192
SUSAN SONTAG
structures and ideologies, but .the struggle to liberate women cannot
be
e~pected
to succeed, in my opinion, if it is mainly directed toward trying
to aggravate and intensify already existing contradictions; the task is
not so much to exploit a contradiction as to dislodge this most pro–
foundly rooted of structures. The women's movement must lead to a
critical assault on the very nature of the state - the millennial tyranny
of patriarchal rule being the low-keyed model of the peculiarly modern
tyranny of the fascist state.
I would maintain that fascism, far from being a political aberration
whose greatest plausibility was confined to Europe and the interval be–
tween the two World Wars, is the
normal
condition of the modern state:
the condition to which the governments of all industr,ially advanced
countries tend. Fascism, in other words, is the natural development of
the values of the patriarohal state applied to the conditions (and contra–
dictions) of twentieth century "mass" societies. Virginia Woolf was al–
together correct when she declared in the late 1930s, in a remarkable
tract called
Three Guineas,
that the fight to liberate women is a fight
against fascism.
5. It is often said that most salaried work in present day society is
alienating. In spite of this, do you 'advise women to seek salaried em–
ployment as a means of liberation?
However alienating most salaried work may be, for women it is still
liberating to have a job, if only because it frees them from the confine–
ment of domesticity and parasitism. But the committment to work is only
a first step, of course. Women will never be autonomous unless they
participate in society's work on terms of complete equality. Women must
break out of the ghettos of work in which they are isolated: jobs that
continue to exploit their life-long training to be servile, to be both
supportive and parasitical, to be unadventurous. For a woman to leave
"home" to go out into "the world" and work rarely carries a full com–
mitment to "the world," that is, achievement;
~n
most cases, it is strictly
unders'tood ,to
be
just a way of earning money, of supplementing the
family income. Women fill very few corporate or political posts, and
contribute only a tiny contingent to the liberal professions (apart from
teaohing). Except
in
communist countries, they are virtually barred
from jobs that involve an expert, intimate relation to machines or an
aggressive use of the body, or that carry any physical danger or sense of
adventure, or that directly compete with (instead of support) what men
do. Besides being less well paid, most employment available to women
has a low ceiling of advancement and gives meager outlet to normal
wishes to be active and to make decisions. The result is of these
prejudices is that virtually all outstanding work by women in capitalist
