suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing.
They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the
focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self-respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a
larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her
poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the
street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get
her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for
literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know.
Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have
dreams of being in the world, not m erely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. "Women dream , ” Florence N ightingale wrote in
strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so
honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet
which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those
dreams go at last.. . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream,
neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. ”6
V irginia Woolf, the most splendid modern writer, told us over
and over how awful it was to be a woman of creative intelligence.
She told us when she loaded a large stone into her pocket and
walked into the river; and she told us each time a book was published and she went mad—don’t hurt me for what I have done, I will hurt m yself first, I w ill be incapacitated and I w ill suffer and I
will be punished and then perhaps you need not destroy me, perhaps you w ill pity me, there is such contempt in pity and I am so proud, won’t that be enough? She told us over and over in her
prose too: in her fiction she showed us, ever so delicately so that
we would not take offense; and in her essays she piled on the
charm, being polite to keep us polite. But she did write it straight
out too, though it was not published in her lifetime, and she
was right:
A certain attitude is required—what I call the pouring-out-
tea attitude— the clubwoman, Sunday afternoon attitude. I
don’t know. I think that the angle is almost as important as the
thing. W hat I value is the naked contact of a mind. Often one
cannot say anything valuable about a w riter—except what one
thinks. Now I found my angle incessantly obscured, quite unconsciously no doubt, by the desire of the editor and of the public that a woman should see things from the chary feminine
angle. M y article, written from that oblique point of view, alw ays went dow n. 7
To value “the naked contact of a mind” is to have a virile intelligence, one not shrouded in dresses and pretty gestures. Her work did always go down, with the weight of what being female demanded. She became a master of exquisite indirection. She hid her meanings and her messages in a feminine style. She labored under
that style and hid behind that mask: and she was less than she
could have been. She died not only from what she did dare, but
also from what she did not dare.
These three things are indissolubly linked: literacy, intellect, and
creative intelligence. They distinguish, as the cliche goes, man from
the animals. He who is denied these three is denied a fully human
life and has been robbed of a right to human dignity. Now change
the gender. Literacy, intellect, and creative intelligence distinguish
woman from the animals: no. Woman is not distinguishable from the
animals because she has been condemned by virtue of her sex class to
a life of animal functions: being fucked, reproducing. For her, the
animal functions are her meaning, her so-called humanity, as human
as she gets, the highest human capacities in her because she is
female. To the orthodox of male culture, she is animal, the antithesis
of soul; to the liberals of male culture, she is nature. In discussing
the so-called biological origins of male dominance, the boys can
