Herself Read Online Free PDF

rouses the new money to civic-mindedness.
    I go and do what women are immemorially urged to do in wartime, especially when the bleeding goes on somewhere else. From Balaclava helmets, to Bundles for Britain, to USO, down the ages it’s all bandage-rolling—and part of the quieting corruptions to which women have immemorially lent themselves, in the name of good works. Always finding by instinct their proper niches and social class.
    … Mine has retrograded—or advanced. Early in the war, in Rochester (where on the Sunday afternoon of Pearl Harbor we two and child have been symbolically caught in a bookshop) I have been somehow organized into a group of the daughters and wives of its rich clothiers, women who (as our energetic hostess confides to me) would otherwise not have done anything . As we fold and ply, their talk and their diamonds flash equally rainbow; what we could have been sewing for an atomic war, I can now no longer imagine.
    In Detroit, I work for election reform with the League of Women Voters, campaign for Roosevelt (under the aegis of the electrical workers’ union’s notorious Briggs Local), and when I get back to the house hang his picture in the bay (in defiance of the Park, which thinks it low to hang party posters, and knows where it stands, anyway)—and teach the new baby to do his fine razzberry of a “Pffui,” whenever I say “Gonna vote for Dewey, Pete?” Sad anodynes of women, when they live cattycorner to world responsibility, sad games of all men, when they live under conditions for which they are indirectly not to blame.
    In the Relief Bureau, I had learned that any food tickets I brought—or any emotional welfare I might bring—if as has been suggested, I train to be a psychiatric social worker with one of those private agencies which now took over where public welfare left off—would not be even as much as a thumb thrust in the dike of human economic misery. Now I realize that in a war, unless a woman can kill for it, or will dance for it, she has no honest position in it. To be a woman pacifist is as nothing; since for us (and me) there is no risk. This must be why women, since getting the vote, or one half of Athenian citizenship, now appear to me to have done little since except sit down and let the political facts roll by, until once again it is time to cooperate blindly—wartime. Until women come under full and equal military service (I think to myself)—nothing to do with WACS or WAFS—they cannot hope to have any of the secular powers which men took for granted, including the possible right to refuse to fight. All secular power was related to it. Once they had it, their own pacifism might mean something … though I wasn’t at all sure that women, given military power, might not show the same divisions of opinion as the men. I could be so bright about all this, and so distant, because I have now faced a fact—I don’t want to play any of these roles.
    The role I want to play is evermore hidden, not a role at all, but an overwhelming need. Certainly not merely to be a writer, for though I have a deep, natural yearning to have an honorable place in the world, co-essential with what I am in the family, and using intelligences that seem to be lying fallow—I never think of the role of the writer as other than on the printed page, have never met a writer, and somehow never expect to.
    The urge I have is a personal mysticism, somehow to be worked out between external fate and this self I have been fated with, which has a physico-religious-sexual impetus to complete itself in print. As it remains thwarted, I begin to feel more and more caged off from the realm of those lucky ones who are “allowed” to do as they were meant to do, or who will it; an almost palpable wall of glass seems to be between me and them. I droop (it seems to me now) exactly like those specimen animals, rat or primate, whom the experimenter frustrates into depression or frenzy by keeping them from