Right-wing Women полностью

movements throughout history and facing some kind of disintegration again (with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States, the possible enactment of the Family Protection

Act, the Human Life Amendment or Statute, and other social,

political, and legal initiatives promoting female subordination*),

have to face the real questions. Can a political movement rooted in

a closed system of subordination—with no political support among

power-based political movements—break that closed system apart?

Or will the antifeminism of those whose politics are rooted in sex-

class power and privilege always destroy movements for the liberation of women? Is there a way to subvert the antifeminism of power-based political programs or parties—or is the pleasure and

profit in the subordination of women simply too overwhelming,

* Feminists all over the world report similar backlash.

too great, too marvelous, to allow for anything but the political

defense of that subordination (antifeminism)? Will it take a hundred fists, a thousand fists, a million fists, pushed through that circle of crime to destroy it, or are right-wing women essentially

right that it is indestructible? Can the wall of prostitution be

scaled? Can what is at the heart of sex oppression—the use of

women as pornography, pornography as what women are—be

stopped? If antifeminism triumphs over the liberation movement of

women—now, again, always—whoever has political power or represents social order or exercises authoritarian rule—whatever they are called, whatever they call their political line—has women for

good; the Right, broadly construed, has women for good. Stasis

and cruelty will have triumphed over freedom. The freedom of

women from sex oppression either matters or it does not; it is either essential or it is not. Decide one more time.

Notes

1. T h e P r o m is e o f t h e U l t r a -R ig h t

1. M arilyn Monroe, in a dressing-room notebook, cited by Norman M ailer, M arilyn: A B iography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973), p. 17.

2. Terrence Des Pres, The S u rvivor: An A natomy o f Life in the

Death Camps (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. vi.

3. Leah Fritz, Thinking Like a Woman (Rifton, N . Y .: W in Books,

1975), p. 130.

4. Anita B ryant, Bless This House (New York: Bantam Books,

1976), p. 26.

5. Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (New York: Pocket Books,

1975), p. 57.

6. Ruth Carter Stapleton, The Gift o f In ner H ealing (Waco, T ex.:

Word Books, Publisher, 1976), p. 32.

7. Ibid., p. 18.

8. Morgan, Total W oman, p. 8.

9. Ibid., p. 96.

10. Ibid., p. 60.

11. Ibid., p. 161.

12. Ibid., pp. 140-41.

13. Anita Bryant, M ine Eyes H ave Seen the Glory (Old Tappan,

N. J .: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1970), pp. 26-27.

14. Ibid., p. 84.

15. Bryant, Bless This H ouse, p. 42.

16. Bryant, M ine Eyesy p. 83.

17. Bryant, Bless This House, pp. 51-52.

18. “Battle Over Gay Rights, ” Newsweek, June 6, 1977, p. 20.

19. Phyllis Schlafly, The P ow er o f the P ositive Woman (New Rochelle, N . Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1977), p. 89.

2. T he Po l it ic s o f In t e l l ig e n c e

1. Norman Mailer, Advertisements fo r M yself (New York: G. P.

Putnam’s Sons, Perigee Books, 1981), p. 433.

2. Edith Wharton, “The Touchstone, ” in Madame de Treymes and

Others (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), p. 12.

3. Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child o f the Dark: The Diary o f Carolina

M aria de Jesu s, trans. David St. Clair (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 47.

4. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and

the State: An Agenda for Theory, ” Signs: A Jou rn a l o f Women in

Culture and Society, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring 1982.

5. De Jesus, Child o f the Dark, p. 29.

6. Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (Old Westbury, N . Y.: The

Feminist Press, 1979), p. 49.

7. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion o f 'The