Читаем Right-wing Women полностью

their value is recognized and in the workplace it is not. In marriage, sex labor is rewarded: the woman is generally “given” more than she herself could earn at a job. In the marketplace, women are

exploited as cheap labor. The argument that work outside the

home makes women sexually and economically independent of

men is simply untrue. Women are paid too little. And right-wing

women know it.

Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal

work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence.

But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating

social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all

their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual

subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays

women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for

working outside marriage or prostitution, since women work hard

for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that

punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low

wages contributes significantly to women’s perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman’s life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for

equal work is a simple reform, whereas it is no reform at all; it is

revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay

for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-

wing women have refused to forget it. Devaluation of women’s

labor outside the home pushes women back into the home and encourages women to support a system in which, as she sees it, he is paid for both of them— her share of his wage being more than she

could earn herself.

In the workplace, sexual harassment fixes the low status of

women irreversibly. Women are sex; even filing or typing, women

are sex. The debilitating, insidious violence of sexual harassment

is pervasive in the workplace. It is part of nearly every working

environment. Women shuffle; women placate; women submit;

women leave; the rare, brave women fight and are tied up in the

courts, often without jobs, for years. There is also rape in the

workplace.

Where is the place for intelligence— for literacy, intellect, creativity, moral discernment? Where in this world in which women live, circumscribed by the uses to which men put women’s sexual

organs, is the cultivation of skills, the cultivation of gifts, the

cultivation of dreams, the cultivation of ambition? Of what use is

human intelligence to a woman?

“Of course, ” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the learned women were

very ugly; but then they were very poor. She would like to feed

Chuffy for a term on Lucy’s rations and see what he said then

about Henry the Eighth. ” 28

“No, it would not do the slightest good if he read my manuscript. . . , ” wrote Ellen Glasgow in her memoir. “T h e best advice I can give you, ’ he said, with charming candor, ‘is to stop writing, and go back to the South and have some babies. ’ And I

think, though I may have heard this ripe wisdom from other men,

probably from many, that he added: T h e greatest woman is not

the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who

has had the finest babies. ’ That might be true. I did not stay to

dispute it. However, it was true also that I wanted to write books,

and not ever had I felt the faintest wish to have babies. ” 29

Woodhull thought that freedom from sexual coercion would

come with work in the marketplace. She was wrong; the marketplace became, as men would have it, another place for sexual intimidation, another arena of danger to women burdened already with too many such arenas. Woolf put her faith in education and

art. She too was wrong. Men erase; misogyny distorts; the intelligence of women is still both punished and despised.

Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They

see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they

see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having

ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage

means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see