between the legs, acknowledged as such when men show their
strange terror of women. Intelligence neither creates nor destroys
this wound; nor does it change the uses of the wound, the woman,
the sex.
Women’s work is done below the waist; intelligence is higher.
Women are lower; men are higher. It is a simple, dull scheme; but
women’s sex organs in and of themselves are apparently appalling
enough to justify the scheme, make it self-evidently true.
The natural intelligence of women, however expanded by what
women manage to learn despite their low status, manifests in surviving: enduring, marking time, bearing pain, becoming numb, absorbing loss—especially loss of self. Women survive men’s use of them—marriage, prostitution, rape; women’s intelligence expresses
itself in finding ways to endure and find meaning in the unendurable, to endure being used because of one’s sex. “Sex with men, how can I say, lacks the personal, ” 24 wrote Maryse Holder in
Some women want to work: not sex labor; real work; work that
men, those real humans, do for a living wage. T hey want an honest wage for honest work. One of the prostitutes Kate M illett interviewed made $800 a week in her prime. “With a P h. D. and after ten years’ experience in teaching, ” M illet wrote, “I was permitted
to make only $60 a w eek. ” 25
Women’s work that is not marriage or prostitution is mostly
segregated, always underpaid, stagnant, sex-stereotyped. In the
United States in 1981 women earned 56 to 59 percent of what men
earned. Women are paid significantly less than men for doing comparable work. It is not easy to find comparable work. The consequences of this inequity— however the percentages read in any given year, in any given country— are not new for women. Unable
to sell sex-neutral labor for a living wage, women must sell sex.
“To subordinate women in a social order in which she must
Proudhon in the mid-1800s, “is to
of the producer extends to the value of the product;. . . The
woman who cannot live by working, can only do so by prostituting
herself; the equal of man or a courtesan, such is the alternative. ” 26
Proudhon’s egalitarian vision could not be stretched to include
women. He wrote D’Hericourt:
. . . I do not admit that, whatever reparation may be due to
woman, of joint thirds with her husband (or father) and her
children, the most rigorous justice can ever make her the
EQUAL of man;. . . neither do I admit that this inferiority of
the female sex constitutes for it either servitude, or hum iliation, or a diminution of dignity, liberty, or happiness. I maintain that the contrary is true. 27
D’Hericourt’s argument constructs the world of women: women
must work for fair wages in nonsexual labor or they must sell
themselves to men; the disdain of men for women makes the work
of women worth less simply because women do it; the devaluation
of women’s work is predetermined by the devaluation of women as
a sex class; women end up having to sell themselves because men
will not buy labor from them that is not sex labor at wages that
will enable women to divest themselves of sex as a form of labor.
Proudhon’s answer constructs the world of men: in the best of all
possible worlds—acknowledging that some economic discrimination against women has taken place—no justice on earth can make women equal to men because women are inferior to men: this inferiority does not humiliate or degrade women; women find happiness, dignity, and liberty in this inequality precisely because they are women—that is the nature of women; women are being treated
justly and are free when they are treated as women—that is, as the
natural inferiors of men.
The brave new world Proudhon wanted was, for women, the
same old world women already knew.
D’Hericourt recognized what Victoria Woodhull would not:
“disdain of the producer extends to the value of the product. ”
Work for wages outside sex labor would not effectively free women
from the stigma of being female because the stigma precedes the
woman and predetermines the undervaluing of her work.
This means that right-wing women are correct when they say
that they are worth more in the home than outside it. In the home
