ADRIENNE RICH
25
lie "anxiety and the impairment of self-respect . " Anxiety there cer–
tainly is; the anxiety of the objectified who realizes that however
much she may
wish
to
render herself pleasing and nonthreatening,
she will still to some degree partake of the feared aspect of Woman,
an abstraction which she feels has nothing to do with her. Since
politically and socially men do wield immense power over women, it
is unnerving to realize that your mate or employer may also fear you.
And
if
a woman hopes to find not a master but a brother, a lover, an
equal, how is she to meet this dread? If it brings to her intimations of
a power inherent in her sex, that power is perceived as hostile, de–
structive, controlling, malign; and the very idea of power is poisoned
for her. We shall have to return to this fear of women; for the present
it must be repeated that women's primary experience of power till
now has been triply negative: we have experienced masculine power
as oppression; we have experienced our own vitality and indepen–
dence as somehow threatening to men; and, even when behaving
with "feminine" passivity, we have been made aware of masculine
fantasies of our potential destructiveness.
Today, one quest of women is a search for models or blueprints
of female power which shall be neither replications of male power nor
carbon-copies of the male stereotype of the powerful, controlling,
destructive woman. The resurgence of interest in the work of
J.J.
Bachofen, Robert Briffault, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, Helen
Diner, Jane Harrison, the response generated by E.G. Davis's
The
First Sex,
has been in part a search for vindication of the belief that
patriarchy is in some ways a degeneration, that women exerting
power would use it differently from men: nonpossessively, non–
violently, nondestructively. The matriarchal controversy has arisen
directly from this quest, and has served as a catalyst for reexamining
the reaction against "biology" which was necessarily an early stage in
feminist thought. Two widely read women theorists, Helen Diner
(first published in Germany in the late 1920s) and Elizabeth Gould
Davis (writing in the 1970s) both draw heavily on earlier writers,
notably Bachofen and Briffault,
to
argue that woman's physiology
was the original source of her prepatriarchal power, both in making
her the sOl:1rce of life itself and in associating her more deeply than
man with natural cycles and processes. Both writers envisioned a pre–
historic civilization centered around the female, both as mother and
