Women: The Struggle for Freedom

(This is a part of "Women-the Struggle for Fdeedo," one of the founding documents of the women's liberation movement, It was written by a women's group in England, and first published in "The Black Dwarf." an English socialist magazine.)

WE DON'T know how to find one another or ourselves. We are perhaps the most divided of all oppressed groups: divided in our real situations and in our consciousness of our condition.

We are in different classes. Thus we use one another. Our "emancipation" has often been merely the struggle of the privileged to consolidate its superiority. The women of the working class remain the exploited of the exploited, oppressed as workers and oppressed as women.

We are with families and without them. Hence we distrust one another. The women with a home and children is suspicious of the women with no ties, seeing her as a potential threat to her security. The single women feels the married woman is subtly critical of her because she is not fulfilling her role as wife and mother; she feels accused of being unfeminine.

The girl who for some reason breaks away intellectually is in a peculiarly isolated position. She finds herself straddled across a great gulf, which grows wider, while she is pulled both ways: a most perilous and lonely condition.

In the process of becoming interested in ideas she finds herself to some extent cut off from other girls and inclines naturally toward boys as friends. They do more interesting things, discuss wider topics. Other girls appear curious and rather boring, passive and accepting. The social contempt in which women are held confirms this. She is constantly told that she is "quite good for a girl."

THROUGHOUT this process the distorted image of the suffragette, educated girl probably takes her "emancipation" as being beyond question, not even worth stating or discussing. Men will readily accept her as different, an exception, an interesting diversion. There might be a hint of strain over her sexuality, a flicker of doubt, the discovery of a strange duplicity lurking in men. But no connection is obvious. She cannot see a condition of women.

We walk and talk and think as living contradictions. Most of us find the process too painful and not surprisingly settle for limited liberated areas. We give up struggling on every front and ease into a niche of acceptance.

We become the educated housewife desperately scratching for dignity and fulfillment. Or the popular adopting the alienated style of the male in order to live autonomously.

Another retreat is into sexuality. Because women have traditionally been deprived of control over their own bodies, we prove that we are "liberated" simply by fucking.

But if the definition of our constraint is not extended beyond sexuality we are only untrammeled in a greater bondage. We may not be choosing but reacting, ironically under the compulsion of our real subordination; we express in our sexual life the very essence of our secondariness and the destructive contradictions of our consciousness. The "free" women constantly needs the reassurance of men that she is beautiful and wanted, because only through these is she capable of defining her freedom.

Most of us live a particular combination of these or run the whole gamut, knowing them for subterfuge. At certain moments we, struggle through and beyond them all.

These emancipations have nothing to offer you if you're economically exploited, or if you're poor or black or working class. They forget that we are oppressed within a class system. Moreover they never go beyond confirmation or denial of what men say we are. We never tell them what we are, we never take hold of our own definitions.

MARXISTS have quite rightly stressed the subordination of women is part of the total oppressive system called capitalism. No one group can be liberated except through a transformation of the whole structure of social relationships.

But subordination is not a matter of economics or institutions only. It is little things which happen to us all the time, every day, wherever we go, all our lives. It is an assumed secondariness which dwells in a whole complex of inarticulate attitudes, in smirks, in insecurities, in desperate status differentiation.

Secondariness happens in people's heads and is expressed every time we do not speak, every time we assume no one would listen. It is located in structure in which both sexes are tragically trapped. It is only women who can dissolve the assumptions. It is only women who can say what they feel because the experience is unique to them.

Only women can define themselves. To define yourself you have to explore yourself. It is only by understanding your situation as a group that you can relate it to the system through which you are dominated. This means a certain withdrawal into the group, and a realization on the part of the elite of a common identity.

The privileged woman has to extend beyond her limited consciousness to learn the extent of her common condition with underprivileged women. Only then can women really challenge the external definitions imposed on them, and become sufficiently aware and united to be able to act together.

THE ENEMY is not defined as men only; the ally is not the woman who supports and benefits from capitalism. It is, rather, all people who are being crushed and twisted and want space and air and time to sit in the sun.

But the oppressed have to discover their own dignity, strength, and freedom. They have to liberate themselves. Only then can they liberate their oppressors.