Women Warriors
(With thanks to Maxine Hong Kingston)
I honor the woman-warrior. I honor HRC, a worldwide symbol of the dream of female autonomy. And Harriet Tubman. And Toni Morrison. And Wonder Woman and Gal Gadot, the woman who plays her. I honor Maxine Hong Kingston for her beautiful phrase, and Arundhati Roy, and Virginia Woolf. I honor my friends, who are novelists, publishers, editors, memoirists, doctors, therapists, college teachers, rabbis, pastors, Quakers, lawyers, law makers, mothers, teachers, friends, lovers. I honor my amazing daughter.
I am a relic of the second wave of feminism. In 1970, when I was, nineteen, I had a true epiphany in the class of an ex-nun who hi-jacked an English course to teach us about patriarchy. Trust me. It was like Helen Keller learning the name of water. Nothing has ever looked the same after I discovered that gender discrimination is a systemic conspiracy to control the bodies and lives of women.
When I was asked to teach a Women’s Studies class in 1980 Claudette’s was the only class on the subject I had ever taken. Pioneer professors lent me syllabi and handouts. They directed me to textbooks and essays. Our learning curve was steep, and everyday new work was done in disciplines across the board, even in scientific disciplines. The great British thinker, Brian Eslea, showed us how patriarchy and sexism had even penetrated physics.
No knowledge is value free.
We are in a gender war, make no mistake about it.
Everyday some guy on Facebook tells me that it’s unfair that I use actual information in an argument. He tries to shame me. A favorite put-down is that Facebook is not my college classroom.
In “Leda and the Swan” Yeats suggests that power and knowledge cannot coexist. Patriarchy chooses power. In one holy book of patriarchy, the Bible, we are offered two versions of the creation of human beings, Genesis I in which women and men are co-equal created from earth, and Genesis 2 in which Eve is created from the rib of Adam who is granted dominion over all, plants, animals, the earth itself, and finally women who can only be helpmeets. This is the last, lonely hill this war is being fought on — the right of men to retain their control over all they survey, especially women.
What is a male god but a legitimization of that hierarchy? God and His son and Abraham and his son — doesn’t it make you dizzy? And which idols were Abraham smashing? Could it have been the images of female gods that had become so befouled in his eyes? And what is the secret name of God Jews are not allowed to say but a female name?
No, I am not trying to resurrect a Great Goddess. She inspired us in our pre-agricultural history. I do not believe in her any more than I believe in the great daddy who lurks behind all the stories of sexual aggression against women that are surfacing like the water from the spigot that taught Helen Keller that words are names for things. That is why the Christian right is unperturbed by stories of sexual exploitation. The control of women is in service of a god whose very description and definition bespeaks the subordination of women. His followers have control of our bodies through draconian laws, unfair taxes on our necessities, restriction of our reproductive freedom, economic discrimination against us, and sexual aggression against us all ensure our dependence on men for our well-being and the well-being of our children. To be rulers men need subjects over whom to rule. We are those subjects.
When I began working on my doctoral dissertation in the early 1980’s I focused on the novels of Thomas Pynchon. My sixteen-year-old self had vowed that should she ever get as far as a PhD., she would work on this writer who outlined the terrors of the postmodern world. When I finally got to this task, in my late twenties, I considered another project, the poems of Adrienne Rich, particularly her late collection, The Dream of a Common Language. I had studied myth and epic, and I knew that in a true epic, with a true warrior, language defines community through both narrative and linguistic innovation. And I saw that Rich defined a new feminist nation, one that was purely hypothetical when she wrote her work. But hers is the country of the woman-warrior. Hers is a vision of a community free of male domination where language is free of the cant of the male god and the Adam who dominates all he sees.
I worked on both projects in tandem until the Pynchon project won, and I completed that thesis. The dream of that common language was never forgotten, but I want more now. I want a lexicon for both women and men to use and a world where woman-warriors live side-by-side with male warriors who respect her. I honor Bach, and Van Gogh, and Walt Whitman, and Jonas Salk, and Einstein, and other heroes, some of whom were horrible to women but still inspire me. I want the language to teach them, the language we are carving out with each new story of male transgression. I want the egalitarian world of Genesis I, and not the hierarchical world of Genesis II. I want a lot.
I celebrate my allies, my male friends who are doctors, lawyers, writers, musicians, college professors, insurance salesmen, civil servants, and gardeners and contractors and carpenters and analysts and psychologists and filmmakers. I honor my amazing son. I honor my struggling husband.
I honor women-warriors. I dream of a common language. I understand the web of patriarchy. We have so much knowledge and understanding painstakingly gathered by all the thinkers and adventurers who came before us. All we have only to remember it and then to use it.