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words “Ah just love tha Jew ish people. ” The slime variety of anti-

Semite, very much in evidence, was typified by a Right to Life

leader who called doctors who perform abortions “Jew ish baby killers. ” I was asked a hundred times: “Am Ah speakin with a Jewish g irl? ” Despite m y clear presence as a lesbian-feminist with press

credentials plastered all over me from the notorious Ms. magazine,

it was as a Jew that I was consistently challenged and, on several

occasions, im plicitly threatened. Conversation after conversation

stopped abruptly when I answered that yes, I was a Jew .

*

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt

they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to

them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites,

or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no

matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to

ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other

than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder

their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom

they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief.

Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify

the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at

least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they

are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason

to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of

danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols

of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as

sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can

change over time to meet changing social circumstances—for ex­

ample, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can

be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or

kept under the surface— but the existence of the dangerous outsider alw ays functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, pain-killer, and threat.

The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide. The danger is that self-sacrificing women are perfect foot soldiers who obey orders, no

matter how criminal those orders are. The hope is that these

women, upset by internal conflicts that cannot be stilled by manipulation, challenged by the clarifying drama of public confrontation and dialogue, w ill be forced to articulate the realities of their own

experiences as women subject to the w ill of men. In doing so, the

anger that necessarily arises from a true perception of how t hey

have been debased may move them beyond the fear that transfixes

them to a meaningful rebellion against the men who in fact dim inish, despise, and terrorize them. This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their male-defined ideological origins; and this

struggle alone has the power to transform women who are enemies

against one another into allies fighting for individual and collective

survival that is not based on self-loathing, fear, and humiliation,

but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic integrity.

2

The Politics of Intelligence

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.. . . It’s a

feeling of impotence: of cutting no ice.

Virginia Woolf, her diary,

October 25, 1920

Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it