THE WOMEN'S CENTER The Celebration of What Could Be

( The author is a Radcliffe junior. )

"Where do good ideas come from? Do they fall from the sky? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social praxis and from it alone."

THE women's center is a process; it is the social praxis of a strong women's consciousness. It is an opportunity, an incredible chance for us as women to break out of the definitions that define us and confine us and to find, in sisterhood and in solidarity, the strength to liberate ourselves from these definitions and from the emptiness of our lives. The center is "out of bounds"; it is totally separate from the male-dominated world we live in. It is continually and essentially becoming what it is, what we are making it, what we want it to be. And the center is not just the building-it is the women in it, the women who are becoming in it. But the building has become a large part of our experience of the center, of our experience of ourselves, together, here, for the first time. From the first tremendous excitement of discovering this building at the end of our long beautiful march of solidarity through Cambridge (where Harvard looms like a patriarch over the city) to our active participation in making the building a real center-cleaning it, painting the walls, cooking meals, fixing the plumbing and the electric wiring, sleeping in it, dancing in it, discovering ourselves and one another in it-we have brought life into the building, it has become our building. And because we have brought life and love into the building, we want to stay here-and we will stay here, we will fight to keep this building which is our building, our center, in any way necessary.

The center is the experience of a growing women's consciousness. To begin with, our women's consciousness comes from our experience of life in Amerika, which has been a continual process of self-destruction through submission to repression and oppression. We have been alienated from our bodies and afraid of our minds. From the beginning, with our dolls and the frilly dresses we were told to keep clean, we have learned-they have told us-that it's a man's world and we had better learn to keep in our places (in the home, in bed). And they kept on telling us we were inferior, we were dumb, we didn't matter-in school, where we learned about famous men and their civilizations and their science and their art. And on the radios, rock stars singing about fucking their totally dehumanized (except for maybe how they look) girlfriends; and the women singing mostly about loving their men, or being lonely for men. But both the culture and the counter culture are entirely sexist in nature, and male-created, male-produced, male-dominated. And then there's advertising, which sets up "ideal" images of people who want and need and use the kinds of things that capitalism produces-things that don't fulfill our real needs, but feed false, alien needs and wants; the artificial needs that keep the system going. And as women, we're forced to fit ourselves into these roles and categories: sex object and/or housewife. Wherever we turn, these images confront us, demand that we live up to their standards and their definitions.

And we probably believe in the mythology. We give up. We take their word for it. After all, they know better-they're men. We let ourselves be defined by men, for men. Taking care of our bodies means making ourselves attractive to men-not being as strong and as healthy as we can. Instead of finding out who we really are, who we really want to be, what we really want to do-we "get into" whatever the men who have chosen us are into, we take on their values, needs, interests, instead of developing and discovering our own. We lose all sense of ourselves as human beings-because we were never given the chance to explore ourselves, to define ourselves in our own terms. Or if we haven't lost all sense of ourselves, we find a greater and greater split between what we feel to be real inside and what we are told is real outside. We keep on playing the game, their game, until we find out that there's no way to win, there's no way to fight alone. We can give in or get out.

And getting out is what the center is about. It's fighting back, it's saying: no, that's not true. The center isn't knowing who you are, but it's about being able to find out who you are and to begin to be that, for the first time. As women, we have been classified and categorized and canonized by male ideologies and systems. And we're sick of it. We've been isolated from one another, we haven't taken one another seriously because we're women, and no one takes women seriously. We haven't mattered, because women haven't mattered. But women do matter. I'm a woman and I matter. And my sisters matter to me, and I matter to them. And that's what the center is about. And all of a sudden the world opens up and there's hope. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" -well, there's nothing for us to lose in the man's world, because there's nothing in it that we want any more. Capitalism's ideology is a male ideology, an ideology of exploitation and progressive dehumanization that is the logical conclusion of the patriarchal ideology whose roots go back five thousand years. Male supremacy is a social fact; and as such is a central part of the dominant ideology. This ideology is part of our consciousness, but our consciousness is also made from our experience of our lives. This experience has been mostly one of frustrations and disappointments, being torn apart trying to "fit in" to a system that we don't want to fit in-it has nothing to offer us.

BUT the women's center is a whole difference of our lives. It is the beginning of putting into practice the women's consciousness which rejects all definitions and systems that are oppressive and repressive and unfulfilling and alienating. It is a consciousness based on anger at oppression and love for the oppressed. It is the experience of sisterhood, of building strength, of building the power to destroy the systems and ideologies of oppression and to build new systems based on love and self-realization. It is the negation of what is and the celebration of what could be. It is building towards a community of free independent strong women taking control of their own lives.

A lot of Radcliffe women seem to think that the center has nothing to do with them. They think that, as intellectuals, they have broken away from the myth of women as non-thinking beings; they think they can "make it" in the men's world. Well, sisters, you're wrong. You're not really respected intellectually here at Harvard, you're afraid of talking in classes, you're outnumbered-and, no matter what kind of progressive facade exists, your personal lives are just as fucked over by men as any other woman's. Being "bright" becomes another way of being attractive to men. Radcliffe women, privileged guests at this male institution whose education is outrageously irrelevant to women, have a whole sexist Radcliffe mythology-beginning with the competition with other women to get admitted here, believing themselves to be without the problems of other women because of money, class, education, intelligence, expectations of satisfying jobs, probably being able to afford to pay other women to take care of their children, Mrs. Bunting's pseudo-feminism which defines Radcliffe women as "special." But this just doesn't fit into the realities of our lives. Most Radcliffe women end up getting jobs which are basically that of glorified secretaries, or get married and devote themselves to their husband and family; they don't have orgasms; they live in fear of being "unfeminine"; they are isolated from other women and alienated from themselves-just like all women.

And the center is a place for all women. It is a chance for all kinds of women to discover themselves as women and to realize how much they do share with other women. It is a chance to identify with other women, with all women, to stop being afraid of women and of being a woman; it is a chance to begin to love our sisters and ourselves.

It's not enough to come down to the center for an afternoon to "take a look around"; to understand the center you have to become part of it-and you are part of it, because you're woman. And the center is only what we make it. There isn't leadership: it's all up to us. And because it is all up to us, it is sometimes frightening, but it is also incredibly exciting to begin to make choices, to begin to decide what it is that we need and want, and to begin to create a place and an atmosphere where we can find ourselves and fulfill our needs. The center is the experience of growth, of self-definition. What it is depends on what we make it be; we cant' wait around for "those women" to turn it into something we can relate to-but we can be there, we can live there and turn it into what we want it to be, for ourselves, for our sister, together, growing, strong.

AND THE center has already begun. It is always beginning. Child care has been set up. Raising children is an incredibly important part of society; no one would deny that. But to demand that each woman should, all by herself, bear the entire responsibility of child-rearing is entirely unreasonable, both for the individual woman and for the children. The nuclear family seems to be the worst possible way of bringing up children-the child's whole early experience of life is dependence on one woman-if the child is a boy, his goal in later life will be to possess such a woman, and if the child is a girl, to identify with such a woman. And that woman's sole function is to love and to feed and to give. It seems that a much healthier way of bringing up children would be to share that responsibility with both men and women in a kind of day care system where the children would have continual attention and affection from different sources. A woman alone bringing up a child gets tired, frustrated, bored: which is bad both for her and for her children. Daycare is a first step towards more rational and humanizing forms of child care.

There are also art classes, media workshops going on in the center-developing forms of self-expression and political expression. There are karate classes and discussions of nutrition-for us to build stronger and healthier bodies. More classes are always being set up; the ones already set up are functioning.

The issue of gayness cannot, of course, be separated from sexism. Many women feel that it is necessary for us to become entirely independent of men and this means depending on other women emotionally and sexually. As women, our sexuality has always been defined in terms of men and male sexuality, and for many women, gayness is a way of breaking out of sexual exploitation, and of discovering our women's bodies, of enjoying our women's bodies, for the first time. But gayness has become a political issue as well as a personal decision. It has been important for the women's movement as a whole to accept gay women as part of the movement and to recognize the social and personal implications of gayness. No one is born gay: gayness is a way of relating to the sexually and emotionally exploitative nature of our society. Gay consciousness comts from an experience of life without men, without male domination, without male control. Some of the gay women at the center are the strongest, most beautiful women I have ever met. And at the center is a warm, loving atmosphere, a lot of physical affection and trust among all the women. And as women, we refuse to continue to separate our minds from our bodies; learning to love our sisters as fully and as wholly as we can, we learn to love and enjoy our bodies as well. And loving our bodies together is not defined by a sexual act, but by working together, dancing together, doing exercises together. At the center, it feels like there is no such thing as gayness-there are just a lot of women who love one another, who are learning to love one another.

THE women's movement is a revolutionary movement, part of the worldwide struggle for the liberation of all those oppressed by U. S., imperialism. The center is building towards a strong women's consciousness which recognizes the causes of our own oppression and struggles against the structures which perpetuate that oppression. The women's center and the struggle in which we are now engaged to keep the center and to make it grow, is part of our liberation. And our experience of the center is helping us to grow stronger and freer; it is helping us to learn to love one another and ourselves, and to learn to live with one another and to begin to take control of our own lives. The center is not a redefinition of ourselves, but a chance to escape definition; sometimes it feels like being in Noah's are in the middle of the flood-but then you pick up a newspaper and you read about the Vietnamese winning and the Cambodians and the Laotians fighting back against U. S. aggression; and about all the support for our sisters Angela and Erika in their struggles; and the Riverside tenants fighting Harvard; and the welfare mothers; and health care centers starting up-and you know we're not alone. This is a revolution and you have to take sides: you have to choose between oppression and liberation, between self-destruction and self-realization; you have to choose between submission and revolution.

Coming to the center is not making a choice; it is being able to see what choices you really have to make. The center is a place for women-for all women in this Boston-Cambridge community-to come together as women sharing common experiences of oppression and alienation; to come together as women struggling against the cause of our oppression, the structures of our alienation; to come together to build love and strength among ourselves. The women's center is a process; it is the social praxis of a strong women's consciousness. The center is part of our liberation. And as women, we are part of the center, we are taking part in the center, we are taking part in our liberation, we are taking control of our lives.