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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 Give

Sorrow Words.

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 work in

order to l i v e ” Jenny D’Hericourt wrote French socialist Joseph

Proudhon in the mid-1800s, “is to desire prostitution; for disdain

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