Going Too Far Read Online Free PDF

economics, health, legislation, literature, or whatever, and if, most of all, you appear optimistic—you are clearly Sold Out. To succeed in the slightest is to be Impure. Only if your entire life, political and personal, is one plummet of downward mobility and despair, may you be garlanded with the crown of feminist thorns. You will then have one-upped everybody by your competitive wretchedness, and won their guilty respect. Well, to such a transparently destructive message I say, with great dignity, “Fooey.” I want to win for a change. I want us all to win . And I love, support, and honor the courage of every feminist who dares try to succeed, whatever the realm of her attempt: the woman who sued her male psychiatrist for rape—and won; the woman who ran for governor—and won; the young girl who brought suit against her school for enforced home-economicsclasses (for girls only)—and won. There are a million “fronts” to this feminist revolution, and we each of us need each of us pluckily fighting away on every barricade, and connecting her victories to the needs of other women.
    I would say to those few dear “oldies” who are burned out or embittered: you have forgotten that women are not fools, not sheep. We know about the dangers of commercialism and tokenism from the male Right, and the dangers of manipulation and co-optation from the male Left (the boys’ Establishment and the boys’ movement). We are, frankly, bored by correct lines and vanguards and failurism and particularly by that chronic disease—guilt. Those of us who choose to struggle with men we love, well, we demand respect and support for that, and an end to psychological torture which claims we have made our choice only because of psychological torture. Those of us who choose to relate solely to other women demand respect and support for that , and an end to the legal persecution and attitudinal bigotry that condemns freedom of sexual choice. Those of us who choose to have or choose not to have children demand support and respect for that . We also demand respect for our feelings, and for the desire to forge them into art; we know that the emerging women’s aesthetic and women’s spirituality are lifeblood for our survival—resilient cultures have kept oppressed groups alive even when economic analyses and revolutionary strategy fizzled.
    We know that serious, lasting change does not come about overnight, or simply, or without enormous pain and diligent examination and tireless, undramatic, every-day-a-bit-more-one-step-at-a-time work. We know that such change seems to move in cycles (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—which itself in turn becomes a new thesis …), and we also know that those cycles are not merely going around in circles. They are, rather, an upward spiral , so that each time we reevaluate a position or place we’ve been before, we do so from a new perspective. We are in process , continually evolving, and we will no longer be made to feel inferior or ineffectual for knowing and being what we are at any given moment.
    Housewives across the nation stage the largest consumer boycott ever known (the meat boycott) and while it may not seem, superficially, a feminist action, women are doing this, women who ten years ago, before this feminist movement, might have regarded such an action as unthinkable. The campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment does continue to gain supporters (like those fine closet feminists Betty Ford and Joan Kennedy) despite all the combined forces of reaction against it. Consciousness-raising proliferates, in groups, in individuals, in new forms and with new structures. The lines of communication begin to center around content instead of geography, and tostretch from coast to coast, so that women in an anti-rape project, for example, may be more in touch with other anti-rape groups nationally than with every latest development on the