altogether by Phyllis Schlafly, who waxes euphoric on having children: “None of those measures of career success [traveling to “exciting faraway places, ” having authority over others, winning, or earning a fortune] can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and
the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies m ultiply a woman’s jo y . ” 15 The thrill, the endlessly m ultiplying joy, was not in God’s original intention; and indeed, it is unlikely that
Schlafly has outwilled him. In the sorrow of having children there
is the recognition that one’s humanity is reduced to this, and on
this one’s survival depends. Being a woman is this, or it is unspeakably worse than this. Homosexuality brings up for women the barrenness of not even having this. A woman has committed
her life to bringing forth children in order to have a life of dignity
and worth; she has found the one w ay in which she is absolutely
necessary; and then, that is gone as an absolute. It must be an
absolute, because there are women who stake their lives on it as an
absolute; it is certainly what women have had to count on. Everything that women have to gain from homosexuality— and women have a great deal to gain from it: less forced penetration of themselves, for instance— is obliterated by the fear of losing what value women have, a fear conjured up by homosexuality in women
whose own right to life is in having children. Despite all the happy
talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did
not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives
would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her
womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to
her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for
her own sake. It is not rational to hate homosexuals because they
force one to experience a terror of extinction: the cold chill of being
useless, unnecessary, expendable. But passions are distinguished
by their illogic: one can describe them and find an interior logic in
them up to a point—then there is a sensational leap into hate, dazzling, crazed, obsessional. Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals—
despised because they are associated with women—is more than
self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it
does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with
women. But the perception that having children is the only edge
women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute
perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for
and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without
reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not,
bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need,
no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women
afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous
anyway.
5
The Coming Gynocide
Rich as you are
Death will finish
you: afterwards no
one will remember
or want you;. . .
Sappho
In
Virginia Woolf called the attention of the women in her audience
to a statement by a popular British journalist of the time who
warned “that when children cease to be altogether desirable,
women cease to be altogether necessary. ” 1 The woman who is deviant because she has no children, as Woolf was even in her avant-garde set, is often aware of how tenuous her existence is: it is a
courtesy extended to her— letting her go on—despite the fact that
she is not earning her womanly keep in the womanly w ay. She
knows how little the world at large needs her or values her for
anything else she does even when she is exceptional; and if she
understands how systematic and relentless the valuation of her
kind is, she also knows that at the heart of the male system there is
a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that
