Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Thelma and Louise 'R' Us." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 29-31). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, May 1992
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2014. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Ever since feminists organized the modern movement in the ’60s, we have been harangued from all sides for being insane, unfulfilled, petty-bourgeois, narcissistic, frivolous, home-wreckers, strident bitches, dykes, man-haters, and enemies of civility and civilization.
And we purportedly derail organizations by elevating secondary questions.
The rightwing said we should be jailed; the leftwing said we’d gone overboard on this women’s lib trip. Black leaders said we were destroying race solidarity. Union bureaucrats said discrimination wasn’t a bread and butter issue. The man in the street said all we needed was a good fuck.
Not that it’s funny, but who’s got the last laugh now?
Just read the papers, folks, and note what the headlines are screaming about.
Rape. Job discrimination and sexual harassment. Differential education and training. Violence against women. The “proper” or “improper” role of political wives. Birth control and abortion. Healthcare. Childcare and child abuse. Granny dumping. Wife/girlfriend murder. Outrageously unequal legal treatment à la Anita Hill, Patricia Bowman, Desiree Washington, Leona Helmsley, Zsa Zsa Gabor, ad nauseam.
Even the marital relations of politicians are under the microscope, and while much of this is puerile, prudish, puritanical and irrelevant, it’s a sign of the new times.
If we must use a yardstick and measure afflictions to discern who are the most affronted people in the U.S. or internationally — and I know that people hate these comparative-agony calculations — the mathematical answer is overwhelming. Women of color, women of age, women of youth, women of marriage, women of divorce, women on welfare, women who are prostitutes, women of accomplishment, women of minority sexual persuasion, women who organize at the workplace, women who organize revolution — females win the endangered species contest.
Women are slaughtered because their dowries aren’t adequate, because they were born without penises, or because they dare to rebel against Slavery. But we rarely realize that while the price for assertiveness in the USA may not be physical execution, it is execution in every other sense.
American women, whether they exemplify success or struggle desperately to survive, are all subjected to merciless hatred, resentment, fear, denunciation, excoriation, retaliation, intimidation, deprivation and inquisition.
Women are the permanent unrecognized undercaste of U.S. society. And the proof of that transparent fact is that almost nobody recognizes it! The condition of women dominates the news, but no political conclusions are drawn.
We are just as ignored when our issues are in the limelight as when we’re invisible!
In 1967 my closest comrades and I stunned the radical movement by launching a faction fight against my then-husband. He had violated every socialist standard of conduct by denying me the right to an uncontested divorce and child custody. He had provoked a courtroom scandal, accusing me of bad motherhood, over-attention to politics, bad wifery, adultery, and the usual crimes of my gender.
Because I labeled his behavior as political treachery, my ex became a martyred hero to most of the Left. But phallocentric public opinion couldn’t change the facts, and that well-known leader was not a leader much longer.
That should tell you where I stand on the question of whether Senator Brock Adams, so-called liberal Democrat, should continue in office even though practically everybody seems to know he’s an utterly unscrupulous, conniving sex oppressor. It should tell you where I stand on the matter of whether Mike Tyson, because he is a Black man, should be excused for behaving like a demented monster.
I am sick and tired of Rights, Lefts, and Centerites apologizing for men who brutalize women on the grounds that these men are otherwise politically effective and inspirational. Inspired by a male who is a vile abuser of women, I ain’t.
But feminists, take heart. There is going to be a new global upsurge of women like you have never seen, one that will engulf every economic relationship, every institution, every government. The second sex can no longer tolerate, whether they know it or not, the shackles and brainwashing and outrages visited upon them by the male establishment and its yuppie or scaredy-cat female enablers.
It is time for gender mau-mauism. Time for women guerrillas, 20th-century Amazons, mad shrieks of protest, and careful mobilization of political battalions. Goddammit, sisters: Let’s get revolutionary. Let’s understand that the private profit system is at the bottom of all this horror, and let’s catapult ourselves onto the mainstage of history. The world is waiting for the sunrise.