Going Too Far Read Online Free PDF Page B

Women’s Movement in their own backyards. I think this is to the good; it’s a widening of vision, an exercising of muscle.
    Once I would have sneered at what I then called “the reformist wing” of our movement—groups like the National Organization for Women, Women’s Equity Action League, the National Women’s Political Caucus. But my own individual process has led me to a more pluralistic tolerance of other women’s life-styles and politics. At the same time (miracle of the spiral), there has been substantial change taking place in such groups. As a radical feminist, I still disagree with some of the politics operating there, but I’m forced to reevaluate what I now call, respectfully, the “civil-rights front” of the movement. How can I not do so when, for instance, Karen DeCrow’s acceptance speech after her election in 1974 as national president of NOW expressed authentically radical concern with those issues that had discomfited the national board in the past: rape, lesbianism, self-help health techniques, the representation and priorities of minority women? What else can I do but heartily applaud the moves toward genuine democracy in NOW, via ballot-by-mail and chapter rights? How can I not burst with pride when my “average American” sister-in-law in Seattle takes up feminist cudgels, braving ridicule at her job for doing so? How can I not chortle with glee when in one week I read the following two quotes in national newsmagazines: “I’m tired of being a martyr. When we got married Chuck expected that I’d work, but that I’d also be the chief one to have lunch money ready in the morning and take the kids to the doctor. Men need to volunteer more.… We’ve got to get some help for this job.”—Lynda Johnson Robb, speaking at a Boston symposium on “The American Woman.” And this: “Sisters, we must bury Dr. Spock and assert equal rights for women!”—Margaret Trudeau, at a Canadian women’s seminar. Well! Am I to dismiss such courageous converts as “ruling-class women”? Am I to throw a stone at the mirror in a defeatist desire for seven years of purist bad luck? No way, no more.
    I’ve changed too much for those games, and I’m in this process for good. I’ve learned that the “either/or” dichotomy is inherently, classically patriarchal. It is that puerile insistence on compartmentalization (art versus science, intelligence versus passion, etc.) that I abhor. We needn’t settle for such impoverished choices. Reason without emotion is fascistic, emotion without reason sentimental (cheap feeling which is, in turn, fertile ground for the fascistic). Science and art budded from the same stem—the alchemist poets, the Wiccean herbalists, the Minoan and Druidic astrologer-mystics and mathematician-musicians. The integration of such crafts was assumed, we now know, inthe early matriarchal cultures, but a love of excellence, a devotion to skill, a thirst for wisdom, and a sense of humor are still great unifiers, capable of overcoming the current binary pigeonholing of people, ideas, vocations. The point is, we are all part of the problem and the solution—rhetoric to the contrary. And it is the inclusiveness of the feminist vision, the balance, the gestalt , the refusal to settle for parts of a completeness, that I love passionately.
    This process is metamorphic. Today, my sexuality unfolds in ever more complex and satisfying layers. Today, I can affirm my mother and identify with her beyond all my intricate ambivalence. I can confront ersatz “sexual liberation” and its pornographic manifestos for what they are—degrading sexist propaganda. And I can confess my pride at an ongoing committed relationship with the husband I love and have loved all along, whose transformation by feminism I have watched over and struggled with and marveled at. This process has