A book on radical feminism that did not deal with love would be a political failure. For love, perhaps even more than childbearing, is the pivot of women’s oppression to­day. I realize this has frightening implications: Do we want to get rid of love? The panic felt at any threat to love is a good […]

[a large, formidable profile of a black woman in an Afro] I AM THE BLACK WOMAN, MOTHER OF CIVILIZATION,QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE, THROUGH ME THE BLACK MANPRODUCES HIS NATION. If he does not protect his woman he will not produce a good nation. It is my duty to teach and train the young, who are […]

What is the attitude of the militant black community to this psychosexual degradation that is racism? I have stated that the black male has three choices in reacting to the white male’s power over him. 1) He can submit on the terms set up by the white male (at best to become a black celebrity—comedian, […]

oedipus/electra, the eternal triangle, the BROTHEL-BEHIND-THE-SCENES Let us look at race relations in America,* a macrocosm of the hierarchical relations within the nuclear family: The white man is father, the white woman wife-and-moth — er, her status dependent on his; the blacks, like children, are his property, their physical differentiation branding them the subservient class, […]

The slave may be freed and woman be where she is, but women cannot be freed and the slave remain where he is. Angelina Grimke, in a letter to Theodore Weld What must be done, I believe, is that all these problems, particularly the sickness between the white woman and the black man, must be […]

We have seen how the increasing privatization of family life brought ever more oppression to its dependents, wom­en and children. The interrelated myths of femininity and childhood were the instruments of this oppression. In the Victorian Bra they reached such epic proportions that finally women rebelled—their rebellion peripherally af­fecting childhood. But the rebellion was destroyed […]

In the Middle Ages there was no such thing as child­hood. The medieval view of children was profoundly different from ours. It was not only that it was not “childcentered,” it literally was not conscious of children as distinct from adults. The childmen and childwomen of medieval iconography are miniature adults, reflecting a wholly different […]

t FOR NECHEM1A who will outgrow childhood before it is eliminated Women and children are always mentioned in the same breath (“Women and children to the forts!”)* The special tie women have with children is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature of this bond is no more than shared oppression. And that […]

To the two main points of this chapter, first, that Freudianism and Feminism grew out of the same historical conditions, and second, that freudianism and feminism are based on the same set of realities, I shall add a third: Freudianism subsumed the place of Feminism as the lesser of two evils. x We have shown […]

1) Freudianism and Feminism grew from the same soil. It is no accident that Freud began his work at the height of the early feminist movement. We underestimate today how important feminist ideas were at the time. The par­lor conversations about the nature of men and women, the possibility of artificial reproduction (babies in glass […]