- in typical Victorian fashion --
expected to play her assigned role, “part slave, part angel of sympathy.“ When
she would not play, Woolf reports, his exacerbation led him to “barbarous

violence.“ (125) Woolf attributed his brutality to his consciousness of his

professional failure as well as "the crippling effect of Cambridge; and its one-

45

sided education.“ (125-6) This, then, was the private face of Victorian manhood,
the side only women saw because confessing a need of sympathy would have
meant for a man of his stature, utter shame. From the perspective of the men of
his class, women were their dependents; that the reverse was often the case
was unspeakable. And her economic dependence on him made it impractical, if
not impossible, for her to speak this truth to anyone outside the house and be
heard. (ibid.)

By putting together the disparate memories of her family members a
sketch of Woolf emerges. With no tradition or symbolic figures to help her get
her bearings and make a life, she forged an identity for her Self through her
resistance to the patriarchal world that threatened to crush her. She locates the
roots of this identity in her “conspiracy“ with Vanessa. From the world they
made for themselves, the two began to look at “the big world“ through outsider's
eyes. At the end of her life, remembering her Self then, she names that Self and
her sister “explorers, revolutionists, reformers.“ (126)

With this context in mind, consider Three Guineas. This book is
addressed to a gentleman who, according to Woolf's sketch, is a graying,
balding, middle-aged lawyer who, despite appearances, has not “sunk into the
contented apathy,“ but rather who solicits Woolf's aid “with the sound of guns in
MS] ears.“ (8-9) His solicitation (for a signature, membership in his society, and
funds) presents itself to her as a request for her opinion on how to prevent war.
This is the larger question which directs the development of her thinking about

how She and the women of her class might have a radical influence in the world.

46

The fact of this man's question is of great historic significance. His letter is, in
Woolf's words, “unique in the history of human correspondence, since when
before has an educated man asked a women how in her opinion war can be
prevented?“ (8) More significant than the question, however, is the possibility
that she and the other daughters of educated men, may for the first time have
some influence with their response.

Woolf explores the revolutionary potential of this new influence in some
depth. Up until twenty years ago (1919) she argues the only influence women of
her class might have exercised on the men of their class amounted to a form of
“prostitution.“ The systematic exclusion of women from participation in the Army
and Navy, the Stock Exchange, the Press (insofar as “the decision what to print,
what not to print -- is entirely in the hands of your sex“) the Civil Service, the Bar,
and the Church meant that whatever influence women might have, they did not
have the means of force, negotiation, money, law and God at their disposal. (23)
Women of the educated class had only the “indirect influence,“ described by Sir
Ernest Wild, secured by the fact that “every man who had a woman to care
about him liked to shine in her eyes.“ (28)10 If this is the real nature of women's
influence, Woolf proclaims, “many of us would prefer to call ourselves prostitutes
simply and to take our stand openly under the lamps of Piccadilly Circus rather

than use it.“ (29) But with the right to earn a living, Woolf suggests, women no

 

‘0 Woolf argues that winning the vote accomplished little since it only kept women “trudging in
processions.“ (27) It did not amount to a qualitative change in women's influence because
practically, influence is “only fully effective when combined with rank, wealth and great houses.“
(28)

 

 

47
longer needed to use the influence described by Sir Ernest Wild. (31) Now, for
the first time,

The word “influence“ then has changed. The educated man's daughter

has now at her disposal an influence which is different from any influence

that she has possessed before. It is not the influence which the great
lady, the Siren, possesses; nor is it the influence which the educated
man's daughter possessed when she had no vote; nor is it the influence
which she possessed when she had a vote but was debarred from the
right to earn a living. It differs, because it is an influence from which the
money element had been removed. She need no longer use her charm
to procure money from her father or brother. Since it is beyond the power
of her family to punish her financially she can express her own opinions.

(32)

This new “weapon“ is the “sacred coin“ which the educated man's daughter
stands on the bridge twirling and pondering. It is not a powerful weapon since
twenty years is not a long time, “nor is a sixpenny bit a very important coin.“ (30)
Nevertheless, the distance between compulsory acquiescence and the
unfettered expression of opinion is considerable. On Woolf's view, economic
independence from men is the condition enabling women to think for
themselves, and express their point(s) of view. Freedom from prostituting their
minds is won with “the weapon of independent opinion based upon independent
income.“ (73)

The radical potential of this weapon becomes apparent from consideration
of Woolf's theory of sexual difference. While Woolf is not an essentialist, she
insists, there is a difference between the sons and daughters of educated men
which makes a difference. This difference arises first as a “difficulty of

communication“ which must be acknowledged in conjunction with her response

to the question of preventing war. It is not a class difference since she and the

 

48

letter writer both eem their own livings and come from “the educated class,“ and
therefore, “speak with the same accent, use knives and forks in the same way;
expect maids to cook dinner and wash up after dinner; and talk during dinner
without much difficulty about politics and people; war and peace; barbarism and
civilization.“ (9) It is a sexual difference apparent in the fact that “when we look
at the same things, we see them differently.“ (11) For example, women and men
see education differently. Woolf makes this point by comparing the what she
and the letter writer see when they look at “that congregation of buildings there,
with a semi-monastic look, with chapels and halls and green playing-fields.“ He
and his brothers see their old school, Oxford or Cambridge, “the source of
memories and of traditions innumerable.“ (11) She and her sisters see the
education they were denied, but expected to make sacrifice for; they see
“petticoats with holes in them, cold legs of mutton, and the boat train starting for
abroad while the guard slams the door in their faces.“ (12)

Another difficulty arises, again the result of looking at the same things
differently, which bears more directly on her response to the question of how
women might help with preventing war. Although, she asserts, “many instincts
are held in common by both sexes, to fight has always been the man's habit, not
the woman's.“ (13) The fact that “scarcely a human being in the course of
history has fallen to a woman's rifle“ makes it plain that women and men see war
differently. Here she comes the closest to asserting an essentialist position, but
stops short at an agnostic position, qualifying her statement about “instinct“ with

“whether innate or accidental.“ (ibid.) When women look at war they are led,

49

Woolf claims, to the question, “Why fight?“ Like Virginia on the lawn in her tussle
with Thoby, women see the pointlessness of hurting of other people. When, on
the other hand, men look at war, Woolf claims on the basis of evidence in their
biographies, they see “a profession; a source of happiness and excitement; and
[...] an outlet for manly qualities.“ (15-16) They also see war as a an expression
of “patriotism“ which means, according to the Lord Chief Justice of England,
“Englishmen are proud of England. For those who have been trained in
English schools and universities, and who have done the work of their
lives in England, there are few loves stronger than the love we have for
our country. When we consider other nations, when we judge the merits
of the policy of this country or of that, it is the standard of our own country
that we apply. Liberty has made her abode in England. England is the
home of democratic institutions. It is true that in our midst there
are many enemies of liberty -- some of them, perhaps, in rather
unexpected quarters. But we are standing firm. It has been said that an
Englishman's Home is his Castle. The home of Liberty is in England. And
it is a castle indeed -- a castle that we will defend to the last.“ (Quoted in
Woolf, 17)
The distance between what women see when they look at war (“why fight?“) and
what men see when they look at the same (“we will defend [our castle] to the
last“) illustrates well Woolf's point that the daughters and sons of educated men
see the same things quite differently. She marks this difference in “point of view“
throughout the book with the metaphor of the bridge between the old world of the
private house and the newly opened public worlds. What the daughters can see
from the perspective of the bridge is radically different than what is visible to their
brothers and fathers from the(ir) Castle.

What, on Woolf's view, explains the fact that women and men view the

world, and think about it, differently? As I noted at the start, this difference is not

50

a matter of feeling differently when looking at the photographs of dead bodies
and ruined houses, rather it is a matter of how those feelings are experienced or
interpreted. In order to “prove this“ Woolf asserts,
we need not have recourse to the dangerous and uncertain theories of
psychologists and biologists; we can appeal to facts. Take the fact of
education. Your class has been educated at public schools and
universities for five or six hundred years, ours for sixty. Take the fact of
property. Your class possesses in its own right and not through marriage
practically all the capital, all the land, all the valuables, and all the
patronage in England. Our class possesses in its own right and not
through marriage practically none of the capital, none of the land, none of
the valuables, and none of the patronage in England. That such
differences make for very considerable differences in mind and body, no
psychologist or biologist would deny. (33)
This difference in outlook, then, is the combined effect, on “body, brain and
spirit“ of different historically constituted life experiences. The daughters of
educated men have not had “paid-for“ educations In English schools and
universities. Rather they have had what Woolf names “unpaid-for“ educations.
As a result, they have not had Shakespeare's scripts to get their bearings and
chart their courses in life. The only scripts they have had are those provided by
the Church which have led them only into to the service of men and children.
They have not done the work of their lives in the House of Liberty. Rather they
have done the work of their lives in the private house. They have no tradition of
participating in judgments concerning the policies of other nations. Nor have
they participated in England's “democratic“ institutions. In fact, on the grounds
enumerated by the Lord Chief Justice women have no life experience at all

which would qualify them as English citizens. This difference in point of view

boils down to the effects of having almost no investment in “civilization.“ Why

 

 

51

fight? Indeed. If the daughters of educated men can help prevent war at all,
Woolf argues, it will only be through the influence they can exert through the free
expression of the perspective they have developed in virtue of this sexual
difference.

At this point she commences an a-mazing analysis of patriarchy. “Let us,“
she says, “by way of a very elementary beginning lay before you a photograph
[...] of your world as it appears to us who see it from the threshold of the private
house; through the shadow of the veil that St. Paul still lays upon our eyes; from
the bridge which connects the private house with the world of public life.“ (34)
From the bridge she reports on a “queer“ and “enormously impressive“ world
constituted by “the processions of educated men.“ She observes them, as they
have been for hundreds of years, “mounting those steps, passing in and out of
those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching, administering justice,
practicing medicine, transacting business, making money.“ (111) From the
bridge, she moves in to “survey the scene in greater detail,“ and reports that in
the midst of the disparate phenomena she identifies a common thread in the
clothes worn by educated men in their public capacities. She describes in
elaborate detail the “extremely ornate“ and “dazzling splendour“ of their public
attire, and notes the “comparative simplicity“ of their dress at home. (35-6) She
observes, “every button, rosette and stripe seems to have some symbolic
meaning.“ (36) In contrast, she points out, among the functions of women's
clothing is not this effort “to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual

standing of the wearer.“ (38) She finds, in the midst of her a-mazing

 

52

investigation, a connection between the dead bodies and ruined houses and the

“sartorial splendours“ of educated men:

Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your
finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers. (ibid.)

Military uniforms, she suggests, present such an impressive spectacle in order to
advertise and promote the profession of war. This love of symbolic distinction is
apparent across the professions. Among the men of the schools and universities
she finds the will to mark their superiority over other people “by dressing
differently, or by adding titles before, or letters after their names,“ which, she
argues, rouses the very emotions -- competition and jealousy -- which
encourage “a disposition towards war.“ (40, 43)

From these “surface“ insights she returns to her station on the bridge to a-
maze patriarchal education. Drawing facts from history and biography she
makes the following case. All the men who have ruled England in 500 years
have received a university education. Despite the immense wealth of the
universities the poor as well as privileged women have been systematically
denied an education therein. All the evidence, including the segregation,
specialization and coercion of testing and degree-granting, suggest that the aim
of this education is not learning for its own sake or to prevent war, but to instill
and pass down the arts of domination, ruling, killing and acquiring capital. In her
words, “all attempt to influence the young against war through education must be
abandoned“ because “education, the finest education in the world, does not

teach people to hate force but to use it.“ (54)

 

 

53
Plunging even deeper in her a-mazing analysis of the Society of
rocessions she moves on to another bridge where she addresses the
'ofessions. From here she proceeds into one of their good libraries to examine
le books, particularly the biographies for any light they can shed on the lives of
'ofessional men. In the midst of all of the diversity she identifies a common
.read in the fact that most of the biographies she reads by professional men in
,e nineteenth century are largely concerned with war. (115) In her investigation
is finds that,
They were great fighters, it seems, the professional men in the age of
Queen Victoria. There was the battle of Westiminster. There was the
battle of the universities. There was the battle of Whitehall. There was
the battle of Harley Street. There was the battle of the Royal Academy.
Some of these battles, as you can testify, are still in progress. (115-6)
he notes that while the combatants in these battles “did not inflict flesh wounds“
ey belonged to professions which “seemed to be as bloodthirsty as the
'ofession of arms itself.“ (116) The wounds they did inflict were “upon the
man spirit which no surgery can heal.“ (ibid.) What is common to all these
attles, claims Woolf, is the plan and the enemy. The enemy of professional
en, according to the testimony of the biographies, was, in all cases, “their
stars and daughters.“11 (117) The plan of the “authorities encamped within
9 sacred gates“ was to keep women out in the name of God, Nature, Law and

'operty. (119) All the reasons they gave for excluding women indicate, Woolf

Includes, a pattern of repetition, rather than progress.

 

This point is developed by Daly in “The Radical Enemy of the Patriarchal World War,”
apter 9 of Syn/Ecology, p.355-367.

r

 

54

We can almost hear them if we listen singing the same old song, “Here

we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree,“ and

if we add, “of property, of property, of property,“ we shall fill in the rhyme

without doing violence to the facts.“ (120)

The fact that all of the processions of professional men are leading to the
accumulation of capital and the possession of property is significant, in Woolf's
view because it points to the effect on the practitioners: it makes them
“possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative if
anyone dares dispute them.“ (121) Hence, Woolf makes the connection between
the war against the daughters and sisters and what she later names “the money
'motive.“ It pays to kill the spirit in women.

Interestingly, Woolf argues, it also kills the spirit in men.12 Using the
same biographies, she points out that professional men are enslaved by the
pursuit of money. Among the conditions for participation in the professions she
names are: the sacrifice of time with family, performing “arduous“ and
“barbarous“ duties, and wearing uniforms which profess your loyalties. Each
one will be stamped and moulded by the patriarchal machinery. “If you succeed
in your professions,“ she argues, “the words 'For God and Empire' will very likely
be written, like the address on a dog collar, round your neck.“ (127) Not only do

those who succeed in the professions pay with their ability to think for

themselves, she argues, they also lose their senses.“3

 

12 Daly argues this same point in Syn/Ecology, only she adds the following distinction: “While

men also receive false molds and follow-up fixes to reinforce their supernatural, that is unnatural,

state in patriarchal society, the grace/serum injected is different. Fatherly fixes are essentially
inflating for men, whereas those administered to women are depressants.” (54)

1 Compare with Daly’s argument that monodimensional foreground existence “numbs” the

senses making it difficult to find the “door to our depths."

55

Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They
have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for
conversation. They lose their sense of proportion -- the relations between

one thing and another. (131)

Each one ends up, in the end, she says, no more than “a cripple in a cave.“
(132)

In the process of her investigation of the battle to keep women out of the
professions, she considers the discrepancy of income among male and female
civil servants by examining quotations of men in the newspapers on the issue.
She attributes the problem to an “atmosphere“ which is alluded to in the
quotations, taken from the newspapers, on the reasons for this discrepancy.

And in the process of a-mazing this atmosphere, she comes across “an egg“
which helps explain the connection between different forms of domination.

There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same worm that we

know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the

creature, Dictator as we call him when he is in Italian or German, who
believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race
is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what

they shall do. (96)

The voice which compels women to accept less in wages for their work or to stay
home and leave the jobs for the men, she argues, bears an unmistakable family
resemblance to those Fascist and Nazi voices the Englishmen profess to abhor.
Making this connection leads Woolf to ask the author of one quotation, “what
right have we, Sir, to trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries
when we can shake out from our most respectable newspapers any day of the

week eggs like these?“ (98) It seems that Woolf has identified one of those

“enemies of liberty,“ which the Lords Chief Justice had admitted were among his

 

l'

56

fellow Englishman, unexpectedly in the father's quarters of the Castle. What
hatches from the egg, says Woolf, is the enemy of the “great principles of Justice
and Equality and Liberty.“ (187)

To examine the nature of this “egg,“ and uncover the “roots“ of the
Society of Processions, Woolf turns to the project of a-mazing the Church. She
says here that “some ancestral memory prophesying war“ directs her to “lower
the veil of St. Paul“ between herself and the letter writer, that is “to take shelter
behind an interpreter.“ (219) She finds her interpreter in the report of the
Archbishops' Commission on the Ministry of Women, a published response to
the request by the daughters of educated men in 1935 to have the profession of
religion opened to them. This document provides, Woolf suggests, an
opportunity to examine “that profession which, since it is the highest of all may
be taken as the type of all, the profession of religion.“ (ibid.) Using this
interpreter to help a-maze religion provides insight into “the soul or essence“ of
all the professions because unlike the others which can appeal to statutes and
charters to justify the exclusion of women from the professions, the Church is
compelled to provide “spiritual and not merely historical reasons for its actions.“
(226) What the report reveals is that there are no spiritual reasons for excluding
women in the teachings of Jesus Christ. (221) So the Archbishops substituted
the interpretation and ruling of St. Paul that women be debarred from teaching
the gospel as a rationale for the exclusion. In addition, Woolf points out, in the
absence of a spiritual justification the Church fathers sought a psychological

justification from Christian philosopher who admitted there is no psychological or

57
rational evidence which suggests “man has a natural precedence of woman,“
however, he does find a practical justification for the exclusion in the strong
feelings and hostility which are aroused by the suggestion of admitting women.
The source of these “irrational“ emotional responses he claims is in a “powerful
and widespread subconscious motive“ deriving from “ideas of woman as 'man
manqué', to which he gives the name “infantile fixation.“

The insight provided by this interpreter into all the professions, according
to Woolf, is that among the “roots“ of the efforts to exclude women from the
professions is what the professor calls an “infantile fixation,“ and what Woolf
says, “without a scientific education," she named “an egg.“ (231) Developing the
professor’s point, she asserts,

“Strong feeling is aroused by any suggestion that women be admitted“ -- it

matters not to which priesthood; the priesthood of medicine or the

priesthood of science or the priesthood of the Church. (231)

In addition to this “powerful and widespread subconscious motive“ Woolf names
two other motives that appear to have escaped the professor. The first is the
“money motive“: “To pay women more would be to pay men less.“ (231) And
second is the “psychological motive“: “To be able to set aside all worldly cares
and studies and lay them upon another person.“ (232) This is the motive that led
Virginia's father to bury Vanessa under his concerns about the weekly account
books. This egg hatched in Victorian families as the will of the fathers of
possess the energy and secure it with the loyalties of the daughters. The effect
that the uninterrupted exercise of these motives has on the daughters and

sisters is, of course, devastating. It amounts to little more than a living death as

58
3 evident from the biographies of the sisters and daughters which Woolf draws
In for testimony. Hence, she concludes this a-mazing analysis of patriarchy,
Society it seems was a father, and afflicted with the infantile fixation.“ (245)
The implications of all of this for the daughters of educated men was a
liant dilemma which Woolf presents from the bridge.
Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its
immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the
professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity,
its greed. The one shuts us up live slaves in a harem; the other forces us
to circle, like caterpillars head to tail, round and round the mulberry tree,
the sacred tree, of property. It is a choice of evils. Each is bed. (135)
”he choice of returning to the private house is bad because dependence on
lather amounts to possession by Father. In the home, Woolf argues, a woman
res “forced to use whatever influence she possessed to bolster up the system
rhich provided her with maids; with carriages; with fine clothes; with fine
arties.“ (71) Choosing the private house involves coerced identification with the
"ether. Hence, it seems that to escape his coercive grasp, she must get an
ducation to obtain the appointments she needs to earn her own living which is
ie condition of her new weapon. But the choice to follow in the processions of
ducated men is also bad because, Woolf points out, it means merging with the
lentities of the professional men and so losing that difference of perspective
mm is what distinguishes her new weapon from his old one. This seems to be

he of those situations where “the strategies [the system] requires to survive it

om day to day are exactly the opposite of what is required to change it.“

 

59
(MacKinnon, 1987, 16) It is a classic example of the “double bind“ analyzed by
Marilyn Frye in her “Oppression” essay. (Frye, 1983.2)

After briefly considering a suicidal plunge from the bridge into the river,
she sets out to pave a third way, bringing us face to face with the questions of
strategy. Here Woolf begins to reveal the normative implications of her theory of
sexual difference. First, it is important to note that the possibility of a third way is
rooted in an anti-determinist position which, in some popular theoretical quarters
at the moment, is unfashionable. Woolf operates on the assumption that,

men and women, here and now, are able to exert their wills; they are not

pawns and puppets dancing on a string held by invisible hands. They can
act, and think for themselves. (13)
Even if men have become “cripples in a cave” and women are paralyzed with
fear at the prospect of resistance, our independence qualifies us as agents
capable of acting to change our situations. Hence, there is some hope that the
daughters of educated men can answer the questions which confront them on
the bridge, “do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall
we join that procession?“ (113) After establishing that the processions are
leading directly and indirectly to the dead bodies and ruined houses it is clear
that if the daughters join it must only be on the basis of grave reservations and
firm anti-war and anti-patriarchal commitments, that is with the intention of
breaking the circle and making off on a third, heretofore unexplored path.

The original impetus for Woolf's strategzing effort, you might recall, was
the request of the liberal lawyer for, among other things, her help in preventing

war by joining his anti-war society. In her response to his request she thinks

60
through what the relation of the daughters to their more progressive brothers
ought to be. She insists they share the same goals, Liberty, Equality, Justice
and Peace. However, Woolf hesitates at the prospect of joining them in any
formal way. She locates the source of her hesitation in the “reasons and
emotions” which have their “origin deep in the darkness of ancestral memory.”
(189) Joining a “society” is a very different thing than choosing an individual
relationship, says Woolf, because “the very word 'society' sets tolling in memory
the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not." (190) This is
another matter of seeing the same things differently. The daughters look on
societies as “an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; letters the
will.” (191) She elaborates on how being members of fraternal societies effects
even the men who may deserve respect as individual allies in struggle. In her
words, “societies” turn them into “monsters” who are,
loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the
earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings
are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially; where, daubed red and gold,
decorated like a savage with feathers he goes through mystic rites and
enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and dominion while we, “his”
women, are locked in the private house without share in the many
societies of which his society is composed. (191)
Women should not join because to do so would be to risk identification with this
“monster,” and lose the critical distance afforded by sexual difference. Hence,
Woolf concludes, the daughters must work for the goals they share with their

progressive brothers autonomously, by different means, from outside their

societies. (192)

61

The outsiders must create a society of their own, to which she gives the
now infamous name, the “Outsider's Society.” (193) She is explicit on this point.
The new society must “consist of educated men's daughters working in their own
class -- how indeed can they work in any other?” (ibid.) In her first sketch of the
“Outsider's Society” she provides a decidedly anarchist picture. It would have no
honorary treasurer, for it needs no funds. “It would have no office, no
committee, no secretary; it would call no meetings; it would hold no
conferences.” And, of course, it would have no oaths, nor ceremonies, nor
pageantry. The Outsider’s would make their first duty to live by the lessons of
their own traditions.

The traditions upon which the Outsider's Society would be founded are
the “unpaid-for“ education and professions which are the legacy of the daughters
of educated men. In order to reconstruct a collective memory of this legacy
Woolf draws from the biographies of Florence Nightingale, Ann Clough, Emily
Bront'e', Christina Rossetti and Mary Kingsley among others. From these
disparate sources she makes the connections among their lives and thoughts
which constitute what she names “that ancestral memory which lies behind the
present moment.“ (149) Of course, she acknowledges, “that this education and
these professions were in many ways bad in the extreme, both for the unpaid
themselves and for their descendants.“ (143) However, it must also be
acknowledged, she argues, that “biography is many-sided“ and that as a guide

to these traditions they admit of “great virtues as well as great defects.“ (144)

Hence, she suggests,

62

We cannot, when we consider the lives of our uneducated mothers and

grandmothers, judge education simply by its power to “obtain
appointments,“ to win honour, to make money. We must if we are honest,

admit that some who had no paid-for education, no salaries and no
appointments were civilized human beings -- whether or not they can
rightly be called “English“ women is matter for dispute; and thus admit
that we would be extremely foolish if we threw away the results of that
education or gave up knowledge that we have obtained from it for any
bribe or decoration whatsoever. (ibid.)
According to Woolf, this tradition offers “four great teachers“ which she names,
“poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties.“ (145) What is
more important than their names is the unconventional interpretations which
Woolf gives them. Accordingly, poverty teaches that one must earn enough
money to maintain one's independence, but not a penny more. (ibid.) Chastity
teaches one must to refuse to sell her brain for money. (146) Derision teaches
to “refuse all methods of advertising merit, and that ridicule, obscurity and
censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise.“ Finally,
freedom from unreal loyalties teaches one not to identify with others on the basis
of nation, religion, college, family, sex, and others that spring from them. (ibid.)
Together the lesson of these teachers is “do all in your power to break the ring,
the vicious circle, the dance round and round the mulberry free.“ (179) Living by
these lessons, Woolf promises, means one “can join the professions and yet
remain uncontaminated by them;“ be rid of “their possessiveness, their jealousy,
their pugnacity, their greed;“ and use them to exercise a mind and will of one's
own. (151)

The strategy of forming an autonomous society made up of the daughters

of educated men is, on Woolf's view, both “critical” and “creative.” It is critical

63

insofar as it calls on the daughters to think for themselves, from the point of view
of their difference, about the forces which contribute to war, including traditional
education and professionalism, to name them and to resist them. The attitude
which Woolf argues this critique calls for is one of “indifference.“ (194) Outsiders
must neither “incite“ nor attempt to “dissuade“ their brothers from fighting. This
attitude is based on the facts of her situation and “the special knowledge“ of what
makes the educated man tick. Her situation as an outsider provides her with no
rational grounds for supporting war, even in the name of her country, because

she announces,

“in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.
As a woman my country is the whole world.“ (197)

The “special knowledge" Woolf refers to is the insight about her brother: being in
the limelight of the war machine, in the name of his country, makes him tick.
This knowledge suggests to her that indifference will be an effective critical move
because it will involve dimming the light considerably since women have been, in
the state of economic dependence, among the most enthusiastic supporters of
“what Lady Lovelace called 'our splendid Empire.“ (71) Psychology, Woolf
points out, shows that humans find it harder to act in the face of indifference.
(198) Hence, Woolf advises, the daughters “should give their brothers neither
the white feather of cowardice nor the red leather of courage, but no feather at
all.“ (199) Through maintaining such an attitude, Woolf suggests, the daughters

will be able to actively discourage war.

64

In order to reveal how the outsider's strategy is not only critical but
creative Woolf employs an analogy. Consider, she says, a rabbit or other little
creature which runs out of the darkness on to a country road where it is “caught
in the glare of a head-lamp.“ Like the glazed and rigid animal, the human in the
limelight is paralyzed; inhibiting, she says, the “power to change and create new
wholes.“ (208) Putting this point together with the insight about how the limelight
makes her brothers tick, it becomes clear what Woolf is saying when she insists
that the processions are leading only in a repetitive circle around the mulberry
tree. By actively discouraging their brothers from choosing the limelight, the
daughters are encouraging movement which is not going in circles, but rather,
which is creative engagement in the world.

“The power to change and create new wholes,“ which Woolf argues,
emerges from attention to the “darkness“ of women's ancestral memories, brings
us back to Woolf's philosophy. Recall the shocks which she experienced as
revelations about the matrix of the whole. Only when one breaks through the
cotton wool, the frozen foreground populated by Dickens-like characters, does
one experience life as a fully conscious, engaged, inner-directed individual.
Putting the severed parts together, the critical work of the outsider, is the
strongest pleasure known to Woolf; it is the “ecstasy“ of creative movement
which getting out of the light enables. What she is suggesting here, in Daly's
terms, is that the practice of a-mazing is integral to the strategy which makes her
feminism radical: a-mazing leads one to the conclusion that choosing to be an

Outsider is the most effective strategy for women in her situation. She is

65

suggesting something which is very similar to what Angela Davis (1971 ) and
Adrienne Rich (1978) argued in the seventies, namely, that being disbarred from
“civilization“ endows one with a particularly unique and useful political
perspective, ground for agency, and set of possibilities.

The question which fuels Woolf's analysis -- what will keep the daughters
of educated men from adding their sixpence to their brothers' guinea and using
their influence in the same way? -- is a matter of whether or not the Master's
Tools (in this case the “sacred coin“) can dismantle the Master's House. Hence,
Three Guineas is really a book about means or strategy insofar as Woolf is
thinking about how women of her class should use their new weapon. It is
important to note that this book is not addressing the question of the relation
between the liberation strategies of women in the ruling class and the liberation
strategies of women in other classes, a point which will be discussed in chapter
four. The unquestioned assumption of this work is that the condition for the
liberation of ruling class women is getting out of their Father's House, and the
only conceivable way out is through economic independence. Everything turns
on this point. The only way women are going to be able to a-maze patriarchy,
create new wholes, and thus, help prevent war is through economic
independence. Active participation in the Outsider's Society is the third way she
envisions for the women of her class to move on in a positive direction from their
station on the bridge. In Syn/Ecology Daly carries on in this tradition of radical

feminism.

66

As is already obvious to the reader of Gyn/Ecology, Woolf's influence on
Daly is comprehensive. The thesis of Gyn/Ecology is that radical feminism is
“the journey of women becoming.“ Following Woolf, Daly is interested in the
process through which women come to be fully conscious, engaged, inner-
directed individuals. This process of radical becoming, or be-ing, Daly
announces on the first page is an “Otherworld Journey.“ As Daly charts the
journey, one moves from the world of the phallocentric “foreground“ to the
“Otherworld” which is the gynocentric “Background.“ Daly's concept of a
“foreground“ has its roots in Virginia Woolf's concept of “cotton wool“ which
takes the concrete form in Three Guineas of the processions of educated men.
Daly's concept of a “Background“ as the “realm of the wild reality of women's
Selves“ is related to Woolf's idea of “the scaffolding in the background“ as the
constitution of the writer. A subtle and illuminating difference is revealed in their
respective Background metaphors. For Woolf, the reality behind the cotton wool
is a “work of art;“ for Daly, the reality behind the foreground realm is the
“lntransitive Verb.“ (23) What Woolf finds in art, Daly finds in language. What
they share is a view of reality and “really living“ which does not revolve around
God, Nature, or Law, but rather which unfolds as this process which humans
choose to create and participate in.

In the Introduction to Gyn/Ecology Daly singles out Woolf's Three Guineas

as a particularly important source of inspiration in the charting and describing of
the “Metapatriarchal Journey of Exorcism and Ecstasy.“ (33) Daly charts the

journey from the foreground to the Background on the basis of Woolf's strategic

67

attempts to think about how the daughters of educated men can at once,
maintain their economic independence and break with the processions of their
fathers. On Daly's development, radical feminism is about independence from
the fathers in all its dimensions -- mind/body/spirit as well as economic -- in the
midst of the ever present invitations of assimilation and tokenism. Woolf's
insistence on sexual difference, rooted in a duplicitous historical situation which
is both depraved and a valuable source of ethical lessons, manifests itself in
Daly's insistence that radical feminism is a “Metapatriarchal“ journey in the
“Tradition of Hags“ which is not given, but chosen. The work of Three Guineas
and Gyn/Ecology is the same in the sense that both are seeking strategies for
resisting “the condition of women caught on the Wheel of Processions, clutched
by the clockwork hands that circle the surface of the Time Keepers clocks.“ (42)
Daly's radical feminism rests on the knowledge which was passed down to her
from Virginia Woolf, namely,

that patriarchy is itself a continual resurrection of the past, a series of

processions. No social revolution, however “radical,“ that falls short of

metapatriarchal movement can break the circles of repetition. (Daly, 42)
This is the knowledge she takes from Woolf's insistence that the daughters of
educated men must break the death march around the mulberry tree.

Consider how Daly's radical feminism, as it is revealed (1) in the method
of a-mazing from an Outsider's perspective and (2) in the strategy of
maintaining independence from the patriarchal processions of the foreground,

evolves from Woolf’s feminism. The theme of the Second Passage in

Syn/Ecology, “Processions” has its origins in Woolf's thought. Woolf's radical

68

insights about the connections between patriarchal processions, professions,
and possession of women's spirit unfold as the “foreground“ journeyers must a-
maze. The voyage is charted around the Sins of the Fathers , which Daly
conceives of as “incarnated' in institutional and individual demons who guard the
gateways to women's “Background.“ These demons are personifications of the
traditional “Deadly Sins“ which Daly renames, the “Eight Deadly Sins of the
Fathers.“ The basic Sin of phallocracy claims Daly is “deception,” revealed by
Woolf’s analysis of processions, and so named by Daly, "Processions.” The task
of the Joumeyer who has internalized patriarchal deceptions, then, is to free
herSelf from their death grip, a task Daly names “exorcism.” (2) The practice or
method of “A-mazing,” or “Metapatterning Movement” which Daly also finds in
Woolf's work is the way to identify and relieve oneSelf of patriarchal deceptions.
The work of the Second Passage, a-mazing the Society of Processions, makes
Journeyers aware of the universal intent of patriarchal rituals to destroy “the
divine spark in women.” “The Know-ing of this intent,” says Daly, “has been
necessary for our a-mazing process of exorcism.” (315) By “putting the severed
parts together” the dormant senses of the Journeyer are awakened and
strengthened. Daly suggests that through pattern detecting her way to the intent
of foreground practices a Spinster begins to develop “a kind of
multidimensionanultiform power of sensing/understanding her environment,”
which she names “Positive Paranoia.” (316) In the Third Passage the
Journeyers pattern-detecting powers are further refined as she breaks out of the

patriarchal processions and begins Spooking, Sparking, and Spinning. The

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theme of this final Passage, “Gyn/Ecology: Spinning New Time/Space,” names
“the pattems/designs of the moving Female-identified environment which can
only be heard/seen after the Joumeyer has been initiated through The First and
The Second Passages.” (ibid.) In this Passage Daly develops Woolf’s argument
that a historically constituted sexual difference of perspective can provide the
basis for a feminist politic which is both critical and creative. Following and
developing the radical feminist insights of Woolf’s work, Daly argues in this
Passage that everything turns on the Voyagers “growing integrity of vision and
purpose.” (112)

It is significant that each of the chapters which make up this Passage are
introduced with epigraphs taken from Woolf's work. The chapter entitled
“Spooking” begins with Woolf’s description of the “great delight" she experiences
from putting the “severed parts together” in order to reveal the order of the
Whole behind the “cottonwool of daily life.” (Daly, 322) “Spooking” is the name
Daly gives to this Metapatterning which enables women to Dis-possess their
Selves of the internalized patriarchal demons and dis-cover the female Self.
Spinster-Spooking, which involves Re-membering the Witches“ powers, has a
cognitive dimension and a tactical dimension. Cognitively, Daly argues, it
involves pattern detection which identifies “the time-warps through which women
are divided from each other —- since each woman comes to consciousness
through the unique events of her own history.” Tactically, it involves “learning to
refuse the seductive summons of the Passive Voices that call us into the State of

Animated Death.” (318) The symbolic figure which the Passive Voices call

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women to identify with is the “Painted Bird.” The Painted Bird is, according to
Daly, the man-made “Woman” who is allowed to participate in the foreground as
a “Token” on the condition that she sell out her Sisters, playing the part of the
Token Torturer, as an expression of her loyalty to patriarchal civilization. (Daly,
333-336) Spooking is “Unpainting,” which is according to Daly, Re-membering
her Sisters through Re-membering her Self as a healing environment within
which, echoing Woolf,

She pledges allegiance to no flag, no cross. She sees through the lies of

the alleged allies. She re-veres no one, for she is free-ing herself from

fears. This space, the Self’s holy environment, is the opposite of the re-

covery room of the unnatural physicians of soul and body. It is dis-covery

room. (338)
The Labyrinthine Journey of Ecstasy requires in this Passage that the Joumeyer
e-maze the deceptions of the Passive Voices of patriarchy in order that she
resist the temptations of symbolic placement in the Father’s foreground
Processions. Through choosing this process a new task becomes apparent, "the
task of seeing/sensing/Self-moving in the directions which our dis-covering
senses open out to us,” which is the “Self-conscious, Self-directed movement”
Daly names “Enspiriting.” (339-40) “T o enspirit,” explains Daly, is

to be an expressive active verb, and Active Voice uttering the Self utterly,

in a movement/Journey that spirals outward, inward. In this Active

Voicing, the Self Spooks the spookers. She affirms the becoming Self

who is always Other. She dis-covers and creates the Othenlvorld. (340)
Hence, Daly's practice of a-mazing leads to the creation of a world Other than

patriarchy in the same way that Woolf’s efforts to makes “wholes” from the

severed parts led her to need for an Outsider's Society. The effectiveness of this

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radical feminist practice, therefore derives from the fact that “as we A-maze, we
are amazed.” (341) [There is a bit more to say here.]

The theoretical relation between Daly’s feminism and Simone de
Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Daly's Gyn/Eco/ogy reflects an intimate and complex engagement with
Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949). Here I will only highlight some points of
agreement between the two and indicate a sense in which Daly's radical
feminism was a critical response to Beauvior's theory of women's liberation.
This brief examination of the theoretical relation between Daly and Beauvoir is
also intended to provide a contrast which helps define the parameters of the
radical feminist tradition out of which Syn/Ecology grew. 1 suggest that in spite
of the a-mazing analysis in The Second Sex, especially her analysis of
patriarchal myth, Beauvoir does not work from a gynocentic perspective. And
she is explicit on this point, insisting that her work must be read in the tradition of
existentialism. (xxviii)

Beauvoir holds that human subjects, individually and collectively, make
themselves through their choices. We tell stories and make art, build and
discover things, explore and (unfortunately) exploit the natural world, all the while
interacting with others in ways which establish our identities. Women, like all
other humans, are autonomous beings capable of self-creation. However,
Beauvoir notes, women have failed to lay claim to the status of Subject. The

identity Woman, she argues,

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is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with

reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the

essential. He is Subject, he is the Absolute -- she is the Other. (xxviii)
Women have been compelled to conform to the fixed and unchanging
transcendental Idea of Woman projected by men in myth, science and juridical
discourses. [Reference to chapter on Myths] This situation, she explains, is the
result of a history of “bad faith“ efforts on the part of men attempting to make
themselves supreme. (xxxv-xxxvi) Men have found “Othering“ women to be in
their metaphysical, as well as material interests. According to Beauvoir, they
have refused to recognize women's subjectivity, refused, that is, to “share the
world in equality.“ (xxxii) Instead, “Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and
scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of women is willed in
heaven and advantageous on earth.“ (xxxiv)

Beauvoir claims women, as a class, have submissively accepted their
status as Other, or at least, failed to challenge male sovereignty. (xxx-xxxiii) In
part, she argues, this failure is due to the fact that women lack the means for
organizing themselves for resistance, or lack what she calls, “organic“ solidarity.
(mi, 597) Women are not segregated from their oppressors, they share no
solidarity on the basis of work or interest, and furthermore, they have neither a
religion, nor a past. (xxxi) As a result, she explains, women have no myth, no
poetry, no history and no dreams of their own. (143) Unlike other oppressed
groups which can struggle collectively for their autonomous existence, women

cannot even imagine life without men. (xxxi) It follows that women's liberation

depends, in large part, on a collective decision and effort by men to share the

73
world. Despite Beauvoir's admission that oppressors cannot be expected to
choose the moral life, her case against the possibility of woman-identification
makes The Second Sex a plea toward that end. In fact, the tone of many
passages reflects Beauvoir's resignation that men must be convinced. For
example, she writes at the end of Book One, “what must be hoped for is that the
men for their part will unreservedly accept the situation that is coming into
existence; only then will women be able to live in that situation without anguish.”
(263, emphasis is mine)

Daly following Woolf, shares Beauvoir's rejection of any strong form of
determinism and affirms the view that humans make themselves through their
choices. In addition, she agrees with Beauvoir that women's oppression has
entailed practices designed to bring women into conformity with essentialist
Ideas of Woman. Furthermore, while Daly's radical feminism rejects the
dichotomy and the language of immanence and transcendence, she agrees with
Beauvoir that women sometimes choose to conform to the normative identities of
Womanhood, that is, women make “false“ choices.14 Daly quotes Beauvoir on
this point,

to exist is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves

restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men [read

sub-women]. They have eyes and ears but from childhood on they make

themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. (Beauvoir in
Daly, 54)

 

14 The argument for the claim that Daly's philosophy successfully refuses the
transcendence/Immenence dichotomy is provided by Wanda Warren Berry in her excellent
essay, “Feminist Theology: The 'Verbing' Of Ultimate/Intimate Reality in Mary Daly,“ Ultimate
Reality and Meaning, vol. 11 , 1988.

 

74

Even though many “false“ choices reduce one's life to that of a “sub-man“, or
what Daly calls, the “depthless state of robotitude,“ she follows Beauvoir in her
insistence that decisions can always be reconsidered. (Daly, 53-4) According to
Daly “reconsidering“ for women means, “acknowledging that a spell has been
cast upon us, that we have been framed by the pictures of patriarchy, robotized
by its processions and rituals;“ it means “breaking the casts into which we have
been molded,“ and “reclaiming our original movement.“ (55) Reconsidering
requires “roboticide” requires acting on our “Prehistoric questing power.“ (55-6)

Notice that Daly parts with Beauvoir on the options for reconsidering
available to women. For Beauvoir women are necessarily bound to men in a
“fundamental unity“ or “primordial Mitsein,“ within a “masculine universe.“
(Beauvoir, xxxi, 597) As a result, women's efforts to liberate themselves can
only be individual efforts, while they wait for men to stop their incessant
“Othering.“ On Daly's view, the story that it's a man's world is the story men tell
about the world, but it is only partially true. Daly's Gyn/Ecology, a critical
response to Beauvoir's repeated claim that women lack the means to make their
own world, tells the rest of the story. Daly argues, women have a past, which
has been buried, and a mythical tradition, which has been stolen and twisted,
both of which constitute means to make a world. In Daly's view, nothing less
than a collective World-making effort will enable women to reconsider, is. to
realize their ability to make themselves through their choices.

From the perspective of this discussion, Daly's definition of radical

feminism as “the Otherworld journey of women becoming“ is, at once, an

75

affirmation of Beauvoir's insistence that women's liberation must involve the
“good faith“ efforts of women re-creeting themselves and a denial of Beauvoir's
unqualified claim that it is and has always been a man's world. The “Otherworld
Journey“ is “the discovery of a world Other than patriarchy.“ (Daly 1987, 87) It is
significant that Daly retains the capitalized “Other“ in her definition of radical
feminism. For Beauvoir, being “Other“ meant being marked by men as different
and inferior. Feminism, on her view, was therefore, a struggle for women to
become free subjects, like men. For Daly, being Other means refusing to be the
same as men [i.e. wo-men], who are “the sons of their own machines“ and,
above all, not free. (Daly 1978, 52) Feminism, on her view, is women's struggle
to define and name, for ourselves, our difference, that is, to be free. Daly's point
is that radical feminism is a radical departure from assimilation and tokenism in
this man's world. Choosing to identify with the witches and the Outsiders is the
radical feminist strategy for “be-ing“ out of his world. This is not a strategy which

Beauvoir was able to imagine from the perspective of existentialism.

Part II

AUDRE LORDE'S "AN OPEN LETTER TO MARY DALY" AND DALY'S
DECISION NOT TO RESPOND IN KIND

In 1978 Mary Daly published Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical
Feminism. In 1979 Audre Lorde published an “Open Letter to Mary Daly“
challenging the white Western European standpoint of Gyn/Ecology. (Lorde,
1984) Lorde wrote to Mary Daly during the early years of the “second wave“
U.S. women's movement in the hope that they might interrupt the history of
separation between black and white women with conversations about sisterhood
and difference.1 Lorde depicts this history as one marked by a pattern of
relating in which white women have not heard black women or tried to maintain
dialogue with them, and in which black women have assumed they would not be
heard. (Lorde 1984, 66) The significance of Lorde's letter, in view of this history,

is underscored by a silence she had imposed on herself in 1977. When her

 

‘ Audre Lorde privileges black/white dynamics in both in her poetry and rhetoric, in part, as a
result of the moment she was writing. The late 19703 and early 1980s was a time in the U.S.
when race and racial conflicts were mostly understood in the context of civil rights and black
power movements' challenges to the white establishment. As a result, most discussions of race
were cast exclusively in terms of black and white. A case in point is Common Differences:
Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives, (Joseph, 1981 ). However, even at this time,
feminists were pushing the limits of duelistic construals of race. For example, This Bridge Called
My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Moraga and Anzaldt'ie, (1981). Today, many
feminists insist that discussions of race which fail to consider the spectrum of racial identities and
racist practices, as well as the varieties of ethnocentrism and imperialism, are simply inadequate.
In an effort to signal the historical context of Lorde's writings l have chosen to retain her use of
the terms, black and white. However, at points my interpretation of her work takes account of the
more multiple understandings of race and racism today.

76

77
previous attempts at dialogue were consistently met with white guilt and
defensiveness she decided never again to talk with white women about racism.
(70) In addition, the self-imposed silence was a commitment to leave the
education about white racism in white hands. (113) Her letter to Daly broke
Lorde's self-imposed silence in the name of feminist sisterhood. Lorde affirms
Daly’s good faith toward all women, her vision of a future in which all women can
flourish, and her “commitment to the hard and often painful work necessary to
effect change.” Then she invites Daly to a critical dialogue about the implications
of their differences, as black and white women, for the radical feminism of
Gyn/Ecology. (67) To date, Daly has not responded in kind to Lorde's letter.

It is remarkable that Lorde's letter, the paradigmatic example of
challenges to white feminist theory by feminists of color in the 1980s, has
received so little systematic analysis and criticism. Footnotes in some feminist
writings suggest that Lorde's challenge should be read as a postmodern critique
of feminist theory. For example, Christine DeStephano finds in Lorde's work the
argument that understanding “gender as basic merely serves to reify, rather than
to critically contest, transform, and escape the imposed myth of difference.“
(DeStephano 1990, 65) On this sort of reading, Lorde's letter suggests that
Gyn/Ecology, in particular, and radical feminism generally, are fundamentally
flawed theoretically and politically. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson read
Lorde's work as a challenge to “quasi-metanarratives“ in feminist theory which
hinder, rather than advance, sisterhood. (1990, 27) Linda Alcoff, in her widely

read essay, “The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory“ argues radical feminist

78
theories, like Daly's, are “essentialist.“ (1988) In contrast, she reads Lorde's
work, along with other work by feminists of color, as consistent with the anti-
essentialist inclinations of postmodern feminism. On these readings, Lorde's
letter points feminists, away from radical feminist theory, toward postmodern
theoretical frameworks.

I begin Part II, with a close reading of Lorde's “Open Letter,“ using insight
from Lorde's other writings to elaborate and explain her central arguments.
First, I outline the common ground between Lorde and Daly. Second, I interpret
the critical arguments of Lorde's letter. On the basis of my reading, I conclude
that Lorde's letter is, among other things, an attempt to effect a shift in Daly's
thinking which would strengthen her work and help realize the vision they share.
Third, I explore the context of Daly's decision not to respond in kind to Lorde's
letter from several different perspectives. On the basis of this exploration I offer
contextual explanation for Daly's decision.

The Common Ground in the Radical Feminisms of Lords and Daly

In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,“ Lorde calls for a radical feminist mode of living
based on the “knowledge“ we derive from what she refers to variously as “that
dark true depth,“ the “place of possibility within each of us,“ and “that back place,
where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings.“ In the “Open Letter,“ she
says, “as you know,“

when I speak of knowledge [...] I am speaking of that dark and true
depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and makes

accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this
depth within each of us that nurtures vision. (1984, 68)

79

This “knowledge,“ on Lorde's view, is insight gained from a “know-ing“ process
rooted in identification with the experiences of women who have survived and
thrived under the agency-suppressing weight of oppressive regimes.2 It is the
insight which gives shape to Lorde's visionary claims: we were never meant to
survive, your silence will not protect you, the master's tools will never dismantle
the master's house, anger is a useful response to racism, differences among us
can be a creative force for change, and poetry is not a luxury. These are not
new ideas, claims Lorde, but “old and forgotten ones, new combinations,
extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves.“ (38) Lorde shares with
Daly the belief that making a “truly different“ world, a radical feminist world,
requires excavating and re-inventing radical ideas. Daly's concept of “the
moving center of the Self,“ or a woman's “Background,“ is close to Lorde's “back
place of unnamed, untamed longings,“ in that it names the “source“ of radical
feminist insight. (Daly 1978, 6) Women who act from the Background, on Daly's
view, experience an opening of our “inner eyes“ and “inner ears“ enabling us to
see through and beyond the “foreground“ lies of the fathers, to our own “stolen
integrity/energy/be-ing.“ (20)

This feminist know-ing process, which leads women to “radical and daring
ideas,“ requires a focus on those feelings -- anger, love, joy -- experienced by
those of us who have survived and thrived, feelings which are regularly ignored,

trivialized, or condemned. (Lorde 1984, 37) The process, says Lorde, requires

 

2 The hyphenated term “know-ing“ highlights the kinship between Lorde's and Daly's
epistemologies. Daly uses the hyphen to flag the difference between patriarchal “nouns of
knowledge“ and radical feminist “verbs of know-ing.“ See Daly (1978, 11).

80
that each of us learn “disciplined attention to the true meaning of it feels right to
me.“ (Ibid.) For example, in the “Uses of Anger,“ Lorde argues, anger which is
focused with precision is a tool which helps clarify differences among us and
teaches us, in the process, to distinguish allies, with whom we have grave
differences, from genuine enemies. (127) In “Uses of the Erotic,“ Lorde argues,
erotic feelings can be a path to radical insight. (56) By “erotic feelings“ Lorde
does not mean the disengaged sensations promoted by pornography, but that
“internal sense of satisfaction“ one achieves when she brings sensuality together
with love and joy. (54) From giving our focused attention to erotic feelings, she
argues, we are led to the radical idea that it is possible to animate all of our
action and thinking with this internal sense of satisfaction. As she puts it, “the
erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and
fully we can feel in the doing.“ (Ibid.)

Lorde has been charged with contributing to the duelistic construction of
the rational white male and the emotional dark female. (101) On my reading,
Lorde refuses this dualism, privileging neither construction. It is clear in “Poetry
is Not a Luxury,” she does not shun reason, but only the deployment of a
rationality disengaged from the feelings associated with the struggles to meet
human needs. In an interview with Adrienne Rich, Lorde speaks of reason
devoid of feeling as a “road.“ On this analogy, she explains,

it you're traveling a road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere,
the ownership of the road is meaningless. If you have no land out
of which the roads comes, no place that road goes to

geographically, no goal, then the existence of that road is totally
meaningless. Leaving rationality to the white man is like leaving

81

him a piece of that road that begins nowhere and ends nowhere.
(100)

Understanding, on Lorde's view, constitutes a dimension of know-ing which
involves recognizing the patterns among our emotional perceptions and
organizing them in conceptual and linguistic expressions so we can travel,
pursuing radical feminist change. Reason “serves“ radical insight by ordering
the chaos of emotions. Lorde speaks of feeling and thinking not dichotomously,
but “as a choice of ways and combinations.“ (101) Hence, on my reading,
Lorde's “knowledge“ is a synthesis of rational thinking and experiential feeling. A
similar attempt to resist the dichotomizing of thought and feeling is present in
Daly's work. Chapter ten of Gyn/Eco/ogy is devoted to a discussion of the need
for radical women to “Spin“ the “lost thread of connectedness“ between thinking,
imaging and feeling. (Daly 1984, 390)

If a dualism exists between reason and emotion, Lorde claims, the white
man has constructed it by taking “a world position, a position throughout time“
against what is not strictly rational within themselves and others. (1984, 101)
Patriarchal modes of living “defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional
dehumanization,“ Lorde writes, are the result of the history of acting on the belief
that “the head will save us. The brain alone will set us free.“ (38) Exclusive
reliance on rationality has taught us, argues Lorde, an instrumentalist mode of
living, which she calls the “european mode.“ (39, 37) In this mode we are taught
to distrust and reject our emotions and sensuous experience, and

simultaneously, to hate and fear any difference associated with it which we find

82
in ourselves and In others. Instead, we are taught to believe in and live by the
dictates of a disembodied reason, and simultaneously, to identify with those who
we associate with this rational standpoint, i.e. western white men. We learn to
hear only their voices within us. Both Lords and Daly argue that new feminist
modes of living must begin with know-ing which is informed by listening to those
feeling-identified voices within each of us.
Lords and Daly also share views on patriarchy. Lorde is unambiguous in
the letter about her agreement with Daly's claim that patriarchy is global. She
affirms, with Daly, the fact that the oppression of women knows no ethnic nor
racial boundaries. (Daly 1978, 111; Lorde 1984, 70) In addition, Lorde speaks of
the patriarchal oppression in terms very similar to Daly's. Both agree patriarchy
manifests itself in social practices which exploit or harm women, and ideologies
which distort and silence women's ways of know-ing and living. For example,
Lorde writes about patriarchal suppressions of the erotic,
we have been warned against [the erotic] all our lives by the male
world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women
around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears
this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within
themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position
to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain
colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance to their
masters. (1984, 53-54)

In a similar vein, Daly writes that men fetishize women's procreative organs,

rather than acknowledging “female creative energy it all of its dimensions,“ in

order to mask their “parasitic relationship to women.“ (1978, 60) At this level of

generality, Lords and Daly only differ on what fuels the oppressive patriarchal

De

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83
psyche. While Lorde attributes it to xenophobia, Daly believes it is a self-
awareness of inner barrenness or lack, which men develop as a result of being
dependent on the foreground structures of society to define their identities and
life goals. (359-360) Furthermore, both insist that women who run on this
patriarchal fuel are responsible for their contribution to the oppression of other
women. Lorde consistently criticizes women who indulge their internalized fear
of difference, often in the hope that their silence will protect them. The challenge
facing us is not simply the external conditions of our lives, she insists, but “that
piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows
only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.“ (123) Similarly,
Daly's theory of patriarchal oppression includes a thoroughgoing critique of the
ways women have internalized patriarchal voices and who, heeding those
voices, participate in oppressive practices as “Token Torturers.“

Lords and Daly also share the view that even if patriarchy is everywhere,
it does not exhaust social reality. To insist on the possibility of identity formation
“beyond” patriarchal construction is not to deny that we are products of dominant
institutions and ideologies. It is only to deny an insidious form of
phallocentricism. Women who have survived, and even thrived, in the midst of
oppressive regimes defy the role and goal expectations built into various
patriarchal constructions of Woman. Those who have resisted and “escaped“
these constructions are different. Lords and Daly share a theory of radical
sexual difference which challenges the appearance that patriarchy’s foreground

constructions exhaust the realm of possibility. But Daly and Lorde speak of, and

34

to, women who are off the categorical grid of social identities. The existence of
women who are radically “Other,” on this view, is proof that there is, has always
been, more to the social construction of identity than the totalizing discursive
mechanisms deployed by white Western capitalist patriarchs. The efforts, of
both Lords and Daly, to name feminist-identified symbolic and conceptual
resources and processes signifies a shared commitment to re-membering, dis-
covering, and re-creating autonomous feminist agency and liberating social
idenfifies.

Lords and Daly map a path of liberation for women from individual
empowerment to collective feminist action which is in an important sense
“beyond“ patriarchy. Both argue, social change begins with individual
transformations which involve women's efforts to center themselves and
enhance their agency. Lorde believes women are able to find their center --
recognize their deep feelings and use them to shape their thinking -- through
identification with their foremothers whose concrete daily experiences under
patriarchy made them, of necessity, 'world'-builders. Radically “Other“ women,
in different historical periods and different cultural contexts, have constituted and
created “worlds“ in the sense of matrices of social constructs which constitute
fields of meanings and values, materialized in identities, practices and relational
structures.“ Lords and Daly argue, grandmothers and mothers, as well as
sisters, friends and lovers have woven spaces/time contexts out of their daily

lives within which their feelings and actions -- which were scorned, denied, and

 

“ Here I am drawing on Maria Lugones' concept of a “world.“ See Lugones 1987.

85
trivialized in their father's houses -- made sense and found affirmation.
Wherever women have bonded in strength and love there have been “worlds“ in
the making. Women who have moved in these “worlds“ are able to center
themselves by attending to and acting on those feelings, which Lorde argues,
are the condition of women's liberation.

Daly and Lorde agree, sisterhood -- the condition for feminist “world“-
building -- is possible only when self-centering women who find each other and
connect. Lorde writes on this point,

as a Black lesbian feminist, l have a particular feeling, knowledge,
and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard,
played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the
forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before. (59)
Women empowered through trusting their own internal processes, Lorde points
out, are dangerous. Women so empowered, engaged in work, in play, in love,
and in critical dialogue with other women in touch with their own “unnamed,
untamed longings,“ constitute a serious threat to patriarchal life as usual. This is
one of the things experience has taught women who have not only survived, but
thrived: women bonding expands the universe of possibility. In Daly's words,
“the Fire of Sisterhood results from the Sparking of Female Selves who are
finding each other.“ (1978, 370) Patriarchs know, Daly claims, that they have
everything “to fear from the combination of even two or three Sparking Female

Selves, for Sparking Spinsters confirm each other's sense of reality, burning

through [patriarchal] lies.“ (379-380)

86

Both find productive world-building tools in language and myth. If women
are to find each other, we must give our radical ideas shape in language.‘ Both
advocate metaphorical practices of naming. Lorde argues, in our present
historical moment, poetry is the best language for expressing and conveying
women's radical insights because it is a form of expression which combines the
problem-solving rationality of the “european mode“ with the experiential
emotionality of women's “ancient, noneuropean“ modes. (37) In her view, to
understand poetry as fantasy and utopian vision is to obscure its revolutionary
potential. Poetry is, in Lorde's words, “a revelatory distillation of experience,“
which “lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of
what has never been before.“ (37-38) Poetry expresses the possibility of Other
worlds, without which we might never have the courage, Lorde says “to attempt
the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas
disparage.“ (38-39) In Syn/Ecology, Daly suggests along the same lines, that
gynocentric forms of writing “crystallize“ feminist process. “Like crystal balls“ or
“Glowing Globes“ she claims, women's writings allow “us to foretell the future
and to dis-cover the past, for they further the process itself by transforming the
previously unknown into that which we explicitly know.“ (23) Hence, Daly agrees
with Lorde, in the process of calling forth radical world-making action, poetry is

not a luxury.

 

‘ This was the subject of papers presented by Daly, Lorde and others on a panel, at the 1977
Annual Modern Language Association Convention, entitled “The Transformation of Silence into
Language and Action.“ Sinister Wisdom 6 (Summer 1979).

 

 

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Feminist myth-making is an important world-building tool because it
challenges the patriarchal ideology which denies the existence of powerful self-
centered women, feminist-bonding, and simultaneously, provides a source of
insight about histories of woman-identified modes of living. As she read the First
Passage of Gyn/Eco/ogy, Lorde reports in the letter, she “nodded in agreement“
with Daly's theory of myth and mystification. In this passage, Daly argues that
patriarchal myths -- which share the basic pattern of the all-male Christian
symbolic -- function to mystify and deceive women about radical feminist
possibilities represented by female symbolic figures, specifically, the “goddess.“
Myths, according to the patriarchal myth-makers, express “intuitive insights,“
about meaningful human activity which “open up depths of reality and of the self
othenivise closed to us.“ (46) In fact, Daly argues, the “insights“ expressed by
patriarchal myths actually close off depths of reality and of the Self othenivise
opened to women, by “deceiving us into believing that these are the only
doonNays to our depths and that the fathers hold the keys.“ (Ibid.) The Christian
symbolic order, characterized by “processions from and return to god the father,“
requires, the “murder“ or “dismemberment“ of the goddess. Lorde was nodding
in agreement with Daly's claim that the face of the goddess has been obscured
through the complete denial of female mythic presence implicit in the idea that
the only sacred human activity is patriarchal-bonding. The real doorways to our
depths, our Background, insists Daly, is the knowledge expressed in gynocentric
myths which were distorted, reversed and buried in the making patriarchal

myths. According to Daly, and Lorde concurs, “Re-membering the Goddess,“

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involves recognizing the “archetypal messages about our own Prehistory and
about Female-identified power.“ (47)

The metaphor of the “goddess“ is central to the re-construction of female
identity in the work of Lorde and Daly. In the “Open Letter,“ Lorde writes that
Daly's work on the nature and function of the goddess agrees with what she has
discovered in her searches through African myth/legend/religion for the “true
nature of old female power.“ (67) In Daly's work, the “goddess“ stands for “the
deep source of creative integrity in women,“ which enables autonomous female
agency. (111) In Lorde's poetry and fiction, “the Black Goddess,“ or sometimes,
“the poet,“ or "the Black mother,“ is a mythic figure who trusts her own insight
and animates all of her activities with “that internal sense of satisfaction.“ The
“Black Goddess,“ names and symbolizes ancient female-identified power. Lorde
and Daly agree that individual transformation in identity can begin by identifying
one's own possibilities with those which the “goddess“ represents, that is, by
“Re-membering the Goddess“ within ourselves.

In order to illustrate what this “re-membering“ process entails more
concretely it will be useful to consider a passage from Lorde's “biomythography,“
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The passage opens with the question, “to
whom do I owe the woman I have become?“ (Lorde 1982, 4) Lorde's answer is
DeLois, a woman who

lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done,
and all the neighborhood women sucked their teeth as she walked
by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud
stomach moved her down the block while I watched, not caring

whether or not she was a poem. Even though I tied my shoes and
tried to peep under her blouse as she passed by, I never spoke to

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DeLois, because my mother didn't. But I loved her, because she
moved like she felt she was somebody special, like she was
somebody I'd like to know someday. She moved like how I
thought god's mother must have moved, and my mother, once
upon a time, and someday maybe me.

Hot noon threw a ring of sunlight like a halo on the top of
DeLois's stomach, like a spotlight, making me sorry that I was so
flat and could only feel the sun on my head and shoulders. I'd
have to lie down on my back before the sun could shine down like
that on my belly.

I loved DeLois because she was big and Black and special
and seemed to laugh all over. I was scared of DeLois for those
very same reasons. One day I watched DeLois step off the curb of
142nd Street against the light, slow and deliberate. A high yaller
dude in a white Cadillac passed by and leaned out and yelled at
her, “Hurry up, you flat-footed, nappy headed, funny-looking bitch!“
The car almost knocking her down. DeLois kept right on about her
leisurely business and never so much as looked around. (Ibid.)

It was the black goddess apparent in DeLois's size, movements, and unswerving
centeredness to which Lorde believed she owed her becoming. This example
resonates with Daly's claim that the “moving presence of each Self calls forth the
living presence of other journeying/enspiriting Selves.“ (366) The black goddess
remembered in those women, like DeLois, who make a place for themselves in
spite of a world bent on their nonexistence, reveals to others possibilities,
feminist modes of living, which might otherwise not be apparent. DeLois inspired
Lorde to move like she was somebody special, and to laugh, in the face of her
fears and the ever-present threat that she would be run down. It is Lorde's
conviction that not only she, but all women, must attempt to re-member the black
goddess within. It is the nature and function of the Black Goddess to call on us,
and to authorize us, to fight the fears and silences which stand between us and

our freedom. On Lorde's view, women all live with the threat we will be run

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down, presenting each of us with two choices. Obey the rules of the road and
stay out of the way, or, like DeLois, mark your course and move forward
accordingly. It takes the kind of “guts“ one learns from identification with that
which is powerful, female and Black in order to make the latter choice.

Daly also affirms feminist myth making as a liberation strategy.
“Feminists are agents for the Goddess Nemesis,“ claims Daly, “the Divine
Daughter claiming her rights.“ (40, 347) As such feminists recognize that acts of
“Goddess murder“ separate women and that acts of “re-membering the
Goddess“ connect women. Lorde and Daly agree that connection among
women is the condition for feminist autonomy. Their efforts to articulate female-
centered symbolic orders are intended to assist with the creation of contexts, or
worlds, which make sense of the lives of women who refuse to live up to
patriarchal constructions of Woman.

The common ground in the projects of Daly and Lorde suggest it is a
mistake to reduce their views to the opposite poles of modernism and
postmodernism, a mistake which obscures the similarities in their radical feminist
projects. Daly and Lorde simultaneously resist reifications of gender and insist
that something important is lost when feminist conceptions of sexual difference,
i.e. radical female Otherness, is denied. Neither views theoretical narrative as
antithetical to sisterhood. Furthermore, both find the ground for sisterhood in
epistemological practices, rather than essentialist claims about women's nature.
In fact, if either posited a fixed and unchanging female essence, their respective

critiques of women who have chosen loyalty to the fathers would make very little

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sense. While neither would embrace an essentialist theory of sexual difference,
both reject a form of humanism by insisting that sexual difference matters. The
concrete conditions of women's lives, including making and circulating in
women's worlds, have presented a multitude of unique social and political
possibilities and choices. Lords and Daly agree patriarchal constructions have
distorted sexual difference. By making dominant worlds within which “Woman“ is
the waste bin for those parts of themselves which are not strictly rational,
patriarchal agents have waged war on differences associated with emotion and
sensuality. Given this fact, some feminists have moved to affirm the nonrational
in the name of women's liberation. However, this is clearly not the feminist
strategy embraced by Lorde and Daly. Both reject the artificial opposition of the
masculine and the feminine, the rational and the emotional, by refusing to come
down on either side of these dualisms. Their strategy, and I believe it is
characteristic of what is radical in their shared vision, is a third path. They have
chosen the path of DeLois. Radical sexual difference is important, not because
oppression has made it so, but because those living under oppression have it
made it so, and not through any simplistic re-affirmation of the feminine.
Lorde's First Two Criticisms

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries,

true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.

Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries.

To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our

commonality as well as our difference. For then beyond sisterhood

is still racism.
Audre Lorde, “Open Letter to Mary Daly“

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As I read the letter, Lorde makes three related criticisms of (Syn/Ecology.
I discuss the first two in this chapter, and the third, which involves Daly's use of
Lorde's work, in Part III. Lorde's first criticism is that Daly “distorts our
differences“ in her analysis of patriarchal oppression. Lorde is criticizing Daly for
using the “master's tools,“ specifically for relying on the assumption that we must
“either ignore our differences, or view them as causes for separation and
suspicion.“ (112) On Lorde's view, it is not the “very real differences between
us“ which threaten solidarity, but the misnaming and misusing of these
differences “in the service of separation and confusion.“ (115) Second, Lorde
criticizes Daly for “distorting our commonality,“ or “the real connections that exist
between all of us.“ Lorde is concerned with the “connection“ we share in virtue
of identifying with female symbolic figures who break with patriarchal mythology,
e.g. the “Goddess“ or the “Witch.“ When Lorde charges that Daly is “dealing
only out of a patriarchal western european frame of reference“ she is contesting
Daly's racially- and ethnically-neutral representation of a female symbolic
“Background“ which is, particularly, white and Western. As I read the letter,
Lorde is attempting to move Daly in the direction of a conception of feminist-
identification which turns on the recognition of racial and ethnic difference.
Contra the postmodern feminist footnotes cited above, Lorde's challenge to Daly
is not simply theoretical. It is directed against a particular racial and ethnic
discourse she finds in Gyn/Ecology. Borrowing Ruth Frankenberg's concepts, I
argue that Lorde is trying to shift Daly from a “color- and power-evasive“ to a

“race cognizant“ frame of reference. On my reading, Lorde's letter is not a call

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for Daly to abandon the pursuit of radical sexual difference. It is not a call for the
end of radical feminism. Quite the opposite. Lorde is worried about the lack of
“material on non-white female power and symbol in white women's words from a
radical feminist perspective.“ The letter is a call for the growth and development
of radical feminism.

It will be useful to begin with a sketch Lorde's views on socially
constructed differences. The assumption of difference among individuals, as
well as within and among groups, is Lorde's fundamental starting point. She
rejects the humanism which suggests differences are simply mythic constructs
designed to establish dominant social identities and reinforce political
hierarchies. Any approach which understands all significant differences as the
products of dominant discourses would be reductive on her view. The history of
Western thinking has conditioned us, she claims, “to see human differences in
simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down,
superior/inferior.“ (114) But these oppositions, in Lorde's view, obscure and
distort the spectrums of human diversity which have emerged historically around
the world. Distorted constructions of difference captured in oppositional
categories have functioned, in some modern histories of oppression, to collapse
this diversity into criteria which justify the persecution of those who deviate from
what she calls the “mythical norm.“ (116) Hence, she would not deny that some
differences are mythical fabrications constructed through hierarchically opposed
categories in order to create and sustain the norm. However, her point is that

difference is more than a Iinchpin of oppression, even if oppression has involved

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“misusing“ and “misnaming“ difference. (115) For example, some forms of
racism are characterized by the use of stereotypes to claim black-identified
cultural practices are inferior to white-identified cultural practices. On Lorde's
view, the racism lies not in pointing to the difference between the practices, but
in distorting that difference by making it a measure of value. If Lorde was wrong,
that is, if oppression and difference were essentially and constitutively related,
then we would not consider the refusal to recognize some differences another
form of oppression.

Lorde urges women to “extract these distortions from our living at the
same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which
they are imposed.“ (Ibid.) What is the nature of these differences which Lorde
insists are distorted by ageism, racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism? As
I suggested in my reading of Lorde's theory of radical sexual difference, they are
not essentialist differences in the sense of given or static ontological
endowments. However, they are “essential“ because they reflect our existence
and circulation in variously constituted fields of meaning, value, and social
organization, what I have been calling “worlds.“ The differences which Lorde
claims women must recognize, reclaim and define are “world“ differences. On
Lorde's vision, the promise of radical feminist change lies in the affirmation and
creative employment of racial and ethnic world differences among women. (111-
112)

The first criticism in Lorde's letter in need of analysis is that Daly implies

“all women suffer the same oppression,“ which obscures “the many and varied

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tools of patriarchy.“ The problem arises, Lorde says, when “these tools are used
by women without awareness against each other.“ Although Lorde is not explicit
about how Daly implies all women suffer the same oppression, it is safe to
assume she is concerned with the “Sado Ritual Syndrome,“ the seven-point
analytic device Daly fashions to reveal connections among the ritual practices of
Indian Sati, Chinese footbinding, African genital mutilation, European
witchburning, and American gynecology. Consider what Lorde means by “all
women suffer the same oppression.“ The phrase is ambiguous between (i) all
women share a universal experience of oppression, and (ii) all the practices
which constitute women's oppression are the same. A reason for thinking that
Lorde is not criticizing Daly for implying (i) all women experience the same
oppression, is Lorde's expressed concern that the problem with Daly's
implication is that it obscures various “tools of patriarchy.“ If Lorde criticism were
directed against Daly's generalizations about the experience of oppression then
one would expect to hear Lorde represent the problem in terms of obscuring
varieties of psychological or ontological damage, rather than varieties of
patriarchal “tools.“ In fact, Lorde agrees with Daly’s claims about the
psychological consequences for women victimized through ritual reenactments
of “Goddess Murder.”

Lorde is critical of the “Sado Ritual Syndrome“ because it implies (ii) that
the practices which constitute women's oppression are basically the same.
Lorde is concerned that different practices, “various forms and degrees of

patriarchal oppression, some of which we share and some of which we do not,“

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are obscured by Daly's Sado-Ritual Syndrome. (70) What are the different
practices which Lorde is worried Daly has obscured? What are the “tools“
employed under the various “fonns' of patriarchy, which women might
inadvertently use against each other?

“Tools“ might refer to the ritual practices themselves. However, recall that
the problem with obscuring the “tools“ is the risk of women using them, without
awareness, against each other. Since it is unlikely Lorde is worried feminists
might inadvertently engage in practices like footbinding or genital mutilation, the
“tools“ at issue are most probably not these practices. The “tools“ obscured by
the Sado Ritual Syndrome, on Lorde’s view, are discursive assumptions which
have shaped various racist and ethnocentric patriarchal formations. By looking
only at the gynocidal ritual atrocities from the perspective of the Sado Ritual
Syndrome, Gyn/Ecology reveals a one dimensional picture of patriarchy.

Hence, Lorde's concern is not that Daly's analysis misinterprets the ritual
atrocities analyzed in (Syn/Ecology as patriarchal violence. On the contrary, she
agrees with Daly that African genital mutilation is patriarchal violence. Denying
this, on Lorde’s view, would be a case of ethnic difference being distorted in the
service of patriarchal efforts to divert attention from the gynocidal intent of these
practices. She makes this point explicit in an essay on redefining differences, by
claiming against the views of Jomo Kenyatta, that female circumcision is a
“cultural affair,“ that it is a “crime“ against black women. (120) Lorde's criticizes
Daly more for what cannot be seen through the lens of the Sado Ritual

Syndrome as Daly has it focused, than for what Daly has brought clearly into

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focus. Lorde is concerned that there is more to patriarchy than what Daly
reveals in the Sado Ritual Syndrome analysis. For example, in the U.S.,
patriarchal power is manifest in the racialization of subjugated groups, the de-
racialization of dominant groups, and an ideology of “color-blind“ institutions.
Since the Sado Ritual Syndrome is not sensitive to manifestations such as these,
Lorde claims Daly implies women all suffer the same oppression.

Given this reading of Lorde's concern, what is the tool at work which white
women might use, without awareness, against women of color? Here's an
example. The systematic denialof health care to women of color in the U.S. --
which is different than getting health care of a lower quality -- is masked with an
assumption that all women's health care needs are generally the same and can
be assessed through the experiences of white women. If white feminists were to
mobilize a campaign to improve women's health care, based on the assumption
that the issue was quality of service, rather than access to health care, it would
ignore the problem faced by many black women and could eventuate in less
health care resources being allocated to black women. White feminists, without
awareness, would have used the master's “color-blind“ assumption against black
women.

Another dimension of patriarchy which might be obscured by the Sado
Ritual Syndrome analysis, on Lorde's view, is cultural forms which have emerged
from modern histories of violence among societies. For example, the history of
European colonialism in India has had a devastating effect on traditional Indian

cultures. Similarly, the American importation and enslavement of Africans meant

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not only millions of deaths, but also cultural domination in the form of genocide.
One of the discursive assumptions informing these atrocities is the belief that
Western European patriarchal culture represents the global paradigm of human
culture. Any society which fails to meet this standard of culture is not considered
culture. Therefore, destroying it, especially if it is to replace it with “real“ culture,
is not only justifiable, but laudable. Practices of ignoring, distorting and
eliminating cultural differences are integral to the forms patriarchy has historically
taken in the West.

How might women use these tools of cultural imperialism against other
women without awareness? lf white American feminists, like Daly, challenge the
patriarchal assumption that men set the standard for what counts as human on
the basis of sexual difference, without also challenging the assumption that white
Western culture sets the standard for what counts as culture, we inadvertently
use the tools of the dominant culture against our sisters who do not share a
white Western heritage. In my analysis of the second major criticism of Lorde’s
“Open Letter“ I will argue that Lorde found this kind of assumption in Daly’s
representation of the female symbolic of Gyn/Ecology.

On this reading, it becomes evident why Lorde often racializes her
references to patriarchy, e.g. she refers to “white patriarchy.“ However, these
references not a denial that patriarchal oppression is a planetary phenomenon,
but an affirmation that patriarchal oppression is a heterogeneous phenomenon.
If my reading is right, Lorde is not suggesting that what is problematic about the

Sado Ritual Syndrome analysis is the focus on patriarchal violence, nor that it

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constitutes a global narrative. Her critical claim is that the Sado Ritual Syndrome
analysis obscures the ways patriarchal oppression manifests itself intra- and
inter- culturally. This claim is driven by Lorde's basic concern, that is, how to
forge and strengthen connections among women. Lorde believes feminist
analyses without focused attention on distortions and misnamings of racial and
ethnic difference threatens connections between women by heightening the
possibility that women in dominant cultural positions will inadvertently use their
father's tools against other women.

The second major criticism I find in Lorde's letter is that Daly includes only
“white, western european, judeo-christan goddess images“ in Gyn/Ecology. To
highlight the exclusion Lorde asks, “Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and
Mawulisa? Where were the warrior goddesses for the Vodun, the Dohomeian
Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan?“ (67) There are two problems,
according to Lorde, with Daly's exclusion of black female symbolic figures. First,
by excluding black female symbolic figures, Lorde claims, Daly “dismissed
[Lorde’s African] heritage and that of all other noneuropean women,“ which
involves using the patriarchs tools against them. Second, according to Lorde,
the exclusion “denies the real connections that exist between all of us.“ (68)

Consider the first problem. Lorde charges that by excluding nonwhite
goddesses Daly has dismissed Lorde's heritage and the heritages of all other
noneuropean women. Lorde asks Daly in the letter to “be aware of the effect
that this dismissal has upon the community of black women.“ (Ibid.) She

charges that Daly's dismissal of black female heritage “does not differ from the

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specialized devaluations that make Black women prey, for instance to the
murders now happening in [Daly's] own city.“5 (69) This is a strong charge which
requires a careful reading. Notice, she is not saying the exclusion of black
mythic figures is like murdering black women. She is saying that the systematic
devaluation of black women implicit in their exclusion and erasure is a condition
which fosters violence against black women. In this way, Daly’s exclusion and
erasure is like patriarchal exclusions and erasures.

Patriarchal devaluations of what is black and female have taught black
women to fear and deny, or even, not to be able to recognize their own forms of
power. In order to recognize and realize their inner strength and resources, on
Lorde's view, black women need the insight that only their own mythic
background and heritage can provide. ln “Eye to Eye,“ Lorde suggests that to
search for the power within herself she must be willing to move through her
internalized fear and dismantle “America's measurement“ of her through re-
membering her heritage. (146-147) In her research Lorde finds that

Black women have a history of the use and sharing of power, from
the Amazon legions of Dahomey through the Ashanti warrior queen
Yaa Asantewaa and the freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, to the
economically powerful market-women guilds of present West
Africa. We have a tradition of closeness and mutual care and
support, from the all-woman courts of the Queen Mothers of Benin
to the present day Sisterhood of the Good Death, a community of
old women in Brazil who, as escaped slaves, provided escape and

refuge for other enslaved women, and who now care for each
other. (151)

 

‘ In a footnote, Lorde explains the reference, “In the spring of 1979, twelve Black women were
murdered in the Boston area.“

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Lorde's criticism of Gyn/Ecology suggests that dis-covering this heritage is every
bit as essential to the realization of black women's integrity/energy/be-ing as
remembering the Spinsters and Witches in white Western women's heritage is to
their/our becoming. Since African women's heritage, on Lorde's view, is
symbolized by the black goddess who is absent from the pages of Gyn/Ecology,
the mythic “Background” and Journey Daly maps there does not open the door
to black women's depths.

A further consequence of the exclusion is the barrier it erects to black
sisterhood. ln “Eye to Eye“ Lorde argues that black women who cannot love
themselves cannot love their black sisters. (155) In fact, she writes in this essay
about the painful “crucifixions' black women reenact upon each other, “the
avoidance, the cruelty, the judgments“ which separate black women, and she
explicitly links these separations with the situation of being denied black
goddesses and black female symbolic figures. (164-5) Remembering the black
goddess, on Lorde's view, addresses the “need for Black women to confront and
wade through the racist constructs underlying [their] deprivation of each other.“
(164) By excluding black goddesses in Gyn/Ecology Daly contributes nothing to
black women's struggles to overcome the forces that separate them from each
other.

The consequences of the exclusion must be understood in connection
with the inclusion of analyses in Gyn/Ecology which represent noneuropean
women as “victims and preyers-upon each other.“ (67) The problem, in Lorde's

view, is not that Daly analyzes the practices of Indian Sati, Chinese footbinding,

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and African genital mutilation as crimes against women. The problem stems
from presenting these analyses as if they told the whole story about the lives of
Indian, Chinese and African women. In contrast, Daly presents her analyses of
the Western practices of witchburning and gynecology in connection with female
symbolic figures reclaimed from white Western European traditions. By
including Artemis, Metis, and Nemesis, as well as, Hags, Crones, Spinsters and
Witches, Daly presents a complex, if still incomplete, story about the lives of
European and American white women. Lorde's criticisms specifically concern
Daly's dismissal of the goddesses and warriors from her African tradition in
connection with Daly's analysis of African women as victims and “Token
Torturers,“ which includes, for example, a vivid description of six African women
holding down and violently mutilating a young girl with the broken neck of a
bottle. (163) In presenting this image and failing to include black goddesses
which reflect the “power and strength and nurturance found in the female
bonding of African women,“ Daly has “distorted and trivialized“ Lorde's
archetypal experience in a manner not unlike the racist patriarchal devaluation
which make black women prey to murder. The lack of a black female mythic
presence in (Syn/Ecology, on Lorde's view, reveals Daly's underlying assumption
that “the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory
and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite
women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of
female victimization.“ (Lorde 1984, 69) By assuming the heritage and myth of

European women functions as the symbolic source of power for all women, Daly

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leaves women of color with only two possibilities for finding themselves in
Gyn/Ecology. assimilated in a white Western symbolic frame of reference or
broken by the totalizing experience of patriarchal violence. When Lorde
comments in the letter, “I am used to having my archetypal experience distorted
and trivialized, but it is terribly painful to feel it being done by a woman whose
knowledge so much touches my own,“ she is pointing out that Daly has hurt her
with one of the master's tools in Gyn/Ecology. (68)

Now consider the second problem Lorde identities with excluding black
goddesses, that is, that Daly has denied the “real connections“ among all
women. Recall that Daly and Lorde agree that female symbolic figures, and the
legends which surround them, are sources of archetypal information about
female power we need for re-membering our autonomous agency and building
worlds to make our lives possible. They agree that re-membering the “goddess
within“ enables us to forge “real connections“ with other women. However,
Lorde's criticism regarding Daly’s distortion of the “real connections“ among
women clearly goes beyond the idea that we all need our goddesses, to the
claim that we all need the black goddess. On my reading, Lorde's point is that
only through identification with the black goddess can white women recognize
and resist the internalized hate and fear we are taught to associate with
blackness. lnsisting that white women identify with the Black Goddess is Lorde's
strategy for helping white women to unleam the lessons through which they/we
have learned only to identify with white men. Only through identification with the

Black Goddess will white women be able to realize a self-conscious and critical

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perspective on their/our own race and ethnicity, and to see the urgent need to
stand with their sisters of color against racism and imperialism. By excluding
nonwhite, nonwestern goddesses from Gyn/Ecology, Lorde is concerned that
Daly has foreclosed the possibility of a sisterhood which is cognizant of, and
grounded upon, racial and ethnic difference. In the absence of black female
symbolic figures, white women may not be able to face those differences upon
which, Lorde insists, our connections rest.

Before moving on it will be instructive to turn again to Zami this time for
insight into Lorde's claim that in distorting her heritage, Daly distorted the real
connection among all women. After acknowledging her symbolic debt to DeLois,
Lorde acknowledges another debt to,

the pale girl who ran up to my car in a Staten Island midnight with
only a nightgown and bare feet, screaming and crying, “Lady
please help me oh please take me to the hospital, lady...“ Her
voice was a mixture of overripe peaches and doorchimes; she was
the age of my daughter, running along the woody curves of Van
Duzer Street. I stopped the car quickly, and leaned over to open
the door. It was high summer. “Yes, yes, I’ll try to help you, I
said. “Get in.“ And when she saw my face in the streetlamp her
own collapsed into terror.

“Oh no!” she wailed. “Not you!“ then whirled around and started to
run again.

What could she have seen in my Black face that was worth holding
on to such horror? Wasting me in the gulf between who I was and
her vision of me. Left with no hope. I drove on.

In the rear-view mirror I saw the substance of her nightmare catch
up with her at the corner - leather jacket and boots, male and
white.

I drove on, knowing that she would probably die stupid. (1982, 5)

This passage vividly illustrates what consequences she believes will follow for

white women who cannot find or face “the Black Goddess“ within. Without the

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establishment of our connections on the basis of our common source of
strength, white women's prospects for survival are greatly reduced.

On Lorde's view, women's survival and freedom depend on our
interdependence, our connections. The prospect of this interdependence is
threatening, especially for black women, explains Lorde, unless each white
woman who shares the dream of female autonomy is able to “reach down into
that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of
any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears.“ (1984, 113) If those of
us who are white cannot confront these fears and learn to identify our power with
what is female and black, then Lorde insists, our “mutual (nondominant)
differences“ cannot be recognized and utilized as tools for change. Without
these tools, “only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and
allowable.“ (Ibid.) Radical feminism must find its foundation, according to Lorde,
in the recognition of racial and cultural difference.

Lorde's argument fits together like this. Daly distorts the differences
among women, which are the result of being exposed to the different patriarchal
practices, by not giving focus to the racial and cultural assumptions informing her
analyses. In addition, by assimilating the power and Background of all women to
that of white Western European women she distorts the commonalties among
women, i.e. the ability to act and connect with other women under patriarchal
oppression through identification with radically Other female symbolic symbols.
Both distortions rest on assumptions Daly makes from a white Western

European standpoint. Hard as it may be to believe for those who have studied

AQUA‘ ._. ..-.

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Daly's work, Lorde is charging that Gyn/Ecology, in certain respects, expresses
identification with her white, Western European fathers. Daly whole-heartedly
agrees the work of dis-covering, re-claiming, and naming cannot be
accomplished within the father's frameworks. But the difference between the
term Daly uses most, “fathers,“ and the one Lorde uses most, “masters,“ is
telling. In Lorde's view, Daly attempts to reject the tools employed in the father's
mythologies and practices, but in the process she (inadvertently) uses the
Master's ethnocentric, racist tools. In the effort to avoid the Master's tools, Lorde
believes it is essential to sort by race and culture, the various assumptions in the
conceptual tool boxes of patriarchy.

On my reading, Lorde's challenge to Daly's frame of reference is an
attempt to shift Daly's thinking about racial and cultural differences among
women. I want to conclude by re-framing Lorde’s challenge using some
conceptual resources developed by Ruth Frankenberg. The central concept in
Frankenberg’s book, White Women, Race Matters (1993), is “race discourse.“
By “discourse“ Frankenberg means, “historically constituted bodies of ideas
providing conceptual frameworks for individuals, made material in the design and
creation of institutions and shaping daily practices, interpersonal interactions,
and social relations.“ (265) A “race discourse“ is such a body of ideas about the
nature and meaning of race, racial differences, and racism. A “race discourse,“
in other words, is like a “tool box,“ i.e. a set of framework principles or

assumptions about race, racial difference, and racism which guide or govern

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practices. A “race discourse" is a constitutive part of a “world“ as I have been
using the term.

Frankenberg argues three “race discourses“ have emerged in different
moments of U.S. history, each of which frames race differently.“ The first
discourse on race Frankenberg calls “essentialist“ because it emphasizes “real“
or “biological“ differences between the races. On the basis of these essential
differences, this discourse provides arguments for white racial superiority, e.g.
the “scientific“ biology- and evolution-based theories which were used to justify
antimiscegenation laws which were on the books in the U.S. until 1967. (72-73)
In Lorde's lexicon, the essentialist discourse distorts racial differences. The
second discourse, which emerged in the 19208, is popularly referred to as
“color-blindness,“ but which Frankenberg re-names “color- and power-
evasiveness.“ This discourse, premised on the notion that we are all the same
under the skin, provides fuel for the assimilationist policies of the government,
and fashions a tool for blaming the victim of assimilation for any failure to realize
the ideal of American democracy. In Lorde's lexicon, the color- and power-
evasive discourse denies racial difference.

The third discourse, which Frankenberg names, “race cognizance,“
emerged in the late 1960s with Black Power, La Raza, and the American Indian

movements. Like the essentialist discourse, this discourse emphasizes racial

 

‘ Frankenberg develops her idea of a “race discourse“ from Michael Omi and Howard Winant's
analysis. (Omi and Winant,1986) She explains about her analysis that it “diverges from theirs in
a range of ways, including the names I have given to specific periods or tendencies, my
emphasis on the continued salience of 'essentialist racism,‘ and my focus on daily life rather than
on intellectual movements, political processes, and social movements.“ (Frankenberg 1993,
268).

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difference. But unlike the essentialist discourse the terms for understanding
racial difference are determined by the experiences of people of color.
Frankenberg explains that “where difference within the terms of essentialist
racism alleges the inferiority of people of color, in the third moment difference
signals autonomy of culture, values, aesthetic standards, and so on.“7 (14) And
unlike the essentialist discourse, the race cognizance discourse affirms
difference in historical, political, social terms rather than biological terms. (157)

Borrowing these concepts, my point is this. Lorde was trying to effect a
shift in the race discourse Daly was operating out of, from “color- and power-
evasion“ to “race cognizance.“ This reading makes sense of Lorde’s challenge
in historical terms. At the time Daly wrote (Syn/Ecology the race-cognizant
discourses were just emerging in the U.S. Frankenberg traced the emergence
of race-cognizant views among white feminists she interviewed to their
awareness of the very immediate critique of feminist racism coming from U.S.
women of color, who were critiquing white feminist racism. (167) Lorde’s “Open
Letter to Mary Daly” was part of the critique which enabled white feminists to
move beyond a “color-evasive” frame of reference. In this historical context is
becomes clearer that Lorde was trying to push Daly toward a race cognizant
radical feminism. On my reading, Lorde believed that realizing the vision of
global sisterhood depended on Daly’s willingness to make such a shift in

Gyn/Ecology.

 

7 Here makes a connection between race-cognizance and feminism, pointing out second wave
feminism has some of its roots in the antiracist and cultural nationalist movements which gave
shape to “race cognizance.“

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The Context of Daly's Decision Not to Respond in Kind
I began Part II, by pointing out that Daly did not respond “in kind“ to
Lorde's letter. However, in the “New Intergalactic Introduction“ (1990) to
(Syn/Ecology Daly acknowledges Lorde's letter and describes a brief meeting
she had with Lorde in which they discussed the book and the letter.“ (xxx)
Regarding Lorde's explicit request for a response to the “Open Letter,“ Daly
explains, “it continues to be my judgment that public response in kind would not
be a fruitful direction. In my view, Gyn/Ecology is itself an 'Open Book.“ (xxx-
xxxi) In this section I read the social and historical context in search of reasons
for Daly's decision not to respond in kind.° Daly's new introduction provides
perspective on the moment fifteen years earlier when she began work on
Gyn/Ecology. Regarding 1975, she says,
my world split open, in the most Positively Revolting ways
imaginable. That year marked my entry into a New Realm of
Qualitative Leaping through galaxies of mind space. [...] It was a
Startling, Stunning Time, consisting of Moment after Moment of
Spinning Integrity. I believe that this book could not have been
written earlier, because before that Time there was no context
which would have allowed for the possibility of its becoming. But
that year was marked by a convergence of many events which
hurled me into utterly New dimensions of thinking, living, loving,
writing, and be-ing. (xi)

I focus on those dimensions of the context which I find reflected in Daly's

perspective, including the perspectives of black nationalism, the new left, the

 

' According to Lorde, she wrote the letter on May 6, 1979 and published it four months later.
Daly and Lorde met at the Simone de Beauvoir Conference in New York on September 29, 1979.
’ In this chapter I search for reasons within the social and historical moment. In the next part, I
search for a textual explanation. However, these analyses may not be able to provide a
complete answer to the question at hand. A complete answer may require insight into the
complex web of interpersonal relationships and political engagements of Daly's life, insight I
cannot provide.

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nascent second wave women's movement, and the voices of radical black
feminists. First, I point out the influence of these various perspectives on Daly's
thinking by briefly discussing several of the theses which constituted what she
calls the “Qualitative Leap“ she made in writing (Syn/Ecology. Second, I examine
directly the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power within the discourse of black
liberation during the late sixties and early seventies; the response by white men
of the New Left in the face of challenges from radical feminists; and the voices of
radical black feminists in the early seventies. Finally, I say what I think Daly
heard in Lorde's letter within the context I have reconstructed as one way of
explaining why Daly did not respond in kind.
What Daly's "Qualitative Leap" Reveals About the Context
In the first section of the new introduction, entitled “The Watershed Year,“

Daly reflects on the exhilaration of reading a radical feminist paper which she
had prepared for the Second International Symposium on Belief sponsored by
Cardinal Konig of Vienna entitled, “The Qualitative Leap Beyond Patriarchal
Religion.“ (Daly, 1975) The “Qualitative Leap“ refers to what Daly saw as an
unavoidable choice facing women concerned with philosophical/theological
questions.

One either tries to avoid “acceptable“ deviance (“normal' female

idiocy) by becoming accepted as a male-identified professional, or

else one tries to make the qualitative leap toward self-acceptable

deviance as ludic cerebrator, questioner of everything, madwoman,

and witch. (ibid.)

Although the choice between assimilation and ostracism is not an easy one, Daly

makes it clear where she stands. Like Matilda Josleyn Gage and Virginia Woolf

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in their times, Daly made the choice in the mid-seventies to think from the
perspective of the Witch, the female Outsider, the “Ludic Cerebrator.“‘° The
larger theoretical framework within which this choice takes shape is presented in
the symposium paper which includes twenty-three theses. Among the theses
which constitute the “Qualitative Leap“ are the following.
1. There exists a planetary sexual caste system, essentially the
same in Saudi Arabia and in New York, different only in degree.
(20)
5. All of the major world religions function to legitimate patriarchy.
This is true also of the popular cults such as the Krishna movement
and the Jesus Freaks. (ibid.)
8. A significant and growing cognitive minority of women, radical
feminists, are breaking out from under the sacred shelter of
patriarchal religious myths. (20)
13. The ethos of Judeo-Christian culture is dominated by The Most
Unholy Trinity: Rape, Genocide, and War. It is rapism which
spawns racism. It is gynocide which spawns genocide, for sexism
(rapism) is fundamental socialization to objectify “the other.“ (21)
22. Entrance into radical feminist consciousness involves
recognition that all male-dominated “revolutions,“ which do not
reject the universally oppressive reality which is patriarchy, are only
reforms. (22)
In Part III, I explore the development of these theses in Gyn/Ecology. The
question I want to raise now about each point is, what does it say about the
context Daly as saw it? The reason I think these theses will provide an
indication of Daly's perspective at the time is that this paper was probably the
last writing she did before she began writing Gyn/Ecology. The paper contains,

in addition to the theses, segments which are obviously earlier versions of the

 

‘° According to the Wickedary (1987), “Ludic Cerebration,“ defined by Daly in 1975, is “thinking
out of the experience of being: the free play of intuition in New Space, giving rise to thinking that
is vigorous, informed, multidimensional, independent, creative, tough.“ (143)

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first introduction to Gyn/Ecology, as well as the Preludes to the First and Second
Passages of Gyn/Ecology. A brief consideration of these five theses will provide
a window to the world as it appeared to Daly in 1975.

The first thesis suggests Daly was responding to a world, or a discourse,
within which the existence of a “planetary sexual caste system“ was explicitly
denied. In fact, Daly was in the midst of several discourses denying this claim.
In the wake of emerging post-modem critiques, it was quickly becoming
fashionable among Western scholars in the human sciences and mythology to
reject universalistic narratives in favor of positions which rested on
acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural practices. Daly was in close
proximity to the voice of the Western scholar in her position as associate
professor of theology at Boston College. It was also common among the leaders
of the emergent political movements like Black Power, La Raza and the
American Indian Movement in the United States, as well as other anti-imperialist
nationalist movements around the world, to deny that the women in these
movements had anything in common with the women outside of them. One
explanation for why leaders of these racial and national liberation movements
took this position, offered by Partha Chatterjee (1989), is that the women of the
group seemed to provide a ground for the establishment of a unique cultural
identity, the signifier of a fundamentally different world, a ground which it was
necessary for launching claims for cultural autonomy or nationhood. In the

context of the project of establishing a particular cultural identity, the idea that

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the women of the group seeking the identity were the same as women all over
the world probably seemed to constitute a threat to the heart of the project.

The fifth thesis makes the claim that the “planetary sexual caste system,“
or patriarchy, is legitimated by “all of the major world religions.“ This thesis
suggests that Daly was looking out at a world of women whose religious beliefs
were obscuring their ability to see the possibilities of living self-determined lives.
A footnote in Gyn/Ecology provides a vivid illustration of what she had in mind.

An article in an Indian paper, the Sunday Standard, May 11, 1975,
described the wretched existence of the 7,000 widows of the town
of Brindaban, “the living specters whose life has been eroded by
another's death.“ These poverty-stricken women with shaved
heads and with a single white cloth draped over their bare bodies
are forced every morning to chant praise (“Hare Rama, Hare
Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare, Hare Krishna“ ad nauseam) for
four hours in order to get a small bowl of rice. In mid-afternoon
they must chant four more hours in order to receive the price of a
glass of tea. A not unusual case is that of a sixty-nine-year-old
widow who was married at the age of nine and widowed at eleven,
and has been waiting ever since for the “day of deliverance.“ (114)
When Daly said “all the world religions“ she meant Bubbhism, Hinduism, Islam,
Judaism, and Christianity, as well as “secular derivatives“ including Fruedianism,
Jungianism, Marxism, and Maoism. What she saw in the world were various
“sects subsumed under [patriarchy's] vast umbrella/canopy.“ (39) This was the
perspective she brought to the increasing numbers of women in the seventies
moving into the work force, especially the male-dominated academic fields who

were making the choice to become male-identified. In other words, she was

aware of the vast numbers of women from India to the U.S. in the late twentieth

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century living by belief systems which were obscuring their ability to see the
possibilities of living self-determined lives.

Thesis eight identifies Daly's affinity with the emergent radical feminist
movement of the late sixties and early seventies. From Daly's perspective, it
was Radical Feminists who were cracking the code of planetary patriarchy by
unmasking the deceptive legitimating forces of patriarchy, and exorcising male-
identified patterns of thought from their consciousness. The radical feminist
whose work Daly was probably most familiar with at the time was Robin Morgan.
Morgan's poetry is included in five of the ten sets of epigraphs which introduce
Daly's chapters in Gyn/Ecology. And, if specific references to Morgan's political
writings are absent in Gyn/Ecology, the spirit and direction of those writings is
not. Morgan edited the first major anthology of the women's liberation
movement, the 600 page tour de force, Sisterhood is Powerful (1970).

This was a time when women educators across the disciplines were
facing discrimination, denials of tenure, and firings, especially those radical
feminists like Daly who were making the qualitative leap toward self-acceptable
deviance as ludic cerebrators, questioners of everything, madwomen, and
witches. Daly describes the denial of her application for promotion to the rank of
full professor at Boston College which culminated in a nation wide protest by
feminists against harassment and discrimination in Higher Education. According
to Daly, Robin Morgan opened the Forum on Women in Higher Education held in

protest of Boston College's denial of promotion on the grounds that she had

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“made no significant contribution to the field,“ with the words, “Sisters, we meet
on bloody Jesuit ground.“ (xiv)

Thesis thirteen makes a claim about the relations among different
systems of oppression what was prevalent in the seventies in the U.S. which
employs metaphor of a tree root. Recall from the opening paragraph in Part I
what Morgan said she meant by “radical“ feminist. It meant to her “that sexism
is the root oppression, the one which, until and unless we uproot it, will continue
to put forth the branches of racism, class hatred, ageism, competition, ecological
disaster, and economic exploitation.“ (Morgan, 1977, 9) What does this thinking
about the relations among the major systems of oppression say about the
context Daly as saw it? The use of the tree root metaphor was not particular to
radical feminists. It was pervasive throughout the spectrum of political
movements of the seventies. In response to New Leftists and Black Nationalists
who were insisting that capitalism or racism, or some combination was the root
of oppression and the cause of sexism, Radical Feminists were insisting that
patriarchy was at the root of problems of racism and economic exploitation.

Thesis twenty-two points to the discourse whirling around the question of
who is “radical“ and who is “reformist“ in the universal struggle against
oppression. The context was constructed in a way that made “radical“ politics
those belonging to the movement which identified the oppression at root of all
oppressions. Hence, in 1975, the various autonomous movements were locked

into battles over whose movement was the truly radical one. With Daly's

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awareness of these contextual dimensions in mind, I now begin a more focused
survey of some of the perspectives which constituted this context.
From Civil Rights to Black Nationalism

Black nationalism evolved in the 20th century through the visionary work
of W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Harold Cruise among others. Black
nationalist politics in the 1960s, informed by this legacy, were shaped in part, by
the lessons of the civil rights movement." In order to describe the moment in
which Daly began writing Gyn/Ecologyfrom the perspective of the black
nationalism which took shape in the United States in the late sixties and early
seventies I trace significant developments in the work of Stokely Carmichael.

After the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955, black activism in the U.S. took its
shape in the civil rights movement. In the late fifties and early sixties civil rights
groups, notably SNCC, CORE, and SCLC, worked against segregationist
policies using a variety of tactics, such as, economic boycotts, voter registration
campaigns, sit-ins and mass demonstrations.12 Martin Luther King symbolized
the vision of political equality and full participation in U.S. society pursued
through actions such as these designed to change unjust laws and social
attitudes. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail“ (1963) King argued that

Americans have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws.

 

" Black Nationalism was/is not a monolithic ideology. It has taken many different shapes around
the world during the last several hundred years. Even in the United States there are a number of
different Black Nationalist traditions. They varied on a number of issues, not least of which was
the role of women in a nationalist movement. A good reference on the different traditions is
Raymond L. Hall's Black Separatism in the United States, (New Hampshire: University Press of
New England, 1978).

‘2 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian
Leadership Conference.

"a“. fl..- .

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An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group

compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on

itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law

is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is

willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. (King, 1963)
The force behind this integrationist vision was the claim that U.S. society had not
lived up to the promise of its democratic ideals. This contradiction was evident in
the history of U.S. laws and programs conceived and justified on the basis of
“real” or “biological” racial difference. Against this history of essentialist racism,
the idea that people are all the same under the skin, made sense. The civil
rights demand for a “color blind" society was an effort to force whites to act in
accordance with “equality and justice for all.”

By the mid-1960s black activism began to take a new shape in the Black
Power movement, which was among other things, a stepping stone to
nationalism. The ideological evolution of Stokely Carmichael illustrates this
transformation. Carmichael, one of the founders of SNCC, was an early
advocate of the integrationist approach. However, he claims, civil rights activism
taught him that the problems associated with being black in the U.S. could not be
solved by integration and political equality. In The Black Power Revolt (1968)
Carmichael argues that integration fails to confront “the problem of color,“

As a goal, it has been based on complete acceptance of the fact
that in order to have a decent house or education, blacks must
move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white
school. This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that
“white” is automatically better and “black” is by definition inferior.

This is why integration is subterfuge for the maintenance of white
supremacy. (67)

 

‘3 In his dissenting opinion in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1892) Supreme Court Justice
Marshall Harlan argued, “Our Constitution is color-blind.“ For a discussion of the “The Color-
Blind Principle“ see Blacks and Social Justice, Bernard R. Boxill, (Rowman & Allanheld, 1984).

. ”12'“

 

 

 

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The problem was not simply that whites had excluded blacks from social,
political, and economic spheres. Rather, it was that U.S. society was organized
by and reflected the legacy of white power. “The reality is that this nation, from
top to bottom, is racist,“ claimed Carmichael. (70) The interests which govern the
economic, social and political spheres are white interests. The values, beliefs,
traditions, and institutions which constitute U.S. society are white. On this view
of the problem, struggles for equality which do not attack the white power
structure maintain white supremacy by presupposing and implicitly affirming
white assumptions and standards for participation. Because white power is “built
in,“ realizing the vision of social integration meant, for Blacks, assimilation in a
white world. King's position, making “sameness“ legal, on Carmichael's view
would only serve exacerbate the problem since the standard for sameness was
white.

Effective resistance to white power, Carmichael insisted, would require
“Black Power,“ by which he meant in 1968, the combination of political self-
determination, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural autonomy. At first,
Carmichael worked to realize these ideals in the U.S. context. He helped
organize The Black Panther Party to speak for the needs of urban blacks in the
U.S. “from a position of strength.“ (62) He argued, from this position of political
power that “the masses could make or participate in making the decisions which
govern their destinies, and thus create basic change in their day-to-day lives.“

(ibid.) Poverty would be addressed by black politicians acting in the interests of

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the black community. Carmichael argued, for example, “if a black man is elected
tax assessor, he can collect and channel funds for the building of better roads
and schools serving black people -- thus advancing the move from political
power into the economic arena.“ (64)

Cultural autonomy, he argued, was necessary to combat the
psychological damage done to blacks in a society built on the distortion and
denial of black experience. He illustrates this damage reflecting on his boyhood
trips to the Saturday movies.

White Tarzan used to beat up the black natives. I would sit there
yelling, 'Kill the beasts, kill the savages, kill 'eml' l was saying, Kill
me. (68)
This internalized self-hatred, Carmichael argued, was the historical legacy of
slavery in the U.S. To be born black in the U.S. today was, he insisted, to begin
life in doubt of one’s worth as a human being. (1967, 29) Carmichael and
Hamilton wrote Black Power in order to “ask the right questions, to encourage a
new consciousness and to suggest new forms which express it.” (vii) The
consciousness they sought to awaken among the black people was a race
consciousness of black values, beliefs, traditions, and possibilities. The
emphasis here is on racial difference, understood in social and historical, rather
than essentialist, terms. In order to develop this liberating consciousness,
Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can do that.
Throughout this country, vast segments of the black communities
are beginning to recognize the need to assert their own definitions,

to reclaim their history, and their culture; to create their own sense
of community and togetherness. (37)

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They argued that redefinition could be accomplished through “the use of words.“
For example, black folks should reject the term “Negro“ because it defines
blacks, in white terms, as "lazy, apathetic, dumb, good timers, shiftless, etc.“ (37)
On the other hand, they suggest, “African-American,“ “Afro-American“ are terms
which blacks can use to self-define as “energetic, determined, intelligent,
beautiful and peace-loving.“ (ibid.) Redefinition, they pointed out, requires a
“common bond,“ a sense of community such as that which is evoked when
“people refer to each other as brother -- soul-brother, soul-sister.“ (38) In
addition, they suggested that challenging white-identified self-understandings
necessarily involved learning black history, “a history not taught in the standard
textbooks of this country.“ White supremacy has maintained itself on the lie that
blacks “had no culture, no manifest heritage, before they landed on the slave
auction blocks in this country.“ (ibid.) Race consciousness among blacks, they
insisted, required a collective identity built on a common language, a sense of
community, and their shared history. In their words, “the time is long overdue for
the black community to redefine itself, set forth new values and goals, and
organize around them.” (32)

In 1971, reflecting on the lessons of political work within the U.S. context,
Carmichael explains that he and other black activists soon learned, “our solution
cannot be found within America, even though those of us who live in the United
States may remain there physically." (1971, 177) As Carmichael’s thinking
developed he developed an Afrocentric perspective by linking the plight of blacks

in the U.S. with Africans on the African continent. This link was explicitly

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historical. It is a mistake, he argued, to view slavery as the beginning of black
history in the U.S. and colonialism as the beginning of black history on the
continent. He claimed, on behalf of blacks around the world, “Our starting point
in history must precede the period of colonialism and slavery; must precede the
Arabic and Europeans invasions.“ (222) He points out that all Africans were
connected in virtue of their land and civilizations prior to slavery and colonization.
The slaves were Africans who were taken from their land and the colonized were
Africans who had their land taken from them. (223) As a result of their losses,

Africans today, irrespective of geographical location, have a

common enemy and face common problems. We are the victims

of imperialism, racism, and we are a landless people. (222)
In Black Power, Carmichael and Hamiliton began to think in terms of Frantz
Fanon's analysis in Wretched of the Earth. “Black Power means that black
people see themselves as part of a new force, sometimes called the 'Third
World,” they asserted, because institutional racism is just another form of
colonialism. ( 1967, xi, 5) They tried to make this case on political, economic and
social grounds.

They argued, blacks in the U.S. are subject to white rule, directly or
indirectly, in manners similar to colonial subjects. Despite the insistence of some
that the U.S. political system is pluralistic, Carmichael and Hamilton pointed out,
“white groups tend to view their interests in a particularly united, solidified way
when confronted with blacks making demands which are seen as threatening to

vested interests.“ (7) Whites rule blacks directly when, for example, the federal

government claims that there is a limit to what it can do to stop white abuse of

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black civil rights workers. (9) Whites rule indirectly when, for example, the
participation of black politicians turns on their loyalty to the White Establishment.
(12) Finally, they argue, the manipulation of political boundaries and the
devising of restrictive electoral systems indicate there is a form of political

colonialism operating in the United States. (15)

The colonial status of blacks is also evident in the organization of
economic life in the United States. Carmichael and Hamilton insist, following
Fanon in Hegelian terms, the colonies have existed for the sole purpose of
enriching the colonizer, a process which has always resulted in the economic
dependence of the colonized. (16-17) A similar process is at work in the United
States, they argue, for example, when “exploiters come into the ghetto from
outside, bleed it dry, and leave it economically dependent on the larger society.
(ibid.) Socially, the colonial relationship is perpetuated in the U.S. through
representations of blacks designed to justify the denial of basic human
entitlements, housing, medical services and education. (23) Degradation and
dehumanization are the consequences of social colonialism. Carmichael and
Hamilton assert, for example, that “White America's School of Slavery and
Segregation, like the School of Colonialism, has taught the subject to hate

himself and to deny his own humanity.“ (31)

At this point Carmichael and Hamilton propose that the solution lies first,
in the development of a liberated black consciousness, and second, in what they

call “political modernization,“ by which they mean challenging the traditional

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values and institutions of American society, working for new political and
economic organizational structures, and broadening the base of political
participation. (39) This analysis, Carmichael argues, which had been achieved
through “years of hard work, organizing, and learning“ ultimately led him and
others by 1970 to face the reality that “there is no way we can operate as an
independent island surrounded by a hostile white community's police and military
forces.“ (1971, 177) He began to urge blacks in the United States to recognize
“the fact that we are an African people, that we must be about building a nation.
(180)

In 1971 he claimed, “Pan-Africanism“ the highest political expression of
Black Power and began to formulate an ideology which mapped black liberation
along nationalist lines. Quoting Malcom X, Carmichael declared, “even though
we might remain in America physically while fighting for the benefits that the
Constitution guarantees us, we must return to Africa philosophically and
culturally, and develop a working unity in the framework of Pan-Africanism.”
(179) On the basis of this Pan-Africanist analysis he comes to the conclusion
that American blacks must abandon their identities as “black Americans“ or
“Afro-Americans“ and to embrace their “African“ identities. (200-1)

Stokely Carmichael's Pan-Africanism shares with other black nationalisms
the demand for organizations uniformly composed of the victims of racial

oppression. (Omi, Michael and Howard Winant, 1986, 38) The civil rights

 

“ In the early seventies Carmichael was expelled from SNCC and quit the Black Panther Party.
He changed his name to Kwami Toure, and moved to Conakry, Guinea where he became a
citizen of Guinea and lived with his wife, South African musician Miriam MaKeba (sp?).

 

124

movement had been the rainbow coalition of the twentieth century made up of
social and political groups, labor unions, churches, and the Left. To a large
degree SNCC's early successes were due to the efforts of SNCC activists to
recruit white students into the movement. A case in point was the Mississippi
Voter Registration Project of 1963 led by Bob Moses.‘5 However, as black
activism evolved coalitionism gave way to separatism. Part of this evolution
involved coming to consciousness about the need to redress psychological
racism. Carmichael argued that blacks must organize blacks because, “only
black people can convey the revolutionary idea that black people are able to do
things for themselves.“ (1968, 68) On this analysis, white allies organizing in the
black community, doing things for blacks, actually undermine black liberation.

In “The Myths of Coalition“ Carmichael and Hamilton still admit the need
for coalitions, but raise questions about the politics of coalition work from the
perspective of Black Power. “Coalitions with whom? On what terms? And for
what objectives?“ they asked. (1967, 59) Because what is good for White
America is not necessarily what is good for Black America; because those who
enter coalitions are not similarly situated with regard to political and economic
security; and, because coalitions cannot be sustained on a “moral, friendly,
sentimental basis,“ they argue, blacks should not enter coalitions unconditionally.
(60) First, they point out, most liberal reformers who advocate coalitions are

militant about civil rights, but reject “militant Negro organizations because they

 

‘5 The story of this project is the subject of the 1994 award-winning documentary, Freedom On
My Mind.

125

find them 'too race-conscious.“ (Quoting James Q. Wilson, 66) So coalition
work which is in black interests must have as its goal, not reform of the system,
but a rejection of “Anglo-conformity“ and a radical reorganization of society.
Second, Carmichael and Hamilton reveal that historically blacks who have
worked in coalition with whites have been treated as “a political football, to be
tossed and kicked around at the convenience of others whose position was more
secure.“ (70) Hence, they insist that viable coalitions require that all parties can
operate from their own “power base.“ Finally, they argue, coalitions formed
solely on “good will“ cannot weather conflicts of interest. The limits of “good will“
become clear when the issue is “more job competition, 'lower property values,‘ or
their 'daughter marrying a Negro." (77) Therefore, they suggest, all coalitions
should be based on a mutually beneficial goal, which in turn, is based on the
self-interest of each part to the coalition. Finally, after years of failed efforts to
unite with whites in coalitions, Carmichael abandoned his faith in coalitions
altogether and embraced separatism. Recounting the history of interracial
coalitions which have worked to the disadvantage of blacks, he concludes, the
first priority of a revolutionary movement must be to build its power base so that
it is strong enough to achieve its own ends. Hence, he insisted, “we depend
upon no one but ourselves.“ (1971, 196)

On the question of women's role in the Black Power movement,
Carmichael had very little to say. Perhaps this was due to his infamous claim
that “the only position for women in SNCC is prone.“ (Evans, 1979, 87)

According to Sara Evans, Carmichael made this comment, at the end of a day

126

relaxing with activists attending a SNCC staff retreat in Waveland, Mississippi,
1964, as a rebuttal to the suggestion by women in SNCC that sexist leadership
might be hampering the organization's effectiveness. The responses by angry
women may have led Carmichael to the conscious decision to refrain from
commenting on the role of women in the movement. There are two notable
exceptions. Black Power (1967), which contains no discussion of sexism or
feminism, is dedicated to,

our mothers, Mrs. Mabel Carmichael (affectionately known as May

Charles) and Mrs. Viola White, and to all the black mothers who

have struggled through the centuries so that this generation could

fight for black power.
I think it is useful to read this dedication in light of the Moynihan (196?) report
which attributed the plight of blacks in the United States to the “tangle of
pathology“ engendered by the black matriarchate. Interestingly, bell hooks
points out, “the very same Moynihan report that promoted the idea that black
men had been 'unmanned' by black women urged black men to enter military
service.“ (hooks, 1981, 104) From the point of view of this insight, the Black
Power dedication simultaneously debunks the myth of the black matriarchate by
naming black mothers the progenitors of a revolutionary generation, and the
myth of the emasculated black man by implying that the authors are
revolutionary fighters. Hence, on my reading, the dedication says something
important about Carmichael's view on the role of women in the Black Liberation

movement. Namely, that one of the revered functions of women is to have and

raise children who will grow up to fight for the race.

127

The other exception to Carmichael's silence on the role of women in the
movement is his practice of referring to the African continent as a mother. For
example, he encourages blacks in the United States to embrace an African
identity because, “The African's power base is his homeland -- Mother Africa.“
(1971, 224-5) Since this symbolic practice of reference was common among
nationalists struggling against different imperialist forces in throughout the
twentieth century, it is useful to consider it light of the role it played within those
movements. For help in understanding this role consider Mrinalini Sinha's
(1994) explanation of how an essentialist representation of Indian womanhood
aided in the establishment of a national identity in the struggle for independence
from England.

The central contradiction confronting Indian nationalism was to
modernize indigenous society to keep pace with the West while at
the same time to avow a unique and distinctive cultural identity for
the nation, on the basis of which the political claim to nationhood
could be made. The nationalists addressed this contradiction by
elaborating the spiritual and material domains of culture as
distinctive and autonomous spheres. Indian nationalism,
Chatterjee suggests, located “its own subjectivity in the spiritual
domain of culture, where it considered itself superior to the West
and hence undominated and sovereign.“ Furthermore, Chatterjee
suggests that this system of dichotomies was related to the socially
prescribed roles of men and women. Women, as the preservers or
guardians of tradition or “culture,“ became the embodiments of that
inner spirituality which lay at the core of national identity. Having
located the essence of national identity in the spiritual sphere, with
women as the embodiments of this spirituality, nationalists were
now free to “modernize“ or make any concessions to the West in
the material world. (67)

I want to suggest that something like this is at work in Carmichael's Pan-

Africanism. By locating the essence of the nationalist identity in the traditionally

128
feminine domain of reproduction, which he distinguished from the productive
domain where “modernization“ was necessary, Carmichael advanced a
patriarchal form of nationalism. The projection of a symbolic African Mother
whose functions are circumscribed within the reproductive realm of the home
suggests that Carmichael had in mind a revolutionary “script“ for black women
designed to obscure their ability to see the possibilities of living self-determined
lives. Notice that in this sense, Carrnicheal's African Mother constitutes what
Lorde would call a distortion of one of the real differences between black and
white women. As we shall see, black feminists were quick to point out that
forging an identity on the basis of the construction of a feminized Other,
especially one so popular among Western patriarchs, had oppressive
consequences for the women who were supposed to share in the black

nationalist identity.”

New Left Meets Radical Feminism

The Civil Rights movement gave birth not only Black Power, but also to
the “New Left.“ On some accounts the “Old Left“ -- made up of Communists,
labor and religious activists, and pacifists -- had burned-out resisting the
McCarthyism of the 19503.17 The children of the Old Left, along with other

middle class youth of that generation, who joined the sit-ins, voter registration

 

“ In Part III, I point out how Daly's attempt to forge a gynocentric identity on the basis of the
constmction of racializedlfeminine Others, e.g. the Indian widow, also so popular among western
Patriarchs, had oppressive consequences for women who were supposed to share in a global
feminist identity.

'7 This is the perspective of Maurice lsserman's If I Had a Hammer...: The Death of the Old Left
and Birth of the New Left, (Basic Books, 1987).

129

drives, and freedom rides in the early 1960s, revitalized and reinvented the Left
in the form of the anti-war movement, student movement, and counter-cultural
movement of the late 19605. The growth and development of the “New Left“
was hastened by the shift in black activism away from coalitions toward
separatist organizations. At first, this shift left many young white radicals without
a cause.18

In an effort to respond to the idea that each oppressed group should
organize itself, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) produced a powerful
indictment of American social and political values, and set out to put their theory
into practice through their Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP),
student protests, and later in resistance to the Vietnam war.“ The early
theoretical positions of SDS, heavily influenced by the moral and political force of
the Civil Rights movement, stressed the values of equality, brotherhood, and
participatory democracy.20 In addition, SDS theorists proclaimed the
inseparability of ends and means. As sixties scholar, Todd Gitlin, put it, “SDS
had a passion to make life whole: to bring political commitment into private life.“
(Gitlin, 1987, 365)

In Personal Politics (1980) Sara Evans underscores the important
contributions which the New Left made toward the emergence of the Women's

Liberation movement. First, in conjunction with the Civil Rights movement, it

 

" My account of this history is indebted to Sara Evans's Personal Politics: The Roots of
Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & The New Left, (New York: Vintage, 1980).
‘° SDS was the youth organization of the League for Industrial Democracy. See Personal
Politics, chapter 5.

2° The SDS manifesto, the “Port Huron Statement,“ was written by Tom Hayden, (New York:
Students for a Democratic Society, 1962).

130
provided a training ground for women activists who were taken seriously, some
for the first time in their lives. Second, it promoted a substantive critique of
oppression and a vision of a different future. Through Civil Rights and New Left
activism, Evans argues, many women “found the inner strength and self-respect
to explore the meaning of equality and an ideology that beckoned them to do
so.“ (23) Third, it provided the opportunity for women to build informal friendship
networks locally and across the country. And, finally, it presented a concrete
threatto the self-respect of women in the movement in the form of the hypocrisy
of the men in the movement too extensive to ignore. (218-22)

In contradiction with the leftist commitment to the process of participatory
democracy, men on the left maintained gender role expectations consistent with
those promoted in the larger mainstream culture. Leftist men saw themselves as
the intellectual muscle behind the movement and relegated women to the less
prestigious tasks, commonly referred to as the “shitwork.“ According to Robin
Morgan, women provided the New Left with its “labor force of secretaries and
cooks and speechwriters and Panther- Breakfast-program fixers (at 4:00 AM.)
and mimeograph-machine churners.“ (Morgan, 209) The competitive and
aggressive intellectual mode that dominated the New Left, according to Evans,
excluded women from full participation and leadership roles and, at the same
time, made it almost impossible for women to protest their exclusion. Women
were pressured by male “heavies“ to accept the predominately masculine norms.
As Marlene Dixon put it,

women had learned from 1964 to 1968 that to fight for or even
sympathize with Women's Liberation was to pay a terrible price:

131

what little credit a woman might have earned in one of the Left

organizations was wiped out in a storm of contempt and abuse.

(Quoted in Burris, 325)
As the New Left grew (tenfold between 1965 and 1967), and the Vietnam war
escalated, concern with equality, participation and process gave way to “a kind
of macho stridency and militarist fantasy.“ (Evans, 200) Women were further
marginalized once the definitive revolutionary act became risking a jail sentence
for burning one's draft card. A popular anti-war slogan valorizing this
marginalization announced, “Girls Say Yes to Guys Who Say No!“ (179)

Like many outside the movement, women in the movement suffered
sexual harassment and exploitation, often lauded under the banner of “sexual
revolution.“ Marge Piercy's writings suggest that in the early days, among some
movement men there was some interest, more and less sincere, in exploring
egalitarian heterosexual relationships. (Piercy, 1969, 422) However, for the
most part, she claimed, movement men, “fall into two categories: those who
make it clear that what they are doing is fucking, and those who provide a flurry
of apparently personal interest, which fades mighty quick.“ (431) Todd Gitlin's
recollections confirm Piercy's account,

[ijn the rush toward phantasmagorical revolution, women became

not simply a medium of exchange, consolidating the male bond,

but rewards for male prowess and balm for male insecurity. The

fantasy of equality on the barricades shattered against the reality of

the coffeepot and the mimeograph machine. (Gitlin, 1987, 372-3)
Among the "revolutionary“ leaders, Piercy charges, “fucking a staff into

existence“ was only the extreme form of what passed for common practice in

many places. (Piercy, 430) What kept radical women from challenging their own

132
exploitation in a movement which claimed to be for “human liberation,“ was a
concern for the “larger justice,“ which women accepted, Piercy argued, because
women are taught from childhood to “immolate' themselves to the male and the
family. (436-7) Women of the New Left had, like other women, internalized the
patriarchal script of the sacrificial mother.

For several years women in the New Left worked on the premise that their
male comrades could be made to see the contradiction between their political
beliefs and practices, and upon discovering it, would reform themselves. In an
effort to push this process along SDS women brought a resolution to the floor at
the 1967 SDS convention calling for recognition that the liberation of women, like
that of any “colonized“ group, must be part of the larger fight for human freedom;
demanding women's full participation in the movement; and pledging to support
their brothers in their efforts to resolve their contradictions. (Evans, 190-1) After
the resolution was read, the meeting hall erupted with men yelling, arguing,
cursing, and objecting all over the floor. In the end, part of the resolution
passed, Evans reports, and

[i]t all duly appeared in New Left Notes alongside a cartoon of a girl
-- with earrings, polkadot minidress, and matching visible panties ~-
holding a sign: “We Want Our Rights and We Want Them Now.“
(192)
Hence, she concludes, “SDS had blown its last chance.“ (ibid.) The road to an
autonomous women's movement was paved.

Women's farewell to the New Left was symbolized, on Morgan's view, by

the women's 1970 seizure of Flat, one of the major “underground“ newspapers of

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the left and counter-culture.21 In the first women's issue Morgan published
“Good-bye to All That“ (1970), which featured a detailed list of misogynist crimes
committed by all of the important male leftist leaders and a demystification of
their rhetoric. (Morgan, 1978,122-30) In this open letter she says good-bye to
the male Flat staff who had published articles on “pussy power“ and “clit
militancy;“ good-bye to Charles Manson, Abbie Hoffman, and John Sinclair;
good-bye to “the illusion of strength when you run hand in hand with your
oppressors;“ and to “the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you
anything but gonorrhea.“ (124) “Good-bye“ was widely reprinted and discussed,
much to the dismay of those named. In response to this letter, Morgan reports,
she received death threats from her “revolutionary“ brothers. After Rat was
seized, Morgan claims, the New Left was never the same again. What she and
others were finally coming to terms with, she writes, was, “the Awful Truth: that it
was the politics of the Left, not solely the men who mouthed them, which were
male supremacist.“ (118)

The New Left in 1967, writes Evans, was “increasingly fragmented.“
(Evan, 195) Gitlin is more candid in his comments about 1967 through 1971. He
claims, the “tough-talking men of steel, committed to their revolutionary mirage,
were losing their grip on reality.“ (Gitlin, 373) In reality, he claims, their inflated
rhetoric was no match for the National Guard, the Draft Board, the CIA, and the

other coercive forces of the State. It was an agonizing time for leftist men who

 

2' Evans dates women's departure to a meeting of women in Chicago in the aftermath of the
1967 National Conference for New Politics (NCNP). The women at this meeting wrote a
manifesto declaring that women should organize their own movement. (196-199)

134

still had not grasped the fact that “the male-run movement was moving nothing
but itself.“ (ibid.) Leftist women, on the other hand, who had already grasped
this fact, were on their way to their own revolution through the creation of an
autonomous women's movement. Since women had been “the cement of the
male-run movement,“ Gitlin argues, “their 'desertion' into their own circles
completed the dissolution of the old boys' clan.“ (Gitlin, 374) Resentment on the
part of the men was manifest in scapegoating and guilt-tripping feminists for the
“directionless and dying“ left. (Morgan, 1977, 209) It was also manifest in
hostility like that exemplified at the 1969 rally organized by the antiwar National
Mobilization Committee to protest the inauguration of Richard Nixon. Marilyn
Salzman Webb, a veteran of the New Left and newly involved member of New
York Radical Feminists took the stand in front of thousands of demonstrators.
She began to speak in clear and certain terms about the oppression of women.
Gitlin describes what followed,
pandemonium broke out in the crowd below her. She plunged on,
denouncing a system that views people as “objects and property“ --
and a cheer went up. She heard shouts: “Take her off the stage
and fuck her!“ “Take her down a dark alley!“ “Take it offl“ (Gitlin,
After she imam), Shulamith Firestone took the microphone, and demanded
“Let's start talking about where you live, baby,“ in a frontal attack on the
hypocrisy of “revolutionary“ men, who claimed to stand for making life whole by
bringing political commitment into private life. (lbid., Also, Evans, 224.)

Organizers, concerned that a riot was in the making, hurried the women off

stage. This event was only one in a series of attacks by leftists men on

135

feminists; others included breaking up meetings, bomb threats and vicious
name-calling.22

Borrowing a phrase from the left, Barbara Burris suggested, “A Specter is
Haunting the Left -- The Specter of Feminism.“ (Koedt, et. al., 1973, 327) In the
face of the specter of feminism many leftist men retreated to the patriarchal
haven of dismissive ridicule and misogynist hostility. However, as the New Left's
focus shifted in the early seventies from anti-war activities to anti-imperialist
activities, their response to feminism became more strategic. Open hostility
gave way to attempts to “re-capture“ women's energy and spirit in a “renewed“
movement. A case in point is a carefully worded 1975 New American Movement
(NAM) statement of objectives.23 (Judis, 1975) The statement includes the claim
that socialist analysis “subsumes“ other movements, including women's
liberation, which arose among newly proletarianized workers. It proclaims, at the
same time, that NAM's work is “not incompatible with the existence of
autonomous women's and third-world organizations,“ advancing the vision of a
respectful coalition of autonomous movements. NAM's explicit goal, to “develop
the potential for socialist consciousness“ that exists in other movements in order
to unite the socialist movement appears to be in tension with the goal of
autonomy as it was articulated by leaders in the liberation movements of blacks

and women. In the “Fourth World Manifesto“ Burris offers as a scathing reply to

 

2' Examples of these sorts of attacks are documented throughout the feminist literature on this
period. An incomplete list of accusations directed against feminists by leftist men, which I
composed in the process of researching this period includes calling feminists: a lower form of life,
divisive, bourgeois, selfish, dumb chicks, reformist, reactionary, frivolous, and castrating bitches.
” The New American Movement (NAM) was founded in 1971 and claimed to be the socialist
descendant of SDS.

136

efforts like NAM's charging that they exploited feminism as an “organizing tool.“
(In Koedt, 324) She characterizes such efforts as, “trying to get a finger in the
Women's Liberation pie.“ (ibid.)

The most effective leftist response -- to women's departure from the New
Left -- was the slanderous accusation that radical feminists where just “white,
middle-class, women.“ The label might not have stuck if it had not been echoed
by black male revolutionaries concerned that “their“ women might follow suit,
and by the mainstream media which was working full time to distort feminism in a
multitude of fiendish ways. (Combahee River Collective, 1981) “White“ and
“middle-class“ were adjectives meant to describe the noun, the thing, “woman.“
According to Burris, the order of terms was intended to imply that women's
positions in society are determined only by race and class. According to the
dominant political analyses among leftists at this time, sex was nota significant
social determinant of one's position. In fact, the nature of leftist men's sexual
perceptions of women suggests to me that their political roots were planted firmly
in the patriarchal discourse of essentialist sexual difference. Unlike their fathers
in the Old Left, who had wrestled with the “Woman Question,“ many men of the
New Left had not even heard of it. Because McCarthyism had so thoroughly
devastated the Old Left, Evans argues, ideological continuity between the old
and the new waves of leftist politics was lacking. (Evans, 118-120) From the
narrow perspective of the New Left, the situation of women hardly constituted
oppression. In support of this position, men of the New Left would point to black

women who prioritized the struggle against racism, and Vietnamese women who

137

prioritized the struggle against capitalist imperialism. In fact, most New Left men
claimed any discussion of women's “oppression“ was peripheral or a deliberate
effort to sabotage “the“ revolution. It was these politics founded on the idea that
capitalism, perhaps in relation with racism, is the fundamental form of
oppression, which denies the very existence of patriarchy which Robin Morgan
found “inherently male supremacist.“

In 1970, Robin Morgan began searching for, and helping to create, the
connective tissue among women, the “organic“ solidarity Beauvoir had thought
impossible, the ground of sisterhood. She began, “O language, thou precise
Richter scale of attitudinal earthquakes!“ to say “we,“ rather than “they“ when
referring to women. (1977, 5) She began to organize women who had previously
been, “angels of mercy for so many other causes.“ (102) She and other New
York Radical Women organized the first major action of the second wave
Women's Movement, a protest against the 1968 Miss America Pageant in
Atlantic City. (62) Morgan recounts that this event was chosen because it was “a
perfect combination of American values - racism, militarism, capitalism - all
packaged in one 'ideal' symbol, a woman.“ (64)

Soon after the Pageant Action, Morgan helped create WITCH, a group
founded on the idea of identifying with witches because “any woman who was
intelligent, articulate, nonconformist, aggressive, or sexually liberated was
usually burned at the stake.“ (69) The WITCHes were dedicated to direct action

which mixed zany humor with militant politics. Their audacious tactics

138

incorporated history and theater with confrontation and disorderly conduct. For
example,
On the true Underground's Holiest Day of the Year, All Hallow's
Eve (known to mortals and Woolworth's as Halloween), at the
stroke of High Noon, a Coven of WITCH (Women's International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) emerged from the Underground
Gates of the IRT at Wall Street to pit their ancient magic against
the evil powers of the Financial District -- the center of the
Imperialist Phallic Society, the enemy of all witches, gypsies,
guerrillas, and grooves. (75)
Dressed as Shamans, Faerie Queens, Matriarchal Old Sorceresses, and
Guerrilla Witches the coven danced right through the Federal Reserve Treasury
Bank and the New York Stock Exchange, led by a High Priestess bearing a
papier-méché head of a pig on a golden platter, casting spells on corporate
stockholders and singing (to the tune of “Tisket-a-Tasket“) “Wall Street, Wall
Street, Crookedest Street of All Street / Foreign Exchange / Student Exchange /
Wife Exchange / Stock Exchange / Trick or Treat / Up Against the Wall!“ (ibid.)
In the process of resisting the Stock Exchange guards, who were about to phone
for help, Morgan reports, “the line went mysteriously dead.“ (76) Following this
report she comments, “Dig it: these are guerrilla witches.“ (ibid.) The idea
spread and soon there were covens forming across the country hexing
everything from the Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden to the United Fruit
Company (for oppressing South American peasants and North American
secretaries) to the unsuspecting Mrs. Pat Nixon. (72-3)

The remarkable thing about Robin Morgan's political work was that she

had such a clear sense of where the movement should be going at a time when

139

there was very little feminist theory for guidance. Some of WITCH's strategies,
e.g. the “guerrilla“ and theatrical tactics, were influenced by politicos and proto-
anarchists on the left. (72) However, the left cannot be credited with the mythic
and historic dimensions of the groups' actions, not to mention the flair. Morgan
and others were taking the connection between 20th century feminists and 15th
century witches to the streets. In 1970, eight years prior to the publication of
Gyn/Ecology, she wrote,

We are the myths. We are the Amazons, the Furies, the witches.

We have never not been here, this exact sliver of time, this precise

place. There is something utterly familiar about us. We have been

ourselves before. (142)
In Gyn/Ecology Daly credits Morgan for inspiring and encouraging women to
identify as witches. Daly writes, “many women have understood this identity of
the Witch within, the Self who is the target of the fathers' attacks and the center
of original movement.“ (Daly, 1978, 221) Radical Feminists of the second wave
virtually founded the Women's Liberation movement on re-membering and re-
inventing female symbolic figures who broke with the male-identified scripts of
the fathers, revolutionary ones included.

There was at least one script the early second wave radical feminist did
not break with. I am referring to the “radical“ script which claimed that systems
of oppression are related as the roots of the tree are related to the branches.
This “root“ thinking, can be traced back in the Western tradition at least to Karl

Marx's distinction between the base and the superstructure. According to Marx,

the “engine“ of historical change is in the “base,“ that is, in the economic

140

relations which constitute the most fundamental dimension of the social structure
in a given historical moment. On this view, all the other dimensions of social life,
including law, morality, and religion as well as the politics of race and sex, in any
given epoch are rooted in the mode of production characteristic of that epoch.
Hence, the Marxist answer to the question regarding the oppression of women
was that it manifests itself as a superstructural formation determined by the
prevalent mode of production. So, for example, under capitalism, women are
oppressed at the most basic level by their economic class, if there women
experience sexism it is due to their class position. This is the assumption behind
the socialist analysis which sees feminism as a movement which arose among
newly proletarianized workers, and which seeks to “develop the potential for
socialist consciousness“ that exists in the women's liberation movement in order
to unite the socialist movement.
This same pattern of “root“ thinking is apparent among radical feminists,
like Robin Morgan, in the early seventies. Recall my opening line in Part I,
Today in the United States, Radical Feminist theory is commonly
associated with the theses that patriarchy, a socially constructed
sex-class or castelike system perpetuated through ideologies of
male supremacy, is the root and model form of oppression; and
that women's liberation will be achieved through a revolutionary
feminist struggle to overthrow the system which begins with the
reclamation and revaluation of women's experience. (1)
Careful consideration of Morgans' view and the seemingly disparate views of the
men in the New Left and the Black Liberation movement reveals a connection in

their ways of thinking about the relations among systems of oppression. Both

the radical feminists and revolutionary men were arguing that there was one

141

system at the base or root of the others which acted as a causal determinant in
the workings of the other systems of oppression which were said to spring from
it. The men of the New Left insisted feminism was a bourgeois movement.

Black Nationalist men insisted that feminism was a racist movement. Radical
feminists insisted, in reaction, “sexism is the root oppression, the one which, until
and unless we uproot it, will continue to put forth the branches of racism, class
hatred, ageism, competition, ecological disaster, and economic exploitation.“
(Morgan, 1977, 9)

It was from this radical feminist perspective that Burris challenged the
accuracy of the label “white, middle-class, women“ by pointing out that, in fact, it
is sex, rather than race or class, which determines women's primary “caste“
position in society. For example, she argued, if race was a primary determinant
of one's social position, then all whites would share the same privileges and
exercise the same powers. In fact, since white men exclude white women from
the white power structure, she reasoned, “whiteness does not overcome the
caste position of being a woman in this society.“ (330) Any “incidental
advantages“ which a white woman accrues in virtue of being white or middle-
class “come to her mainly in her affiliation with a dominant white male,“ and are
“meaningless in terms of women's true caste position as a sex.“ (ibid.) On this
radical feminist analysis, the label is only an effective weapon against feminists
who have failed to identify their “true caste position as women.“ (331)

In support of their claim that sex was the primary social determinant

radical feminists made cross-cultural arguments. Burris argued, for example,

142

that women around the world shared the repression of their female cultures
within their national, ethnic or racial cultures. Drawing support from “third world“
women, Algerian women in particular, who resisted their subordinate status
within their national liberation movements, she criticized nationalist revolutionary
analysis which viewed women's oppression as a byproduct of colonialism. For
example, she quotes Algerian women in order to “show that a nationalist, anti-
imperialist revolution does not free women because the dominant male culture is
identified as the national culture, and male supremacy is never attacked.“ (351)
The objective of her cross-cultural analyses is to make the case that sex is the
primary social determinant.

It was in these analyses that Radical Feminism found the basis for
solidarity among women. This way of thinking about the relations of systems of
oppression led Burris to argue, since “the Female Liberation Movement must
cut across all (male-imposed) class, race, and national lines, any false
identification with privileges that are really male (such as whiteness or class,
etc.) will be fatal to our Movement.“ (332) It was in this tradition that Daly
argued, “false inclusion“ is a tactic employed by men to keep women of different
ethnic, national, class, and religious affiliation from discovering that women are
the Enemy men seek to kill. (Daly, 1978, 365) These Radical Feminist theorists
shared the logic which moved them from the belief that sex was a primary social
determinant, through cross-cultural arguments for that belief, to the conclusion
that women's solidarity must be grounded in a woman-identified politic which

condemned any identifications on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or class.

143

These early Radical Feminists did not see, from the perspective of the
logic premised on the metaphor of a “root“ form of oppression, the connection
between their views and those of their “brothers.“ They made their arguments
for the “radical“ claim in reaction to leftist men who were attempting to
undermine and co-opt the emerging autonomous women's movement. In
response to the leftist claim that only class and/or race, but not sex, were the
primary determinants of social position, Radical Feminists made the defensive
counter-claim that sex was a more fundamental determinant of social position
than were race or class. In response to the leftist claim that sexism was
peripheral or superstructural, Radical Feminists argued race and class were
byproducts of patriarchy. In response to leftists who held up African-American
and Third World women in support of their position, Radical Feminists held up
other African-American and Third World women in support of their position. And
in response to leftist's who fought for solidarity only against imperialist or racist
domination, radical feminists worked for only against patriarchal domination.
This is the same game.

There is evidence that some Radical Feminists were leery of the game
and tried to avoid it. For example, Morgan attempts to distinguish her argument
that sexism is more fundamental than other forms of oppression from the
comparisons of human suffering which were characteristic of what she calls,
“more-oppressed-than-thou“ politics popular among leftists. In addition, the
choice of the 1968 Miss America Pageant because it was “a perfect combination

of American values - racism, militarism, capitalism - all packaged in one 'ideal'

144

symbol, a woman,“ is evidence that radical feminist activists grasped the
importance of understanding, at a certain level, that oppression and privilege are
lived in ways that are not captured by the metaphor of the root. Still, this limited
level of understanding and critique of leftist politics raises the question, why did
Radical Feminists play? It is important to keep in mind that many of the early
Radical Feminists had matured politically in the New Left. Barbara Burris had
worked in the Civil Rights Movement, the peace movement, and SDS. Robin
Morgan had written for Flat and been active in the anti-war and anti-imperialist
arms of the New Left. Shulamith Firestone was involved with NCNP. Anne
Koedt, one of the editors of the anthology Radical Feminism, had been an SDS
activist. With the notable exception of Mary Daly most of the early radical
feminists had learned what it meant to be “radical,“ how to frame and defend
their positions, and how to attack those positions which conflicted with their own,
from their involvement with the male-dominated New Left, a few from
involvements with anti-imperialist nationalist liberation struggles. Their
participation in the “radical“ discourse obscured the possibility of a gynocentric
perspective which self-consciously and critically sought out patterns revealed by
the intersections among patriarchy, racism, economic exploitation, colonialism,

and imperialism.

Black Feminism
If it is not already obvious, most of the radical feminists who, I have been

claiming, launched the autonomous U.S. Women's Liberation movement from

145

the critique of the New Left, were white women. There was some truth in the
claim that radical feminists were a bunch of white women. The fact that there
were not a lot of black women among those calling themselves “Radical
Feminists“ was not because white women were more woman-identified than
black women, nor was it because feminism was a white woman's thing. In large
part, it was the historical legacy of relations between black and white women
from slavery to segregation to the liberation movements in the sixties. From the
perspective of Cynthia Washington, director of the Mississippi Freedom Project
in 1964, black and white women “started from different ends of the spectrum.“
(Washington, 23840) She explains that most black women had been forced by
circumstance to be independent and, therefore, in their movement work they
welcomed support. Many white women, on the other hand, sought
independence in their movement work because they had been historically forced
into dependence on men. As a result black and white women made different
choices in the late 19605 and early 1970s. However, Washington recalls, not all
black women made the same choices about how they would relate to the
movement.

[S]ome black women were “producing children for the black

nation,“ while others began to see themselves as oppressed by

black men. [...] To me, it was not a matter of whether male/female

oppression existed but one of priorities. I thought it more important

to deal with the folks and the system which oppressed both black

women and black men. (239)

Faced with two autonomous movements, male-dominated Black Liberation and

white-dominated Women's Liberation, both of which were making cases for

146

liberation on the basis of “root“ thinking, many black women at the time, like
Washingtion, were forced to prioritize different dimensions of their life
experience. Even though there was no Black Feminist movement in the early
seventies, there were black feminists speaking out about sexism, racism, and
capitalist exploitation against of black women. Washington reports black women
spoke out against sexist male leadership. In particular, she recalls her own
response to Stokely Carmichael's notorious comment that the only position for
women in SNCC was prone. According to Washington, she and another black
project director, Muriel Tillinghast, who were there at the time, “were not
pleased.“ (Washington, 239) They knew that their positions in the movement
was proof that what he said wasn't true. Furthermore, despite the sexism of
black men, there was also the long tradition of black women and men struggling
side by side for the liberation of the race which held the promise that the
contemporary Black Liberation movement would grow in this tradition.24 Hence,
most black women, like Washington, forced to choose, chose to work within the
Black Liberation movement rather than the Women's Liberation movement.

In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought
(1995), editor Beverly Guy-Sheftall brings together a collection work which spans
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter Three, entitled “Civil Rights and
Women's Liberation: Racial/Sexual Politics in the Angry Decades,“ includes
political theory by Francis Beale, Mary Ann Weathers, Linda La Rue, Angela

Davis and Michele Wallace, among others. A concern that all these women give

 

2‘ bell hooks has written eloquently about this history in a number of her books.

147

voice to, and around which the differences in their views can be seen, is the
myth of the black matriarch. White men, most notably, Patrick Moynihan, argued
that the black matriarch was the root cause of the oppression of the black race.
But it was not only white men that made this case. Michele Wallace describes
how she heard it as an attack on her in 1968,
l was told of the awful ways in which black women, me included,
had tried to destroy the black man's masculinity; how we had
castrated him; worked when he didn't work; made money when he
made none; spent our nights and days in church praying to a jive
white boy named Jesus while he collapsed into alcoholism, drug
addiction, and various forms of despair; how we'd always been too
loud and domineering, too outspoken. (In Guy-Sheftall, 221)
In my representation below of the voices of black feminists I was trying to hear
the ways in which their thinking about the myth of the black matriarch was
influenced by, and refused, the “root“ thinking prevalent in the liberation
movements of the day.

According to Guy-Sheftall, Francis Beale's essay “Double Jeopardy,“ first
published in Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), became the most
anthologized essay in the early years of women's liberation publications. In her
introduction to the essay Guy-Sheftall points out that Beale's essay,

addressed the double burden of race and gender that black women
confronted; dealt with issues of reproductive freedom for black
women in a sanguine manner; articulated early on the necessity for
the white women's liberation movement to be anti-imperialist and
antiracist, a refrain that was repeated by many feminist women of
color throughout the 1970s and 19803; and provided a

revolutionary vision of a 'new world' free of all oppressions.
including capitalism. (145)

148

Beale opens the essay with a statement which indicates the hold that “root“
thinking had on her thought about the relation between the systems of capitalism
and white supremacy. She claims, “The system of capitalism (and its afterbirth -
- racism) under which we all live has attempted by many devious ways and
means to destroy the humanity of all people, and particularly the humanity of
black people.“ (146) Thinking of capitalism as the source of the destruction and
racism as its “afterbirth“ indicates not only “root“ thinking but also Beale's effort
to incorporate both class and race analyses in her thinking.
On the model of bourgeois white womanhood she claims,
A woman who stays home caring for children and the house often
leads an extremely sterile existence. She must lead her entire life
as a satellite to her mate. He goes out into society and brings back
a little piece of the world for her. His interests and his
understanding of the world become her own and she cannot
develop herself as an individual having been reduced to only a
biological function. This kind of woman leads a parasitic existence
that can aptly be described as legalized prostitution. (147)
Against this white-identified ideal of womanhood, Beale stands with black women
who have been “browbeaten with this white image.“ (ibid.) Her critique emerges
from the reality of the “degrading and dehumanizing jobs“ that were relegated to
black women which made their realization of the white ideal impossible. There is
no common ground on her view in the experiences of black and white women.
On the more prominent leadership role of black men in the black liberation
struggle, Beale criticizes black men who she hears espousing the myth of the

black matriarch, arguing that “they have been castrated by society but that black

women somehow escaped this persecution and even contributed to this

149

emasculation.“ (148) She follows this criticism with the claim, “the black woman
in America can justly be described as a “slave of a slave.“ While she admits that
black men have been emasculated, lynched, and brutalized, she adamantly
denies that black women have played any part but “scapegoats“ in these
atrocities. Black men, she says, who “are exerting their 'manhood' by telling
black women to step back into a domestic, submissive role are assuming a
counterrevolutionary position.“(ibid.) However, she insists, at the same time,
that
black women are not resentful of the rise to power of black men.
We welcome it. We see in it the eventual liberation of all black
people from this corrupt system of capitalism. Nevertheless, this
does not mean that you have to negate one for the other. This kind
of thinking is a product of miseducation; that it's either X or Y. It is
fallacious reasoning that in order for the black man to be strong,
the black woman has to be weak. (ibid.)
Here, in the same breath, she depends on and criticizes the logic of “root“
thinking. She depends on it to unite black men and women against racism
rooted in capitalism, and criticizes it to unite black men and women against
sexism. On the basis of this position, Beale criticizes black women “who project
in an intellectual manner how great and rewarding this [weak] role will be and
who feel that the most important thing that they can contribute to the black nation
is children.“ (149) On her view, by embracing “a bourgeois white model,“ they
are undermining their own revolutionary interests as black women.
It is important to note that while Beale prioritizes her commitment to black

nationalism, her critiques of both black and white womanhood are clearly

informed by a radical feminist perspective. However, on the subject of the

150
relationship of black women's struggles to the white women's liberation
movement she claims,
While there are certain comparisons that one can make, simply
because we both live under the same exploitative system, there
are certain differences, some of which are quite basic. [...] Any
white group that does not have an anti-imperialist and antiracist
ideology has absolutely nothing in common with the black woman's
struggle. In fact, some groups come to the incorrect conclusion
that their oppression is due simply to male chauvinism. They
therefore have an extremely antimale tone to their dissertations.
Black people are engaged in a life-and-death struggle and the main
emphasis of black women must be to combat capitalist, racist
exploitation of black people. While it is true that male chauvinism
has become institutionalized in American society, one must always
look for the main enemy -- the fundamental cause of the female
condition. (153)
In the end, she grounds her commitment to prioritizing the black struggle against
capitalist, racist exploitation, in the same logic which she condemns as
“fallacious“ which requires either X or Y. In this case, she reasons, either “male
chauvinism“ or racist capitalism is the “most fundamental cause of the female
condition.“

Mary Ann Weathers's essay, “An Argument for Black Women's Liberation
as a Revolutionary Force," was included in the chapter on “Radical Feminism“ in
the anthology Voices from the Women's Liberation (1970) edited by Leslie
Tanner. ( 157) The premise of Tanner's book, identified by Guy-Sheftall as a
“major tenet of 'second-wave' white feminism in the 19703,“ was that “all women
are 'sisters,‘ despite class differences, because of their common experiences of

oppression.“ (ibid.) Weathers opened her essay by offering the statement,

“Nobody can fight your battles for you; you have to do it yourself,“ as the basis

151
for the case for black women's liberation. (158) She criticized black women who
are “expounding all their energies in 'liberating' black men,“ who talk about
“giving black men their manhood -- or allowing them to get it,“ or who “chew the
fat about standing behind our men.“ (ibid.) On behalf of black women's liberation
she proclaims,

We do not have to look at ourselves as someone's personal sex
objects, maids, baby sitters, domestics, and the like in exchange
for a man's attention. Men hold this power, along with that of the
breadwinner, over our heads for these services, and that's all it is
servitude. In return we torture him, and fill him with insecurities
about his manhood, and literally force him to “cat“ and “mess
around" bringing all sorts of conflicts. This is not the way really
human people live. This is whitey's thing. And we play the game
with as much proficiency as he does. (160)

Hence, she shares with Beale a radical feminist critique of black manhood and
womanhood as they are constructed within the black liberation movement, and
she shares the “root“ thinking which views sexism as “whitey's thing.“ At first, it
appears that like Beale, Weathers makes a primary commitment to the struggle
against racist capitalist exploitation. However, she goes on to insist, what Beales
denies, namely that,
All women suffer oppression, even white women, particularly poor
white women, and especially Indian, Mexican, Puerto Rican,
Oriental, and black American women whose oppression is tripled
by any of the above mentioned. But we do have female's
oppression in common. This means that we can begin to talk to
other women with this common factor and start building links with
them and thereby build and transform the revolutionary force we
are beginning to amass. (Her emphasis, ibid.)
She resists the forces urging her to side with either black or women. In an effort

to resist the logic of “root“ thinking she proposes Black Liberation and Women's

152
Liberation link up with “with the entire revolutionary movement consisting of
women, men and children,“ in a fashion similar to that of NAM. (158)

In “The Black Movement and Women's Liberation,“ (1970) first published
in the Black Scholar, Linda La Rue explains the ambivalence of many black
women to the Women's Liberation movement and suggests that the movement
“has developed a sudden attachment to the black liberation movement as a ploy
to share attention that it has taken blacks 400 years to generate.“ (166) On her
view, any alliance between the two movements, such as that proposed by
Weathers, would be unwise. Despite the “surge of 'common oppression' rhetoric
and propaganda,“ La Rue argues, “any attempt to analogize black oppression
with the plight of the American white woman has the validity of comparing the
neck of a hanging man with the hands of an amateur mountain climber with rope
burns.“ (164) The idea that black women and white women share a common
oppression is mistaken, on La Rue's views because “there is a difference,“
between blacks who are “oppressed“ that is, “unreasonably burdened, unjustly,
severely, rigorously, cruelly, and harshly fettered by white authority,“ and white
women who are “only suppressed,“ that is, “checked, restrained, excluded from
conscious and overt activity.“ ( 166) In arguing for a common cause between
black and white women, she insists white feminists threaten to minimize or
eclipse the “real oppression" of all blacks. (164)

She goes on to argue that a commitment to the Black Movement must
include a thorough-going critique of sexism. As a committed member of the

movement she writes,

153

If we are realistically candid with ourselves, we will accept the fact
that despite our beloved rhetoric of Pan-Africanism, our vision of
Third-World liberation, and perhaps our dreams of a world state of
multi-racial humanism, most black and a good many who generally
exempt themselves from categories still want the proverbial “piece
of cake.“ American values are difficult to disregard, for, unlike what
militant “brothers“ would have us believe, Americanism does not
end with the adoption of Afro hairstyles on pregnant women
covered in long African robes. (165)

She applies her internal critique to Carmichael's comment about the place of
black women in the movement, insisting that it imports “white-ascribed
characteristics of women.“ (171) In La Rue's view, the “black movement needs
its women in a position of struggle, not prone.“ (ibid.)

Among the most compelling black feminist voices of this period was that
of Angela Davis. On the back cover of her (1974) autobiography, she is
described as "America's most wanted woman.“

She was once the FBI's Most Wanted Criminal -- charged by the
State of California with kidnapping, conspiracy and murder in the
Marin County Courthouse shoot-out. Later, she was acquitted.
She is a Communist. Feminist. Intellectual. Symbol of the
shattering sixties. Leader in the Black revolution. Now, a Black,
brainy and beautiful woman tells the compelling story of her life,
loves, sorrows, relationships with George Jackson and the Soledad
brothers, the outrages that shaped a public drama and her struggle
for freedom in America. (Davis, 1975)
In the course of her story it becomes evident that Davis was straddling the New
Left and Black Power movements. Situated in a political context which
compelled her to profess her loyalties to only one movement, she resisted by
trying to work at the intersections. For example, in 1968 she worked as a

member of the Communist Party together with the Black Panther Party to create

a political education program. However, since this false necessity to find the root

154
of all oppression constituted one of the main tenets of all the liberation
movements in the sixties in the U.S., she was often forced to choose. For
example, she recalls how the political education program was effected when a
“crisis struck at the Black Panther Party“ which lead to a purge of some
Communists. Describing how the crisis effected the intersection she was
working at, she wrote,
they did not even confront me with the ultimatum given Deacon --
namely, to choose one of the two parties -- Black Panther or
Communist. (This had been discussed before we entered the
Panther Party, and it had been agreed on both sides that the two
parties were not in competition with each other and that thus there
existed no problem of conflict of loyalties.) (1975, 192-3)
Reflecting back on these times in 1992, she recalls how compelling the
invitation, extended in the “offensive nationalist rhetoric of Malcom X,“ was to
join an empowering black community. (Davis, 1992) With contacts from Stokely
Carmichael, she “embark[ed] upon an exploration of some of the nationalisms of
the era.“ On her discoveries she recalls,
I found out, during my initial contacts, that Ron Karenga's group
was too misogynist (although I would not have used that word
then). Another organization I found too middle class and elitist.
Yet another fell apart because we, women, refused to be pushed to
the back of the bus. And even though we may have considered
the feminism of that period white, middle class, and utterly

irrelevant, we also found compulsory male leadership utterly
unacceptable. (ibid.)

As a result, Davis asserts, she and her sisters, her closest comrades, fought
tenaciously for their “right to fight.“
In her essay “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of

Slaves“ (1970), described by Guy-Sheftall as a “landmark,“ Davis stands up for

155
black women and with black men against the misogynist/racist construction of
the black matriarch. Although Davis's reflections are focused on the period of
slavery, the ways in which that history is present in 1971 are evident throughout.
In order to get a sense of the depth of identification among radical black
women and men in the movement during this period, consider the relation
between Davis and George Jackson, which she foregrounds in a dedication of
the essay.
I would like to dedicate these reflections to one of the most
admirable black leaders to emerge from the ranks of our liberation
movement -- to George Jackson, whom I loved and respected in
every way. As I came to know and love him, I saw him developing
an acute sensitivity to the real problems facing black women and
thus refining his ability to distinguish these from their mythical
transpositions. George was uniquely aware of the need to
extricate himself and other black men from the remnants of divisive
and destructive myths purporting to represent the black woman. If
his life had not been so precipitously and savagely extinguished, he
would have surely accomplished a task he had already outlined
some time ago.
In the essay Davis is concerned the “fictious clichés,“ particularly that of the
black matriarch, which “have given credence to grossly distorted categories
through which the black woman continues to be perceived.“ Like other black
feminists at the time, Davis felt the urgent need to refute the myth that the black
matriarch was at the “root“ of the oppression of black people. This myth was
advanced in the racist Moynihan report as well as in the sexist black nationalist
rhetoric of the late sixties and early seventies. A rigorous effort to deconstruct

the black matriarch, Davis suggests, must begin at “its presumed historical

inception,“ that is, slavery. (In Guy-Sheftall, 200) She argues that the myth,

156

which promoted the idea that black women “actively assented to slavery“ as
collaborators, could not be true because “the slave system did not -- and could
not -- engender and recognize a matriarchal family structure.“ (201) In fact, she
points out, “the American brand of slavery strove toward a rigiditied
disorganization in family life, just as it had to prescribe all potential social
structures within which black people might forge a collective and conscious
existence.“ (ibid.) Hence, the “designation of the black woman as a matriarch is
a cruel misnomer.“ (202) However, she goes on to say that this truth does not
imply the black slave woman played no significant role. On the contrary, Davis
submits that “by virtue of the brutal force of circumstances, the black woman was
assigned the mission of promoting the consciousness and practice of
resistance.“ (ibid.) While her mission was dictated by “the male supremacist
ideology of white society in America; it was also woven into the patriarchal
traditions of Africa.“ (205) Nevertheless, she finds overwhelming evidence of the
black woman, at every juncture, “transcending, refusing, fighting back, asserting
herself over and against terrifying obstacles.“ (214) Davis underlines the fact
that her strength was not directed against her brother, “she fought alongside her
man, accepting or providing guidance according to her talents and the nature of
their tasks.“ (214) Davis's provides this (revisionist) history lesson in order to aid
the understanding of black men and women about how the myth of the black
matriarch works as an ideological weapon to keep black women from taking, in

her words, “our place wherever our people are forging on towards freedom.

157

Lest there be any confusion about the relation between Davis's debunking
of the black matriarch, and Lorde's effort to reclaim the Black Mother, I offer a
few brief notes. I think the projects of both Davis and Lorde are responses to the
urgent need to stand against this ideological warfare being waged, most directly,
against black women during in the sixties and seventies. The myth of the black
matriarch which is the target of Davis's critique constitutes what Lorde would call
a “distortion“ of the difference represented, in Lorde's view, by the archetype of
the Black Mother. While Davis fought the distorted archetype from the ground of
concrete historical circumstance, Lorde fought the distortion from the ground of
possibility represented by black female symbolic figures reclaimed from
patriarchal myth. One difference in their projects reflects the political alliance
each was working to foster at the moment. Davis's project, which focuses on
how the distorted myth threatens the common struggle of black people, was
primarily intended to strengthen the ties between black men and women.

Lorde's project, as articulated in her open letter to Daly, focuses on how the
myth is obscured and distorted by ethnocentric racism, was primarily intended to
strengthen the ties between black and white women.

In contrast with Lorde's “Open Letter“ and Davis's “Reflections,“ Michele
Wallace's “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist's Search for Sisterhood“ (1975)
focuses the absence of strong ties between black women. Wallace was a
founding member of the National Black Feminist Organization (1974) and author
of a “controversial feminist polemic she wrote in her twenties,“ entitled Black

Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978). (Guy-Sheftall, 219) She must

 

 

to

CC

"/

SI

158

have been working this book during the same years Daly was working on
Gyn/Ecology.25 Black Macho was, “a critique of the male-dominated civil rights
and misogynist Black Power movements, and a scathing expose of sexual
politics within the African American community.“ (ibid.)

In “Anger in Isolation“ Wallace recounts how it took her “three years to
fully understand that Stokely was serious when he'd said [her] position in the
movement was 'prone,‘ three years to understand that the countless speeches
that all began 'the black man did not include [her].“ (221) She recalls how she
was told, when she first began calling herself a feminist, “That's whitey's thing.“
(225)

In Ebony, Jet, and Encore, and even in The New York Times,
various black writers cautioned black women to be wary of smiling
white feminists. The women's movement enlists the support of
black women only to lend credibility to an essentially middle-class,
irrelevant movement, they asserted. (ibid.)
Wallace comments on this warning, “Time has shown that there was more truth
to these claims than their shrillness indicated.“ (ibid.) She goes on to criticize
white feminists, including radical feminists, for their “hands off“ approach when it
comes to black sexism. She writes,
I've got no pressing quarrel with the notion that white men have
been the worst offenders, but that isn't very helpful for a black
woman from day to day. White women don't check out a white
man's bank account or stockholdings before they accuse him of
being sexist -- they confront white men with and without jobs, with

and without membership in a male consciousness-raising group.
(ibid.)

 

’5 See Wallace's self-critique of Black Macho in her new introduction, “How I Saw lt Then, How I
See It Now,“ (1990).

 

II_L
/_ --
...I'L

159
In this criticism she is suggesting that there is a failure of interracial sisterhood
implicit in white feminist critiques which sidestep black men's sexism in order to
avoid being racist.

Wallace's critiques of black men's sexism and white women women's
racism contribute to an explanation of why she must “search for sisterhood“
among black feminists. She searched in vain for black sisterhood in the National
Black Feminist Organization, which folded when it was barely off the ground,
because she says “many of the prime movers in the organization seemed to be
representing other interest groups and whatever commitment they might have
had to black women's issues appeared to take a back seat to that.“ (226) Her
efforts to start a black women's consciousness-raising group were thwarted, she
says, because “we had no strength to give to one another.“ (ibid.) She
observes, “Despite a sizable number of black feminists who have contributed
much to the leadership of the women's movement, there is still no black women's
movement, and there appears to be for some time to come.“ (ibid.) Her
important point is that black women's deep engagements in the Black Liberation,
the New Left, and Women's Liberation functioned effectively to keep black
women isolated from one another. Describing the plight of black feminists in the
early seventies, she concludes,

We exist as women who are black who are feminists, each
stranded for the moment, working independently because there is
not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our

struggle -- because, being on the bottom, we would have to do
what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world. (227)

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Why Didn't Daly Respond in Kind to Lorde's Letter?“
In order to develop a historically sensitive understanding of how Daly
might have received Lorde's letter it is important to keep in mind that hearing is a
process which depends on a context. In this regard it is useful to consult Daly's
thinking about “Depth Hearing.“ (Daly, 1987,72; 1978, 412) “Depth Hearing“ is
the name Daly gives to the logic described by Nelle Morton, whereby in the
beginning is not “the Word,“ but hearing. Morton explains:
I knew I had been experiencing something I had never experienced
before. A complete reversal of the going logic in which someone
speaks precisely so that more accurate hearing may take place.
This woman was saying, and I had experienced, a depth hearing
that takes place before the speaking -- a hearing that is far more
than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that
evokes speech -- a new speech -- a new creation. The woman had
been heard to her own speech. (Daly, 1978.412)
The idea of “hearing a woman to her own speech“ suggests, against traditional
logic, which presupposes that there is nothing to hear until something is said,
that the reverse is true, i.e. there is nothing women can say until there is
hearing.“7 Hearing, or understanding, takes place before speaking, in the sense
that what is spoken is incoherent without a context within which it can be heard.
Here is an example. In the “Preface“ of This Bridge Called My Back (1981),

Cherrie Moraga relates how she experienced being heard into speech for the

first time.

 

2‘ I ask why Daly did not respond “in kind,“ that is, with another open letter, in order to highlight
the possibility that one might find an implicit response to Lorde in Daly's later work.

’7 Marilyn Frye suggested to me that this idea is another way of thinking about the French
feminist idea that there is no female writing in the context of the male symbolic, that there must
be a “female symbolic“ before there can be female speech. At any rate, Frye points out, Daly
and Morton are rejecting the view that the speaker can make meaning all by himself, which is
implied in the idea that first there is the word. Correspondence, June 7, 1995.

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Months ago in a journal entry I wrote: “I am afraid to get near to
how deeply I want to love the other Latin women in my life.“ In a
real visceral way I hadn't felt the absence (only assumed the fiber
of alienation I so often felt with anglo women as normative). Then
for the first time, speaking on a panel about racism here in San
Francisco, I could physically touch what I had been missing. There
in the front row, nodding encouragement and identification, sat five
Latina sisters. Count theml Five avowed Latina Feminists: Gloria,
Jo, Aurora, Chabela y Mirtha. For once in my life every part of me
was allowed to be visible and spoken for in one room at one time.
(xvii)

In order to be seen and heard as a whole presence, she is saying, she need to

be able to experience this bodily/spiritual form of Latina-identification among her

sisters.

In this section of the paper, I will consider what Daly might have heard
and what she could not hear in an effort to understand her decision not to
respond in kind to Lorde's letter.

What reasons can be found in the political context of the late sixties and
early seventies for Daly's decision not to respond in kind? First, consider the
common ground between Daly and Lorde. The extent and limits of the common
ground in the feminisms of Lorde and Daly, as I have outlined it above, could not
have been apparent to Daly during the time she was writing Gyn/Ecology. All of
Lorde's political writings were published after Gyn/Ecology with the exception of
“Poetry is Not a Luxury“ (1977). By 1977, Lorde had published several books of
poetry from a radical black perspective, however, she was writing the first

volume of her poetry in which she spoke from a black radical feminist

perspective, The Black Unicorn (1978), at the same time Daly was writing

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Gyn/Eco/ogy.” They were both working, simultaneously, on writing projects
which involved speaking from radical feminist perspectives using
symbolic/mythological insight and deconstructive strategies as a basis for
generating woman-identified thought, one from a black radical feminist
perspective, one from a white radical feminist perspective.

In 1977 Daly and Lorde both read papers on a Modern Language
Association “Lesbian and Literature“ panel entitled “The Transformation of

0129

Silence into Language and Action. The other panelists included Julia Stanley,
Judith McDaniel and Adrienne Rich. Daly read a paper (1978b) which contained
sections of Gyn/Ecology on the “State of Patriarchy as a State of War“ and the
“warrior element in Sisterhood.“ In the paper she argued, since “the Female Self
is The Enemy under fire from the guns of patriarchy,“ a woman's survival
depends on her resistance to assimilation. She must not be “tied back by old
Iigatures, old allegiances,“ Daly proclaimed.
She pledges allegiance to no flag, no cross. She sees through the
lies of alleged allies. She re-veres no one, for she is free-ing her
Self from fears. (8)
Sisterhood, unlike brotherhood, Daly argued “has as its core the affirmation of

freedom.“ (9) After Daly's paper, Lorde read an untitled paper ( 1978b) which

was reprinted in Sister Outsider with the title, “The Transformation of Silence into

 

2' Poetry by Lorde prior to 1977 included, The First Cities (1968) New York: Poets Press, Cables
to Page (1970) London: Paul Breman, Heritage Series, From a Land Where Other People Live
(1973) Detroit: Broadside Press, and New York Head Shop and Museum (1974) Detroit:
Broadside Press. “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,“ (1979) provides useful
background on Lorde's life, especially in the late sixties and early seventies. (Lorde, 1984)

” All of the papers presented on this panel were published together in Sinister Wisdom, 6
(Summer, 1978). The panel was attended by 700 women in December, 1977, Chicago, IL.

163
Language and Action.“ (1984) Lorde opened her paper with a poem from The
Black Unicorn entitled “A Song for Many Movements.“ After reading the poem,
Lorde reflected,
In listening to Mary I was struck by how many of the same words
seem to come up. They did in her paper, and I know they do in
mine, words such as war, separation, fear and the ways in which
those words are intimately connected with our battlings against
silence, and the distortions silence commits upon us. (1978b, 12)
Lorde explicitly connects themes in her work with themes she heard in Daly's.
Lorde goes on in her paper to announce that she had a tumor in her breast.
Although the tumor was benign, she explained how facing her mortality enabled
her to overcome other fears and silences which stood between women who were
working at “bridging our differences.“ Echoing themes in Daly's paper, Lorde
said,
The women who sustained me through that period were black and
white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we
all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me
a strength and concern without which I could not have survived
intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came knowledge -- within
the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and

otherwise, conscious or not -- I am not only a casualty, I am also a
warrior. (ibid.)

Daly probably heard in these words agreement with her argument that patriarchy
is a war waged against all women, a war which separates women. She probably
also heard Lorde agree that overcoming the fear of death is possible only
through sisterhood which enables women to dis-cover the warrior within. In the
context of this particular moment when many black women were prioritizing the

struggle against the racist war threatening the existence of all blacks, she

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probably assumed Lorde shared her radical feminist analysis which located the
root of their shared oppression in patriarchy.

Perhaps it was Lorde's effort to connect her work with Daly's which led
Daly to include an excerpt from one of Lorde's poems as the opening epigraph in
the chapter on African genital mutilation. It is clear from the “Open Letter“ that
Lorde felt there was enough common ground in their feminisms for Daly to be
including a quotation from her work. Daly was not mistaken to hear in Lorde's
words affirmation of the common ground between. The problem which led Lorde
to write the “Open Letter“ was that Daly heard only the common ground between
them. Although most of Lorde's poetry prior to The Black Unicorn was written
from a black-identified, or race-cognizant perspective, including the collection,
New York Head Shop and Museum, in which Daly found the excerpt which she
used in Gyn/Ecology, Daly heard only Lorde's woman-identified voice. When
Lorde said “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior,“ Daly heard a woman
like herself, i.e. one who seemed not be “tied back by old Iigatures, old
allegiances,“ one who pledged allegiance to no racial identity. Daly's
assumption that Lorde's was a woman-identified, rather than a black-identified
voice, is what leads Lorde to ask Daly in the letter of “Did you ever really read
my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you
thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old

and distorted connection between us?“0 (1984, 68) The “old and distorted

 

3° In view of my examination of the common ground in the positions of Lorde and Daly, it is
revealing to ask this question about postmodern feminists' reading and use of Lorde's words as
evidence that the “Open Letter“ is a postmodern critique of radical feminism. Serious

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connection" is color-evasive idea that we are all the same “under the skin.“
What Daly did not hear was Lorde's claim that sisterhood depends on fighting
this idea as well as other distortions which cause us to view our differences as
“causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change.“ (Lorde,
1984,110)

If Daly did read Lorde's words what might she have heard? Within the
radical feminist context taking shape at this particular moment, if she heard
Lorde's black-identified voice, she probably heard it as a sign of an earlier stage
of Lorde's journey towards radical feminism, a stage in which Lorde was more
male-identified. Like many white radical feminists who left behind their
identification with their white brothers in the new left upon coming to radical
feminist consciousness, Daly probably assumed that in coming to radical
feminist consciousness Lorde would abandon her earlier black-identified
perspective. It Daly was thinking along these lines she probably heard in the
“Open Letter“ something that sounded like residual male-identification. Or she
may have heard a contradiction. According to the logic of root thinking, one
could not be both black-identified and woman-identified at the same time. A
response in kind which suggested that Lorde was either male-identified or
caught in a contradiction probably did not seem like a response which might

constructively advance the dialogue between black and white women.

 

consideration of this question, in my view, reveals that white Western postmodern feminists have
not come to terms with the ways in which they are walking the path of Daly's mistakes.

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On the one hand, Lorde was urging women to bridge their differences.
On the other hand, Lorde says the letter is intended to clarify differences
between them as black and white women which she argued Daly obscured by
implying that all women suffer the same oppression as women. Furthermore,
Lorde claims that it is not enough that women identify with the Goddess within,
black and white women must learn to identify with the Black Goddess. Now
consider these assertions of racial difference in the context of the moment.
What did Daly hear in Lorde's assertions of difference?

Lorde's claim that the oppression of black women was different than that
of white women probably sounded like agreement with the claims about
differences being made by black nationalists and black feminists. Lorde's claim
that Daly obscured differences by implying all women suffer the same
oppression, may have sounded like the claim among radical blacks that white
feminists obscured differences by incorrectly identifying the root of black
women's oppression. Recall that Carmichael argued that U.S. society was
organized by and reflected the legacy of white power, that the values, beliefs,
traditions, and institutions which constitute U.S. society are white. This is the
view behind the black argument that feminism is “whitey's thing.“ While Daly
may not have read Carmichael, she probably read Francis Beale since she and
Beale were both included in the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful (1970). In
addition, remember Beale insisted that there were “quite basic“ differences in the
experiences of black and white women, and that “while it is true that male

chauvinism has become institutionalized in American society, one must always

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look for the main enemy -- the fundamental cause of the female condition,“
which was racist capitalism. Beale and others who were arguing that the
experiences of black and white women were different were arguing it on the
grounds that black women's oppression was rooted in racism and/or capitalism,
while white women's Oppression (if white women were “oppressed,“ rather than
“only suppressed“ as suggested by La Rue) was rooted in “Americanism.“
Considering the theses of Daly's Qualitative Leap we can deduce Daly's radical
feminist reading of positions like these. Any insistence on the differences in the
oppression of women only served the interests of men who were benefiting from
the planetary sexual caste system. Women under the influence of these men
failed to see how their allegiance obscured the possibilities of living self-
determined lives. In the absence of a context within which Daly could hear
Lorde's refusal of the black nationalist position on the differences between black
and white women, she probably assumed that Lorde's difference claims
indicated that she held some version of this position. She most definitely would
not have been alone in this assumption.

Lorde makes the claim that Daly was dealing out of a patriarchal western
European frame of reference, and in so doing , was serving the destructive
forces of racism and separation between women. Could Daly hear it? In my
view, this claim may have seemed somewhat incoherent to Daly in the context of
the radical feminist view that identification with any group of men, in particular
white men, was a sign of male-identification. Since radical feminism was about

rejecting all forms of male-identification, she and other radical feminists believed

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themselves to be self-consciously refusing their racial, cultural and class
privileges and points of reference. Since Lorde's claims appeared to have
dismissed this commitment, her view may have appeared to Daly, as a
misunderstanding of her work. On this reading of Lords, Daly may have felt that
a response would result in more division among women. It Daly thought the
misunderstanding was the result of a distortion of the connection between them,
she probably could not hear in Lorde's letter a constructive critique of radical
feminism, her decision not to respond might have been an effort to avoid the
kind of quarrel among women that would only serve men's interests.

Lorde's claims that the oppression of black women was different than that
of white women also probably sounded like agreement with the claims of new
leftists. Recall that the men of the new left were arguing that feminists were just
“white, middle-class, women“ whose experiences were fundamentally different
from those of black and Vietnamese women who were oppressed by racism and
capitalism. Here again, without a context for distinguishing Lorde's claims about
the differences in the forms of women's oppression from the claims about
differences in women's situations made white leftist men, Daly probably heard in
Lorde's claims more traces of male-identification. Also remember that it was
common among leftist men to quote black women and Vietnamese women who
named only racism and/or imperialism as the source(s) of their oppression as
evidence against the radical feminist claim that patriarchy was global. When
Lorde claims in the letter that Daly had misused her words in Syn/Ecology,

utilizing them only to testify against her “as a woman of color,“ Daly probably

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heard not only echoes of the women of color who stood with the leftists against
the radical feminists, but also a rebuke for using her black voice in the name of
radical feminism. Since white radical feminists at this time did not recognize that
they shared with leftist and nationalist men a pattern of root thinking about the
relations among oppressions, Daly probably did not recognize in Lorde's
criticism an attempt to use both her black voice and her woman's voice in the
name of radical feminism. Such an attempt probably would have seemed
misguided or confused. After accusing Daly of misusing her words, however,
she makes her intention evident by insisting, “my words which you used were no
more, nor less, illustrative of this chapter than “Poetry Is Not a Luxury“ or any
number of my other poems might have been of many other parts of
Gyn/Ecology.“ (1984, 68)

Evidence that Daly could not hear the concern behind Lorde's suggestion
that Daly might have chosen to included material on non-White/European female
power and symbol from a radical feminist perspective is found in Daly's reply that
Gyn/Ecology is not a compendium of goddesses. (Daly, 1990, m) Recall that
Daly and Lorde share view that women are connected in virtue of a source of
inner strength which makes authentic choice and radical action possible.

Lorde's concern was that by excluding material about her African Background,
black women would not have access to the source of their gynergy. Had Daly
been able to hear this concern she might have considered the possibility of a
fruitful response. The context which kept Daly from hearing Lorde on this point

is complex. First, the idea was in the air, in the aftermath of the expulsion of

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whites from the Black Liberation movement, that whites should not go around
trying to be experts about the subjective experiences of people of color. The
imperative to organize on the basis of your own oppression seems to have led
white radical feminists to research their own herstory, but without a complete
understanding of the racial and cultural dimensions of their herstories. In
addition, it may have seemed to radical feminists at the time, in view of the
barren field of feminist research on nonwhite/European women's histories, that
all the historical research on oppressed minorities, like much of that propounded
by Pan-Africanists, was sexist. Lorde herself acknowledges the paucity of
research on nonwhite/European women's histories at the time.

What would Daly have heard in Lorde's claim that all feminists need, not
only the Witch and the Spinster, but the Black Goddess or Black Mother? Since
Daly was operating on the assumption that the feminist symbolic figures in
Syn/Ecology were racially- and ethnically-neutral insofar as they symbolized a
refusal to pledge allegiance to any and all male-identified nations or movements,
then Lorde's call for racially and ethnically specific symbolic figures would sound
like another instance of male-identification. In the early seventies black
nationalists and Pan-Africanists appeared to be the only ones calling for racially
and ethnically specific symbolic figures. Carmichael was not alone in calling for
blacks in the U.S. to embrace “Mother Africa“ as their homeland as part of taking
on a black nationalist identity. Daly would have been critical of Carmichael's
strategy at the very least because his use of the female symbolic figure of

“Mother Africa“ was derived not from the concrete lives of African women, but

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from his own patriarchal nationalist interests. Would Daly have been able to
distinguish Lorde's call for all women to embrace the Black Goddess from the
kind of call Carmichael and others were making for all blacks to embrace Mother
Africa? She probably would have assumed that Lorde's call was not informed by
an interest in Iegitimizing patriarchal gender role expectations. On the other
hand, she would have had no feminist context for understanding the interest
informing Lorde's call, especially in light of her assumption that she and Lorde
shared the radical feminist project of bridging the differences among women,
which appeared to her to depend on a racially- and ethnically-neutral feminist
symbolic. Lorde's work in The Black Unicorn (1978a) was one of the first
published works, if not the first, by a black feminist based on the radical feminist
strategy of recovering the “true nature of female power“ assumed to be buried
beneath and obscured by patriarchal mythology, in this case African mythology.
Ironically, Lorde's project may have been influenced by her reading of Daly's
previous work. In the “Open Letter“ she thanks Daly for having Gyn/Ecology
sent to her, then informs her,

As in Beyond God the Father, many of your analyses are

strengthening and helpful to me. Therefore, it is because of what

you have given to me in the past work that I write this letter to you

now, hoping to share with you the benefits of my insights as you

have shared the benefits of yours with me. (1984, 66)
What Daly was unable to hear in Lorde's letter was Lorde's message that radical

feminism must be self-consciously and critically race- and ethnicity-cognizant.

Because she could not hear this, could not comprehend how this was possible,

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perceived it as the demise of radical feminism, at this time, it appeared to Daly
that a response in kind would not be a fruitful direction.

In the context of the early seventies Daly could hear black men like
Carmichael speaking for himself and black women, insisting that racism was the
root of oppression faced by blacks, and therefore, blacks must prioritize the
struggle for black liberation. She could hear white leftist men standing up for the
“universal“ causes, speaking for themselves and everyone else against white
feminists who they claimed were only reformist advocates for their own particular
cause. If she heard the voices of black women she heard them standing with
their brothers, prioritizing the struggle for black liberation instead of the struggle
for women's liberation. Lorde probably first sounded to Daly, and other white
radical feminists at the time, like a brave black woman who shared the
knowledge that in order to end racism, it was necessary to get to the root of the
problem, and therefore necessary to stand with her sisters in the struggle for
women's liberation.

But Daly plainly could not hear Lorde in a deep way when she first
received the letter because at the time there was no context which would have
allowed for the possibility for Depth Hearing. Wallace's comments in “Anger in
Isolation“ speak to this absence. “Stranded,“ she wrote in the early seventies,
“Perhaps a multicultural women's movement is somewhere in the future.“ (In
Guy-Sheftall, 226) My understanding of Lorde's letter is possible because the
multicultural women's movement which Wallace hoped for was created in the

late seventies by women calling themselves “Radical Women of Color.“ Toni

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Cade Bambara introduces these women whose writings are published together
in This Bridge Called My Back (1981),

Blackfoot amiga Nisei hermana Down Home Up Souf Sistuh
sister El Barrio suburbia Korean The Bronx Lakota Menominee
Cuban Chinese Puertoriquefia reservation Chicana campafiera
and letters testimonials poems interviews essays journal
entries sharing Sisters of the yarn Sisters of the rice Sisters of
the corn Sisters of the plantain putting in telecalls to each other.
And we're all on the line. (vi)

Radical Women of Color were women who shared the experience of living lives
as “bridges" between worlds. Cade Bambara appeals to Lorde's “Open Letter“
to describe how this experience brought them together and enabled them to
identify with each other. In the “Forward“ to the book she says,

though the initial motive of several siter/riters here may have been
to protest, complain or explain to white feminist would-be allies that
there are other ties and visions that bind, prior allegiances and
priorities that supersede their invitations to coalesce on their terms
(“Assimilation within a solely western european herstory is not
acceptable“ -- Lorde), the process of examining that would-be
alliance awakens us to new tasks (“We have a lot more to
concentrate on besides the pathology of white wimmin“ --
davenpon)

and a new connection: US

a new set of recognitions: US

a new site of accountability: US

a new source of power: US (ibid.)

Through “fashioning of potent networks of all the daughters of the ancient
mother cultures “ Cade Bambara suggested, women of color must come to know
each other as sisters. Sitting down and breaking bread together, she argued is
the beginning for women who take up the task Quintanales described as “seeing
radical differences where they don't exist and not seeing them when they are

critical.“ (vii) This was a vision of sisterhood that refused the root thinking which

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identified fundamental differences in experiences as sources of “causes for
separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change.“
In the preface of This Bridge Called My Back Cherrie Moraga provides
insight into the context the book helped to create in the U.S.
The Left needs it, with its shaky and shabby record of commitment
to women, period. Oh yes, it can claim its attention to “color“
issues, embodied in the male. Sexism is acceptable to the white
left publishing house, particularly if spouted through the mouth of a
Black man. The feminist movement needs the book, too. But for
different reasons. (xiii)
Among the reasons she gives for why the feminist movement needed the book is
the failure to make the connections between the racism, classism and sexism in
their lives and the lives of their “would-be“ sisters of color. But the needs of
these movements was not the primary focus of Moraga's insight. In this preface
she is attempting to articulate a new and different conception of sisterhood which
is coming into existence and being named. Listen as she describes her first visit
to Boston to meet with Barbara Smith.
By the end of the evening of our first visit together, Barbara comes
into the front room when she has made a bed for me. She kisses
me. Then grabbing my shoulders she says, very solid-like, “we're
sisters.“ I nod, put myself into bed, and roll around with this word,
sisters, for two hours before sleep takes on. I earned this with
Barbara. It is not a given between us -- Chicana and Black -- to
come to see each other as sisters. This is not a given. I keep
wanting to repeat over and over and over again, the pain and
shock of difference, the joy of commonness, the exhilaration of
meeting through incredible odds against it. (xiv)
It is through the words Lorde spoke to Daly that Moraga is able to articulate the
“pain and shock of difference“ which came with a the realization of a multicultural

sisterhood. Moraga wrote,

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When Audre Lorde, speaking of racism, states: “I urge each one of
us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself
and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives
there.“ I am driven to do so because of the passion for women that
lives in my body. I know now that the major obstacle for me,
personally, in completing this book has occurred when I stopped
writing it for myself, when I looked away from my own source of
knowledge. Audre is right. It is also the source of terror -- how
deeply separation between women hurts me. How discovering
difference, profound differences between myself and women I love
has sometimes rendered me helpless and immobilized. (xvi)
What Lorde was trying to say required a context within which it made total sense
to reject the thinking premised on the idea that fighting one system of
oppression, the root of the other systems, could radically change the world.
One of the most important papers in This Bridge Called My Back, entitled
“A Black Feminist Statement“ written by black feminists calling themselves the
Combahee River Collective, describes how they became disillusioned with
movements which insisted on one order of allegiance, and how this created the
need “to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and
antisexist, unlike those of black and white men.“ (210) This paper provides
previously unavailable framework for understanding Lorde's criticisms in the
Open Letter. The insight of the Collective that makes sense of Lorde's letter is
that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking,“ that is, not related as the
branches are to the roots of a tree. (209) They make the claim against the idea
that either race and class or sex is the root of their oppression, that “there is
such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely

sexual, e.g. the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of

political repression.“ (213) Although I do not believe Daly could hear it at the

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time, this is what Lorde meant when she claimed that Daly had distorted the
differences between black and white women.

From our historical moment, it is difficult to keep in mind that a context
within which Daly might have heard the depth of Lorde's letter did not exist.
From the early 1960s up until after the publication of Syn/Ecology in 1978, black
and white feminists had been on two different historical trajectories. While there
was some awareness among the early radical feminists that theirs needed to be
an anti-racist, multicultural movement, it was abstract and unrealized. This was
largely due, in my view, to the prevalence of root thinking among white radical
feminists. In order to illustrate how incomprehensible it was to white feminists
that a black feminist such as Lorde could claim at once black- and woman-
identification, consider the following reflection. In an essay on the history of what
she calls a “class-race-gender“ analysis, Kathleen Daly reflects on the context
surrounding, and her response to, the first time she heard Audre Lorde speak.

I began as a graduate student in sociology in 1978. At the time,
debate centered on the possibility of linking Marxist theories of
class with feminist theories of gender. Could these theories be
reconciled or were they in ontological conflict? Clearly, in asking
those questions, race was not on the agenda. Also, around that
time Audre Lorde came to the Amherst area to give a speech. I
remember then a confusion I felt -- and one she wished to teach
the audience -- about her multiple commitments. She discussed
her participation in black community groups, in women's groups,
and in gay and lesbian groups, but she wanted to stress, she was a
whole person, one person across these settings. I asked her,
nervously raising my hand in a large auditorium setting, how can
you be and act all these things at once? My memory of her

response to my question was that it didn't make any sense to her.
(Kathleen Daly, 1993,59)

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There was certainly awareness among early black feminists that feminism
needed to include a critique of white European women's racism and
ethnocentrism, however, there was no black feminist movement to amplify the
critique and demand that white women be accountable to it. The world of
“Radical Womyn of Color,“ out of which came the systematic critiques of white
feminism, did not emerge until the early 19805. Despite their respective
awarenesses, black and white feminists in the early 19705 were as segregated
as their sisters before them at the turn of the century, for different, but related
reasons. There was no history which Daly might have turned to for insight about
how to respond to Lorde in a constructive manner. To my knowledge, there is
nothing in print about any cross-movement interactions or communications
among white Radical Feminists and Feminists of Color from 1967 to 1979 on the
idea of anti-racist, multicultural feminist solidarity. Lorde was one of the first to
put the idea into words. Lorde was the first to fathom the possibility that women
might come together on the basis of their differences. To think that Daly, whose
work emerged before the contemporary writings by Radical Women of Color,
should have heard Lorde's New Words, and responded in a feminist anti-racist,
multicultural manner is to make a serious ahistorical error. It is to assume Daly
could respond out of a context which did not exist.

In the process of considering what Daly might have heard in Lorde's letter
I suggested that she may have heard Lorde's words in a distorted way. She may
have thought Lorde was speaking from male-identified voice. She may have

heard a contradiction which seemed consistent with a stage of coming to radical

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feminist consciousness. She may have heard betrayal if she believed that
Lorde's criticisms framed her and other white radical feminists as male-identified
in a war that seemed clearly to be between us and them. This, I have been
suggesting, is the strength of the conceptual grip root thinking can have on one's
most passionately held beliefs. It is reasonable to assume that Daly chose not to
respond in kind because, at the time, as she read Lorde's criticisms they pierced
the heart of radical feminism with an arrow dipped in the poison of divide-and-
conquer. Perhaps the only honest response Daly could imagine at the time was
to respond to Lorde's “Open Letter to Mary Daly“ with an “Open Reply to Audre
Lorde.“ If she could think of nothing to say in reply to Lorde's accusation that
she had used the white Western European “tools of patriarchy“ against Lorde
and other women of color, except to make a counter-accusation stating Lorde
had used patriarchal nationalist tools against her and other white radical
feminists in her “Open Letter to Mary Daly,“ then it is not hard to understand why
Daly did not respond in kind.

I have also suggested that Lorde was saying something important, and
new, about the conditions for sisterhood. She was saying that sisterhood
requires giving up the root thinking which split the black feminist in two and
learning how to identify with difference, but Daly could hear nothing in her
criticisms but a serious threat to sisterhood. On my reading of the context, Daly
heard her saying radical feminism is fundamentally flawed. Daly did not hear the
promise in Lorde's letter, on my view, because the bodies had not yet come

together to hear her to speech. The context created out of and symbolized by

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the project entitled, “This Bridge Called My Back“ did not yet exist, and this is the
context which is ahistorically assumed when people ask, “why didn't Daly
respond to Lorde's letter?“ Lorde's letter was one of the sparks, a really Big
Spark, that ignited what Daly calls, remembering the moment when she got the
letter, an “Explosion of Diversity.“ (1990, xxx) What Daly had not realized, but
acknowledges in the new introduction, is that “Explosions of Diversity do not
happen without conflict.“ The interaction between Daly and Lorde took the
shape of an unresolvable conflict because it was a part of changing the world, a
new world was coming into being, the world of “Radical Women of Color.“ What
has remained unresolved, and still open to question, then, is the nature of the
relation between Radical Feminists and Radical Women of Color? Does our
sisterhood ride on the issue of whether or not our oppressions are related as the
branches of tree are to the roots? Since it probably appeared to Daly, at least at
the time, as if it did, it is not hard to understand why she chose not to respond in
kind.

It may seem that my speculations about Daly's decision not to respond in
kind to Lorde's letter only answer the historical question about why Daly did not
respond in 1979. However, with regard to the question of why Daly has
continued, into the 19905, to believe that a response in kind would not be fruitful,
I think it is helpful to keep in mind that a context which might support reciprocal

Hearing and constructive dialogue is to date, still in a process of becoming.

Part III
THE RACIAL AND ETHNIC POLITICS OF GYM/ECOLOGY

In the “New Intergalactic Introduction“ to Syn/Ecology Daly extends an
invitation to those who have read the criticisms of Gyn/Ecology, and “who have a
sincere interest in understanding and discussing this book“ to read it and “think
about it.“ (1990, mi) In this chapter I accept Daly's invitation and take seriously
her claim that Gyn/Ecology is an “Open Book.“ She claims that Gyn/Ecology
was not written to be worshipped as a sacred text. She was aware that she had
not written the “Last Word“ when she “set it free“ in the hope that it “would be
Heard and that it would harmonize with the works of other women, whose
melodies, of course, were coming from different Realms of the Background.“
(xxx) In the spirit of this vision of “New Creation“ I begin to think critically about
the racial and ethnic politics of Syn/Ecology. In my study of the racial and ethnic
politics of Gyn/Ecologyl bring Lorde's criticisms to the text. Using Lorde's
criticisms as a guide, first, I argue that Daly uses white Western patriarchal tools,
without awareness, against her sisters; second, I show how the Journey of
radical feminism as charted by Daly in Gyn/Ecologyfails to provide a liberating
path for women of color, leading me to the conclusion that radical feminist book

was written from a white Western perspective for white Western women.

180

181
In considering the racial and ethnic politics of Gyn/Ecology let us begin by

considering who the book is said to be written by and for. Using the commonly
employed string of adjectives to identify Daly, one might say she is a “white Irish-
American feminist raised working-class and Catholic.“ However useful such a
description might be for conveying vital information about the perspective of her
book, Daly would definitely not choose these designations to identify herself, and
they are not the adjectives which describe her on the jacket the 1990 edition of
(Syn/Ecology. According to the jacket she is,

a Positively Revolting Hag who holds doctorates in theology and

philosophy from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. An

associate professor of theology at Boston College, this Spinster

spins and weaves cosmic tapestries in her own time/space.
And, on the jacket of Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage, Containing
Recollections From My Logbook of a Radical Feminist Philosopher (Be-ing an
Account of My Time/Space Travels and Ideas -- Then, Again, Now and How)
(1992), she is identified as,

the author of The Church and the Second Sex, Beyond God the

Father, Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust, and Websters' First New

Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Conjured in

Cahoots with Jane Caputi). This PirateNoyager commutes

lrregularly from the Other side of the moon to lecture around the

United States and Europe and to teach Feminist Ethics at Boston

College.
There are clues in these book jacket blurbs to Daly's racial and ethnic identity.
Perhaps the most important clue is that there is no sign in these descriptions of

any racial identification. Consider what feminists have discovered about

patriarchal gender identity: only women have a gender, men are simply humans.

182

The same sort of thing is true of racist/ethnocentric racial/ethnic identity: only
people of color have a race/ethnicity, whites are simply humans.‘ Hence, the
absence of racial identification in the description of Daly suggests she is white
and Western. If skin color, hair and facial features are any indication, the
photograph of Daly on the jacket of Outercourse, confirms this assumption.
Another clue can be found in the terms “Hag,“ “Spinster,“ and
“PirateNoyager“ which Daly often chooses to describe herself. Although these
terms of identification may appear to be neutral with regard to ethnicity, careful
consideration suggest Western European ancestry. In Gyn/Ecology (1978) Daly
defines “Hag,“ “from an Old English word meaning harpy, witch.“ (14) A
“Spinster,“ she says, is “a woman whose occupation is to spin,“ and one “who
defines her Self, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men.“ (3) In the
“New Intergalactic Introduction“ Daly claims she is a “Pirate“ because in
Gyn/Ecology she “Righteously Plundered treasures of knowledge that have been
stolen and hidden from women, and [she] struggled to Smuggle these back in
such a way that they can be seen as distinct from their mindbinding trappings.“
(1990, xxiv) If the “treasures“ she is after are any guide to her ethnicity, she is
explicit that Gyn/Ecology focuses primarily on “myths and symbols which were
direct sources of christian myth.“ (xxx) In other words, Daly is “Plundering'
through the patriarchal symbol systems of her own Western tradition. Curiously,
in her comments about Lorde's letter in the “New Intergalactic Introduction“ Daly

explains, after writing Gyn/Ecology she anticipated a “profusion of New Creation,

 

‘ For a lucid analysis of whiteness as an unmarked category see Frankenberg, 1995.

183

which [she] believed could emerge from women of all races, cultures, classes --
from women all over this planet, speaking/Be-Speaking out of our various and
vital heritages.“ (ibid.) What is curious is that Daly anticipates women of all
races, cultures, and classes speaking out of their various and vital heritages, but
in Gyn/Ecology she does speak/Be-speak explicitly out of her heritage. She
seems only to have discovered her “ancestral home“ in the context of the
“explosion of Diversity“ which she claims moved personally. Here for the first
time she names her Irish heritage a “Treasure Island“ which she recognizes
“deeply as the wellspring of my Background, my ancestral home.“ (ibid.) This
hindsight suggests that when she was writing Gyn/Ecology, she was not fully
aware of her own racial and ethnic heritage. In this respect, Daly would not have
been different from most white Americans in the seventies, and many today. As
I suggested above, it is common among members of a dominant group to see
their dominant group traits as neutral. When one belongs to both dominant
groups (e.g. white and Western), and oppressed groups (e.g. women and
lesbian), the tendency appears to be to see one's marked oppressed group
identity (e.g. gender) as neutral with regard to one's dominant group identity
(e.g. race/ethnicity). Hence, Daly sees herSelf as a woman without a
racial/ethnic identity.

Notice, in contrast, how Audre Lorde is presented on the jackets of her
books. On the jacket of Sister Outsider there is a photographic portrait beneath
the title on the front cover, which -- again on the basis of skin color, hair and

facial features -- suggests African ancestry. The following blurbs on the back

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cover of The Black Unicorn (1978) provide explicit information about Lorde's
racial and ethnic identity. Adrienne Rich's blurb includes this description.

Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde
writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a
feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing,
nightmare and Iucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the
timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western
politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond
the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan
Amazons.
Like Daly, Lorde regularly used the terms “Lesbian,“ “Feminist,“ “Warrior,“
“Amazon“ and, occasionally, "Witch“ to name herself. Unlike Daly, the
“Spinster,“ whose self-definition never included, on principle, a relation to
children, Lorde often defined herself symbolically and concretely as a “Mother.“
What is more to the point here is the fact that Lorde always identified as “Black,“
while Daly never identifies as “White.“ As I argued in Part II, Lorde always
identified as “Black“ because, on her view, the promise of radical feminist
change could only be found through the reclamation, recognition and creative
employment of racial and ethnic world differences among women. Daly on the
other hand, I suggested, viewed the affirmation of racial or any cultural
differences except gender, as misguided male-identification. On the basis of this
view, marking her own racial and ethnic identification would have given the
impression that she identified on some level with those white Western men who

took pride in the supremacy of their heritage. On Lorde's view, not marking it is

claiming an identity which as Rich puts it, is too simple.

 

2 Of course, racial and ethnic identifications are social constructs which belong to particular
contexts. Hence, they shift for given individuals as they move geographically.

185

Daly's decision not to mark her racial and/or ethnic heritage was not a
mere oversight. She is explicit that Gyn/Ecology is for those parts of one's self
which are quite simply woman-identified. In the Preface she states who the book
is for in two separate passages. In the first passage she offers Gyn/Ecology as
an invitation to “women who choose to be present to each other.“(xlvi) She
names this “complex participation in being“ the Journey of “Female-identified
yes-saying.“ (xlvii) Acknowledging that there is no way “to divide the Female
World into two camps: those who say 'yes' to women and those who do not,“

The Journey of this book, therefore, is (to borrow an expression
from the journal Sinister Wisdom) “for the Lesbian Imagination in
All Women.“ It is for the Hag/Crone/Spinster in every living woman.
It is for each individual Journeyer to decide/expand the scope of
this imagination within her. It is she, and she alone, who can
determine how far, and in what way, she wiIVcan travel. She, and
she alone, can dis-cover the mystery of her own history, and find
how it is interwoven with the lives of other women. (ibid.)
While Daly says the book is for parts of women's Selves which she names
“Lesbian“ or "Hag,“ with the acknowledgment that she cannot specify the life
experiences which might fall under these names for any given woman, she
names the possibilities with terms which belong to a particular heritage. The
idea that each woman must dis-cover this Female-identified part of her self
through identification with these symbolic figures in the context of her own life
history, presupposes she has grown up in a place where these terms of
identification could make some sense. That the book is for the Self “in every

living woman“ is also significant. In Daly's conceptual framework, the

“foreground“ and the “Background“ distinguish different modes of living, the

186
former she names “necrophilic,“ the latter she names “biophilic.“ Our
“foreground“ selves are not really living, not biophilic, in the sense that we are
just going through the motions in our lives according to the patriarchal scripts.
As we shall soon see, among these patriarchal scripts are the scripts of racial
and ethnic identification. For now what is important to note here is that Daly
implies in this passage that the book is for that part of a woman's Self which she
may dis-cover in the context of her individual history, not her collective racial or
ethnic history. This point, considered together with the racially- and ethnically-
neutral introduction of the Hags and Lesbians, obscures the sense in which the
recovery of these symbolic figures is the collective project of radical women with
a white Western heritage.

She extends a similar invitation in another passage of the Preface. In this
passage, preceded by a discussion of how Gyn/Ecology is bound to be
(mis)read by traditional academics, Daly suggests Journeyers must take Virginia
Woolf's “vow of derision,“ which is a commitment to “refuse all methods of
advertising merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity and censure are preferable, for
psychological reasons, to fame and praise.“ (xlviii-xlix) The book is an invitation
to “the deriders,“ that is, she says,

to the Wild Witch in all women who long to spin. This book is a
declaration that it is time to stop putting answers before the
Questions. It is a declaration/Manifesto that in our chronology
(Crone-ology) it is time to get moving again. It is a call of the wild

to the wild, calling Hags/Spinsters to spin/be beyond the parochial
bondings/bindings of any comfortable “community.“ (xlix)

187

There are two important points here which speak to the question of who the
book is for. First, the book is for those of us who share a chronology, which she
names a “Crone-ology“ to designate that it is the one which originates with the
Witch. Which Witch, one might ask? While Daly acknowledges in footnotes that
American and African women were hunted as witches, Gyn/Ecology deals only
with European witches. (179, 180) The book is for those who trace their roots
through a European Crone-ology. Second, the book is not for those who belong
to “any comfortable 'community.'“ The “community“ about which she is directly
concerned here is the United States “women's community,“ which on her view,
grew out of and coopted much of the energy of “the women's movement.“
However, she derides all communities for the same reason she believes that
biophilic living begins with that part of the Self which refuses racial and ethnic
scripts. It is a “symptom of settling for too little, of settling down, of being too
comfortable.“ (xlix) Gyn/Ecology, then, is for the Movement of women who
identify as Female yes-sayers, but claim no racial nor ethnic Identities. That is
white Western women.

In this part, I read (Syn/Ecology in complicity with racist and ethnocentric
ideology and discourse. My case presents the textual grounds for Lorde's claim
that. Gyn/Ecology was written from a white Western patriarchal perspective. In
the part IV, I read Gyn/Ecology for resources of resistance to white Western
patriarchy, and go on to develop this possibility under the heading “Radical

White Western Feminism.“ One of the strategies I will use throughout this part,

188

in order to get at the racial and ethnic politics of the text it will be to ask where
the Joumeyer, who the book is for, stands in relation to others in the text.
Daly Uses White Western Patriarchal Tools, Without Awareness, Against
Sisters

Recall that Lorde argued in the “Open Letter,“ that by distorting the
“various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression“ and obscuring “the many
and varied tools of patriarchy“ Daly ignored “how those tools are used by women
without awareness against each other.“ In fact, she suggests Daly has used the
tools of white Western patriarchs against her Indian, Chinese and African sisters
in Gyn/Ecology. I suggested, in my reading of Lorde's letter, the tool Lorde was
referring to was a “color- and power-evasive“ assumption operative in Daly's
Sado-Ritual Syndrome, the seven-point analysis of the basic patterns of
similarity in the apparently disparate practices of sati, footbinding, genital
mutilation, witch-burning, and gynecology. In this section I try to show how the
Sado-Ritual Syndrome represents patriarchy in a way that leads Daly to use,
without awareness, this white Western patriarchal tool against her sisters. My
analysis will focus on the case of Indian women. If it can be shown that Daly
does use the weapons of patriarchy against her sisters in Gyn/Ecology, then
book cannot, in any liberating sense, be for them.

Consider what Daly says about the Sado-Ritual Syndrome when she first
introduces it in the “Prelude to the Second Passage.“

In the following pages I will analyze a number of barbarous rituals,
ancient and modern, in order to unmask the very real,

existential meaning of Goddess murder in the concrete lives of
women. I will focus upon five specific righteous rites which

189

massacre women: Indian suttee, Chinese footbinding, African

female genital mutilation, European witchburning, American

gynecology. In examining these, I will seek out basic patterns

which they have in common, and which comprise the Sado-Ritual

Syndrome. (111)
Daly is claiming that Indian suttee, Chinese footbinding, African female genital
mutilation, European witchburning, American gynecology have in common
elements which reveal that patriarchy is the war on the Self in every living
woman. This claim is developed in support of her larger thesis that patriarchy is
a planetary system. If it is true that there is a patriarchal war against women in
African, India, China, Europe, and America, there are grounds for believing that
patriarchy is a planetary phenomena.

Keep in mind the need to establish a theoretical case which established
the nature and scope of patriarchy in the 19705. The act of making such a case
was itself a revolutionary act. Reflecting on this moment in 1990, Marilyn Frye
wrote, “[f]or feminist thinkers of the present era the first and most fundamental
act of our own emancipation was granting ourselves authority as perceivers, and
we accomplished that act by discovering agreement in the experiences and
perceptions of women.“ (Frye, 1992, 61) Feminists of the sixties and seventies
had been stopped short of making these discoveries, according to Adrienne
Rich, by those who insisted that as women “we were utterly different, that the
difference between us must be everything, must be determinative, that from that
difference we each must turn away; that we must also flee from our alikeness.“

(Rich, 1979, 310) As I pointed out in Part II, women were prohibited from

connecting on the basis of their alikeness on penalty of accusations of racism

190
and imperialism, by a diverse group, including white leftists, Black nationalists,
Orientalists, Indian nationalists, and Western scholars across the disciplines.
Daly shared with Rich and other radical feminists at the time the view that
heeding this prohibition meant “passively consent[ing] to remain an instrument of
men.“ (ibid.) Daly, with these patriarchal voices in her ear, insisted in response,
[t]hose who claim to see racism and /or imperialism in my
indictment of these atrocities can do so only by blinding themselves
to the fact that the oppression of women knows no ethnic, national,
or religious bounds. There are variations on the theme of
oppression, but the phenomenon is planetary. (111)
Hence, as Daly conceived it in the moment she was writing, the Sado-Ritual
Syndrome was an effort to counter the prevailing discourses functioning
effectively to keep women separated from each other, and therefore, without a
ground for making sense of the discrepancies between “the official story of 'Man
and His World'“ and our own experiences. (Frye, 1992, 59) The effectiveness of
the Sado-Ritual Syndrome as a weapon of resistance for women in this moment
depended on making the case that women shared the experience of being the
targets of a patriarchal war.

In the context of the larger Journey of radical feminism, Daly suggests the
creation of authoritative perceivers is what the Second Passage is all about. As
the Voyager moves through the Second Passage, identifying the basic patterns
which all five atrocities have in common, she discovers in them “the lethal intent
of patriarchy.“ (112, Daly's emphasis) As the Voyager becomes increasingly

knowledgeable about the “universal intent to destroy the divine spark in women,“

Daly suggests, she is able to distinguish her “Self-centering way“ from “the male-

191

made maze.“ (315) She develops this ability in virtue of “her strengthened

powers of hearing and seeing,“ which Daly describes as,
a kind of multidimensional / multiform power of sensing/
understanding her environment. This is a Self-identified
synaesthesia: it is a woman-identified gynaesthesia. It is a
complex way of perceiving the interelatedness of seemingly
disparate phenomena. It is also a pattern-detecting power which
may be named positive paranoia. (316)

She emerges from this Passage, with “a growing integrity of vision and purpose.“

(112) Daly claims,
[ajs a consequence of her courage to see, she finds the focus of
her anger, so that it fuels and no longer blocks her passion and her
creativity. Thus this exorcising Passage gives her the right of
passage into the Otherworld, the world of her own Enspiriting,
Sparking, Spinning Ecstasy. (ibid.)

This gynocentric method, handed down by Matilda Joselyn Gage and Virginia

Woolf, through radical feminist time/space, takes the shape in Gyn/Ecology as

the creation of the a-mazing female mind capable of seeing through patriarchal

foreground to the Background, the source of power and ground for agency. The

analysis in the Second Passage, is then, explicitly for the Journeyer's growth in

consciousness.

The first chapter of the Second Passage is a chapter entitled “Indian
Suttee: The Ultimate Consummation of Marriage.“ In an effort to identify the
distortion in Daly's picture of patriarchy which leads her to use, without

awareness, a patriarchal tool against her Indian sisters, I begin with her

representation of Indian women. The chapter opens with an epigraph from

192

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's In This Our World which introduces the reader to the
image of the Indian woman Daly constructs in the chapter.

Slow advancing, halting, creeping,

Comes the Woman to the hour!

She walketh veiled and sleeping,

For she knoweth not her power. (113)
The “Woman“ is the Hindu widow. She is slowly advancing, halting and
creeping, to the hour when she will be burned alive on the funeral pyre of her
husband.3 Advancing according to a religious script that casts her as good and
pure only in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, there is little evidence in Daly's
narrative of her resistance. “It the general situation of widowhood in India was
not a sufficient inducement for the woman of higher caste to throw herself
gratefully and ceremoniously into the fire,“ Daly asserts, “she was often pushed
and poked in with long stakes after having been bathed, ritually attired, and
drugged out of her mind.“ (116) In addition to the image of the widow as victim
of this “barbarous ritual of female slaughter,“ Daly presents an image of her as a
victim of a religion which “trained [her] to worship her appointed husband as a
god“ (128) and “taught that the husbands death was the fault of the widow.“
(118) Under the influence of these religious teachings she is “veiled and
sleeping,“ that is, without the consciousness which is the condition for genuine

choice. On Daly's view, the only possible voluntary and deliberate participation

on the part of widows “consisted in 'choosing' to jump from the frying pan into the

 

" Daly offers statistic in a footnote in support of her claim that “[allthough suttee was legally
banned in 1829, and despite the existence of other legal reforms, it should not be imagined that
the lot of most Indian women had changed dramatically since then, or since the publication of
Katherine Mayo's Mother India in 1927.“ (114)

193

pyre.“ (125) The Indian woman has been so thoroughly victimized by the Sado-
Rituals of Indian society she does not know her own power, that is, she does not
realize that it is within her, as it is in all women, to break with the sacrificial script
and act on her own initiative.
The primary source behind Daly's account is Katherine Mayo's Mother
India (1927). Daly describes Mayo as the “startling exception among scholars
who have written about women in India,“ (127) and as a “sister Seeker/
Spinster” whose work is in danger of “being maligned, belittled, erased,
deliberately forgotten.” (130) Daly draws from Mother India descriptions of the
religious context of widowhood (119, 127); evidence, collected by Mayo during a
tour of a Purdah hospital, of young girls who had been murdered or crippled for
life as a result of the their husband’s severe sexual violence (121); and the
following excerpt which, according to Daly, conveys Mayo’s “description of the
‘unspeakable’ dhais, [that is,] ‘midwives’ from the “untouchable“ caste to whose
filthy, brutal, grotesque, and frequently murderous ministrations the woman in
childbirth is subjected.” On Mayo’s account,
Such labor may last three, four, five, or even six days. During all
this period the woman is given no nourishment whatever -- such is
the code -- and the dhai resorts to all her traditions. She kneads
the patient with her fists; stands her against the wall and butts her
with her head; props her upright on the bare ground, seizes her
hands and shoves against her thighs with gruesome bare feet,
until, so the doctors state, the patient’s flesh is often torn to ribbons
by the dhals long, ragged toe-nails. Or, she lays the woman flat
and walks up and down her body, like one treading grapes. Also,
she makes balls of strange substances, such as hollyhock roots, or
dirty string, or rags full of quince-seeds; or earth, or earth mixed
with cloves, butter and marigold flowers; or nuts, or spices -- any

irritant -- and thrusts them into the uterus, to hasten the event.
(Quoted in Daly, 439n)

194

Mayo’s expose, celebrated by Daly with superlatives, is presented as an “eye
witness account” which “aroused a storm of protest in the East and in the West,“
indicating “Mayo had struck a nerve.“ (127) Daly responds to those who
protested Mother India that Mayo's provides a “realistic” assessment of the
situation Indian women face in contrast with the protesters “defensive rhetoric.”
(127)
It is important to understand the analytic context within which Daly
represents Indian women as victims and preyers upon each other. Her
construction is the result of an A-mazing effort to connect what may first appear
(to the Joumeyer) as disparate phenomena: the rite of sati and “our“ rituals, in
this case, Western scholarship about sati. (115, Daly's emphasis) Regarding
this effort, Daly explains,
My purpose here is to detect in these perpetuations of murder
patterns whose effect is mental murder. This pattern-detecting --
the development of a kind of positive paranoia -- is essential for
every feminist Searcher, so that she can resist the sort of mind-
poisoning to which she must expose herself in the very process of
seeking out necessary information. (125)

As one of the “the few women in 'advanced' countries who have some idea of

the facts of sexism and some knowledge of 'women's history," Daly says, it is

the responsibility of the feminist Searcher to un-cover “the continued massacre

that is masked by the rituals of re-search which repeatedly re-cover the

interconnected crimes of planetary patriarchy.“ (123) Beginning with Webster's

 

‘ According to the Wrckedary, a “Searcher“ is “one who traverses and surveys dangerous terrain,
seeking the Knowledge buried and continually recovered by the re-searchers of the State of
Reversal.“ (161 -2)

195
definition of sati as “the act or custom of a Hindu woman willingly cremating
herself,“ (116, Daly's emphasis) Daly works to expose Western scholars'
representations of sati as a practice which Hindu women have willingly and
deliberately “sought out, enforced, and accepted.“ (117) She uncovers a pattern
of grammatical usage such as strategic employment of the active and passive
voice, as well as the use of neutral terms like “custom“ and offensive rhetoric in
the guise of “objective scholarship,“ which make Indian women “appear as the
agents of their own destruction.“ (117) Their language, she argues, exhibits
“their complicity in the same social order which was / is the radical source of
such rites of female sacrifice.“ (115) For example, she reproaches Benjamin
Walker, author of The Hindu World: An Encyclopedic Survey of Hinduism (1968),
for using the active voice in his descriptions of widows. Walker indicates his
Identification with those who pushed, poked and drugged the widows by referring
to the widows as agents who “adopted the practice“ and “immolated
themselves.“ (1 17)

Daly draws several examples from the writings of mythologist Joseph
Campbell. In the first he is discussing sati as a “custom” of human sacrifice in
conjunction with the practice of burying wives, harems and attendants alive in
the tombs of ancient Egypt. Regarding evidence that the victims died hideous
deaths from suffocation, Campbell claims,

[ijn spite of these signs of suffering and even panic in the actual
moment of the pain of suffocation, we should certainly not think of
the mental state and experience of these individuals after any
model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate.

For these sacrifices were not properly, in fact, individuals at all; that
is to say, they were not particular beings, distinguished from a

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class or group by virtue of any sense or realization of a personal,
individual destiny or responsibility. (116-7)

The women who died in the tombs should not be thought of as victims, on
Campbell's logic, because they did not have individual identities like “ours.“ In
another example, Campbell offers a description of the sacrificed woman from the
perspective of the distinction between the “real” self who lives by sacred scripts
and the “unreal” self who acts on her own individual initiative.5
Sati, the feminine participle of sat, then, is the female who really is
something in as much as she is truly and properly a player of the
female part: she is not only good and true in the ethical sense but
true and real ontologically. In her faithful death, she is at one with
her own true being. (118)
On this logic, Daly points out, “to be killed is 'good and true,‘ and to cease to
exist is to be.“ (119) Here Campbell is suggesting the widows should not be
thought of as victims because in the sacred act of sacrifice they realize their “true
and real” existence.
These are examples, Daly argues, of “scholarly mystification” which dull
“all sense of the unrightness of such rites as suttee, regarding them with
detached interest and making them appear isolated and unrelated to ‘our’
culture.“ (123-4) Campbell is what she names a “devotee of the rites of de-

tached scholarship.“ (119) What connects him as a representative of Western

scholarship with Indian patriarchs who prod the widow to the pyre is a failure of

 

5 Recall from Part II, I explained Daly's view about how patriarchal myths deceive women.
According to the patriarchal myth-makers, Daly points out, myths express “intuitive insights“
about meaningful human activity which “open up depths of reality and the self othenNise closed to
us.“ In fact, Daly argues, the “insights“ expressed by patriarchal myths actually close off depths
of reality and of the Self otherwise opened to women, by “deceiving us into believing that these
are the only doorways to our depths and the fathers hold the keys.“

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identification with her as a victim. Daly finds this failure again in Campbell’s
description of the live burial of a young widow in 1813 as “an illuminating, though
somewhat appalling, glimpse into the deep silent pool of the Oriental, archaic
soul... [emphases mine].” (ibid.) In response to this description Daly points out
that Campbell misses “the fact that the “archaic soul’ was a woman destroyed by
Patriarchal Religion." (ibid.) Daly argues, these mystifications, so prevalent in
Western research, indicate “that the authors identify on some level with the
agents of the atrocities, while being incapable of identifying with the victims -- a
subjective condition which is masked by the pose of “objective scholarship.”
(125) This pose not only colludes in legitimating these gynocidal atrocities, Daly
points out, it “keeps minds / imaginations in a state of readiness to accept similar
or comparable practices which carry out the same program.“ (123-4)

In this chapter, then, Daly distinguishes between those who identify with
the victims, including herself, Katherine Mayo, and all radical feminist journeyers,
and those who do not identify with the victims, including Western scholars and
Indian patriarchs, and those hostile towards radical feminism. She offers her
representation of the Indian woman as victim, revealed by the Sado-Ritual
Syndrome analysis, with the intention of standing with her against those who
commit and condone the patriarchal crime of sati. In contrast, the representation
of the Indian woman as an agent acting on her most cherished beliefs, offered
by the patriarchs, East and West, Daly argues, indicates a detached stand, one
from which the ritual is not viewed as a crime. The underlying assumption Daly

is operating on here is that crimes have victims; no victim, no crime. The Sado-

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Ritual Syndrome is an analytic device designed to make the line between
perpetrators and victims, between right and wrong, clear and distinct.

Daly claims to reveal a connection between Western scholars and Indian
patriarchs in their shared adherence to the basic assumption which underlies
their planetary gynocidal social order: that the widows consciously and
deliberately immolate themselves as an expression of their love, devotion, and
fidelity. In fact, Daly's analysis includes direct references to the views of only two
Indian men.6 While neither addresses this basic assumption directly, both offer
images of Indian husbands who could be desenring of nothing less than undying
expressions of love, devotion and fidelity. For the most part Daly assumes a
construction of the traditional Indian patriarch as defender of “barbaric” social
customs sanctioned by orthodox readings of Hindu scriptures. There is no sign in
her analysis of the Indian men who worked for social reforms in India throughout
the nineteenth century. The following examples are mentioned by Kumari
Jayawardena in The White Woman's Other Burden (1995).

The Parsi reformer Behramji Menrvanji Malabari, submitted a
memorandum entitled, “Notes on Infant Marriage and Enforced
Widowhood“ and called upon the government to raise the age of

consent. And in his journal, The Indian Spectator, Malabari
frequently discussed the treatment of women and children in India.

 

° The first is a justification for child marriages, offered by a Brahman during the Legislative
Assembly Debates of 1925. She reports that he exclaimed, “To the Brahman girl-wife the
husband is a greater, truer, dearer benefactor than all the social reformers bundled together.“
(121) The second is offered as an example of the “sort of defensiveness which [Katherine]
Mayo’s exposé evoked.“ (127) Daly presents the following commentary on and quotations from
Dalip Singh Saund's My Mother India (1930). “Defending the hindu married woman's condition,
he pictures her as 'dropping longingly into his [her husband's] embrace with almost divine
confidence...’ He speaks for his sister (who of course is not allowed to speak for herself): 'And
when the ideal of her childhood was realized, no wonder she found in his company that height of
emotional exaltation which springs from the proper union of the sexes and is the noblest gift of
God to man. The American girl thinks my sister married a stranger; but she had married an ideal,
a creation of herimagination, and a part of her own being [emphasis mine].'“ (127-8)

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In 1890, on a visit to Britain, he wrote an “Appeal on Behalf of the
Daughters of India“ that led to further debates in Britain on Indian
family life (Farquhar 1915: 87) Similarly, one of India's leading
social reformers, M.G. Ranade (1842-1901), a high court judge in
Bombay, also took up the issue. He had succeeded in bringing
together social reformers from all parts of India into a National
Social Conference that met annually from 1887 to 1895 as part of
the Indian National Congress sessions. (Jayawardena, 92)
The efforts of Malabari and Ranade indicate that there were Indian men who
worked to end the crimes perpetrated against Indian women. Nor does Daly
mention the efforts of Gandhi, who said,
the Smritis contain texts which can command no respect from men
who cherish the liberty of woman as their own and who regard her
as the mother of the race The question arises as to what to do
with the Smritis that contain texts that are repugnant to the moral
sense. I have already suggested that all that is printed in the
name of scripture need not be taken as the word of God or the
inspired word. (Quoted in Chatterjee, 1989, 627)
Why is there no acknowledgment in the pages of Syn/Ecology of the social
reform efforts led by Indian men? Perhaps she decided it was not necessary to
acknowledge these examples because they presented only token efforts which
would not undermine her thesis regarding planetary patterns. Even if there were
some Indian men who struggled on behalf of Indian women, Daly may have
reasoned, they did not upset the line she was drawing in the chapter between on
the one side, feminist Searchers such as herself and Mayo, and on the other
side, Western scholars and Indian patriarchs because their efforts were not
rooted at any level in an identification with the experiences of Indian women.
Rather, their efforts were motivated by the assumption that to be politically

credible in the struggle against British control, social reform was necessary.

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Support for this explanation is found in Daly's condemnation of the book written
by Dalip Singh Saund in protest to Mayo’s Mother India. Daly points out that in
the book he speaks for his sister, “who of course is not allowed to speak for
herself.“ (128) Chatterjee confirms the practice among Indian men of speaking
for “their“ women was the rule among Indian nationalists. He reports about the
nationalist discourse that it has been,

a discourse about women; women do not speak here. It is a

discourse which assigns to women a place, a sign, an objectified

value; women here are not subjects with a will and a

consciousness. (Chatterjee, 632)
Within the nationalist discourse the Indian woman is not considered a victim
because she holds this place, has this value, in the struggle to secure national
identity in resistance to British imperialism. There is an unmistakable
resemblance between the essentialism which informs Campbell's view of the
widow as a symbol of the “Oriental, archaic soul“ and that which informs the
Indian nationalist’s view of her as the symbol of Indian identity. Hence, Daly
might have reasoned that the reform efforts signified less identification with the
victims of ritual atrocities than a view among some Indian nationalists that the
movement for self-rule would be well served by social reform on their behalf,
leading her to the conclusion that anti-imperialist patriarchy is still patriarchy.

On Lorde's view, however, representing patriarchy without distinguishing

between, in this case, imperialist and nationalist formations constituted through

racial and ethnic discourses presents a distortion with serious consequences for

global sisterhood. Having identified the kind of distortion Lorde was concerned

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with in Daly's text, the question becomes, what tool has been obscured by the
distortions? In order to get at the nature of the tool, consider the similarities Daly
has obscured between her representations of Indian women and those of the
Western scholars she criticizes. In particular, it will be instructive to examine the
common ground in the views of Daly and Campbell. Consider first the
connection between Campbell's image of the Indian widow good and true
expression of “archaic, Oriental soul“ and Daly’s image of Indian woman as
victim of barbarous violence. On both representations the widow is advancing
on the funeral pyre as an actor following a script. On Campbell's view, the
Indian woman is not a victim insofar as she is participating in “archaic Oriental“
customs which “open up depths of reality and of the self otherwise closed to
[her].“7 Immersed in the sacred activities of her culture she is “not properly an
individual at all.“ However, he insists, she “really is something in as much as she
is truly and properly a player of the female part.“ On Daly's view, the Indian
woman is a victim of those whose intent is to deceive her into believing that the
script which she follows is the only “doonlvay to her depths.“ She plays the
female part in patriarchal religious scripts because she has been forced through
deception into believing that “veiled and sleeping“ is the only key to truth and
goodness. What is common in both Campbell's and Daly's representation is the
Indian woman as the Other. She is not like the white Western Subjects: not like

Campbell with his sense of “personal, individual destiny or responsibility,“ not like

 

7 These are the words of Karl Jaspers, quoted by Daly in her critique of the male myth-makers'
discourse in “Deadly Deception: Mystification Through Myth,“ (46).

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Daly and the other “women in 'advanced' countries who have some idea of the
facts of sexism and some knowledge of 'women's history,“ who must take
responsibility for un-covering the massacre. Only those who might break with
the scripts acting on their own initiative are Subjects. The Indian woman is the
Other of the Western scholar who erases her suffering by refusing to see her
experience on “any model of our own“ experience. She is the Other of the
radical feminist who makes it her responsibility, as one of the few who is not
veiled and sleeping, to detect the patterns among the disparate atrocities in
order to stand up for her and others like her who do not have the knowledge of
their own power.
The tool at work here is the construction of the nonwhite, nonWestern
woman as Other. The construction of indigenous women of colonial empires
took various shapes, according to Thomas Prasch,
They appeared as sexual opportunity or temptation (depending on
the terms of the account) for white men, a motif through all imperial
territories that takes perhaps its most pronounced form in the
Western imagination's vision of the Orient's veiled women, harems,
and baths; as the pretext for imperial intervention to save women
from “barbarian“ practices ranging from sati in India to pologamy in
Africa and the Middle East; as the unresisting subjects of tradition-
bound patriarchal cultures; and as metaphorical embodiments for a
passive and penetrable, thus femininized, realm. (1995, 175)

In Daly's analysis, the Indian woman is Other as pretext for radical feminist

critique which implicates the “barbarous rituals“ perpetrated against women in

different social contexts in a planetary system. Obviously this is not the same as

Othering with the intent of sexual conquest or essentialist identity construction.

However, from the perspective of the Indian woman whose experiences are at

203
issue here, there is no difference in the perspective which would make a
difference. Neither the Orientalist, the patriarchal Indian nationalist, nor the
Western feminist acknowledges the Indian woman’s full subjectivity. This is the
situation which leads Gayatri Spivak, in her speculations on widow-sacrifice, to
ask, “Can the Subaltern Speak?“ (1985) Regarding the connection in the
thinking of Daly and Western patriarchs on the rite of sati, Spivak is explicit,
The abolition of this rite by the British in 1829 has been generally
understood as a case of “white men saving brown women from
brown men.“ White women did not produce an alternative
understanding, as one can see from perusing the nineteenth
century British Missionary Registers down to Mary Daly. (121)
In depicting the Indian woman as a victim of a tradition bound patriarchal culture,
Daly employed the tool of Othering, without awareness, to silence Indian
women.“ Both Daly and the scholars she criticizes assume their authority as
competent interpreters of sati. Daly assumes the correctness of her radical
feminist standpoint in much the same way as the Western scholars assume the
correctness of their “objective“ standpoints. Neither understands their social
location as a problematic place from which to begin their respective analyses.
Neither attempts to hear the voices of the Indian women in order to understand
the practice. Both effectively silence the Indian women by speaking for them.
The fact that not even one Indian woman's voice can be heard in Daly's analysis
of sati suggests that Daly has used one of the patriarchs tools against her

sisters. She has represented the Indian woman as utterly different from herself

and other white Western feminist Searchers. To represent Indian women as

 

° For a review of the voices of Indian women on sati and other issues see Sinha, 1994.

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thoroughly victimized and only American women as capable of consciousness
and resistance is, on Lorde's view, is to distort their differences.

In the next chapter of the Second Passage, “Chinese Footbinding: On
Footnoting the Three-Inch 'Lotus Hooks,“ Daly lays out a second a-mazing
analysis, similar in key respects to her analysis of sati. Here again, Daly
constructs the view of the traditional patriarch, this time Chinese, on the basis of
a few brief references cited in the Western patriarchal texts. She dismisses the
idea that Maoist revolutionaries are to be credited with bringing an end to
footbinding, since their motive did not derive from identification with the victims,
but from their interest in getting women into the work force. (142) The only
voices of Chinese women that can be heard are the Chinese mothers who use to
say, “if one loved a daughter, one could not love her feet.“ Daly offers this
saying in support of her thesis that women are used as Token Torturers to
obscure the male-centeredness of the ritual. (139-40) Even more than the
chapter on sati, this chapter is a focused critique of Western patriarchal
scholarship. Over half of the chapter is devoted to the seventh element of the
Sado-Ritual Syndrome, the legitimation of the ritual by the rituals of “objective“
scholarship. As alluded to in the title of the chapter, the main point of the
chapter is to a-maze the connection between the Chinese ritual footbinding and
Western scholarship about footbinding, in order to aid the Joumeyer in her ability
to perceive the workings of patriarchy, and to be able to distinguish her path
from that the scholarly men of her tradition. In the process, Daly again makes

her case on the basis of a construction of an Other, only this time, it is the

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Chinese woman rather than the Indian woman who is the victim discovered by
the feminist Searcher. Viewing herself on the side of the victim, again without
awareness, Daly distorts the racial/ethnic difference between women in a
dualistic construction of the white Western feminist who knows and the nonwhite,
nonWestern woman who does not.

A similar analytic pattern is evident in the third chapter of the Second
Passage, “African Genital Mutilation: The Unspeakable Atocities,“ however, Daly
shifts the focus of analysis in this chapter in a significant way by explicitly taking
up the silence of the victims. In fact, their silence is the subject of the chapter.
Where the chapters on sati and footbinding focused on the forces of legitimation
at work in the texts of Western patriarchal scholars, this chapter focuses on the
forces of silence, erasure, and denial at work in many disparate quarters about
the crime of genital mutilation. While Daly quotes two African women in the
chapter -- a woman from Guinea who testified as a witness at the International
Tribunal on Crimes Against Women (163), and a “young Egyptian woman
physician“ who gave reasons why she would circumscribe her own daughter
(165) -- neither challenges Daly's construction of the African woman as acting
according to a patriarchal script that casts her as good and real only insofar as
she participates in the ritual atrocity of genital mutilation. Both women are silent
on the gynocidal intent of this crime. Daly offers the following explanation for the
absence of African women's voices of resistance.

Those who have endured the unspeakable atrocities of genital
mutilation have in most cases been effectively silenced. Indeed this

profound silencing of the mind’s imaginative and critical powers is
one basic function of the sado-ritual, which teaches women never

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to forget to murder their own divinity. Those who physically survive
these atrocities “live“ their entire lifetimes, from early childhood or
from puberty, preoccupied by pain. (155)

On Daly's view, her depiction of nonwhite, noneuropean woman “only as victims
and preyers-upon each other“ does not ignore the voices of resistance among
African women, rather, it illustrates how effective patriarchy has been in silencing
them.

This chapter opens with the following epigraph drawn from Lorde's poem,
“A Sewerplant Grows in Harlem.“

Have you ever risen in the night

bursting with knowledge and the world

dissolves toward any listening ear

into which you can pour

whatever it was you knew

before waking

Only to find all ears asleep

or drugged perhaps by a dream of words
because as you scream into them over and over
nothing stirs

and the mind you have reached is not a working mind
please hang up and die again? The mind

you have reached is not a working mind

Please hang up

And die again. (153)

In order to explore Daly's discussion of the silence among African woman in the
chapter, it will be fruitful to examine her analysis through a reading of Lorde's
poem. Why did Daly choose this poem for this chapter? I suggest she chose it
because it seemed to capture so perfectly every radical feminist thing she

wanted to say in the chapter. I think, in choosing it, she understood herself to be

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engaging in an “act of Biophilic Bonding with“ Lorde.‘ From Daly's gynocentric
perspective, the “night“ women are rising from is the society of gynocidal
patriarchy, constituted by the concrete foreground practices of sati, footbinding,
genital mutilation, witch-buming, and gynecology, which are re-enactments of
patriarchal myth. The women rising from this night “bursting with knowledge“ are
the “significant and growing cognitive minority of women, radical feminists, [who]
are breaking out from under the sacred shelter of patriarchal myths,“ named in
Daly's eighth Qualitative Leap thesis. (1975, 20) This would include the feminist
Searchers whose analyses provide the primary feminist sources for each of the
chapters of the Second Passage, i.e. Katherine Mayo, Andrea Dworkin, Fran
Hoskin, Matilda Josleyn Gage, and herself. It would also include those whose
voices are heard in the text through the epigraphs, including Audre Lorde's
voice. The “knowledge“ these radical feminists are bursting with is the
knowledge which the Journeyer, who has been traveling through the Second
Passage of the book, is coming to consciousness about, namely, the “deep and
universal intent on this patriarchal planet to destroy the divine spark in women.“
(Daly, 1978, 315) There is no “listening ear“ for this knowledge because all ears
are “asleep.“ On Daly's perspective, Lorde is describing the experience of
radical feminists in the early seventies in the United States who were beginning
to name and theorize patriarchy without a context within which it could be heard.

Lorde's poem probably seemed to speak directly to Daly's experience as she

 

° In the new introduction, after expressing regret for “any pain that unintended omissions may
have caused others, particularly women of color, as well as myself,“ these are the words that
Daly used to describe what writing (Syn/Ecology meant to her. (1990, xxxi)

208
was discovering the Sado-Ritual Syndrome at work in the ritual of female genital
mutilation.

In this chapter Daly is bursting with the knowledge of patriarchal violence
in the midst of a “conspiracy of silence“ around the crime of genital mutilation.
(157) According to Fran Hoskin, the editor of the Women's lntemational Network
News, located in Lexington, Massachusetts,

International agencies, the UN. and UN. agencies, especially
WHO and UNICEF (both devoted to health), development agencies
(such as U.S. Agency for lntemational Development), non-
governmental organizations working in Africa, missionaries and
church groups concerned with health care, also women's
organizations including World Association of Girl Guides and Girl
Scouts, Y.W.C.A., and the Associated Country Women of the
World, and others working in Africa, all know what is going on. Or
they have people in Africa who know. This is quite aside from the
Health Departments and hospitals in African countries and the
MOS, especially gynecologists, who get the most desperate
cases... The doctors know all. But they don't speak. (In Daly,
1978, 157-8)
A-mazing these disparate silences, Daly points to “their essential sameness.“
(158) Their collective silence on the crime committed against African girls and
women reveals their fundamental ability to identify with the victims. “Educated“
persons and African leaders, Daly suggests, “babble about the importance of
’tribal coherence' and 'tradition' while closing their eyes to the physical reality.“
(ibid.) This is the situation faced the feminist who has risen in the night, bursting
with knowledge, to find everyone is asleep, “or drugged perhaps by a dream of
words.“ The “dream of words“ drugging the potential listeners, on this reading, is

the patriarchal script which falls to condemn the ritual on the grounds of

“avoiding cultural judgment.“ Daly hears the message of those who deny

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responsibility and blame for the crime by naming the mutilation a “custom“ which
must be respected as part of a “different tradition,“ as instructions from a
patriarchal operator, “Please hang up/ And die again.“ What Daly found in
Lorde's poem was a woman, like herself, who was waking up to the knowledge
of the horrible crimes against women only to find all ears asleep or drugged .
Consider Daly's position in the midst of this situation, in which the African
woman is silenced by pain, and in which academics, catholics, liberal reformers,
population planners, and “politicos of all persuasions“ collude in a conspiracy of
silence. Regarding her position in this chapter, she explains,
I have chosen to name these practices for what they are: barbaric
rituals/atrocities. Critics from Western countries are constantly
being intimidated by accusations of “racism,“ to the point of
misnaming, non-naming, and not seeing these sado-rituals. The
accusations of “racism“ may come from ignorance, but they serve
only the interests of males, not of women. This kind of accusation
and intimidation constitutes an astounding and damaging reversal,
for it is clearly in the interests of Black women that feminists of all
races should speak out. Moreover, it is in the interest of women of
all races to see African genital mutilation in the context of planetary
patriarchy, of which it is but one manifestation. (154)
On Daly's view, accusations of racism are intended to keep white Western
women, like herself, from speaking out. The possibility is not apparent to her
that one might speak out about patriarchal violence against African women in a
racist or ethnocentric manner. Although she is aware that others will be critical
of her exposé, she is not aware of how racism and ethnocentrism are embedded
in her radical feminist perspective. She cannot see how speaking for the African

woman Others them by affirming racist and ethnocentric discourses which

represent them only as victims. Part of what keeps Daly from seeing the racism

210
and ethnocentrism of her perspective is the responsibility she feels as Searcher
who knows to speak out. She views this responsibility as transcending race and
racism.

Daly presents her perspective on “sex differences and race“ in the
process of critiquing Felix Bryk’s Dark Rapture: The Sex Life of the African Negro
(1939). According to Bryk, genital mutilation is “practiced for erotic reasons.“ (In
Daly, 1978, 170) On his view, efforts to end the practice will be thwarted by
nature.

Woman is forever woman, and man everywhere man;
independently of race or color of skin -- white, black, yellow, or
copper-red; whether ugly or beautiful; despite youth or age; beyond
good and evil. (ibid., 172)
His explanation rests on an essentialist view of sexual difference which, as Daly
points out, is designed to legitimize the rigidly role-defined order of planetary
patriarchy. Bryk also holds an essentialist view of racial difference, evident in his
claim that “They [Blacks] like to lie -- particularly to the whites -- just as children
do, because, like children, they cannot comprehend the moral necessity for
truthfulness.“ (ibid.) Notice that there is a contradiction in his views: He says
everywhere men and women are different, and at the same time, all blacks are
the same, i.e. they are all morally depraved. However, black women can not be,
at the same time, women who are like white women in their not being men, and
women who are essentially different than white women in their being liars. The

way essentialism works, they are either like or not like all other women. Daly

sees the racism in Bryk's effort to Other blacks and the misogyny in his Othering

211

of women, but not the contradiction. The important thing she wants women to

hear in his position is his patriarchal voice. In her words,
It would be helpful if women of all races could hear this message of
patriarchy with the deep understanding/hearing of the labyrinthine
inner ear, for it describes succinctly the sexual caste system,
pointing to its fundamentally same view of all women. (172)

Since patriarchy is “color-blind,“ Daly reasons, it is in all women's interests to

speak out against it. Not to speak out would be racist, on Daly’s view, because it

would collude in Bryk's racism by seeing blacks, in this case black women, as

different from white women. However, she warns,
There is a danger presented by such unabashedly racist books that
the underlying, universal misogyny will go unnoticed. Haggard
criticism should enable women who have been intimidated by
labels of “racism“ to become sisters to these women of Africa --
naming the crimes against them and speaking on their behalf --
seeing through the reversal that is meant to entrap us all. It is truly
racist to keep silent in the face of these atrocities, merely 'studying'
them, speaking and writing deceptively about them, applying
different (male-centered) standards to them, failing to see and
name the connections among them. Beyond racism is sisterhood,
naming the crimes against women without paying mindless respect
to the “social fabric“ of the various androcratic societies, including
the one in which we find our Selves imprisoned. (172)

The root thinking evident in Daly claim is that seeing the racism threatens to

obscure the “underlying“ misogyny. The danger here is in taking one of the

branches tor the root. Sisterhood is “beyond racism“ because it transcends the

essentialist racism based on the idea that all blacks are different than whites.

On Daly's view, the radical feminist sisterhood of Gyn/Ecology is anti-
racist and anti-ethnocentric because it refuses essentialist notions of racial

difference. It is anti-racist and anti-ethnocentric because of its concern not just

212

with discrimination against white American women, but with the war against all
women “white, black, yellow, or copper-red“ on this planet. From a race-
cognizant perspective, like Lorde’s, Daly's “color-blind“ re-action to Bryk's
essentialist racism, distorts the importance of racial difference which signals as
autonomy of culture, values, aesthetic standards, and so on. Hence, Daly has
used the tools of color-evasive racism and ethnocentrism against her sisters of
color without awareness. This is not ignorance in the sense of “ignoring“ racism
and ethnocentrism. On the contrary, her lack of awareness is undergirded by
her deep perception and conviction that radical feminism is “beyond racism.“
Having examined the first three chapters of the Second Passage in which
Daly analyzes the oppression of nonwhite, nonWestern women, we are in a
position to understand how does Daly's Sado-Ritual Syndrome analysis has hurt
Indian, Chinese, and African women as well as Indian-American, Chinese-
American and African-American women. As Lorde says in the letter,
representing women of color as victims, voiceless victims, helps maintain an
atmosphere of violence against them. If objective posturing by Western scholars
connects them with those who commit crimes against nonWestern women by
keeping “minds / imaginations in a state of readiness to accept similar or
comparable practices which carry out the same program,“ then any similar
connection between radical feminist and Western patriarchs probably has the
same effect. In the process of my investigation I argued that both Daly and
Western patriarchs view nonWestern women as Other. By representing

nonwhite, nonWestern women only as victims, Western minds / imaginations,

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including feminist minds / imaginations, remain in a state of readiness to accept
the violence against them. I submit this critique as grounds for my conclusion
that the book was not written for nonwhite and/or nonWestern women. Ironically,
Daly's radical feminist theory uses white Western patriarchal tools against
nonwhite, nonWestern women as part of a conscious effort to condemn the
crimes perpetrated against them. Daly's explicit claims that the Journey of the
Second Passage is an exercise in “woman-identified gynaestheia“ -- necessary
for the creation of the a-mazing female mind capable of seeing through the
patriarchal foreground to the Background reality of women's Selves -- together
with the conscious and critical understanding of the white and Western
perspective of the feminist who is bursting with radical feminist knowledge of
planetary patriarchy, suggest Gyn/Ecology was written for white Western
women.

How the Journey of Radical Feminism Charted in Gyn/Ecology Fails to
Provide a Liberating Path for Women of Color

Recall from my reading of Lorde’s letter, I argued, that the inclusion of
analyses in Gyn/Ecology which represent nonwhite, nonWestern women as
victims and preyers-upon each other, must be understood in connection with the
exclusion of powerful and resistant female symbolic figures from Indian, Chinese
and African traditions. (See Part II, 21—24) I suggested, following Lorde, that in
presenting the image of the African woman as Token Torturer, a victim coerced
into complicity with patriarchal scripts, and failing to include black goddesses

which symbolize the strength and knowledge and female-bonding of African

214

women, Daly distorted Lorde's archetypal experience. Daly's exclusion,
according to my reading of Lorde’s letter, revealed Daly's underlying color- and
power-evasive assumption that the herstory and myth of white women can
represent the symbolic Background for all women. With Lorde's criticism as a
guide, let us now turn to the last two chapters of the Second Passage.

What about the last two chapters of the Second Passage in which Daly
finds the Sado-Ritual Syndrome at work in early modern Europe and
contemporary [North] America? Doesn't she represent European and American
women as victims in the war against the Self in every living woman, just as she
represented Indian, Chinese and African women as victims? If she represented
all women as victims, that might suggest that I am on the wrong track in
attempting to link the problems Lorde found in Gyn/Ecology to Daly's white
Western perspective.1o However, I will argue in this section I am not on the
wrong track. Unlike the first three chapters of the Second Passage (on sati,
footbinding and genital mutilation) which present nonwhite, nonWesten women
only as victims, the last two chapters (on witch burning and gynecology) do not
represent European and American women as only victims.11

Consider the fourth chapter of the Second Passage, entitled “European
Witchburnings: Purifying the Body of Christ.“ In this chapter, the witch who is

represented as a “victim“ of patriarchal violence, is also represented as a symbol

 

‘° If this was the case, it might indicate that there is a theoretical problem (as suggested by the
postmodern feminist footnotes mentioned in Part II), rather than a problem with the race
discourse Daly is operating out of, as l have been suggesting.

" Taken together the chapters on European and American rituals (114 pages) offer the reader
almost twice as much analysis as the chapters on Indian, Chinese, and African rituals (64 pages).

215

of female knowledge and power. She symbolizes a “threat“ to the patriarchal
order. This image of victim/threat is introduced in the epigraph by Willie Tyson.

A woman's place is set like a tightly woven net

She's chained like a dog to her position.

But if by chance or fate she should happen to escape

She's a menace to the keepers of tradition.

So if you have the gift to heal but forget which way to kneel

Get ready for a manmade Inquisition.

In the Witching Hour you come to your power

You feel it deep inside you, its rising, rising

And you think it's a dream until you hear yourself scream

Power to the witch and the woman in me. (179)
The European witch in this chapter is represented -- unlike the Indian widow,
footbound Chinese woman, and mutilated African woman who follow the
patriarchal scripts to Self-destruction -- as a menace who threatens to patriarchy
by acting on her own initiative! Here, for the first time in the Second Passage,
Daly addresses the question, “just who were the women who were so horrifying
to the learned experts who created, controlled, and legitimated the witchcraze?“
(193) Recall she did not ask, just who were the women who were so horrifying
to Indian patriarchs and Western scholars who created, controlled, and
legitimated sati? Nor did she ask, just who were the daughters, what potential
did they have, which horrified Chinese patriarchs and Western scholars to the
point of creating, controlling, and legitimating the ritual of footbinding? Nor did
she ask, just who were the girls and young women who represented such a
threat to those who created, controlled, and legitimated female genital

mutilation? The reason she did not address these questions is provided by Daly

in the following passage.

216

The situation of those accused of witchcraft was somewhat
different from that of the footbound Chinese girls and of the
genitally maimed girls and young women of Africa, for these were
mutilated in preparation for their destiny -- marriage. It was also
somewhat different form the situation of the widows of India, who
were killed solely for the crime of outliving their husbands. For the
targets of attack in the witchcraze were not women defined by
assimilation into the patriarchal family. Rather, the witchcraze
focused predominantly upon women who had rejected marriage
(Spinsters) and women who had survived it (widows). The witch-
hunters sought to purify their society (The Mystical Body) of
these “indigestible“ elements -- women whose physical, intellectual,
economic, moral, and spiritual independence and activity
profoundly threatened the male monopoly in every sphere. (184)

 

She does not ask the questions about “just who these women were“ who were
victimized in India, China, and Africa, because her Searches led her to the
conclusion that they were “veiled and sleeping,“ completely Silenced, or Token
Torturers. These were women who were “defined by assimilation into the
patriarchal family." They were “digestible“ rather than “indigestible' elements of
society. She did not ask the question of who these women were, in a
Background sense, because her analysis led her to believe that they presented
no threat to the patriarchal order.

So, just who was the witch? The witch was the target of patriarchal
violence, not in order to make her a good wife or mother, but because she
refused these patriarchal roles. Like the other victims of patriarchal violence the
witches were women accused of and punished for impurity. Daly offers the
following case to provide perspective on the confessions of those accused.

A typical example was that of a young woman of twenty, whose
name was Agnes, who was tortured in Tettenwang, Germany, in
1600. On August 11 she was hoisted repeatedly in the strappado

(defined in Merriam Webster as a torture consisting of “hoisting the
subject by a rope sometimes fastened to his [sic] wrists behind his

217

back and letting him fall to the length of the rope“). According to

Lea, she bore this heroically, confessing nothing and pardoning

those who had falsely accused her, even those she had been

hoisted eleven times, ten of them with a fifty-pound weight. Ten

weeks later she was hoisted again and was told that her mother

had accused her, and then “her courage gave way.“ (181)
On Daly's analysis, Agnes was accused of being a witch because she
symbolized a particular sort of impurity. This was not the bodily impurity which
legitimated genital mutilation, but rather an impurity her mode of living presented
within the larger social body (“The Mystical Body“). The witches were accused
of sexual impurity to mask the “intent“. of the witch hunters, which Daly claims,
“was to purify society of the existence and of the potential existence“ of “women
outside patriarchal control -- Spinsters and widows -- whose crime is
independence (indigestibility).“ (183, 185) Unlike the victims who followed the
scripts to become good and true women, the witches were “strong women“ who
refused to follow the scripts, and were tortured for presenting this threat. (183)

On Daly's analysis, the witches were victimized because they were Hags

(healers, counselors, wise women, teachers) who “earned the respect of the
people“ through expressions of their “real female-identified goodness, that is,
[through their] independence, strength, wisdom, and learning.“ (193) Like the
daughters of educated men, their independence was the condition for their
contributions. The were women who had earned the respect of the people
through their work which combined “spiritual and medical“ knowledge. Because

of their knowledge, Daly argues, the Witches became the targets of a “secret

bond between seemingly distinct and even opposed categories of men“

218

obsessed with “purifying society of deviant/defiant women.“ (185) According to
Daly's a-mazing analysis, this “gynocidal fraternity“ included members of the
legal profession, priests from the “bitterly opposed“ traditions of catholicism and
protestantism, “aspirants to political power,“ those who controlled the newly
invented printing press, and the rising professional class of knowledgeable
“experts.“2 (185-193) The witchcraze, on Daly's view, was a war waged by “an
aspiring 'intellectual' elite of professional men“ against “a spirituallmoral/know-
ing elite cross-section of the female population of Europe.“ (194) The witchcraze
differs from other atrocities in the Second Passage in that this “primal battle of
principalities and powers was at heart concerned with the process of know-ing,
which the professionals wanted to possess and control as their “body of
knowledge.“ (194) This was not a slaughter of innocent victims, but a “battle“
over knowledge.‘3 The European witch was a Warrior Witch.

Daly acknowledges this difference constitutes a break with the basic
similarities dis-covered among the other patriarchal crimes analyzed in the
Second Passage. “However,“ she suggests, “it is essential also to be aware of
some significant differences“ in manifestations of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome.
(180) The difference between the war on women who are “veiled and sleeping“
and the “battle“ against the wise women is significant, Daly asserts, for “Hags

and Crones [who] are struggling to survive today“ on the “boundaries of

 

‘2 An interesting research project might be made of comparing Daly's gynocentric historicism with
Foucault's “new“ historicism.

‘° For a review of the recent literature on gender and the historiography of the European witch-
hunts see Elspeth Whitney’s “International Trends: The Witch 'She'l The Historian 'He'“ (1995) in
the Journal of Women '5 History, vol. 7, No.3 (fall).

219

androcratic Western-dominated society.“ (ibid.) In order to understand the
significance of this difference recall the two-fold project of the Second Passage:
to establish on the basis of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome that patriarchy is a
planetary war on the Self in every living woman, and in the process, to create
and develop the a-mazing female mind capable of perceiving the relation
between, on the one hand, foreground myths and rituals, and on the other,
Background practices and potentialities. In the previous Second Passage
chapters the feminist Searchers do battle with the Western scholars over how
women who are the targets of the patriarchal world war should be perceived.
The feminist Searcher herSelf, is not a victim, but one “bursting with knowledge.“
She is one who acts responsibly on her knowledge on behalf of the silenced
victims of patriarchy. It is “essential“ to acknowledge the difference between the
(Indian, Chinese, and African) victims and the (European) victim/threat if the
Joumeyer/Searcher is going to be able to recognize the Witch within her as the
doorway to her depths. The difference is significant because of the relation
between the Joumeyer who a-mazes the Sado-Ritual Syndrome in the chapters
on patriarchal atrocities in India, China and Africa, and the Witch who is dis-
covered in this chapter. The radical feminist Journeyer is a Witch! In Daly's
words,

The women hunted as witches were (are) in a time/space that is

not concentric with androcracy. Hags are Self-centering,

constituting the Society of Outsiders, defining gynocentric
boundaries. (186)

 

220

It is important for the Journeyer to find herSelf, through a-mazing the European
witchburnings, because in that identification the Joumeyer discovers that she is
more than a victim, she is one who defines her a mode of living from the
knowledge within herSelf, a knowledge and mode of living which present a
liberating path beyond patriarchal boundaries. Here for the first time in the
Second Passage, Daly presents a connection between the Joumeyer or feminist
Searcher who is a-mazing the planetary massacre and women who are victims
of it. The Joumeyer/Searcher is unrelated to the Indian woman, the Chinese
woman and the African woman, but she is the symbolic descendent of the Witch.
From this Hag-identified perspective the Joumeyer realizes by the end of the
chapter,
There is much to be done. Working with increased confidence and
precision, Hags must continue in the spiritual tradition of such
visionaries as Matilda Joselyn Gage, continuing to uncover our
past and paths to our future. This will be possible to the degree
that we continue with courage in the Journey of our own
time/space. Seeing through the fraudulent re-presentatlons of the
witchcraze will help us recognize the tactics of today's Male
Midwives, the professional Wizards who have unsuccessfully
“succeeded“ the Wise Women -- the Unhealers of Modern
Medicine. (222)
By including in the Sado-Ritual Syndrome analysis of the witch, representations
of women who are both victims of patriarchy and threats to it, Daly offers the
history and Background of European women to the feminist Searcher who must

face in the last chapter the Sado-Ritual which threatens to make a victim, who

presents no threat, of her.

221

In the final chapter of the Second Passage, “American Gynecology:
Gynocide By the Holy Ghosts of Medicine and Therapy,“ Daly clearly intends to
present the American woman who suffers the crimes of gynecology as another
victim of planetary patriarchy. She asserts from the start,

I have shown in the earlier chapters of this passage how women in
various cultures -- which are merely multi-manifestations of the
overall culture of androcracy -- have often been lulled / lobotomized
by the myths and habits of their particular social context. Drugged
by the prevailing local dogmas and disabled physically, they have
not always seen the intent behind the vicious circle of maiming and
murder of mothers and daughters. In twentieth-century America,
women are lulled by the myths and rituals of gynecology and
therapy, believing that “doctor knows best.“ We have entered the
Ice Age of Gynocidal Gynecology. (224)
Like the Indian woman who is drugged to induce her to follow patriarchal scripts
to self-destruction, like the footbound woman of China who is disabled physically
and mentally, like the African woman who is silenced in pain by genital
mutilation, American women are kept by gynecologists “in the state of perpetual
patients whose bodies and minds are constantly invaded by foreign objects --
knives, needles, speculums, carcinogenic hormone injections and pills, sickening
self-images, festering fixations, debilitating dogmas.“14 (230) Daly's analysis
includes an exposé of a range of Sado-Rituals including estrogen replacement
therapy (especially DES), the “recent hysterectomy epidemic,“ the “breast
surgery craze,“ forced sterilization as well as forced motherhood (via abortion

laws), and “psychiatric replacement of [a woman's] Self-identified natural history

by man-made misinterpretations.“ (236)

 

“ In this chapter, Daly explains in a footnote, she uses “the term gynecology broadly to refer to
all those professions -- including psychiatry and the other psychotherapeutic fields -- which
specialize in the ’diseases and hygiene’ of women's bodies and minds.“ (224)

 

 

222

Despite of Daly’s intention to present the American woman as victim of
gynecology, the Joumeyer/Searcher does not identity with her as such because
she is also represented as part of a tradition of strong, knowledgeable, resistant
women linked genealogically, or as Daly says “Crone-ologically,“ with the
European women burned as witches. Unlike the other chapters of the Second
Passage, which all begin with the first element of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome
(obsession with purity), this chapter begins with a section entitled, “A Brief
Crone-ology.“ The argument of this section is that, in the West, patriarchy has
taken shape in different formations in response to particular threats which have
presented themselves in three historical moments: early modern, nineteenth
century, and late twentieth century. During the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Daly argued in the previous chapter, “the European
witchcraze signaled the arrival of a new age of gynocidal processions.“ (229) In
response to the threat presented by Spinsters and widows outside patriarchal

control whose process of know-ing gained them the respect of the people --

“their competence shows up the incompetence of the legitimated professionals“
- patriarchy took shape in the witchcraze. (193) According to Daly, “Man-
midwives of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteen, and nineteenth centuries were
under fire from woman midwives, such as Elizabeth Nihell, who described their
instruments as 'weapons of death.“ (224) Hence, it is no coincidence, on Daly's
Crone-ology that "the massacre of the wise women/healers during the
witchcraze was followed by the rise of man-midwives who eventually became

dignified by the name “gynecologist.“ (224)

 

 

223
During the nineteenth century, Daly argues patriarchy took shape in

gynecology, which was a response to the threat presented by feminists. In
Daly's words, “it is essential for Crone-ologists to see that the specialized
treatment for women known as gynecology arose in the nineteenth century as a
direct response to the first wave of feminism.“ (227) She makes her case by
reading together two seemingly disparate histories -- the history of the
emergence of gynecology and the history of the first wave women's movement --
in order to make apparent that they are connected by being responses to
assertions of female strength and knowledge. Among the disparate events she
a-mazes are the following.

In 1848, the year of the first Women's Right's Convention, Dr.

Charles Meigs was advising his pupils that their study of female

organs would enable them to understand and control the very

heart, mind, and soul of woman. (ibid.)

In 1852 Dr. Augustus Kingsley Gardner let out a battle cry against

“disorderly women,“ including women’s rightists, Bloomer-wearers,

and midwives. (227)
Thus, the patriarchal response to feminists of the first wave was like the
response to the Witches, in that both were intended to maintain the sexual caste
system by eliminating threats and potential threats to it. Finally, in this chapter
Daly goes on to establish the gynocidal link between American Gynecology and
second wave of feminism. Previewing her analysis, she says,

our Crone-logical analysis will show that the current escalation of

murderous gynecological surgery (and of chemotherapy and

psychotherapy) is no chronological coincidence. There is every

reason to see the mutilation and destruction of women by doctors

specializing in unnecessary radical mastectomies and
hysterectomies, carcinogenic hormone therapy, psychosurgery,

 

 

224

spirit-killing psychiatry and other forms of psychotherapy as directly
related to the rise of radical feminism in the twentieth century. (228)

By perceiving the connections between the witchcraze and gynocidal gynecology
in the last two centuries Daly a-mazes these seemingly disparate phenomena to
reveal how "the mutilations and mutations masterminded by the modern man-
midwives represent an advanced stage in the patriarchal program of gynocide.“
(226) Hence, in the chapters on witchburing and gynecology Daly has provided
a context for understanding these crimes which she does not provide in the
chapters on sati, footbinding and genital mutilation. In fact, the chapters on
witchburing and gynecology fit together in a way that the other chapters do not.
Together they present a historical narrative which enables the Joumeyer to see
the Background of women acting on their own initiatives (witches, first and
second wave feminists) behind the foreground practices which are re-
enactments of patriarchal scripts of Goddess Murder. The Joumeyer sees the
crimes as responses to female knowledge and power, rather than crimes
perpetrated against victims who are “veiled and sleeping.“ Seeing them as such,
Ialy points out, it is
necessary for Spinsters/Lesbians to provide the most lucid analysis
possible in this State of Siege. Precisely as defiant deviants, as
Daughters of the healers burned as witches because they were
“indigestible,“ we can take on the label lmpure as a badge of
honor, for we defy the pure image of perfect femininity. As Anti-
Marys whose prehistoric sources are the ante-Marian Goddesses,
we are in a position to see Mary, Eve, Athena, the Total Woman as
fetishes formed from fragmented female divinity. [...] Spinsters
who are choosing be-ing are ecstatically moving outside the space
of the patriarchal holding pattern. From the vantage point of
Journeyers into the natural Background of our Selves, we can

expose and judge all pseudochoices and pseudosolutions foisted
upon women by the foreground fetishists. In order to do so

225

 

effectively, we must analyze the legitimating logic as well as the
techniques employed by the purifiers / castrators of women. (240)

Unlike the victims of the other chapters who are not able to provide a lucid
analysis, who are not in a position to expose and judge pseudochoices, the
American woman is because she has a Witch within her.

Under each of the elements of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome analysis in this

chapter, the representations of American women as victims are contextualized

 

with insight made possible by the Crone-ological approach. For example, in her
analysis of the gynecologist's obsession with purity, Daly refers to Adrienne
Rich's discovery of the “reversal“ in the traditional historical story of gynecology
which suggests that “filthy“ midwives were replaced by antiseptic ob/gyns.
Quoting Rich, Daly points out,
“The midwife, who attended only women in labor, carried fewer
disease bacteria with her than the physican. [...] In the
seventeenth century began a two centuries' plague of puerperal
fever which was directly related to the increase in obstetric practice
by men.“ The hands of physican or surgeon often came directly
from cases of disease to cases of childbirth. (236)
This example provides even a more striking example of how the portrayal of
victims is different in this chapter than in the first three chapters of the Second
Passage if considered in contrast with Daly's analysis of Mayo's “description of
the 'unspeakable' dhais, 'midwives' from the 'untouchable' caste to whose filthy,
brutal, grotesque, and frequently murderous ministrations the woman in
childbirth is subjected.“ (439n) In the American account, by an a-mazing

reversal, Daly reveals that the midwife was not the filthy one after all. However,

in the Indian account, Daly’s a-mazing analysis reveals that the midwife is filthy,

226

but warns the reader not to misinterpret the fact “the dhais are females,
imagining that this employment of the filthiest and most ignorant women to
attend women in childbirth is not patriarchal in its context and intent.“ The
difference between the two accounts is that the latter is offered without a Crone-
ological type contexualization to locate the dhais in a female-identified
time/space of her own. She is understood only as an agent of male-
idenfificafion.

While there are no references to racial identity in the chapter on the
witchburnings, Daly makes an effort in this chapter to include among the
American women victimized by gynecological practices, examples of black
women. For example, she notes J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology,“

began his life's work “humbly,“ performing dangerous sexual
surgery on black female slaves housed in a small building in his
yard, but rapidly moved up the professional ladder, becoming the
“moving spirit“ behind the founding of the Woman's Hospital in New
York, which provided him with bodies for his brutal experimental
operations. (225)
She also notes that Sims used indigent women in these experimental operations
and provides the following footnote for support.
Mary Smith, an Irish indigent, suffered thirty of his operations
between 1856 and 1859. The black slave Anarcha had suffered
the same number in his backyard stable a decade before. (ibid.)
The obvious point here, in addition to the fact that Sims was a gynocidal butcher,
is that American gynecology is a Sado-Ritual which is practiced with only minor

variations across race and class. Situating the experience of Mary Smith, an

Irish-American indigent, side by side with the experience of Anarcha, an African-

227

American slave, is meant to suggest that American descendants of European
and African women alike share a history of victimization at the hands of men like
Sims. However, an important difference between the experiences of the Irish-
American and African-American women is obscured by this connection. On the
basis of the Second Passage, only the Irish-American women’s experience is
represented in the context of a Crone-ology. Since, black American women do
not share the history of white women of European descent, they appear, in this
chapter, more like the Indian, Chinese and African victims in the first three
chapters than like the Witches of the previous chapter. Since they were slaves,
rather than witches, they appear, like the women in the first three chapters of the
Second Passage, as only victims rather than as victim/threats.

Before moving on, consider one more example from the chapter. In her
analysis of the seventh component of the gynecological sado-ritual, concerning
the legitimation of the ritual by the meta-ritual of “objective“ scholarship, Daly
discusses an article on “Giant Uterine Tumors,“ which describes the
“management and surgical removal of a 65 lb. uterine tumor.“ Daly reports that
the article,

begins with the sentence: “Surgery for massive abdominal tumors
is interesting and challenging.“ This professional piece placidly
lists a series of hideous “procedures,“ to which the woman
(described as a sixty-year-old, black, gravida 1, para 1) was
subjected. We are informed that the patient was “afraid of the
hospital and surgery.“ The woman, whose healthy fear had kept
her away from the hospital, had lived with the tumor for fifteen
years, but had suffered from low-back pain and had trouble
“ambulating.“ After treatment, she had not only the same problems
but others, infinitely more serious. She was subsequently

hospitalized at a nursing home, where she died approximately
seven months after her original admission to the hospital. It is safe

228

to conclude that the surgery was not “interesting and challenging“
for her. (290)

While it cannot be denied that Daly identifies with the victim of this ritual atrocity
against the “devotees of the rites of de-tached scholarship“ who mask their
failure of identification by the pose of “objectivity,“ Daly has represented the
black American woman as utterly different from herself in a dualistic construction
of the white feminist who knows and the black victim who does not. On Daly's
view, the woman with the tumor had a “healthy fear“ that kept her away from the
hospital, but it was not a fear informed by the knowledge of the Witch. She did
not know enough about the gynocidal intent of gynecologists to save her own
life. Daly also presents similar examples of white women as victims. The
difference, again, is that the white Joumeyer who is discovering the crimes
perpetrated against women like herself knows that she is not only a victim
because she has the knowledge of survival handed down to her by her
European foresisters.

To illustrate how the Journey through the Second Passage of
Syn/Ecology presents different paths, consider the paths presented for a white
Western woman, like myself, and a black Western woman, like Lorde. Upon
coming to the first chapter of the Second Passage I discover the Indian woman
“veiled and sleeping“ and I realize that even though I am unrelated to her, as
one of the few women capable of seeing the horror of their situation, I have a
responsibility to un-cover the forces of legitimation which masks the massacre

against her. I am the feminist Searcher. I stand up for her in a battle against the

229

Western patriarchal scholars who identify with the perpetrators of the crimes
against her. In the next chapter I discover the Chinese women as victim who is
made into a Token Torturer. And though she seems different than me, I
understand that making her into a Token Torturer is a patriarchal strategy to
separate women.

I go on to a-maze the connection between the Chinese ritual of footbinding and
Western scholarship about footbinding. I do this analytic work in order to aid me
in my ability to perceive the workings of patriarchy, and to be able to distinguish
my path from that the scholarly men of my tradition. I stand up for the victims of
footbinding arguing that they are used as Token Torturers by men who seek to
mask the male-centeredness of their ritual. Next, I discover the African woman
who is silenced by the pain of genital mutilation. Bursting with the knowledge of
her victimization I find “all ears asleep“ in a “conspiracy of silence“ against her.
By this chapter of the Second Passage, I am becoming increasingly
knowledgeable about the “universal intent to destroy the divine spark in women“
and I am experiencing “a growing integrity of vision and purpose.“ I am clear
that despite the attempts to silence me with accusations of racism, it is my
responsibility as a feminist Searcher to stand up for my victimized sisters by
“naming the crimes against them and speaking on their behalf.“ I feel relieved to
hear the voice of Audre Lorde, who seems to know exactly what I know, i.e. the
message of patriarchy to all women is “Please hang up and die again.“

Next I come to the chapter on the European witchburings. I meet the

European woman, my foresister, and I realize that she is not only a victim, but

230

also a symbol of female knowledge and power who represents a threat to the
patriarchal order. Finally, a woman victimized under the planetary system of
patriarchy who, like me, knows that following the patriarchal scripts makes you a
victim. She is the target of men obsessed with purifying society of women like
her, who refuse patriarchal scripts, who act on their own initiatives. Yes, Agnes
was a victim, but she had the “courage“ to “heroically“ endure the strapedo,
confessing to nothing for ten weeks, because she knew she had committed no
crime. She had earned the respect of the people through her independence, the
condition of her “real female-identified goodness.“ My foresister, who had
engaged in a battle with the patriarchal forces at the dawn of the modern period,
provides for me a model of struggling to survive on the boundaries of androcratic
Western-dominated society. I can identify with her battle because her history is
present in my battle today against the Western patriarchal scholars who
incessantly legitimate patriarchal violence against me and my sisters around the
world. She and l are in a time/space that is not concentric with androcracy. We
are Outsiders. As I approach the final chapter of the Second Passage I am
aware there is much to be done.

Finally, I arrive in the last chapter of the Second Passage which a-mazes
the Sado-Ritual Syndrome as it manifests itself, at home, in my part of the
planet. It is the hardest part of the Journey for me because I must face the ways
my situation is similar to the situation of those I have been told are so utterly
different from me. Upon my arrival I am reminded that American gynecologists

intend to make a victim of me, and I see that in America, women like me are

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“lulled by the myths and rituals of gynecology and therapy, believing that 'doctor
knows best.“ In the face of this foreground reality, I realize I must be like
Katherine Mayo, Andrea Dworkin, Fran Hoskin, and Matilda Joselyn Gage
before them, and the Witches before her. I come to this realization as I read the
“Brief Chronology“ provided at the outset of the chapter. I am part of a tradition
of strong, knowledgeable, independent women linked Crone-ologically with the
European women who were healers, counselors, wise women, and teachers. I
am not a victim, I am a descendent of this tradition. I am one of the few, “a
significant and growing cognitive minority of women;“ I am “breaking out from
under the sacred shelter of patriarchal religious myths.“ I am enraged to
discover that “the mutilation and destruction by doctors specializing in
unnecessary radical mastectomies and hysterectomies, carcinogenic hormone
therapy, psychosurgery, spirit-killing psychiatry and other forms of
psychotherapy“ is an attack on me! With the Witch as my guide, I become the
judge of pseudochoices! l judged the filth of the dhais as a measure of how child
birth is devalued under patriarchy. l judged the filth to the European midwife a
reversal. In this chapter, I see and condemn the reversals which provide the
foundation for the Sado-Ritual Syndrome as it is manifest in American
gynecology. It is the Witch within me who finds J. Marion Sims guilty of crimes
against Mary Smith and Anarcha. I am able to see that researchers who find the
management and surgical removal of uterine tumors “interesting and
challenging,“ regardless of the gynocidal consequences. In this chapter I come

to my power through a-mazing the crimes committed against me.

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Now consider the path presented for a black Western woman, like Lorde,
as she experiences the Journey through the Second Passage of Gyn/Ecology.
Upon coming to the first chapter of the Second Passage she discovers the
Indian woman “veiled and sleeping.“ If, on the basis of her experience with
Black Nationalism in the United States, she recognizes a similarity in their
situations, she may wonder if there is any relation. On the basis of the
representation of the Indian woman as a total victim, she might decide there is
no relation. In response to the horror of the Indian woman's situation, she is
presented with two paths: that of the Western patriarchal scholar who stands
back from the situation masking his inability to identify with the victim with
“objectivity;“ or that of the responsible feminist Searcher who stands up for the
victim by un-covering and condemning the forces of legitimation which masks
the massacre against her. She might agree with the feminist Searcher that sati
is a crime against women and that Western scholars legitimate the crime. At the
same time, if she senses something amiss in the feminist Searcher’s assumption
of responsibility for the victimized Indian woman, she may hesitate to identify
herself as a Searcher. Since the Journey presents only two paths, not siding
with the feminist Searchers is equivalent to siding with the perpetrators of
gynocide.

Moving on to the next chapter Lorde discovers the Chinese woman as
victim who is made into a Token Torturer. Perhaps she identifies, as the
Searcher does, the patriachal strategy of using women as scapegoats to turn

women against each other. She also follows the Searcher in a-mazing the

 

 

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connection between the Chinese ritual of footbinding and Western scholarship
about footbinding. But here again she feels the inclination to distinguish her path
from that the white Western feminist Searcher who only seems to hear the
voices of white Western men. Perhaps she beings to wonder, even if she
agrees with the radical feminist critique of the “objective” and legitimating
standpoint of the Western scholar, why his voice gets privileged in a project

which is about women a-mazing the systematic nature of patriarchal oppression.

She may ask, is the Searcher's path through white, Western patriarchal
scholarship the only path to consciousness of the planetary dimensions of
patriarchy?

Next, Lorde comes to the chapter on African genital mutilation.
Immediately she realizes she is not a feminist Searcher, fore there is no
indication that the feminist Searcher bears any relation to the African woman,
and Lorde is well aware that the African women is her foresister. While she, like
the Searcher, is bursting with the knowledge of the African woman's
victimization, and outraged at the “conspiracy of silence“ against her foresister,
she also knows that it is a lie that the African women is only a victim, silenced by
the pain of genital mutilation, incapable of speaking for herself. She knows
Black women have a history of using and sharing power and a tradition of
closeness and mutual care and support because she has dis-covered in her
Searches through African myth and religion Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, Mawulisa,
the warrior goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons, and the warrior-

women of Dan. She realizes, at this point, the Searcher in Syn/Ecology has

234

constructed an Other of her African foresister in order to support her thesis that
patriarchy is a planetary phenomena. While she shares with the Searcher a
vision of global sisterhood, she knows it can never be realized by taking
responsibility for those who have been victimized. Now Lorde is able to name
what is amiss in the Searchers assumption of responsibility. She remembers one
of the important lessons of Black Power in the sixties, “only black people can
convey the revolutionary idea that black people are able to do things for
themselves.“ White women must listen to Black women speaking for themselves
about the crimes committed against them. In attempting to speak for the African
woman the Searcher has made a victim of her. Now Lorde is angry, not only at
the perpetrators of the genital mutilation, and the “objective“ Western scholars
who legitimate it, but also at the feminist Searcher for contributing to the violence
against her African sisters by silencing their voices in the name of radical
feminism. By this point in the Journey, Lorde is seeing racism in the feminist
Searcher's position. The racism is not in her condemnation genital mutilation,
but in the unsisterly way she goes about it. From the perspective of the Journey,
Lorde’s seeing racism in Daly’s position is equivalent to trying to silence her
radical feminism. Since the Journey presents only the path of the white Western
scholar and the white Western feminist, she probably comes to the conclusion by
this point that this Journey is not for her. Furthermore, she is not pleased to find
her poem being misused in a chapter bursting with distortions. It leads her to
wonder whether the Searcher had read her work or that of other Black women

for what it might give her. She realizes by the end of this chapter, she is in a

 

 

235

time/space that is not concentric with white Western radical feminism. In order
to stand with her Indian, Chinese and African sisters, she must identify, not as a
Searcher, but as a Sister Outsider to the Journey of radical feminism as Daly has
charted it. As she approaches the chapters on European and American women
under patriarchy she is aware there is much to be done.

In the chapter of the European witchburnings she meets the white
Western woman’s foresister who is represented, unlike her foresister in Africa,
not only as a victim, but also as a symbol of female knowledge and power. She
notes rhat the European women burned as witches knew that following
patriarchal scripts would make them victims. Perhaps she wonders if the women
burned as witches in Africa, mentioned in a footnote, knew this too. (180)
Perhaps she wonders about the relation between the European witchcraze,
imperialism and the slave trade.“ Perhaps she is irritated at the arrogance of a
Sister Searcher who represents only her foresisters as models of know-ing,
courage, independence and “real female-identified goodness.“ Perhaps she
wonders where Matilda Joselyn Gage stood on abolition and reconstruction.
Clearly she has questions about the limits of her desire to identify with a Witch
who sees herself and the world from a “color- evasive“ perspective.

Finally, she arrives home to America in the last chapter of the Second
Passage. If she is relieved to find the Searcher uses examples of both black and

white American women who have been victimized by gynecologists, she is

 

'5 I wonder about it. This will be one focus of my research project at the NEH Seminar on
Feminist Epistemologies I will attend in July.

236

probably disappointed to find that they are not contextualized by a “Brief Crone-
ology“ which reads gynecology as a direct response to African-American
feminism.16 The inclusion of black women as victims, in conjunction with the
exclusion a historical narrative which enables the Journeyer to see the
Background of black women acting on their own initiatives behind the
gynocidal/racist foreground practices, constitutes a Journey of “assimilation
within a solely western european herstory.“ (Lorde, 1983, 69) This Journey
confronts Lorde with an either/or choice: identify with Anarcha and the nameless
“sixty-year-old, black gravida 1, para 1“ as a victim, or identify with Mary Daly,
Katherine Mayo, Andrea Dworkin, Fran Hoskin, and Matilda Joselyn Gage
before them, and the European Witches before her as an assimilated black
feminist. Perhaps there is an alternative. Knowing what Lorde knew, I assume
that she would have been looking for a liberating path through Syn/Ecology.
Here’s just one example of where she might have found it. Consider the
seemingly disparate experiences of DeLois, one of the symbolic figures in
Lorde’s work who models a Black feminist mode of existence, (See Part II, 12)
and the victim, which Daly reports, is described in an volume of Obstetrics and
Gynecology as a “sixty-year-old, black, gravida 1, para 1.“ Lorde might have
recognized DeLois in this black woman with the tumor “whose healthy fear had

kept her away from hospitals.“ (289) Like DeLois, who marked her own course

 

‘° Daly provides a few notes in the chapter which might go into such a Crone-ology. For
example, “Women, particularly nonwhite and other low-income women, are the unwilling victims
not only of sterilization but of forced motherhood -- a fact demonstrated repeatedly, as in the
1977 U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowing Congress and state legislatures to ban funds for
elective abortions.“ (245)

 

237

in the world, and moved like she was somebody special in the face of her fears
and the ever-present threat that she would be run down, this woman knew she
was never meant to survive, which is why she was not lulled into the hospital
fifteen years earlier believing, “doctor knows best.“ There is no reason to doubt
that Lords, and other Radical Women of Color, who were Searching for and dis-
covering the patriarchaI/racist/imperialist foreground distortions and silences
which obscured their own Background traditions, would find it any more difficult
or less necessary to dis-cover the distortions and silences obscured in a white
Western radical feminist text. Lorde comes to her power through Gyn/Ecology
by a-mazing it in her “Open Letter to Mary Daly.“

When I began to lay out the two paths presented through the Second
Passage for a Journeyer like myself and for one like Lorde, I said it was to
illustrate that Gyn/Ecology was written from a white Western perspective for
white Western women. In an important sense the fact that it does not offer a
liberating path for someone like Lorde is not problematic. If there is a problem
with white Western women taking responsibility for everyone else's liberation, as
l have suggested there is, then it is appropriate for white Western feminists like
Daly to be thinking, in particular, about the becoming of white Western women
like herself and me. However, this exercise has revealed that the path it
presents even for white Western women is problematic. In order to understand
why, reconsider Lorde's request in the letter that Daly be aware of how the
“assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and

sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background,“

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encourages the demise of radical feminist theory by serving the “destructive
forces of racism and separation between women.“ (Lorde, 1983, 69) By
presenting a path for white Western women which only enables us to see our
nonwhite, nonWestern sisters as victims and preyers-upon each other, Daly has

undermined her goal of making the Second Passage an exercise in the creation

 

of our Selves as authoritative perceivers. Recall that Frye suggested that the
process of granting ourselves authority as perceivers was accomplished “by
discovering agreement in the experiences and perceptions of women.“

However, throughout the Second Passage, the Searcher is engaged in a-mazing
the texts of white Western scholars, which convinces her that Indian, Chinese
and African women cannot speak for themselves, so a-mazing their texts
appears to be the only way to establish the thesis that patriarchy is global. But if
she cannot hear the voices of Indian, Chinese and African women she cannot
discover whether or not their experiences and perceptions agree with hers. The
authority she grants herself through a-mazing the texts of white Western
scholars is like their authority in that it is established from a distance, rather than
in the process of a dialogue. In order to create herself as an authoritative
perceiver, she must assume that all women of all cultures have herstories and
gynocentric myths to call upon for power and background which have been
stolen, distorted and buried beneath the patriarchal foreground in their worlds.
She must Search for the women in India, China, and Africa, who, like the
European women burned as witches knew, and like the white Western Searcher,

know, and she must listen for what they can teach her, not only about how their

239

cultures are like hers, but also how they are different so she does not use the
tools of her culture, without awareness, against them. The vision of global
sisterhood, shared by Lorde and Daly, depends on making the Journey of radical
feminism for white Western women critically and creatively race- and ethnicity-

cognizant about the different Realms of the Background.

 

 

Part IV

RADICAL WHITE WESTERN FEMINISM: TOWARD A RECONSTRUCTION OF
GYM/ECOLOGY

I hope that in its richness, as well as in its incompleteness,
Gyn/Ecology will continue to be a Labrys enabling women to learn
from our mistakes and our successes, and cast our Lives as far as
we can go, Now, in the Be-Dazzling Nineties.

Mary Daly, “New Intergalactic Introduction“

among my people
it is rude
to listen to another
without making noises
of acknowledgment.
a famous anthropologist
now deceased
said the invention
of the boat
started racism.
it is rude to listen to this
silently.
many men and many women
say a good woman
accepts their vision
of whom she should be
in the world.
it is dangerous
to listen to this
without sucking one's teeth.
iam a black woman.
iam a lesbian.
now make a noise
of acknowledgment.
Terri L. Jewell, “Show You Hear“

240

 

 

 

241

I argued in Part III, Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology is a radical feminist book
written from a white Western perspective for white Western women. As such it
charts one white Western radical feminist Journey, one which is problematic in
that it inhibits the goal of sisterhood. Now, in light of what I have discovered
studying Gyn/Ecology and Audre Lorde's “Open Letter to Mary Daly,“ I explore a
reconstruction of the text by charting a new radical feminist Journey for white
Western women which I call “radical white Western feminism.“ This project is
based on the assumption that there is important, even critical, work to be done
by white Western feminists from a radical perspective such as Daly's, which is
primarily for white Western women who seek a perspective and mode of living
that is gynocentric as well as critically and creatively race- and ethnicity-
cognizant.‘ I offer these explorations toward a reconstruction of Gyn/Ecology as
a response to Audre Lorde’s open letter, which is intended to “show I hear,“ and
as a response to Mary Daly's invitation to think about Gyn/Ecology in light of
Lorde's criticisms, which is intended to move the dialogue among radical
feminists -- of all races, cultures and classes -- in a fruitful direction.“

First, a word about the meaning and necessity today for the reconstructive
work I begin here. For the purposes of this paper, I employ the term “theory

reconstruction“ in contrast with “theory replacement“ to distinguish two ways

 

' Two important influences on the development of my thinking along these lines, in addition to
Lords and Daly, are Marla Lugones and Ruth Frankenberg. While I believe this form of radical
feminism must also be critically and creatively class-conscious and sexuality-conscious, I am not
yet prepared to articulate how these awarenesses might inform and transform the politics of the
position I investigate here. However, the work I am doing here is a step in the direction of this
more multi-dimensional radical feminism.

2 Part IV is also an acknowledgment of the a-rnazing work of Terri Jewell, self-described
“succulent heretic and voluptuous outlaw,“ who took her own life in November 1996.

 

242

theory evolves.3 “Theory replacement“ refers to a process whereby previous
theories, which are fundamentally flawed, are abandoned in favor of new rival
theories. In contrast, “theory reconstruction“ involves efforts to dis-cover and re-
invent theories in need of revision by working through their deficiencies. By
taking a theory apart and putting it back together again in a new form it may
attain more fully the goal it has set for itself.“ In feminist intellectual circles today
there are stories circulating about the evolution of feminist theory. A common
version of the story suggests that for the past twenty years feminist theory has
been growing up. In its infancy radical feminist theory relied on “modernist“
assumptions and reductive accounts of women's experience. Through a series
of challenges and lessons, it is said, feminist theory has matured to its grown-up
“postmodern“ state. On this story, the challenges and lessons of the eighties,
including Audre Lorde's “Open Letter to Mary Daly,“ point to fundamental flaws
in earlier radical feminist theories indicating the necessity of abandoning them in
favor of new postmodern feminist theories. Recall from Part Two, I argued out
that Lorde's letter was read by some feminists as a lesson which pointed to the
pitfalls of using gender as an analytic category, and the problems with
constructing quasi-metanarratives and appealing to essentialist conceptions of
woman. On this reading, the lesson of Lorde’s letter requires and authorizes the

abandonment of radical feminist theory. Relatively autonomous feminist theories

 

° I used the work of Tom Rockmore (1989) to clarify the distinction for myself and to articulate it
here.

‘ According to Habermas, “This is the normal way of dealing with a theory that needs revision in
many respects but whose potential for stimulation had still not been exhausted.“ (Habermas,
1979, 95)

243

like Daly's, conceived on the basis of concepts and insights, re-membered and
invented, by women, past and present, have been replaced by “new“
postmodern feminist theories consciously derived from theoretical frameworks
borrowed or imported from white Western men (e.g. Foucault, Lacan, Derrida,
Habermas) thinking in patriarchal time/space.

On my view, abandoning radical feminist theory and replacing it with
postmodern feminist theory is not necessary on the grounds that Lorde's letter,
as I argued in Part Two, was an attempt to effect a shift in Daly's thinking which
would strengthen her radical feminist theory and help realize the vision of global
sisterhood which they shared. It is misguided to find in Lorde's insistence that
racial and ethnic differences be recognized a call for the abandonment of radical
feminist theory. The letter is, foremost, a lesson about the need for a shift in
radical feminism from a color-evasive to a race-cognizant discourse. While there
may be useful theoretical work for feminists who want to deconstruct and
appropriate the theoretical tools of the postmodern fathers, I believe it is a
mistake to suggest that replacing radical feminist theory with this sort of work is
authorized by Lorde’s letter.5 Not only is the replacement of unnecessary and
unauthorized, there is still important work to be done that cannot be

accomplished by replacing radical feminist theories with postmodern feminist

 

5 In fact, it is the same kind of mistake Lorde accuses Daly of making. Recall Lorde criticizes
Daly for failing to read her work seriously, for merely fingering through it in search of quotations
which would valuably support her already conceived thesis. On the basis of my reading of
Lorde’s work, especially the common ground I outline in her work and Daly’s, I am suggesting the
postmodern feminists who footnote Lorde's letter to authorize their theoretical projects have failed
to read Lorde's work seriously, have found in her letter only a critique which supports their
already conceived postmodem theses.

 

 

244

theories. These are two substantively different kinds of theoretical projects.
Postmodern feminists abandon the goal of doing theory by re-membering and
inventing our own conceptual and analytic tools, insisting engagement with the
theories of Marx, Freud and their descendants is inevitable. Following Lorde's
radical insight that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, I
offer my reconstruction as a contribution to the evolution of radical feminist
theory which does not grow up to be postmodern feminist theory, but radical
white western feminist theory.

Up to this point I have been taking the radical feminist theory of
Gyn/Eco/ogy apart. Let's examine the pieces. On Daly's theory, the Journey of
radical feminism is movement from the patriarchal foreground to the feminist
Background. The concepts of the “foreground“ and “Background“ distinguish
between two modes of existence, patriarchal and feminist. For women, living in
the foreground realm of “objectification and alienation“ means participating in
rituals and practices according to patriarchal mythic scripts. The self-sacrificial
Indian women advancing on the funeral pyre and the American woman following
doctors orders are acting out the roles prescribed by gynocidal masculinist myth.
The Chinese woman binding her daughters feet and the African woman excising
her daughter in preparation for marriage are playing the parts of Token Torturers
in the foreground production of patriarchy. In contrast, Background living means
acting on one's own initiative. The Self-centering European woman who refuses

to be defined by assimilation into the patriarchal family and the feminist Searcher

 

245

who does battle with the “objective“ Western scholar are examples of
Background living.

In Part One I suggested that “a-mazing,“ the method by which the
Journeyer travels from the foreground to the Background, distinguished Daly's
radical feminist theory. “A-mazing“ involves both identifying the foreground
scripts and seeing through them to the Background reality which they obscure
and distort. The Joumeyer travels through the First and Second Passage by
identifying similarities in the apparently disparate phenomena of mythic scripts
and their corresponding rituals around the world. In the process she comes to
the knowledge that patriarchy is the war on the Self in every living woman and
strengthens her pattern-detecting powers enabling her to distinguish her Self-
centering way from the man-made maze. Following in the “Tradition of Great
Hags and Crones,“ particularly Matilda Joselyn Gage (who dared to Think for
Herself by re-membering a Hag-identified perspective) and Virginia Woolf (who
invented the Outsider's Society rather than choosing between the twin evils of
dependence on men in the private house or following in the processions of
educated men) Daly found a radical feminist theoretical practice in a-mazing
which held the promise of moving women beyond patriarchy toward a radical
feminist Background mode of thinking and living.

In my view, the fundamental issue which stands between Lorde and Daly
is about sisterhood and difference. Daly and Lorde share a vision, as I argued in
Part Two, "escape“ from patriarchy via a radical feminist mode of living informed

by a know-ing process rooted in identification with women who have survived

246

and thrived under oppression. For Daly, in Gyn/Ecology, this know-ing process
is a-mazing, through which we discover our similarities masked by apparent
differences. In the letter, Lorde acknowledges “As outsiders, we need each
other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the
borders.“ But, she insists, “in order to come together we must recognize each
other.“ (70) Lorde claims the metapatriarchal project of radical feminism is not
possible unless women stop viewing our differences “as causes for separation
and suspicion rather than as forces for change.“ (1983.112) Lorde's criticisms
suggest Daly has not established the needed foundation for sisterhood using
only the tool of a-mazing, because a-mazing does not require the kind of
engagement with women from different patriarchal worlds which enables
recognition of “real“ differences. The question presented by Lorde's claim, is how
to begin the work of identifying, reclaiming and utilizing the “real“ differences, i.e.
“world“ differences, which lie beneath the foreground distortions of these
differences, i.e. racism and ethnocentrism. Lorde herself acknowledges, we
have no patterns for relating across our “real“ differences as equals. (115) I will
argue in this part, first, that that there is a useful resource in a-mazing for doing
the work Lorde calls for, even if there are limits to how far it can take us on the
Journey of Radical White Western Feminism. Second, I will explore Maria
Lugones's practice of “world-traveling“ as a resource in my reconstruction of
G yn/Ecology.

Since I have suggested the fundamental issue which stands between

Lorde and Daly is to be found in their views on sisterhood and difference, I will

247

begin with a brief examination of each of their views. In the Third Passage, Daly
describes the “becoming of Gyn/Ecology“ which involves “breaking out of
patriarchal processions“ and “discovering the sources of the Self's original
movement.“ (315-16) Hence, “Gyn/Ecology“ is Daly’s name for the patterns of
Female-identified movement in the Background.“ Chapter nine, “Sparking: the
Fire of Female Friendship,“ describes the patterns of relating among Self-
centered women in the Background, that is, the patterns of Sisterhood. In the
Prelude to the Third Passage, she explains that “Sparking“ is “creating a room of
one's own, a moving time / spaceship of one's own, in which the Self can
expand, in which the Self can join with other Self-centering Selves.“ (319) In the
first section of “Sparking“ entitled “The Radical Enemy of the Patriarchal World
War,“ Daly begins to describe the patterns of sisterhood by distinguishing it from
brotherhood. The model for brotherhood, she argues, is com radeship. Men
bond in war by projecting an Enemy who they are all against. Daly finds a clue
about this bonding in the term “comrade,“ which “is derived from a Middle
French word meaning a group of soldiers sleeping in one room, or roommate.“
(ibid.) According to Daly,

[t]he concept of room here is spatial, suggesting links resulting

from physical proximity, not necessarily from choice. The space is

physical, not psychic, and it is definitely not A Room of One's Own.

To the degree that it has been chosen, the choice has been made

by another. The comrades do not choose each other for any

inherent qualities of mind/spirit. (ibid.)
In contrast, the model for sisterhood is friendship, which “does not essentially

depend upon an enemy for its existence/becoming.“ (320) Friendship between

248

women, on Daly view, depends on refusing the identities imposed on us by
patriarchal scripts because, as she argued in the Second Passage, these scripts
keep women separate from our Selves and each other. In throwing off the
“male-imposed veils l covers / identities“ and “re-claiming their female heritage,“
Daly argues, Hags discover they are alike. (366) This alikeness is complex.
Recall from Part Two, I explained that while Lords and Daly shared views about
how patriarchal oppression effects women, they differed on what fuels the
patriarchal psyche. Lorde attributes it to xenophobia, while Daly believes it is a
self-awareness of inner barrenness or lack, which men develop as a result of
being dependent on the foreground structures of society to define their identities
and activities. This is a development of Woolf's view that by following in their
own processions men are reduced to “cripples in a cave.“ Men define their
identities and bonds through participating in the death march which is patriarchy,
that is by following the scripts of war. (370) Women who refuse foreground
scripts are alike, on Daly's view, in that women define their Selves and bond in
friendship on the basis of “acknowledging their radical aloneness.“ (366) This is
the heritage Daly reclaims in her identification with the Witch and the Outsider.
According to Daly, “Crones journeying together find after a while that one
of the most difficult parts of the journey is dis-covering the meaning of together.“
(367) There is a temptation, Daly suggests, when journeyers are first “breaking
away from the feminine condition“ to imitate male comradeship through bonding
in the “fire of communal ecstasy.“ (370) This brings us back to a point I made at

the beginning of Part Three. (5-7) Recall that Daly suggests that Gyn/Ecology is

 

 

 

249

“for the Hag/Crone/Spinster in every living woman,“ not for those who belong to
“any comfortable community,“ whether it be a religious community, the women's
community or the African-American community. Since Journeying into the
Background means learning to act on our own initiatives, without dependence on
communal scripts of any sort, Daly claims, “women loving women do not seek to
lose our identity, but to express it, discover it, create it.“ (373) Identity
construction, on Daly's view, is an individual project. Hence, the togetherness of
sisterhood is the “combined combustion“ of individual Hags who Spark each
other, or bond, on the basis of their “highly individualized“ Self-centering and
Self-Affirming movement “outside the State of Possession, the fathers'
foreground.“ (379, 370). In contrast with the “necrophilic self- loss“ which is the
object of male merging, Daly suggests, “the Fire of Sisterhood results from the
Sparking of Female Selves.“ As she puts it, the “moving presence of each Self
calls forth the living presence of other journeying/enspiriting Selves.“ (366).

In the last section of “Sparking,“ entitled “Separation: A Room of One's
Own“ Daly offers her views on sisterhood and difference. It is this section which
Lorde must have been referring to when she said in the letter, "I feel you do
celebrate differences between white women as a creative force toward change,
rather than a reason for misunderstanding and separation.“ (70) In terms which
resonate with Lorde's writings Daly insists Hags must acknowledge that each
Self is unique in that each has her own history and her own temperament and
abilities. She makes a distinction between merely tolerating and genuinely

respecting these differences. She condemns the liberal attitude of “tolerating“

 

 

250
differences, which appears to support originality -- “different strokes for different
folks“ -- but which, in fact, is often used to silence “strong-minded Hags -- who
are labeled 'intolerant,’ 'extreme,’ and 'narrow.'“ (381) Genuine respect for
differences is essential, on Daly's view, because that it was it means to affirm the
Self in another women acting freely on her own initiative. On the basis of
genuine respect of differences, Daly suggests, Hags are capable of “Sparking in
free and independent friendship rather than melting into mass mergers.“ (382)
The relationships among Hags are “free and independent“ in the sense of not
being constrained by stereotypic foreground scripts. “Since there are no models,
no roles, no institutionalized relationships to fall back upon,“ Daly explains, “we
move together and apart in ever-varying patterns of relating. (382)
Women who have the courage to travel can see the absence of
standardized roles as an asset, for such roles inhibit our struggle
for truthfulness and fidelity. [...] As de Beauvoir correctly points out,
men and women are always playing a part before one another. In
contrast to this, Lesbians need not pretend. As she observes:
“They [these liaisons] are not sanctioned by an institution or by the
mores, nor are they regulated by conventions; hence they are
marked by especial sincerity.“ (383)
Paradoxically, then, it is the likeness of women that makes room for
our otherness, our wildness, our strangeness. The creation of
separate female-identified psychic, mythic, semantic, physical
spaces is necessary for likeness and wild otherness to grow. Each
individual Amazon must have such room of her own, and she must
be free to communicate the light and warmth generated in the
privacy of her own room to the hearts/hearths of other Hags, and to
receive their luminous energy. (ibid.)
Because the Journeyer needs the space to explore and develop the potential of
her own initiatives, a room of one's own, or a separate space, is the condition for

a sisterhood which embraces genuine differences.

 

 

 

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It is important to keep in mind, that while Daly is clearly thinking of these
pattern of relating which depend on acknowledging individual differences as
characteristic of sisterhood in general, her description emerges from a particular
tradition. In the Crone-ology recovered by Matilda Joselyn Gage, the women
burned as witches were individuals whose knowledge of healing had earned
them the respect of the people, but whose only apparent relation to one another
was their common refusal to be assimilated to patriarchal identities.
Furthermore, there is no discussion of the relations among the members of
Virginia Woolf's “Outsider's Society“ beyond their common desire to escape the
private house without getting caught on the Wheel of Patriarchal Processions.
Neither the Witches, nor the Outsiders, constitute a community with established
patterns of relating. The paradigm for radical feminist thinking and living on
Daly's view is being able to do one’s own thing, alone, without dependence on
men, interference from children, or reliance on prescribed social roles and
relations for a sense of self. Sisterhood, then, affirming each other's individual
projects which are alike in their common goals, but not sharing in a common
project.

Now listen again to Lorde's words, “As outsiders, we need each other for
support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders.“
Recall the picture of black women's mythic background and heritage evoked by
Lorde.

Black women have a history of the use and sharing of power, from
the Amazon legions of Dahomey through the Ashanti warrior queen

Yaa Asantewaa and the freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, to the
economically powerful market-women guilds of present West

 

 

 

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Africa. We have a tradition of closeness and mutual care and
support, from the all-woman courts of the Queen Mothers of Benin
to the present day Sisterhood of the Good Death, a community of
old women in Brazil who, as escaped slaves, provided escape and
refuge for other enslaved women, and who now care for each
other. (151)
On Lorde’s view, interdependence among women is the centerpiece of
sisterhood. She is explicit about this in “The Master's Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master's House,“ proclaiming,
Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which
allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be
creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the
active being. [...] (111)
The know-ing process which must inform a radical feminist mode of living, on
Lorde’s view, handed down in her tradition by women who survived and thrived
under patriarchy, involves interaction. “Without community,“ she insists, “there is
no liberation, on the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an
individual and her oppression.“ (112) The paradigm for radical feminist
becoming on Lorde’s view is breaking with notions of community which require
the “shedding of our differences“ and having the courage to explore together the
potential in our collective “world“ differences.

Daly says sisterhood requires radical aloneness. Lorde says sisterhood
requires radical collectivity. Daly says the paradigm for liberation is
independence. Lorde says the paradigm is interdependence. Daly says we
need separation in order to be. Lorde says we need mutual care and support to

be. What is going on here? I think Cynthia Washington put her finger on the

distance between the views of Lorde and Daly when she pointed out, “We

 

 

 

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Started From Different Ends of the Spectrum.“ (1977) Reflecting on the tradition

behind her perception that white women were “crazy“ to want leadership roles in

the civil rights movement, she said,

I couldn't understand what they wanted. As far as I could see,
being a project director wasn't much fun. I didn't realize then that
having my own project made a lot of difference in how I was
perceived and treated. And I did not see what I was doing as
exceptional. The community of women I worked with on projects
were respected and admired for their strength and endurance.
They worked hard in the cotton fields or white folks' houses, raised
and supported their children, yet still found the time and energy to
be involved in struggle for their people. They were typical rather
than unusual.

Certain differences result from the way in which black women grow
up. We have been raised to function independently. The notion of
retiring to housewifery someday is not even a reasonable fantasy.
Therefore whether you want to or not, it is necessary to learn to do
all of the things required to survive. It seemed to many of us, on
the other hand, that white women were demanding a chance to be
independent while we needed help and assistance which was not
always forthcoming. (238-9)

For the same reason that Washington could not identity with the drive for

independence among white women in the civil rights movement, Lorde differed

with Daly about the possibilities of a sisterhood which begins with radical

aloneness. In a poem entitled “Sister, Morning is a Time for Miracles“ (1979),

written as “a memorial to the conversations“ she and Daly never had, Lorde

wrote,

Yet just once in the possibilities
of this too-early morning

I wanted you

to talk not as a healer

but as a lonely woman

talking to a friend.

 

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In contrast with the symbolic Background of Lorde's tradition characterized by
relations of interdependence (“mutual care and support“), the symbolic
Background of Daly’s tradition is characterized by women (witches who were
healers) living independently, that is, lonely and outside the relation of friendship
which necessarily involves dialogue. The conversations between Lorde and
Daly did not happen, because on Lorde's view, it was still “too-early“ for a
sisterhood at the intersections of these traditions. Within these traditions of
independence and interdependence are the “world“ differences, or “real“
differences, among us which Lorde argues must be recognized, reclaimed and
utilized as tools for the creation of radical feminist modes of living.

Hence, one important task of Radical White Western Feminists is to
critically and self-consciously investigate the foundations of our own tradition for
resources for and barriers to the project of sisterhood at the intersections of
traditions. Toward this end I offer the following a-mazing analysis of Woolf's
radical feminist project. As I explained, in Part One, Daly’s Metapatriarchal
Journey of radical feminism is inspired by Virgina Woolf's strategic attempt to
figure out how the daughters of educated men can at once, maintain their
independence and break with the processions of their fathers. On Woolf's view,
because the condition of women under patriarchy was service and loyalty to men
who kept them shut up in the private house, establishing and maintaining
independence appeared to be the path to women’s liberation. It will be
instructive to return to Woolf's station on the bridge in order to see the problems

with a radical feminism founded on the ideal of independence. From the bridge

 

 

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between the private house and the public world, Woolf suggests, women see the
same things differently than men. Even if the men and women of the “educated“

class earn their own livings, “speak with the same accent; use knives and forks

 

in the same way; expect maids to cook dinner and wash up after dinner; and talk
during dinner without much difficulty about politics and people; war and peace;
barbarism and civilization," she argues, women see the same things (war,

nationalism, education, professional life) differently than men.

 

Recall that according to Woolf, men see war as “a profession, a source of
happiness and excitement and [...] an outlet for manly qualities.“ (1977, 15-16)
They see war as an expression of patriotism. Woolf made this evident by
quoting the Lord Chief Justice of England, who said of Englishmen, “When we
consider other nations, when we judge the merits of the policy of this country or
that, it is the standard of our own country that we apply.“ (17) Woolf connects
this imperialist perspective with the patriarchal perspective which behind the
exclusion and subordination of women by identifying an “egg“ which informs
men's way of looking at war and women. The “egg“ is the “Dictator,“ who
“believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is
immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall
do.“ (96) The patriarchal Dictator, she argues, is motivated by -- in addition to
something identified in the report of the Archbishops' Commission, as an
“infantile fixation“ -- a “money motive“ (“To pay women more would be to pay
men less“) and a “psychological motive“ (“To be able to set aside all worldly

cares and studies and lay them upon another person“). (321-2) Men see things

 

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from the perspective of the Dictator, then, on Woolf's view, because it appears to
be in their interests to do so.

In contrast, Woolf, argues, when women look at war they see the
pointlessness of hurting other people, are led to the question, “Why fight?“
From women's perspective, Woolf argues, marching in their processions for the
right to dictate how others shall live whether for profit, national pride, or slavish
service and loyalty, only appears to be in men's interests. Women see how men
are led, on the basis of their perspective, to “circle, like caterpillars head to tail,
round and round the mulberry tree, the sacred tree, of property.“ (135) They see
how success on men's way of seeing things means wearing the words “For God
and Empire“ around their necks “like the address on a dog-collar.“ (127) Women
see how men’s processions rob them of their sensory capacity and their
humanity, reducing them to “cripples in a cave.“ (131-2) In order to avoid these
devastating consequence, Woolf argues, women understand that while they
must find a way to maintain the kind of independence men have, they cannot
follow the path of their educated fathers and brothers. In order to maintain the
difference of their perspective, and still earn a living in the professions, Woolf
argues, women must remember and live by the “four great teachers“ of their
uneducated foremothers: “poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal
loyalties.“ (145) What women can see from the perspective of the bridge is that
it is not in their interests to amass wealth, seek praise and fame, or to identify

with others on the basis of nation, religion, college, family, sex, or other

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affiliations which spring from them. The Outsider's perspective is different from
that of the ruling class patriarch in this knowledge and creed.

However, there are also important similarities in these disparate
perspectives. In order to make these connections apparent, consider Woolf's
relation to the maids she occasionally mentions in her writings. First, she
qualifies her claim that women and men see the same things differently,
acknowledging that she shares with educated men the expectation that maids
will cook dinner and wash up after dinner. She is explicit throughout Three
Guineas that hers is the perspective of a woman from the ruling class, although
she prefers the term “educated“ class. All of the women's biographies from
which she culls the “four great teachers“ tell the stories of the lives of women
who are from the ruling class. Second, recall in “A Sketch from the Past,“ in the
context of introducing her philosophy, she lists among the activities which must
be done on a daily basis, “writing orders to Mabel.“ (1978, 70) While she does
not explicitly acknowledge that it is the condition for the other activities which she
describes as “far more necessary than anything else,“ including writing, walking
by the river, and reading Chaucer, she does not require a great leap to
understand the connection. Woolf herself makes a similar connection when she
names the self-interested motives of Victorian men who expect women to stay
home and fulfill the roles of wife and mother. Here, in Woolf's way of looking at
domestic servitude is the Dictator who assumes the right to determine how other
human beings shall live. In terms of the motive behind Woolf's assumption that

Mabel should do her cooking and cleaning, and generally follow her orders,

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there is no difference between her view and the Victorian patriarch's view of
women. Both she and her father wish to “set aside all worldly cares and studies
and lay them upon another person.“

The perspectives of Woolf and the Victorian patriarch are also alike in a
certain lack of consciousness about the internal contradictions of their own
views. Woolf points out this contradiction men's perspective in a question which
links the claim of the Lord Chief Justice who justifies England's right to judge
other nations by its own standards on the grounds that “England is the home of
democratic institutions,“ (17) together with the claim she finds in the newspaper
which suggests women should stay home or accept lower wages. She
illuminates the contradiction, you may recall, in the question, “what right have
we, Sir, to trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries when we
can shake out of our most respectable newspapers any day of the week eggs
like these?“ (98) The point here is that men of the educated classes are not
aware that they hold positions which advocate, at once, both democracy and
tyranny. A similar lack of awareness is evident in Woolf's perspective. In “A
Sketch“ she is mentions the activity of “writing orders to Mabel“ as an example of
“nonbeing.” Like ordering dinner, fixing the vacuum cleaner and other domestic
chores, like telling Mabel what to do, constitute the level of existence that “one
does not remember.“ The moments in life which involve menial, repetitive,
mindless work she says, are “not lived consciously.“ (70) Those whose lives are
completely constituted by existence at the level of “nonbeing“ may never

experience one of the “sudden violent shocks“ Woolf describes which enable

 

 

 

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one to experience moments of being in which the “scaffolding of the background“
is revealed. Right after Woolf locates Mabel in “cottonwool' of the foreground
she describes the moment of being she experienced when she raised her list to
hit Thoby and was struck with the question, “Why hurt another person?“ (71)
The point here is that Woolf was not aware that she held positions which
advocate, at once, domestic servitude and not hurting other people.

Notice this is almost exactly the same kind of lack of awareness that I
found in my critique of Daly's analysis of sati, in Part Three, where I argued that
in representing Indian women as victims Daly failed to identify with them in a way
that was similar to the failure of identification she found behind the mask of
“objectivity“ in the work of the Western scholar. While the contradiction in
Woolf's lack of awareness concerns class and the contradiction in Daly's
concerns race/ethnicity, there is a commonality in their analyses which stems
from their use of the distinction between the foreground and Background. They
both use the distinction in a one-dimensional way to divide the realm of
patriarchal oppression from the possibilities of represented by the ideal of
independence. This is the reason Woolf does not realize she is Othering Mabel
when she locates her In the foreground following orders. Patriarchal oppression,
from her ruling class perspective, has meant idleness and dependence in the
private house. Woolf is not making Mabel idle and dependent. Mabel, like the
women described by Washington, is working outside the private house, that is,
outside her own private house. However, Woolf's Othering is participating in a

foreground script of class exploitation. But Woolf's feminism only recognizes the

260
foreground scripts of her own tradition's patriarchal oppression. Because she
has an interest Mabel's exploitation -- it is the condition for her own Background
existence understood as independence -- she is not aware of how she
oppresses Mabel. When Daly constructs (Syn/Ecology in the tradition of Woolf
she imports this one-dimensional understanding of the foreground and
Background right along with the practice of a-mazing. It simply does not occur to
either of them that in their employment of the distinction, which locates working
class women and women of color only in the foreground, that they are acting
according to foreground scripts written for white and/or ruling class Western
women like themselves. By standing on the bridge between the private house
and the public world without awareness of how the foreground is constituted by
relations of race/ethnicity and class, as well as gender, white Western feminists
fail to see that we are standing on the backs of other women. We fail to see how
following the classist, racist/imperialist script of the Dictator only appears to be in
our interest. If we seek the kind of independence men have we will end up like
them, circling the mulberry tree, and we will lose our sensory capacity, the way
to our Background. Radical White Western Feminists can and must take on the
task of a-mazing the foreground which has kept us from connecting with our
sisters and from learning the lessons of their foremothers, in particular, the
lesson that sisterhood requires interdependence. It would be a mistake to
understand my critique of the contradictions inherent in the tradition of white
Western radical feminism as an indication that there is nothing constructive for

us and others to learn from this tradition of survival. There is much to be said for

261

the Outsider's creed. Working through the lessons of the “four great teachers“
(poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties) with an
awareness that among them are unique contributions we have to share in the
project of making a global sisterhood on the basis of recognizing, reclaiming and
utilizing the “world“ differences, is an important task of Radical White Western
Feminism.

Where has the a-mazing investigation of the white Western tradition of
radical feminism has gotten us? What I hope I have made clear through this
critical re-examination of the tradition is that the analytic tool of a-mazing holds
the potential for revealing to us, not only the sado-rituals of patriarchy, but also
the foreground scripts of racism, ethnocentrism, and class exploitation.
However, there are limits to how far the Jounreyer can go on the basis a-mazing.
The practice of amazing can be done effectively in the solitude of one's own
room. Since it does not require the Joumeyer to travel out of her own tradition,
or world, it does not engage her in interactions with sisters from different worlds.
Remember that the Searcher moved through the Second Passage without ever
interacting with Indian, Chinese, or African women. Her primary sources in the
chapters on patriarchal crimes against these women were white Western
Searchers like herself. Without interacting with women outside our tradition two
important kinds of insight are not possible: insights about ourselves and insights
about other women. First, only through interaction (listening to, asking
questions, comparing perceptions, challenging) can we come to understand the

complexity of the ways we are constructed in the multidimensional foreground.

262

Without this understanding those of us who are simultaneously oppressed and
privileged may, without awareness, use the master's tools against our sisters
even in the process of doing what appear to be good deeds. Second, while a-
mazing enables the Joumeyer to see into her own Background, interaction with
women from other traditions is necessary in order to see into the Realms of the
Background which they inhabit. And seeing other women in the contexts of their
own symbolic Backgrounds is necessary for us to see them as Sisters we can
identify with, and not as victims we must save. Maria Lugones offers a practice
which, I will argue, enables the Joumeyer to gain both of these kinds of insights.
In her classic essay, “Playfulness, 'World'-Traveling, and Loving
Perception,“ Maria Lugones searches for a way to bridge the differences
between herself and her mother, and between herself as a woman of color and
white women. (1987) She finds this bridge in the practice of “world-traveling,“
which she describes as, “a skillful, creative, rich, enriching, and given certain
circumstances, a loving way of being and living.“ (3) According to Lugones,
“world-traveling“ is commonly practiced by “outsiders“ to mainstream life in the
U.S. as a necessary means of survival. In order to survive, she explains, women
of color have acquired the flexibility of shifting from the mainstream construction
of life, or “world,“ where they are constructed as outsiders, to other constructions
of life, or worlds, where they are “at home.“ (ibid.) While “this flexibility is
necessary for the outsider,“ she says, “it can also be willfully exercised by the

outsider or by those who are at ease in the mainstream.“ (ibid.)

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In order to provide more clarity about what the practice of “world-traveling“
involves Lugones offers the following assistance. An “actual society given its
dominant culture's description and construction of life, including a construction of
the relationships of production, of gender, race, etc.,“ she says, may be thought
of as a “world.“ (10) Or, a “world“ may be “such a society given a non-dominant
construction.“ (ibid.) So, for example, both the mainstream construction of life in
the U.S. and a “traditional Hispano construction of Northern New Mexican life“
are “worlds“ on her view. In the “world“ within which one feels most at home, or
“at ease,“ -- that is, confident because she is fluent in the language and norms,
and because she is bonded with others in virtue of a shared history -- one is
constructed, and knows oneself, as a person with a particular set of character
traits. In a “world“ within which one is not at ease, Lugones explains, one may
be constructed, and know oneself, as a different person who lacks some or all of
the particular traits she had at home. “The shift from being one person to being
a different person“ is what Lugones calls “travel.“ (11) For example, Lugones
suggests, one who “travels“ can be sure that she is a playful person and
simultaneously positive that she is not playful because she knows herself in
different worlds. In order to grasp Lugones's idea of a single individual being
different people, one must abandon the Western idea that each of us is a unified
self, for the idea that we are plural. Those who experience an underlying “I,“ on
this view, are people who have never been required, or inclined, to “travel“

beyond the “worlds“ within which they feel completely at ease.

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She recommends “that we affirm this traveling across 'worlds’ as partly
constitutive of cross cultural and cross-racial loving“ and identification which is
designed to resist, what she calls following Marilyn Frye, “arrogant perception.“
(3-4) As Lugones understands it, being taught to perceive arrogantly is part of
being taught to be a woman of a privileged class and race in the U.S. and
elsewhere. Describing the way she was taught to perceive her mother she says,
I could not identify with her, I could not see myself in her, I could not welcome
her world.“ While she loved her mother, she did not identify with her. What
Lugones comes to realize is that “there is a complex failure of love in the failure
to identify with another woman, the failure to see oneself in other women who
are quite different from oneself.“ In her analysis of this failure she argues that
arrogant perception cannot be cured by perception which only recognizes and
respects the independence of other selves. Perception of others as independent
from oneself cannot help overcome arrogant perception because it is possible to
see others as independent of oneself and still fail to identify with them. This, she
claims, is what White/Anglo women do to women of color:

they ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us,
leave us completely alone, interrupt is as crazy. All of this while we
are in their midst. The more independent I am, the more
independent I am left to be. Their world and their integrity do not
require me at all. There is no sense of self-loss in them for my own
lack of solidity. (7)
Like Lorde, Lugones believes that interdependence among women is a condition
for our becoming.
I am incomplete and unreal without other women. I am profoundly

dependent on others without having to be their subordinate, their
slave, their servant. (8)

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We are fully dependent on each other for the possibility of being
understood and without this understanding we are not intelligible,
we do not make sense, we are not solid, visible, integrated; we are
lacking. So traveling to each other's “worlds“ would enable us to be
through loving each other. (ibid.)
The cure for the arrogant perception which keeps us from understanding our
selves in relation to others, then, is a loving form of perception which “world-
traveling“ makes possible. Lugones explains in terms of her relation to her
mother that only by traveling to her mother's “world“ could she identify with her
“because only then could she cease to ignore her and to be excluded and
separate from her.“ “Only then,“ she says, “could I see her as a subject even if
one subjected and only then could I see at all how meaning could arise fully
between us.“ (ibid.)
World-traveling, then, is a complex form of interacting which enables the
traveler to identify with those from other worlds by perceiving them in the context
of the world within which they are most at ease and, in the process, come to a
new, fuller understanding of herself made possible by seeing herself as she is
seen by those in other worlds. In Lugones's words,
The reason why I think that traveling to someone’s “world“ is a way
of identifying with them is because by traveling to their “world“ we
can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves
in their eyes. Only when we have traveled to each other's “worlds“
are we fully subjects to each other. (17)

“Knowing other women's “worlds“ is part of knowing them,“ she explains, “and

knowing them is part of loving them.“ Lugones suggests that by traveling to the

worlds of those who are constructed in the mainstream as victims, we can

266
discover that in their worlds they are “really subjects, lively beings, resistors,
constructors of visions.“ (18) Angela Davis's “Reflections on the Black Woman's
Role in the Community of Slaves“ (1992), which I discussed in Part Two,
provides a good example. By traveling to the “community of slaves,“ Davis
discovers, beneath the traditional mainstream racist/misogynist construction of
the black woman “who assented to slavery,“ a woman who was “transcending,
refusing, fighting back, asserting herself over and against terrifying obstacles.“
(214) In conclusion, Lugones shares what she discovered about her mother by
traveling to her world.
My mother was apparent to me mostly as a victim of arrogant
perception. l was loyal to the arrogant perceiver's construction of
her and thus disloyal to her in assuming that she was exhausted by
that construction. I was unwilling to be like her and thought that
identifying with her, seeing myself in her necessitated that I
become like her. I was wrong both in assuming that she was
exhausted by the arrogant perceiver's construction of her and in
my understanding of identification, though I was not wrong in
thinking that identifying was part of loving and that it involved my
seeing myself in her. I came to realize through traveling to her
“world“ that she is not foldable and pliable, that she is not
exhausted by the mainstream argentinian patriarchal construction
of her. I came to realize that there are “worlds“ in which she shines
as a creative being. Seeing myself in her through traveling to her

“world“ had meant seeing how different from her I am in her
“world.“ (18)

Although Lugones does not describe the possibility in this essay, she clearly
intends for White/Anglo women who want to connect with women of color to
commit themselves to a similar pattern of relating.

Now consider the reconstructive project underway in terms of Lugones's

case for world-traveling. While each of the geographical locations (India, China,

267

Africa, Europe, America) in the Second Passage is a 'world'“ in the sense that
each represents a dominant construction of life in a different part of the planet, I
want to suggest that there is at least one important sense in which the
Joumeyer, or Searcher, is not a world-traveler: she never leaves her own world.
She never leaves her own world by Searching for literature written by nonwhite,
nonWestern women. She does all of her Searching in the library of the white
Western scholar. In addition, none of her primary feminist sources, with the
exception of Katherine Mayo (who I will discuss shortly), ever leave home in
their Searches. As a result, the Searcher moves through the Second Passage
without interacting with Indian, Chinese, and African women in their worlds. She
is a world-traveler, she is an arrogant perceiver. While she understands herself
to be making an effort to identify with the women in each “world,“ she only
accomplishes the kind of identification Lugones has in mind when she gets to
Europe and America. She discovers the European Witch and the white Western
Radical Feminist beneath the mainstream patriarchal constructions, as women
who are, to borrow Davis's words, “transcending, refusing, fighting back,
asserting [themselves] over and against terrifying obstacles.“ The fact that she
does not discover that Indian, Chinese and African women are “really subjects,
lively beings, resistors, constructors of visions“ is clear evidence that she has not

traveled to their worlds.

 

‘ Of course, this is a problem since each of these geographical locations constitutes a locus of
many different “worlds.“ lam not prepared to deal with it here.

268
What might the Radical White Western Feminist Searcher discover if she

“world-traveled“ in the Second Passage to India, China, and Africa? I offer the
following illustration of what she might discover on such a Journey to India. The
travel log which I construct here is based on the feminist Searches of Mrinalini
Sinha in “Reading Mother India: Empire, Nation, and the Female Voice.“ (1994)
In this essay Sinha takes her cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who “argues
that the voice of the colonized female is lost between the object-constitution of
imperialism, 'marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from
her own kind,’ and the subject-constitution of patriarchal nationalism, which
'apparently grants the woman free choice as subject.“ (Sinha, 6) Sinha is
concerned with the discourse of Indian nationalism which found “a unique and
distinctive cultural identity for the nation, on the basis of which the political claim
to nationhood could be made,“ in the essentialist construct of Mother India
(Bharat Mata). (ibid.) Following Chatterjee, Sinha explains,

Women's emancipation and national liberation, especially under

M.K. Gandhi's leadership of the nationalist movement from the

19205 onwards, became part of the same struggle; the

identification of women's struggles with the national struggle was

summed up in the popular slogan, “India cannot be free until its

women are free and women cannot be free until India is free.“ (7)
Sinha investigates how Indian women “interpreted this script for their
emancipation,“ arguing that to overlook women’s agency and voice “on the
grounds that it reveals little more than the co-optation of women within a

hegemonic male nationalist discourse, would simply serve to naturalize the new

nationalist patriarchy.“ (ibid.) By focusing on the responses of individual Indian

269

women and the organized Indian women's movement to the imperialist-
nationalist controversy surrounding Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927), Sinha
dis-covers that Indian women speaking for themselves “could never be the
unproblematic repositories of an ahistorical and essentialized Indianness.“ (33)
In this section I travel to “world“ of Indian women to hear their voices in an effort
to understand what it is to be them and what it is to be me in their eyes. 7
Suppose I set off in my Searches to gather information about the workings
of patriarchy in India and discover Katherine Mayo's Mother India. I find In the
book a concern “with the lives of millions of women who happened to live in that
part of patriarchy called 'India.'“ (Daly, 1978.129) Having discovered a Sister
Searcher who has actually traveled to India and who provides a detailed
description of the crimes perpetrated there against women, I seek the views of
Indian women on the book. First I hear Mona Bose, an Bengali woman,
influential in the movement for women's education, who is one of the four Indian
women Mayo mentions in Mother India. Her voice can be heard in an article by
a British Y.M.C.A. official in The Indian Witness on September 7, 1927. (16) In
response to Mayo's use of her statements about the apathy in India towards
women's education, Bose objected to Mayo's report of their meeting, and
retracted the statements which Mayo attributed to her. Next, I hear another of

the women quoted in Mother India, Cornelia Sorabji, social reformer and author

 

’ One might object that Daly would not have had the benefit of Sinha's 1994 research. This is
true. However, all of the historical materials from which Sinha draws would have been available
to Daly in 19705, just as they were available to Katherine Mayo in the 19205. Daly, following
Mayo, chooses to exclude them from her investigation on the assumption that she would find in
them “little more than the co-optation of women within a hegemonic male nationalist discourse.“

270

of Between The Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Wom en By One of
Themselves (1908). Although Sorabji was a self-confessed “loyalist“ of the
British Raj and long-time friend and supporter of Mayo, she requested that Mayo
write a disclaimer which absolved her of any complicity with the antinationalist
position Mayo takes in the book. Mayo complied in a letter which was published
in the Statesman, March 5, 1929. (18) If I conclude that Bose's and Sorabji's
retractions were the result of nationalist pressures I would not be entirely
misguided. As Sinha points out, Indian nationalists were outraged that Mayo
“attacked the very basis of the nationalist construct of India: Mother India had
located the cause of India’s degeneracy in the very same spiritual or cultural
realm that was the basis for the nationalist elaboration of Indianness.“ (13)
However, Sinha also reports that there was “an outpouring of women's
support for the nationalist indignation over Mother India.” (20) One of the most
outspoken Indian women to criticize Mayo's anti-India expose was Sarojini
Naidu, the first Indian woman president of the Indian National Congress and a
role model for the women’s movement. Naidu first responded to Mayo’s work in
a telegram which was read aloud at the famous Calcutta Town Hall meeting
organized by nationalist to protest Mother India. and which was published in
Forward, September 7, 1927. Naidu stated, “The mouths of liars rot and perish

with their own lies, but the glory of Indian womanhood shines pure and as the

 

“ According to Sinha, Manoranjan Jha eliminates any doubt about how deeply Mayo was
implicated in and guided by the British government’s imperial propaganda machine in his well-
documented and detailed study, Katherine Mayo and India (New Delhi: People's Publishing
House, 1971).

271
morning star.“ (21) Later, in a lecture published in the January 24, 1928 issue of
the Statesman Naidu proclaimed,

The women of India should answer all those who come in the guise
of friendship to interpret India to the world and exploit their
weakness and expose the secrets of the home, with the words
'whether we are oppressed, treated as goods and chattels and
forced on the funeral pyres of our husbands, our redemption is in
our hands. We shall break through the walls that imprison us and
tear the veils that stifle. We shall do these by the miracle of our
womanhood. We do not ask any friend, or foe in the guise of a
friend, to come merely to exploit us while they pretend to interpret,
succour and solace our womanhood.’ (21-2)

In Naidu's voice I do not hear a woman who is “veiled and sleeping.“ But is she
more than a mouthpiece for patriarchal nationalism? Sinha provides the
following useful insight about Naidu’s position.
Here Naidu. who had always drawn upon the ideals of the Indian
woman as embodied in the epic figures of Site and Savitri, was
invoking the familiar image of Indian womanhood available within
nationalist discourse to counter Mayo's picture of Indian women.
Unlike many of her male colleagues, however, her main concern
was not to prove that Indian women were not subject to certain
oppressive practices but to challenge Mayo’s right to speak for
“Indian womanhood.“ (ibid.)
Other Indian women objected to Mayo’s work on the same grounds. For
example, Kamala Sathianadhan, editor of the Indian Ladies Magazine had this to
say about Mayo, “we do not question her ability or her cleverness in writing this
book; but we do deny her the self-presumption that she is 'in a position to
present conditions and their bearings,’ and we do not for a minute admit her
'plain speech' as the “faithful wounds of a friend'; for she is no friend of ours.“

(21) A similar sentiment could be heard, in a 1927 letter to the Times, written by

the wife of the leading Indian Muslim, Mrs. Ameer All, who said in response to

272

British women who grant themselves responsibility for carrying out social reforms
in India,

Indian women are not voiceless. They received the franchise, and

those among them who are able and willing to take advantage of it

are aware of the needs of their own people. (31)
What is apparent in these responses to Mayo’s Mother India is an awareness
that while Mayo's concern was ostensibly with the crimes against Indian women,
her effort to portray them as voiceless victims was actually intended to justify
British imperialism. As Naidu points out, had Mayo been genuinely concerned
with the plight of Indian women, she would have reported in the book the abuses
Indian woman suffered at the hands of the British. According to Sinha, Mayo
knew of the exchange between Naidu and Earl Montagu, former secretary of
state in India, in which Naidu accused the British government of being
“indifferent to the plight of those Indian women who had been molested by
British soldiers during the Martial Law Regulations in Amritsar in 1919.“ (15) In
spite of her knowledge, she did not investigate these crimes because they might
undermine the project of portraying Indian women as victims of Indian barbarism
who needed to be saved by the civilizing mission of the British. (16)

Reflected in the views of these Indian women is a nationalist critique of
Mayo's efforts to silence them by speaking for them and assuming the
responsibility for acting on their behalf, but there is no defense of the crimes
committed against Indian women by Indian men. As Sinha points out, Indian

women within the nationalist discourse critiqued Mayo’s diatribe as a way to

open a space for their own critiques of patriarchal crimes in India. For example,

273

Uma Nehru, a well known Hindi journalist, published Mother India Aur Uska
Jawab (Mother India and Its Reply) in 1928 which contained a Hindi translation
of Mayo's book and an imaginary debate with Mayo on the substantive points
raised in Mother India. In the preface Nehru says her aim is to “use this book
meant to insult us to instill pride among us.“ (26) Sinha reports Nehru dismisses
Mayo's exaggerated portrayal of the 'untouchable dhai' or midwife by invoking
her readers concrete experience of these women to refute Mayo's lurid
descriptions.“ (ibid.) On this view, shedding the imperialist portrayals of Indian
women is a necessary step toward acting on their own behalf. The position of
Indian women involved in the organized women's movement (constituted by
predominantly upper-caste and middle-class women's organizations) also
exemplified this movement away from imperialist understandings of Indian
woman as victims and moved simultaneous away from patriarchal oppression.
The Women's Indian Association, a pioneer of the all-India women's movement,
organized the largest protest meeting of women against Mother India at
Triplicane in Madras. According to Sinha the meeting was chaired by Dr.
Muthulakshmi Amal (Reddy), the first Indian woman to be nominated to the
provincial legislature. At this meeting Indian women passed the following two
resolutions, which were published in the Hindu, September 29, 1927,

first, they denied that “Indian womanhood as a whole is in a state

of slavery, superstition, ignorance and degradation which Miss

Mayo affirms“; second, they called upon the Legislative Assembly

and the Legislative Council to enact measures that would legally

prohibit child marriage, early parentage, enforced widowhood,

dedication of girls to temples, and commercialized immorality. (as
reponedin)

274

From the perspective of Indian women, Mayo's use of Indian women's suffering
against the movement for Indian self-determination meant that hers was not a
feminism, if it was a feminism at all, which they could identify with. From within
the “world“ of Indian women I hear Naidu and other Indian woman saying “Yes,
we are oppressed; yes, we are treated as goods and chattels and forced on the
funeral pyres of our husbands; but we are not victimsl You who seek to silence
us to “save“ us through subordinating us the rule of your fathers are not our
friends or sisters. In your effort to stand up for us, you stand in our way. We
shall break through the walls that imprison us and tear the veils that stifle! We
shall do these by the miracle of our womanhood.“

Now it is time for me to begin laying out the path for the Joumeyer
through the Second Passage. Having traveled to the “world“ of Indian women, I
reflect on what I have discovered about myself. Before leaving for India I
understood myself as one of “the few women in 'advanced' countries who have
some idea of the facts of sexism and some knowledge of 'women's history.“
(Daly, 1978, 123) I knew myself as independent, capable of amazing analysis
and committed to the feminist work of revealing the Indian woman as a victim. I
saw myself in Katherine Mayo. After arriving in India and hearing the voices of
Indian women, I recognize that I am an outsider here. I realize the women who
are at home here do not assume I am their friend and sister. This bugs me. I
have a choice. I can assume that they have been co-Opted within a hegemonic
male nationalist discourse or I can assume that they know something about me

that I do not know. Since Mayo chose the former, which did not work to

275

establish her in their eyes as a friend and sister, I chose the latter. What do they
see in me? In my commitment to reveal them are victims of patriarchy they see
a white Western feminist who assumes she is different, an arrogant perceiver. In
the manner of my feminism they see one who takes the side of the imperialist in
the debate between the imperialist-nationalist controversy. They know that I
have been taught the foreground scripts of the imperialism. I realize that if I
want them to see me as a friend and sister I had better not represent them
victims. As an outsider from an imperialist world I must recognize that my
assumption of responsibility for the women of this world is the worst kind of
arrogance. By looking at myself, in their world, through their eyes, I come to
understand that I am not the capable and committed feminist I knew myself as in
my world, I am also an outsider with the potential to use the master's tools
against other women. without awareness. Through this critical self-examination I
come to the conclusion that I must assume my task in the Second Passage as I
construct my indictment of patriarchy is to take responsibility for resisting
complicity with the scripts of racism, ethnocentrism and imperialism. Part of this
work will involve coming to understand the relations, in the foreground and
Background, between myself and the women in each of the chapters in the
Passage.

As part of assuming responsibility for resisting the scripts which have
taught me not to identify with people other worlds, I reflect on what I have
discovered about Indian women from the perspective of their world. I see that in

the foreground they are constructed as victims in need of protection by

276

imperialists and as repositories of ahistorical and essentialized lndianness by
patriarchs. But I definitely do not assume these foreground scripts tell the truth
about Indian women. I recognize them and present them as lies which obscure
and distort the Background traditions of Indian women. I search for answers to
the questions, what threat did those girls represent who were married as
children? Just who were the women who were burned on the funeral pyre? Who
were the dhais? Taking my cue from Uma Nehru, I see through Mayo's
representation of the dhai. (Discussed in Part Three, 12) l a-maze the
connection between Mayo’s description and the description of the practices of
the women who were burned as witches in Europe. I realize there is every
reason to believe that patriarchal crimes in India, like those in America, are
directly related to the movements of radical women past and present who knew
that following the foreground scripts makes you a victim. I present the Sado
Ritual Syndrome analysis of sati in the context of the female symbolic figures
(Kali, Sita and Savitri) Indian women call on for power and knowledge.“ I
recognize the following difference between the pattern of patriarchal myth in my
world and India in the fact that Indian Goddesses have not been completely
obscured in Hindu. Since nothing in my radical feminist project depends on
Othering Indian women, as is clear from the fact that nothing is lost in presenting

myself as both victim and subject, I seek to discover the Indian Goddess within

 

° An excellent source for the Radical White Westem Feminist interested in this reSearch is The
Feminist Companion to Mythology, edited by Carolyne Larrington (London: Pandora Press,
1992). For Background information on Indian female symbolic figures, see “Indian Myth“ by
Emily Kearns.

277

me as a strategy of identification across the differences which have been
constructed to separate me from my Indian sister.

A-mazing and World-traveling used together hold the promise of realizing
the original goals which Daly intended to accomplish in Gyn/Eco/ogy. developing
our powers of perception as a way out of patriarchy. As Marilyn Frye pointed
out, the revolutionary project of granting ourselves authority as perceivers
depends on “discovering agreement in the experiences and perceptions of
women.“ Discovering agreement is not the same as a-mazing connections,
although a-mazing may be a useful tool in the process. Discovering agreement
necessarily involves interaction, especially listening. I have suggested that
through “world-traveling“ we can come to agreement not only about similarities in
our experiences and perceptions, but also agreement about differences in our
experiences and perceptions. To borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf, we can
come to understand that how “we see the same things differently“ than our
sisters of color, in the U.S. and beyond. In the process we recognize, reclaim,
and understand how we might utilize our differences as critical and creative

forces for change.

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