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We want to forbid a member of the National Assembly from saying that aging women cost too much within the national economy and that for the love of them, the Assembly will vote on a law forcing them to retire at sixty so that their employers be saved the bother of having to get rid of them. We want to understand and to expose the historical and social factors that made it possible for one social group to be treated like cattle and that turned us — one half of humanity — into domesticated beings, raised to reproduce and to preserve our species.
We know the meaning of words and we know that « love, abnegation, devotedness » belong to the faked language of scorn, humiliation and fear in our daily lives. We — living beings — are treated like objects because a society based on violence, exploitation, and oppression assumes that our lot is dispossession (no name, no identity, no rights, no body), rape, terror, and murder. We are, depending on circumstances, objects to be used, battered, exchanged, manipulated, or objects linked with wealth, well-being, prestige, power, and science. We are unique among all other historically dominated social groups, in that we have ignored the social character of our condition because we are, as women, bound by individual (marriage) contracts to the patriarchy.
We know the meaning of such words as « eternal feminine, » « instinct, » and our total confinement within « the nature of things. » We know that psychology, categories of knowledge, intellectual disciplines, bourgeois values, and idealism are part of a coded language. There is no essence. There is no woman, no femininity, no eternal feminine. There is a social group burdened with lowly tasks, despised because it must do these tasks, and so little « specialized » that the language which refers to us and gives us a form simultaneously describes us as the sex, but also as the sex which has no sex, as the Mother-Goddess and the whore, as the muse and the bluestocking. We know that « women » illustrate a power relation implying a double work load, professional unfitness, the lowest possible salary, the exclusive social responsibility for the care of the elderly, handicapped, and children. Some say : woman. We say : women.
We are feminists because the commercial manipulation of our bodies, of our lives, gives us no choice; because a society which allows the sexual organs of baby girls to be freely displayed (for example, in Denmark) clearly demonstrates the political character of sex hierarchy and shows that it is not pornography that gives enjoyment, but the enjoyment of power that constitutes pornography.
As feminists we must show the historical, social, and therefore arbitrary and reversible character of this sex hierarchy. We must show that « women » only exist in so far as the oppression and exploitation of one social group is the basis of the other group's power. [C.C.-P.]
Translated by Yvonne Rochette-Ozzello
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