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Overview
A founder of the contemporary global women’s movement, Robin Morgan is widely known as one of feminism’s strongest, most persuasive activists. As a writer, she is unique in her ability to distill ideas into smart pieces of nonfiction that can transform a reader’s worldview forever.
The Word of a Woman follows Morgan’s journalism and shorter prose from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Originally published in 1992, this second edition adds five new essays. An annotated version of her famous, fiery “Goodbye to All That” is here, as are essays that expose the connections between violence against women and pornography, explain the effects of female genital mutilation, and show how sexism and racism are intimately connected. She tells inside stories about having organized the first Miss America Pageant protest, writes poignantly about being a feminist raising a son, and pens a letter to be read one thousand years in the future. She reports on her work with Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip, with Filipina prostitutes in South Asia, and with village women in South Africa—and celebrates finding indigenous feminism wherever she goes. Morgan unveils creative, visionary yet pragmatic ways for women to unite, regardless of barriers. Her message of defiant hope will inspire any woman—and man—who reads it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497678071 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 11/11/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 346 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Word of a Woman
Feminist Dispatches, 1968-1992
By Robin Morgan
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1992 Robin MorganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7807-1
CHAPTER 1
Women vs. the Miss America Pageant
The following piece is based on an article that appeared in various New Left publications. Imade no pretense at being an objective journalist (if such an animal ever existed); I had been one of the organizers of the demonstration, so my reporting was a perfect example of what then was proudly called "participatory journalism."
The 1968 women's demonstration against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City was the first major action of the current wave of feminism in the United States. But years of meetings, consciousness raising, thought, and plain old organizing had taken place before any of us set foot on the boardwalk.
It was an early group, New York Radical Women, that decided to protest the pageant. Almost all of us in that group had been active in civil-rights organizations, the student movement, anti-Vietnam War coalitions, or some such wing of the New Left, but not one of us had ever organized a demonstration on her own before. I can still remember the feverish excitement I felt: dickering with the company that chartered buses, wangling a permit from the mayor of Atlantic City, sleeping about three hours a night for days preceding the demonstration. The acid taste of coffee from paper containers and of cigarettes from crumpled packs was in my mouth; my eyes were bloodshot and my glasses kept slipping down my nose; my feet hurt and my neck ached and my voice had gone hoarse—and I was deliriously happy. Each meeting was an excitement "high": whether we were lettering posters or writing leaflets or deciding who would deal with which reporter requesting an interview, we were affirming our mutual feelings of outrage, hope, and readiness to conquer the world. We also all felt, well, grown up; we were doing this one for ourselves, and we were consequently getting to do those things the men never let us do, like talk to the press and deal with the mayor's office. We fought a lot and laughed a lot and pretended we weren't extremely nervous.
Possibly the most enduring contribution of that protest was our decision to recognize newswomen only. After much discussion, we settled on refusing to speak to male reporters—not because we were so naive as to think that women journalists would automatically give us more sympathetic coverage but because taking this stand made a political statement consistent with our beliefs. Furthermore, we estimated correctly that it would raise consciousness about the position of women in the media—and help more women get jobs there (as well as helping those who were already there escape from the ghetto of "the women's pages"). It was a risky but wise decision that shocked many but soon set a precedent. Today, most networks, wire services, and major newspapers across North America know without being reminded that newswomen should be sent to cover feminist demonstrations and press conferences. And this has perceptibly helped to change the pre-1970s, all-but-invisible status of women in media.
We also made certain Big Mistakes. Not so much the tactical ones: we had women doctors, nurses, and lawyers on stand-by, and local "turf" to which we could strategically flee if the going got too ugly. Our errors were more in the area of consciousness about ourselves and other women—who we really were and who we wanted to reach. For example, our leaflets, press statements, and guerrilla-theater actions didn't make clear that we were not demonstrating against the pageant contestants (with whom, on the contrary, we expressed solidarity as women exploited by the male system), but that our adversaries were the pageant organizers and the pageant concept and process itself. The spontaneous appearance of various posters spouting slogans like "Miss America Goes Down" and certain revised song lyrics (such as "Ain't she sweet / making profit off her meat") didn't help matters. Another error, with 20/20 hindsight, was our crowning of a live sheep on the boardwalk. Not only was this (understandably) perceived as denigrating the contestants; it was, I now think, rather unfair to the ewe. I'm glad that we organizers, well before the days of animal-rights consciousness, took excellent care of the sheep (better care than we ensured ourselves), not out of any awareness of being "politically correct," but out of simple compassion. We made sure the animal had shade, water, and a stash of hay that had been unceremoniously hauled along in one of the buses full of demonstrators singing "We Shall Overcome." And the rented sheep went back to her home, at a nearby New Jersey farm, long before the human protestors left the fray. Yet from my perspective now, renting, crowning, and parading her before press and onlookers was not one of my finest hours.
Still: we came, we saw, and if we didn't conquer, we learned. And other women learned that we existed; the week before the demonstration there had been thirty women at the New York Radical Women meeting; the week after, there were approximately a hundred and fifty.
A year later, there was another demonstration in Atlantic City; I went as a reluctant "old" organizer (based on my vast experience from the previous year) to help and advise those who were putting it together. I had given birth less than two months earlier and was breast-feeding the baby, who was clearly too young to tolerate an all-day and most-of-the-night demonstration. Thus my memories of the 1969 protest are largely of worrying that the child would accept my husband's bottle-feeding, and my own keen discomfort with milk-full breasts—which I regularly emptied via a breast pump I had brought along for that purpose, quitting the picket line every two hours to dash to the nearest women's room and pump myself out. Such are the vicissitudes encountered by a feminist activist.
During the past two decades, some of us from that original small organizing group in 1968 have managed to stay in loose touch with one another. One got divorced and became an actress and drama teacher in California; one owns and runs a women's crafts shop with her woman lover and partner in Virginia; one teaches sociology and women's studies in Alabama, where she's raised her two children; one is an OWL (Older Women's League) activist in upstate New York. But we've lost touch with the others, and two women are lost to us permanently. One died in her early forties after a brave struggle against cancer. The other—a European emigré, a classically trained violinist who had co-founded the first Women's Liberation Rock Band and later played bass with a male jazz combo—fought a long battle with drugs but died of an overdose, whether accidental or intentional no one could tell.
The pageant still exists, of course, but draws less of an audience each year. Meanwhile, the intervening twenty-plus years have seen feminist protests on both state and national levels become as much a tradition as the pageant itself. (The Santa Cruz demonstrations against the Miss California Pageant were so relentless and ingenious as to include full parades with floats, and the successful infiltration by a feminist "contestant" who almost won the Miss California crown—but who pulled a banner reading "Pageants Hurt All Women" from her bra on live TV; finally, the Santa Cruz city leaders capitulated and the statecontest site was moved to another city.) The past decades have also witnessed pageant officials jettisoning the requirement of virginity for contestants and admitting women of color as contestants—dubious victories, but changes reflecting feminist protest. The 1970s saw a finalist who publicly tore off her crown and denounced the whole competitive, objectifying process. The 1980s made note of the unfortunate fall in a corruption scandal of Bess Myerson, a public servant and much publicized Miss A. of the 1940s (always used as an example of how far a winner could go). And 1991 broke another first: former crownholder Marilyn Van Derbur's account (in People magazine, June 10) of having been sexually abused by her father.
Some things have not changed at all, however. In 1968 we protested the use of Miss America as an entertainer for the U.S. troops in Vietnam; in 1990, the winner entertained the U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf.
Still, the time will come when feminists automatically gearing themselves up for Atlantic City will find that there is no longer anything there about which to protest.
No matter how empathetic you are to another's oppression, you become truly committed to radical change only when you realize your own oppression—it has to reach you on a gut level. This is what has been happening to American women, both in and out of the New Left.
Having functioned "underground" for a few years now, the Women's Liberation movement surfaced with its first major demonstration on September 7, 1968, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the Miss America Pageant. Women came from as far away as Canada, Florida, and Michigan, as well as from all over the Eastern seaboard. The pageant was chosen as a target for a number of reasons: it is patently degrading to women (in propagating the Mindless Sex-Object Image); it has always been a lily-white, racist contest (there has never been a black finalist); the winner tours Vietnam, entertaining the troops as a mascot of murder; the whole gimmick of the million-dollar pageant corporation is one commercial shill-game to sell the sponsors' products. Where else could one find such perfect combination of American values—racism, militarism, capitalism—all packaged in one "ideal" symbol: a woman. This was the basic reason why the protesters disrupted the pageant—the contestants epitomize the role all women are forced to play in this society, one way or the other: apolitical, unoffending, passive, delicate (but delighted by drudgery) things.
About two hundred women descended on this tacky town and staged an all-day demonstration on the boardwalk in front of the Convention Hall (where the pageant was taking place), singing, chanting, and performing guerrilla theater nonstop throughout the day. The crowning of a live sheep as Miss America was relevant to where this society is at; the crowning of Miss Illinois as the "real" Miss America, her smile metaphorically blood-flecked from [Chicago political boss] Mayor Daley's kiss, was also relevant The demonstrators mock-auctioned off a dummy of Miss America, and flung dishcloths, steno pads, girdles, and bras into a Freedom Trash Can. (This last was translated by the male-controlled media into the totally fabricated act of "bra-burning," a non-event upon which they have fixated constantly ever since.)
Most picket signs proclaimed solidarity with the pageant contestants, while condemning the pageant itself. An active solidarity has possibly been at work, for that matter: it has been rumored that one of the contestants decided to function as an infiltrator and was responsible for the scrambling of [master of ceremonies] Bert Parks's cue cards, temporarily melting his perfect plastic smile. At night, an "inside squad" of twenty brave sisters disrupted the live telecast of the pageant, yodeling the eerie Berber Yell (from the film the Battle of Algiers) shouting "Freedom for Women!" and unfurling a huge banner reading WOMEN'S LIBERATION from the balcony rail—all of which stopped the nationwide-televised show cold for ten bloodcurdling seconds. One woman was arrested for "emitting a noxious odor"—spraying Toni hair conditioner (a vile-smelling sponsor of the pageant) near the mayor's box, although the sister-traveler among the contestants who shuffled Parks's cue cards was never apprehended. The upshot: The show may have to be taped in the future, possibly without an audience, and the action, widely covered in the press, brought excited new members into the Women's Movement. Who knows? There just might be two thousand of us liberating women from the Miss America image some year. Women's Liberation immediately set up a Legal Defense Fund for those busted in Atlantic City—money and supportive letters poured in to help these sisters. One groovy by-product from the action is a film by women, to be used for organizing purposes.
Women's Liberation demanded the use of women reporters—much to the annoyance of the male-dominated media under- and over-ground, which like to keep "news chicks" covering flower and fashion shows. Some of the press were put through considerable changes by this insistence on recognizing only women reporters, but the press as a whole weren't prepared for anything as "heavy" as arrests; most of them had assumed that the protesters wouldn't be taken that seriously. This assumption came from not realizing that the real soft white underbelly of the American beast was being socked in Atlantic City. So seriously were the women taken, in fact, that the original disorderly conduct charge for the militant use of hair spray was later escalated to an indictable offense with a possible two-to-three-year sentence (ultimately, the sentence was suspended). Reports are also coming back that the fears of the pageant officials are not completely lulled by the idea of taping future events without an audience—since what will they do for contestants, when they no longer can trust even "their own"?
Nevertheless, some male reactionaries in the Left still think Women's Liberation "frivolous" in the face of "larger, more important" revolutionary problems. But what is "frivolous" about rapping for four hours across police barricades with hecklers, trying to get through to the women in the crowd who smile surreptitiously but remain silent while their men scream vilification? What is frivolous, for that matter, about a woman who isn't rich enough to fly to Puerto Rico for an abortion and so must lie on some kitchen table watching cockroaches on the ceiling articulate the graph of her pain? What is frivolous about the young black woman, proud and beautiful and militant, whose spirit cracks when she hears Stokely Carmichael say that "the only position for women in SNCC is prone"? What is frivolous about the welfare recipient who must smuggle her husband or boyfriend out of the house when the social worker arrives, denying her own sexuality or risking the loss of her sustenance (to say nothing of having her children taken away from her)? What is frivolous about the migrant- worker mother who must be yet one step lower than her oppressed husband, must endure his beating her up, impregnating her just after she's dropped her seventh child, and maybe disappearing for a year now and then so that he can exercise his "manhood"? And what is frivolous about the women in Fayerweather Hall at Columbia University last spring, new-minted revolutionaries ready to be tear-gassed and busted as well as anybody (and they were), ready to form a commune that would reflect alternative life styles to this whole sick culture, only to hear a male SDS leader ask for "chicks to volunteer for cooking duty"?
Sexual mores lie at the heart of a society. Men will not be liberated until women are free—truly free, not tokenly equal. The Women's Liberation groups, already becoming a movement, take up this task of liberating themselves and their society on a new (although the oldest) front. Their plans include twenty-four-hour-open storefronts providing everything from birth-control and abortion information to child-care services, crash pads for women "running away from home," English lessons for Spanish-speaking women (and vice versa), judo lessons for all women, free food and coffee and liberation rapping. They are plotting actions against cosmetic and fashion empires for perpetuating ludicrous beauty standards; against male-supremacist, No Women Allowed public eating places; against debutante balls as well as the conditions in decrepit women's houses of detention.
The death of the concept of Miss America in Atlantic City (celebrated by a candlelight funeral dance on the boardwalk at midnight) was only the beginning. A sisterhood of free women is giving birth to a new lifestyle, and the throes of its labor are authentic stages in the Revolution.
—October 1968
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Word of a Woman by Robin Morgan. Copyright © 1992 Robin Morgan. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword to the First Edition,Foreword to the Second Edition,
I From the 1960s and 1970s,
Women vs. the Miss America Pageant (1968),
The Wretched of the Hearth (1969),
Goodbye to All That (1970),
A New Fable of the Burning Time (1974),
On Women as a Colonized People (1974),
Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape (1974),
The International Crime of Genital Mutilation (1979),
II From the 1980s,
Blood Types: An Anatomy of Kin (1981),
The New Physics of Meta-Politics (1982),
The World Without de Beauvoir (1986),
A Paler Shade of Racism (1987),
The Politics of Silence (1989),
III From the 1990s,
A Massacre in Montreal (1990),
Women in the Intifada (1990),
400 Years in the Convent and 50 Years in Hollywood: The Philippines (1990),
Two Essays on Another Just War (1990, 1991),
Feminist Diplomacy (1991),
The Word of a Woman (1992),
Two Essays on the Birth of U.S. Democracy (1992),
Isolated Incidents (1993),
Every Mother's Son (1993),
The Deeper Reality: Notes on the Politics of Language (1994),
Index,
About the Author,