ADRIENNE RICH
35
they have erected their systems on an essential intellectual fault.
Truly to liberate women, then, means to change thinking itself: final–
ly to reintegrate what has been named the unconscious, the subjec–
tive, the emotional with the structural, the rational, the intellectual;
to
"connect the prose and the passion" in Forster's phrase; and
finally to annihilate those dichotomies . In the being of a woman sold
as a bride, or rejected because she is "barren" and cannot produce
sons to enhance a man's status, economics and sexuality, legalism and
magic, caste structure and individual fear , barter and desire, coexist
inextricably; only in the outer world of patriarchal categories and
patriarchal denial can they be conceived as separate .
De Beauvoir in 1949 still saw the liberation of women as but one
of many liberations which would come about as the result of socialist
revolution, insofar as socialism promised to do away with private
property and the patriarchal family and to release women into eco–
nomic equality with men . Her experience and her analysis have since
taken her further. But radical feminism is now speaking in terms of
"feminist revolution", of a "postandrogynous" society, of creating
a new kind of human being.
At one end of the spectrum is a tarpaper shack in Appalachia or
rural New Hampshire, in which an eighteen-year-old mother of four
is expecting her fifth child, her first menstrual period having been her
last. Her legs are discolored with varicose veins, her abdominal wall
permanently distended, her breasts already sagging, her teeth de–
caying from calcium loss. Functionally illiterate, she lives from hour
to
hour and day to day, her nights splintered by the crying of infants,
her energy drained into the survival of lives which suck on her like
mouths. To get to a birth control or prenatal clinic would be to com–
mand herself into a control of her existence which she has never had
and of which, as one of eleven children herself, she has seen no ex–
ample. She has not been physically away from her children since the
conception of the first child , when she was thirteen years of age.
When her husband rapes her , she does not call it rape , but some–
where in her memory lingers a distant past of twelve-year-old restless–
ness, curiosity, physical energy , and germinating desire-even,
perhaps, some vague imagination that her life might be different
