Of Woman Born (1977)
by Adrienne
Rich
To
seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential
to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation,
to respect the effort even where it fails. At the same time, in the
light of most women's lives as they are now having to be lived, it
can seem naive and self-indulgent to spin form matriarchal Utopias,
to "demand" that technologies of contraception and genetics
be "turned over" to women (by whom, and under what kinds of
effective pressure?); to talk of impressing "unchilded"
women into child-care as a political duty, of boycotting patriarchal
institutions, of the commune as a solution for child-rearing. Child
care as enforced servitude, or performed out of guilt, has been all
too bitter a strain in our history, If women boycott the laboratories
and libraries of scientific institutions (to which we have barely
begun to gain access) we will not even know what research and
technology is vital to the control of our bodies. Certainly the
commune, in and of itself, has no special magic for women, any more
than has the extended family or the public day-care center. Above
all, such measures fail to recognize the full complexity and
political significance of the woman's body, the full spectrum of
power and powerlessness it represents, of which motherhood is simply
one—though a crucial—part.
Furthermore,
it can be dangerously simplistic to fix upon "nurcurance"
as a special strength of women, which need only be released into the
larger society to create a new human order. Whatever our organic or
developed gift for nurture, it has often been turned into a
boomerang....
When
an individual woman first opposes the institution of motherhood she
often has to oppose it in the person of a man, the father of her
child, toward whom she may feel love, compassion, friendship, as well
as resentment, anger, fear, or guilt. The "maternal" or
"nurturant" spirit we want to oppose to rapism and the
warrior mentality can prove a liability so long as it remains a lever
by which women can be controlled through what is most generous and
sensitive in us. Theories of female power and female ascendancy must
reckon fully with the ambiguities of our being, and with the
continuum of our consciousness, the potentialities for both creative
and destructive energy in each of us.
I
am convinced that "there are ways of thinking that we don't yet
know about." I take those words to mean that many women are even
now thinking in ways which traditional intellect denies, decries, or
is unable to grasp. Thinking is an active, fluid, expanding process;
intellection, "knowing" are recapitulations of past
processes. In arguing that we have by no means yet explored or
understood our biological grounding, the miracle and the paradox of
the female body and its spiritual and political meanings, I am really
asking whether women cannot begin, at last, to think through the
body, to connect what has been so cruelly disorganized—our
great mental capacities, hardly used; our highly developed tactile
sense; our genius for close observation; our complicated,
pain-enduring, multi-pleasured physicality.
I
know of no woman—virgin, mother, lesbian, married,
celibate—whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail
waitress, or a scanner of brain waves— for whom the body is not
a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its
desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its
changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. There is for the
first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into
both knowledge and power. Physical motherhood is merely one dimension
of our being....
We
need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius
of her own body. In such a world, women will truly create life, bring
forth not only children (if we choose) but the visions, and the
thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence—a
new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence,
power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new
meanings; thinking itself will be transformed.
This
is where we have to begin.
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