Going Too Far by Robin Morgan

Author:Robin Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781497678101
Publisher: Open Road Media

THE PROPER STUDY OF WOMANKIND: ON WOMEN’S STUDIES

One month after the Lesbian Feminist Conference took place in Los Angeles, I returned to California to speak at the Western Women’s Studies Conference in Sacramento, an address on which the following article is based. This conference, too, belied its regional title, and welcomed women from all over the country. It too was beset with destructive confrontation-for-confrontation’s-sake and also with authentic and fruitful struggle. An example of the former was the approach taken by a small “cadre” of women who had resolutely driven up from Southern California to announce to the conference that women should drop out of school and go organize the factories. This eminent morsel of nonlogic was offered, of course, by women who themselves held down teaching jobs in a women’s-studies program started by feminists (who were later forced out by these same women); no fools they, this cadre knew but refused to admit that the “vanguard worker” on the assembly line usually wants nothing so much as to drop out of the factory and go to school. I have never been able to comprehend a train of thought which purports to make a revolution by urging those revolutionaries who have a modicum of education, mobility, or power not to use such tools but rather, out of guilt, to join the downtrodden masses who are themselves too damned weary and bitter and beaten to make that same revolution.

An example of constructive dialogue, on the other hand, was the serious communication that went on in small groups for the duration of the conference and continued for some time afterward, the open discussions established between black, Chicana, Asian, and white feminists, and the uncompromising intellectual integrity of women like Joan Hoff Wilson and Kathleen Barry, who refused to permit the conference to dwindle into an exchange of rhetoric but who insisted instead on an exchange of ideas.

The proliferation of women’s-studies courses, programs, even entire schools is to me one of the most encouraging developments in the Feminist Movement to date. If during my years in the Left and my years as a Marxist-oriented “Women’s Liberationist” I was forced to become ashamed of being an intellectual and an artist, the blame surely must be shared at least three ways: by myself, for ever being cowardly or defensive about what I knew to be important and worth defending; by what had passed itself off as the American intellectual and artistic “community”—in reality a hypocritical establishment which had permitted itself to become ineffectual and cynical; and by the dogmatic pressure of hard-line politicos themselves. Between those who will take no side and those who insist there is no side but their own there must be people of courage who persist in exploration. If a political movement is unconcerned with or suspicious of gaining knowledge, or conversely is naïve about the bias which those in power will have layered over that knowledge, or is lazy about stripping away those layers and seeking the truth—then such a

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