The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,35
“homes” for the art of non-Western people; discrete collections of modern art in rural, less metropolitan sites.
Museums and galleries are an artist’s home; his and her place in art history, in cultural history, where national identities are shaped and reimagined. Increasingly, the focus of these art places is on the relationship among what is outside the museum as well as what is inside. Increasingly the erstwhile “stranger” enriches all of our homes.
Women, Race, and Memory
IN 1868 a forty-five-year-old woman asked the United States Senate for three years’ back pay. She had been hired during the Civil War to do three kinds of work: as nurse, cook, and “commander of several men.” It took thirty years for the men in the nation’s Capitol to make up their minds on a matter in which money, sex, race, and class were so hopelessly entangled. One hundred and fifteen years have passed since this woman’s original request, and the combination of explicit issues in her claim is still a witches’ brew of confusion, anger, fear, ignorance, and malice. At the heart of her nineteenth-century battle for veteran’s pay is the burning question of twentieth-century feminism: How can a woman be viewed and respected as a human being without becoming a male-like or male-dominated citizen?
For a variety of complex reasons, the final answer is not in yet, but it is impossible not to come to the dreary conclusion that chief among these reasons is our (women’s) own conscious and unconscious complicity with the forces that have kept sexism the oldest class oppression in the world. This casual or deliberate treason is like a bone lodged in the throat of every woman who tries to articulate the present condition of women, and, until expelled, it is a bone that will continue to choke, and may soon silence, what could have been the first successful, bloodless revolution in America.
The self-sabotage rife among women is no secret, but what may be unclear is why we insist on chains. Because sexism is not confined to men, psychology, schooling, and theology are frequently scoured to explain this subversion—to locate its origin in the oppressor. But the most effective and reliable saboteur is she who needs no orders.
American women fall into one of three general categories: feminists, anti-feminists, and nonaligned humanists. Each of these admittedly ill-defined groups generates some hostility for at least one other, and each contains subgroups intent on evangelical work among the others.
Avowed feminists, their consciousnesses sufficiently raised to be active workers for women’s rights, have been around for a long time. Feminism is as old as sexual repression. In this country, women’s liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation. The mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes; the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movement yielded Woman’s Liberation. Both movements were loudly championed by black men (no white men so distinguished themselves), but both abandoned black civil rights and regarded the shift away from the race problem as an inevitable and necessary development—an opportunity to concentrate on exclusively sexist issues. Each time that shift took place it marked the first stage of divisiveness and heralded a future of splinter groups and self-sabotage.
Among modern feminists this first split quickly gave way to a second from which two main groups emerged: socialist feminists, who blame capitalism for the virulence of sexual oppression, and radical feminists, who blame men. The outrage of both socialist and radical feminism is directed toward the cause of sexism, yet in pursuit of the enemy, much of the emotional violence spills over to the victims. Regardless of how they define the enemy (men or the “system”) both camps recognize the need to neutralize the hostility of women toward one another—sisters, mothers, and daughters, women friends and employees. They see betrayal among women as a residue of minority self-contempt and the competitiveness of the marriage market. Nevertheless, the result of a raised consciousness in the company of a repressed one is frequently an explosive internecine conflict. There is stark terror in Andrea Dworkin’s account of her attempts to talk to right-to-life women in Houston. There is real arsenic in Simone de Beauvoir’s recollection of her rivalry with her mother. Even among advanced feminists sabotage is a serious threat. A nice little feminist collective bookstore in California (called Woman’s Place) ended up in court when the separatists locked the integrationists out.
The anti-feminists, who have the greatest support of men, are presumed by feminists to be endlessly gestating and lactating; happy for any system, political, economic, or cultural,