Words of Fire (26 page)

This state of affairs unquestionably being the basis for much of our national neuroses it does not seem to occur to the overwhelming sections of American males that, in maintaining woman as Sex Object and/or Child Raiser, the fraternity of social relationships other than sex must necessarily suffer to the extent of creating what is in fact an impossible social arrangement—as indeed must the sexual relationship itself.

Woman like the Negro, the Jew, like colonial peoples, even in ignorance, is
incapable of accepting the role
with harmony. This is because it is an unnatural role which presupposes that she is something other than a human being possessed of the desire for transcendence. The station of woman is hardly one that she would assume by choice, any more than man would. It must necessarily be imposed on her—by force. It is therefore unnatural
and unstable, not to say merely impermanent, which it most certainly is. A status not freely chosen or entered into by an individual or a group is necessarily one of oppression and the oppressed are by their nature (i.e., oppressed) forever in ferment and agitation against their condition and what they understand to be their oppressors. If not by overt rebellion or revolution, then in the thousand and one ways they will devise with and without consciousness to alter their condition. Woman, it may be said with some understatement to make the point, is oppressed.

Moreover, the nature of man is unique in the animal world. His sociality is such that once the hunter is at a certain stage of social organization he is incapable of hunting merely for his personal immediate hunger. He has already found
in his needs
the impetus, the need, to sustain others of his cave. Ultimately he must help to sustain the community because of his needs; because it is incumbent upon his needs that the community survive and even prosper, though the memory of a time without the community may yet exist in his mind. Similarly in a more sophisticated age when his ethic expands beyond his essential needs, his nature will require him by the same laws of the primitive past to satisfy the needs,
the spiritual needs, of his species.

Thus in times past, woman, ignorant, inarticulate, has often found her most effective and telling champion among men. This is to suggest that if by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved. Such we must always come to conclude is the nature of mankind, such is the glory of the human race of which the male is a magnificent half.

The housewife says “just a housewife” for all the reasons she would perhaps try to deny if she thought someone who was attacking housework and “homemaking” as drudgery was also attacking the cornerstone and key and bedrock foundation of her family, home, husband, nation, and world.

The ancient effort to glorify the care of the home into something which it is not and cannot be is one of the greatest assaults against womanhood. Women are, generally speaking, ignorant. Their views, their interpretations of almost anything will largely be drawn from what men have thought and believed and promoted in the world independent of them or any serious consultation with them. This will apply even to themselves. A society dictated and organized by men prescribes that women should not work outside the home because “they take the bread out of men's families' mouths.” (One of the most remarkable arguments against anything I have ever heard.) And so, foremost among those shouting such an argument are always to be—women. Or, more to the immediate point, society tells woman from cradle to the grave that her husband, her home, her children
will be the source of all rewards in life, the foundation of all true happiness. And women believe it and they plunge into marriages; wrap themselves in their husbands and their children—and continue to constitute one of the most neurotic sections, no doubt, of our entire population. Husband reveals himself as but a man, as men must, and they, being humans, are an inadequate, blustering, often pathetic lot, themselves struggling to keep abreast of the rigorous and pointless attitudes society has also set for them in this “man's world.” And so beyond the second or third year, it is only the image of the myth which she married that woman can continue to lose herself in, to love.

Well, there are her children and they require much of her and she gives much—but they are only children. They are “the future of the race”; they are lovely; they are quick and bright and full of experiences for the observing adult—
but they are only children
. One may spend from fourteen to eighteen hours a day with a human being of five and the occasion simply will not arrive when one may discuss the meaning of strontium with that person. This is not a proper experience for the adult mind. As long as the threat exists one really ought to be discussing strontium—or, as a matter of fact, it would not be to the benefit of anyone if our public attitudes toward nursery schools had to rely on the intellectual spirit of five-yearolds—or for that matter, ten-year-olds.

Hansberry's commentary on
The Second Sex
, obviously unfinished, stops here. Her outline for this essay lists two additional, major subjects: “Man and Supremacy” and “Prospectus.” Under the latter, she planned to address the question of biology and whether women are “wedded to the womb” forever. The last topic listed in her outline was simply “liberation.”

ENDNOTES

1
This is far from a final statement on this question.

2
There will be many Communist women to read these remarks and shudder with a premature sense of betrayal. It will seem, out of the subjective experience of sensitive women, that I have, for the sake of ideally presenting a situation, grossly misstated the experience of the American Communist woman and movement. Let it suffice for the moment to insist that
we are speaking here merely in the general,
which, we feel, fact bears out.

3
Particularly in France itself where, if we may take Mlle. Beauvoir's word for it, the Revolution seems to have done little indeed for the lot of her countrywomen.

4
An article in the
N
.
Y
.
Post
, June 18, 1957, shows that the most important part of a woman's wardrobe depends on which industry is speaking. According to famous shoe designer J. Leon Touro, “Shoes are the most important, the most arresting, most sensuous part of a woman's outfit.” Mr. Touro is the man who
first promoted what the Post properly calls “those dangerous to life and limb matchstick heels” which have become accepted style among U.S. women.

5
The Second Sex
, 683.

6
A dispatch to the
New York Times
in June, 1957, tells us that the women of Paraguay expect to achieve suffrage, “very, very soon.”

7
The Second Sex
, 84.

8
It now begins to appear that the feminists are to be held responsible for every unattractive feature of woman's estate. In popular conversation and popular literature one can more easily conclude that women would have been better off without the feminists than with them. The tendency is to lay undue emphasis upon their wildest and most unfortunate exploits and attitudes and to remark not at all upon the meaning of the great role of historical feminism. It is idle to attack that which could not even have existed without a cause. What seems important is that if society found itself outraged by feminist fervor, it ought rather to have more speedily condemned that which gave rise to it: male supremacy. To the extent that the feminist leaders pronounced man rather than ideology as enemy they deserved correction; beyond that it is better to retain a deeply respectful and appreciative attitude of the role played by those great women and their great movement which moved humanity forward so decisively.

9
The Second Sex,
63—64.

10
Hansberry objected to this conceit, the feminization of professional work when performed by women, but she retained the term as part of this direct quote.

—BELL HOOKS,
Yearning

—DARLENE CLARK HINE,
Lure and Loathing

 

T
he history of the Civil Rights and women's rights movements during the “angry decade” of the sixties has been well-documented. The role of African American women in these historic struggles remains less well known. Similarly, the history of the development of contemporary black feminism during this period has received little attention in chronicles of modern feminism, even ones published more recently, where the focus remains middle-class white women.

This chapter focuses on the experiences of black women activists during the sixties, their frustrations with civil rights and more radical organizations, and their embrace of feminism in the early seventies despite their experiences with racism inside the largely white women's movement. What is apparent from our revisiting the feminist writings of African American
women during this critical juncture is that the women's movement would have attracted a broader cross-section of the female population had it taken seriously the insights of women of color. More than anything else, they were committed to societal transformations which would have enabled the poorest and most oppressed women to live better lives. After three decades of struggle this remains a dream deferred.

F
rances Beale, journalist and civil rights activist, was a founding member of SNCC's Black Women's Liberation Committee (New York coordinator) after returning in 1966 to the United States from Paris, where she had lived for six years. In 1970, she was director of the Black Women's Alliance, a feminist group associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). “Double Jeopardy,” first published in Robin Morgan's
Sisterhood
Is
Powerful
(1970), became the most anthologized essay in the early years of women's liberations publications. This now classic essay addressed the double burden of race and gender that black women confronted; dealt with issues of reproductive freedom for black women in a sanguine manner; articulated early on the necessity for the white women's liberation movement to be anti-imperialist and antiracist, a refrain that was repeated by many feminist women of color throughtout the 1970s and 1980s; and provided a revolutionary vision of a “new world” free of all oppressions, including capitalism. This essay, reminiscent of Elise McDougald's “The Struggle of Women for Sex and Race Emancipation” (1925), is also a manifesto for black women committed to eradicating the twin evils of racism and sexism.

I
n attempting to analyze the situation of the black woman in America, one crashes abruptly into a solid wall of grave misconceptions, outright distortions of fact, and defensive attitudes on the part of many. The system of capitalism (and its afterbirth—racism) under which we all live has attempted by many devious ways and means to destroy the humanity of all people, and particularly the humanity of black people. This has meant an outrageous assault on every black man, woman, and child who resides in the United States.

In keeping with its goal of destroying the black race's will to resist its subjugation, capitalism found it necessary to create a situation where the black man found it impossible to find meaningful or productive employment. More often than not, he couldn't find work of any kind. And the black woman likewise was manipulated by the system, economically exploited, and physically assaulted. She could often find work in the white man's kitchen, however, and sometimes became the sole breadwinner of the family. This predicament has led to many psychological problems on the part of both man and woman and has contributed to the turmoil that we find in the black family structure.

Unfortunately, neither the black man nor the black woman understood the true nature of the forces working upon them. Many black women tended to accept the capitalist evaluation of manhood and womanhood and believed, in fact, that black men were shiftless and lazy, otherwise they would get a job and support their families as they ought to. Personal relationships between black men and women were thus torn asunder and one result has been the separation of man from wife, mother from child, etc.

America has defined the roles to which each individual should subscribe. It has defined “manhood” in terms of its own interests and “feminity” likewise. Therefore, an individual who has a good job, makes a lot of money, and drives a Cadillac is a real “man,” and conversely, an individual
who is lacking in these “qualities” is less of a man. The advertising media in this country continuously inform the American male of his need for indispensable signs of his virility—the brand of cigarettes that cowboys prefer, the whiskey that has a masculine tang, or the label of the jockstrap that athletes wear.

The ideal model that is projected for a woman is to be surrounded by hypocritical homage and estranged from all real work, spending idle hours primping and preening, obsessed with conspicuous consumption, and limiting life's functions to simply a sex role. We unqualitatively reject these respective models. A woman who stays at home caring for children and the house often leads an extremely sterile existence. She must lead her entire life as a satellite to her mate. He goes out into society and brings back a little piece of the world for her. His interests and his understanding of the world become her own and she cannot develop herself as an individual having been reduced to only a biological function. This kind of woman leads a parasitic existence that can aptly be described as legalized prostitution.