(The Red Womem’s Detachment received in mid-January a copy of the following letter which had been submitted to the pseudo-underground newspaper RAT and rejected because of its “tone.”. It is reprinted here in full, along with our discussion in response.)
A reply to the “Response” of some New York women (in RAT, Nov. 17, 1970) to WOMEN-IDENTIFIED-WOMEN ON THIS MAN’S, CONVENTION, which was written by a lesbian collective from New York (printed in RAT, Oct. 6, 1970)
WOMEN OF THE COUNTERFEIT LEFT:
Are you listening? Are you hearing? Are you thinking? I ask these questions because it is apparent that you didn’t really think about anything the radical lesbians had to say and I am hoping because of some relentlessly liberal streak of mine, that you will not make the same blind mistake with me.
If Women-Identified-Women really failed to make any distinctions between Black Panther men and Richard Milhouse Nixon, they would not have come to the Revolutionary People’s Convention. You didn’t see them showing up at the Republican National Convention now, did you? Nor at the Democratic Party’s either, for that matter. Any feminist worth her salt knows how important it is to see clearly all the distinctions among men. The Feminist Revolution is going to require, among other things, one of the most delicate juggling acts in history, as we women strive toward greater unity among ourselves and greater disunity among the various classes of men.
If Women-Identified-Women abandoned the convention, calling it enemy territory, it was because the panthers treated them as enemies would treat them. What amazes me is that in the face of all the run-arounds, insults, false promises and even physical threats they describe, these women did not conclude, as you falsely charge, that conflict with the Panthers was inevitable and irresolvable. Women-Identified-Women rather concluded that more of a power base was necessary before the Panthers would take the demands of feminists seriously. Only this would change the Panthers’ “low consciousness” about women.
Your reply to Women-Identified-Woman was politically insincere as well as viciously anti-feminist and anti-lesbian. Although you say: “the oppression of women by men must always be struggled against,” it seems you do not really mean it. By all evidence, yours is a form of struggle with limits imposed from beginning to end. Some men, – ruling class men – you admit may have to be smashed. They must be, in fact. Other men need only be “changed... in the spirit of love and respect.” They must never be threatened. That would be counter-revolutionary.
Your form of struggle has no real force behind it, no power. You refuse to say: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. You are unwilling to “Inflict a consequence” on the men you are trying to change. Thus they scarcely change. You will not stage a walk out on your “brothers” and you attack those women who do. What criticisms you have made of your comrades sound more like apologies and entreaties than criticism. This is not struggle. It is accommodation, which might be okay – for you – if you did not also attack the women who fight.
What self-interest lies in this strategy of yours, a strategy which turns out to be, in fact, reactionary? Marxists though you claim to be, you refuse even to discuss it, “your own reality.”
You attempt to disguise your interests by claiming that your moral outrage at what is done to others in your name is your most pressing reality. You deny your selfishness in the name of your higher “consciousness” of other oppressed people’s needs. In doing so, you end up with a little extra power. Well to be precise, you end up with some more privileges, whatever little favors “good” women get under male supremacy. The rest of us fools have just opened ourselves up to attack by revealing our own desires and you sit there in your pristine purity with apparently no selfish demands of your own. And then you attack us. This is exactly what happened in the women’s workshop at the Revolutionary People’s Convention, in your own words. There you were, seemingly innocent, caught in the middle between the “competitive, egocentric” black women and lesbian women.
You tell us that the lesbian women relentlessly demanded the abolition of the nuclear family and that the black women relentlessly fought against such a demand. You lesbian-bait one group for being aggressively insensitive to the needs of more oppressed women. You red-bait the other group for allegedly pushing the C.P. line on the family. You somehow fail to assume that these black women might have their own reasons for fighting for a family, and sound feminist reasons at that. You make black women feel that the demand for a family, the demand that men take responsibility towards the women they have sex with and stick around to help raise the “children is just a “black problem.” You’ve probably had this same problem yourselves. Most women do who sleep with men. Bu you won’t admit it. You don’t want to admit how oppressed you are. That might put you in the same grimy league as the lesbians and the black women. That might make you look too “demanding.”
So you come out clean. You refuse to fight on the basis of your own reality as the lesbians ask. They assumed incorrectly that you would take their side since you are allegedly in favor of the abolition of the nuclear family. But your actions, your failure to struggle, belie your words. You hopped on the anti-nuclear family bandwagon, not out of solidarity with the lesbian women nor any stated needs of your own, for that matter; but out of some purely theoretical position (because it accommodates to the current white, male, intellectual hip line?). All the while you were trying to stop this bandwagon as best, you could, again, not in your own name but in the name of black woman. Maybe if you had opened up your own true (selfish!) feelings, the conflicts in the workshop could have been resolved. The workshop could have demanded legal rights and social equality for lesbian alliances and single women. At the same time it could have put forward strong demands for the long lost rights of women in sexual unions with men (what we call the nuclear or the heterosexual family). Instead, you created an atmosphere of confusion by the in congruity of your words and actions. You insulted black women by your pure, high-flown theoretical line on the family. You insulted lesbian women by pretending to abandon selflessly your own position in the more pressing interests of the “most oppressed.” It was your patronising dishonesty not any so-called intransigence on the part of the black and lesbian women which created an atmosphere of defensiveness in which no agreement could ever be reached.
You wreak political havoc by your persistent failure even to understand what feminists mean when we say we must act from our own reality. (I, for one, first learned this revolutionary lesson from black people, as a civil rights worker in the South, not from the nasty, selfish feminists who now have me in their grip!) Acting from our own reality means, first of all, that we women have to lay all our cards out on the table with each other. No lies. No “advanced” theoretical positions which contradict our feelings.
When we all know what our immediate needs and desires are, then we can begin to negotiate if our interests appear to conflict. We can talk about where we all want to go and what we are willing to risk now in the hopes of getting something better for ourselves in the future. Maybe some of us will split at certain points. But only this way, with real honesty, can women forge a solid feminist unity.
Right now you are making hay off the oppression of other women!: getting points with men for your ladies-of-mercy work among the poor downtrodden “third world” peoples. The special understanding you show black male supremacists because they are so oppressed is not much better than the opposite mistake white women make when they attack black men, for male supremacy more quickly and readily than they attack their own men. I can only wonder how much black women really like your special understanding and liberalism with respect to black men. Black women are oppressed enough by the loss of their men to more “understanding” more “giving,” less bourgeois white women who are really scabbing on the pioneering feminist struggles of those sisters who are called “evil” black bitches.
You must analyze your own reality and fight for your interests as women. It is in the interested of all women that you do so. The very reasons you give against this strategy – that we live in “the luxury of non-scarcity” in the belly of the imperialist monster ruling the world – are the very reasons you should take up the feminist banner. Women in America can work on a stage of the revolution, on feminist issues and problems – that will help women all over the world but that women in other countries are at this time unable to tackle (yes, because of imperialism!) But in your fight for your liberation you will be attacking the very men who have created the added oppression that Black and Vietnamese and Cuban women face. Our feminist assault will help to crumble the imperialist monster. It will also finish off male supremacy.
If we stop fighting for our own liberation to help groups even worse off than ourselves, we will never get around to our own fight. It seems there will always be liberals like you around to find yet another more oppressed group and try to stop our revolutionary struggle. How fortunate that black people didn’t wait until the war in Vietnam was over to begin their liberation fight, to put their needs first. If black people had waited, we wouldn’t have the powerful grass roots movement we have today which has raised women’s feminist consciousness, workers’ class consciousness and stirred feelings and actions which are beginning to threaten the citadel of male imperialism itself.
If we women fight for our interests all the way, we do not have to worry about winning our liberation at the expense of others (except, of course, the men who oppress us!) You point to the American labor movement as an example of a movement which mistakenly fought along self-interest lines, leaving behind the tremendous tasks that still had to be accomplished for all oppressed people. That’s just wrong. The problem with the labor movement was not that it fought for its own interests. The problem was that the workers failed to fight all the way for their own interests. They settled for higher wages instead of an end to wage slavery. They settled for privileges granted to them by their masters, based on the common male sex, white skin and American citizenship they shared with their masters. The workers failed to go on to seize power and win real liberation.
Right now the situation among workers is in a state of flux. The struggles of the Vietnamese, blacks and other “Third World” peoples are depriving all American workers, white male workers, in particular, of their special privileges. How these workers can wake up to their real self-interest, take a look at who their true enemies are and begin to either fight them instead of the blacks and Vietnamese (and women!). They can either begin to fight for their liberation, in other words, or they can once again opt for privileges instead of power and try frantically to regain what they have recently lost by joining their masters in an effort to crush the rebellious people of the world.
This is the real political significance for women of “differences” within the male ranks. Oppressed men can decide whether to try to crush us in an effort to keep what little power they already have (and all men have power over women, not just privileges). On the other hand, men can decide to stop oppressing us and start fighting for their liberation from their own masters instead. That these men themselves are oppressed by racism and/or capitalism in no way means that we women should “go easy on them” in our struggle for freedom. It merely suggests that the means necessary to change such men will in most cases be less drastic than the means necessary to change their masters. Under revolutionary conditions oppressed men will in all likelihood change more readily because 1). They have fewer male benefits to lose from a feminist victory 2). they have much to gain from the defeat of racist and imperialist male rule. History has shown however, that “power never concedes anything without demand.” Even men who are themselves oppressed will not change without force of some kind or another.
At times we women may have to wheel and deal with ruling class men as we try to defend our interests against the more oppressed men who are coming down on us heavily in our daily lives. This tactic is nothing new for revolutionary groups. After all the Soviet Union signed a pact with Nazi Germany, when it was necessary to do so. Such deals are nothing new; for women either. Don’t blame feminism for leading us down a so-called counter-revolutionary path (It is the “poor men who oppress us who are the real counter-revolutionaries). The female masses have been spontaneously making “alliances” with the pigs for a long time now, whenever forced to do so by men. Every time a woman sues her husband for child support, takes her boy friend to court for assault and battery, calls the cops on the robbers who walked off with her hard earned possessions, or charges some sick bum with rape, she is fighting for her just rights by any means open to her. The main problem with the police in these cases is that they often refuse to help us.
Women have also “scabbed” on the strikes of all-male unions – unions in other words, which discriminate against us and we may have to do this again. We may also have to threaten men with stopping their so-called revolution if it is a “revolution” in which men continue to oppress us.
If men who are also oppressed know we are really determined, to do anything, they will change, and fast, too, because suddenly it will be in their interest to do so. The combination of feminist confrontation and ruling class oppression will force these men to join us and then they will be far truer allies than any temporary ruling class “benefactors.”
Women of the counterfeit left: Instead of being on the defensive with the Panthers and attacking the women, who walked out of the convention, singling them out as “lesbians,” you should have seized this opportunity to take the offensive. You could have pointed to the depth of feeling women have about male chauvinist practices and used the walk out to demand changes in the panthers’ attitude toward women. This is assuming that you have the revolutionary interests of women at heart and not some short term opportunistic interests. Was there a deal? Did the panthers say: “We will give you some recognition as good revolutionary sisters and maybe even throw a few more sentences about women’s liberation into our program if you lesbian-bait the women who walked out”??? Maybe it looks good to you for now. But think ahead. You’ve been getting benefits from the “man-hating” feminist movement. After all, it’s been around for you to get rewards from men for dissociating yourself from it. But the point is coming where this strategy reaches a dead end. If the militant feminists get picked off with your help, either you’ll have to take their places on the front lines or there will be no new benefits of their struggle coming to you. Even worse. You’ll probably get pushed further and further back because there won’t be enough “crazies” left to fight to hold the line.
If you think Women-Identified-Women really are pigs in disguise – or counter-revolutionaries, as you say – then attack them and distinguish them from other women as pigs not as lesbians. Then we women out here can decide from the evidence who the real male supremacist pigs are... you or them. On this matter, let the following be said for now: when you disassociate yourself from lesbian women because they are lesbians, when you set up a distinction between lesbians and women, as you did over and over again in your statement, then you are, in fact, doing what male supremacist pigs do and should be dealt with accordingly by any means necessary.
You women of the counterfeit left somehow keep forgetting that you benefit from the struggle of every woman who is or becomes a lesbian. Consciousness-raising in the women’s movement has taught us that lesbianism is political, not psychological or biological. It is an affirmation of women in a world of men who now really despise women. Don’t forget for an instant that the struggle of the lesbian woman is one of the reasons your man must someday begin to treat you with full human respect. For one thing, let’s face it, every woman who drops out of the race for a man cuts down a little on the competition and pressures on the rest of us, “frees” us to demand more of men. That’s one of the reasons men hate lesbians so and punish them so severely.
A woman like myself is more nearly a threat to you since I am still in the market for a man. And you are a threat to me. The goody-goody charity work you mistakenly call radicalism is making it more difficult for me to find a man who will be real with me. Your sniveling opportunism is delaying my happiness. It is holding back the revolution, not advancing it. Watch out. You’re standing in the way.
Kathie Sarachild
New York City
12/11/70