able to escape, less able to protect their children from incestuous
assault; if abortion becomes illegal, they will still have abortions
and they are likely to die or be maimed in great numbers; * if they
get addicted to drugs, it will most likely be to prescription drugs
prescribed by the family doctor to keep the family intact; if they
get poor—through being abandoned by their husbands or through
old age—they are likely to be discarded, their usefulness being
over. And right-wing women are still pornography (as Marabel
* Before 1973, both abortion and contraception were mostly illegal. Perhaps two thirds of women aborting were married (in one good study 75
percent were married) and most had children, as far as can be discerned
from the scanty evidence. With legal abortion and legal contraception,
about three quarters of the women seem to be single. As many people
suggest, women no longer feel compelled to marry on becoming pregnant,
which accounts in part for the demographic change. But I think that the
availability of contraceptives in conjunction with abortion is mainly responsible for the lower percentage of married women among those aborting. I suspect that married women use contraceptives with more precision
Morgan recognized in
whom they despise; and what they do— just like other women— is
barter. T h ey too live inside the wall of prostitution no matter how
they see themselves.
More than anything else, it is antifeminism that convinces right-
wing women that the system of sex segregation and sex hierarchy
is immovable, unbreachable, and inevitable— and therefore that
the logic of their world view is more substantive and compelling
than any analysis, however accurate, of its flaws. It is not the antifeminism of the Right specifically that keeps the allegiance of these women: it is the antifeminism that saturates political discourse all
along the political spectrum, the antifeminism that permeates virtually all political philosophies, programs, and parties. Antifeminism is not a form of political reaction and suppression confined to the far Right. If it were, women would have compelling reason for
moving aw ay from the far Right toward philosophies, programs,
and parties not fundamentally antifeminist; women would also
have good reason to see sex-class oppression as transformable, not
absolute and eternal. It is the pervasiveness of antifeminism, its
ubiquity, that establishes for women that they have no w ay out of
the sex-class system . The antifeminism of Left, Right, and center
fixes the power of the Right over women—gives the huge majority
of women over to the Right— over to social conservatism, ecoand consistency than do single women—certainly than do the teenagers who characteristically do not use contraceptives at all and who skew the
percentages toward single women. If the Human Life Amendment or Statute passes, or any similar legislation, both the intrauterine device and the low-dosage birth control pill will become illegal. They will be considered
abortifacients because they are known to stop the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall, thereby “killing” it. If effective contraception is once again unavailable—so that both contraception and abortion are inaccessible—I suspect the percentage of married women having abortions will once again skyrocket.
nomic conservatism, religious conservatism, over to conforming to
the dictates of authority and power, over to sexual compliance,
over to obedience—because as long as the sex-class system is intact, huge numbers of women will believe that the Right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression; the best economic security as the economic dependents of men w ho must provide; the most reliable
protection against battery; the most respect. Left and centrist philosophies, programs, and parties tend to vicious condescension with respect to women’s rights; they lie, and right-wing women are
quite brilliant at discerning the hypocrisy of liberal support for
women’s rights. Right-wing women do not buy the partial truths
and cynical lies that constitute the positions of various liberal and
so-called radical groups on women’s rights. They see antifeminism,
though they call it simple hypocrisy. They are outraged by it.
What is it that right-wing women see, then, when they look at
