Women, Culture and Revolution Author(s): Kate Ellis Reviewed work(s): Source: The Radical Teacher, Vol. 1, No.

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Women,

Culture

and

Revolution
by Kate Ellis

The first version of Women, Culture, and Revolution was a talkgiven by Kate Ellis at MLA, December 1975. The paper has gone through many versions thanks to the criticism and support given by Ellen Cantarow, Michele and Lillian Russell, Tillie Olsen, Susan O'Malley, Robinson.

Colonialism dominated pressed destroys

is not

its rule upon

the present and future of a

... By a kind of per and

simply

content

to impose

verted logic, it turns to the past of the op Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
people, it. and distorts, disfigures,

country.

Women seeking to place theirmovement in the con text of a larger anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle cannot but be struck by the similarities between the effects of male culture on their development as a group and the damage to colonial peoples that Fanon ascribes to colonial rule. Such a comparison has its limitations, and when taken to extremes leads to the same dangers that Fanon points out in his chapter on 'The Pitfalls Of National Consciousness" in The Wretched of theEarth. Rather than argue this point, therefore, I would like to take from Fanon his idea of stages, or phases, through which the culture of an oppressed people develops into an instrument of revolution, and use it as a guideline to examine some of the writings that have come out of the second wave of the American women's movement. To do this I would like first to suggestways inwhich impe rialism has created points of commonality between the more limited struggles that women have been waging at
home

Out

of this I would like to argue that Fanon's three the addition of a phase model needs to be modified by fourth phase. Finally I would like to apply thismodel to a number of recent novels by women. Fanon divides into three phases the struggle against the negation of an indigenous culture by a colonial power. In the first phase, "the native intellectual gives of the occupy proof that he has assimilated the culture with ing power. His writings correspond point by point 1 mother in the those of his opposite numbers country." In the second phase, he turns back to his people, from whom he has been separated, and tries to recover a past he shares with them, one that has not been touched by the distortion and disfiguration of the occupying power. turns himself into an Finally, in the third phase, "he a fighting litera comes hence awakener of the people; a national litera and a literature, ture, revolutionary
ture."

and

the more

dramatic

process

of decolonization.

It is tempting to say that women writers of the past have always imitated men, have always been, in other words, in stage one. Yet if one looks at particular women writers, this generalization is not accurate. Inso far as women were not free to imitatemen in the rest of their lives, that course was open only to a few exception al women. The strength of societal prejudice against women writers that prevailed up to the end of the nine teenth century, and which has still not disappeared, had wom a more complicated effect than simply restricting en to imitatingwhat men wrote. Writing like a man, now a term of dubious praise forwomen, has a much longer history as the ultimate insult. Thus a case has recently been made by feminist scholars for a "female tradition" in which women writers, being an outcast group, drew 2 on each other as models and sources of inspiration. Functioning within a hostile milieu, women have had to subvert to some degree the ideals of thatmilieu in order towrite at all. But as women have gained more freedom (defined at this point as the ability to do what men do) they have appropriated in fiction more and more of the candor about themselves (as sexual beings particularly) that has traditionally been a masculine privilege. As feministswe may not set a high value on this freedom in itself,but I would suggest that it is a precondition for a feminist culture of opposition that goes beyond the small number of exceptional and courageous women who have given us a female tradition on which to build. An opposition cul ture that will undermine and eventually supplant the hegemony of the present ruling elite must have as its base some level of economic independence from which to assert itself as a "we." As long as themyth of margin ality (or total dependence) can be perpetrated on a group or nation, the hegemony of the present ruling elite is easy to maintain, and those who challenge it success fully can be simultaneously praised and written off as But this myth is being challenged on "exceptional." many fronts at once, which iswhy it is useful to look at the contemporary women's movement and the culture that is emanating from it in the context of a wider strug gle that includes decolonization and wars of national
liberation.

Decolonization offers themost clear-cut instance of a challenge to the myth that thewhite male patriarchy is simultaneously benevolent and invincable. If the new African bourgeoisie is a disappointment to socialists everywhere and post-colonial African writers [Achebee, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ayi Kwei Armah] in particular, it is at least demonstrating that Africans understand the com plexities of modern capitalism. The acquisition of skills thatwere previously themonopoly of the colonizer, and were used to keep the colonized in a state of depend

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ency and economic marginality, does not automatically bring about a new society. The function of thirdworld economies does not change with a change of rulers. Moreover, capitalism survives by infusingpeople with a desire for consumer products which does not disappear when the colonizer packs his pith helmet and leaves. Perhaps a colonized or oppressed people cannot get be yond the culture and lifestyle of its oppressors until it has in some measure imitated it, given that themeans to do so are known to be available. Demands for themeans to do this, reformist though theymay seem,might then be seen as necessary, not as ends in themselves but as a

stage in a longer process. Women's cultural marginality has sprung from the fact that she has always been defined (except in times of war) as economically marginal. The need of capitalism for a reserve labor pool, one that can be laid offwithout disturbing the ideology of free enterprise because it is working for "extras," has always created a distance be tween reality and the cultural ideal of female depend ence. And like the raw materials of thirdworld coun tries, the unpaid and underpaid labor of women is in fact essential to the necessary continuous growth of capital ism. The distance between themyth of marginality and the reality of exhausting work, between the ideal of fe male dependence and her real role in the family and in the economy, can be rationalized by the oppressor as failure (failure of theman to earn enough, failure of the woman to hold her man) but only as long as it is relative ly hidden. But once we have seven million female heads of household and 3/5 of the female workforce is either single, divorced, widowed, or livingwith husbands earn ing less than $7,000 per year, no amount of opposition to the ERA will bring back the "golden age" of female dependence on a male breadwinner. Given the sharp rise in female participation in the American workforce from the end of World War II to the rebirth of feminism in the sixties, one can see that rebirth as an expression of a desire to debunk themyth of dependence and bring ideology in line with reality. And in this themovement has not failed. Rather, ithas succeeded and is therefore under attack. Nor is this be
cause women's consciousness of themselves as

foreign governments are sometimes necessary and not always possible to conceal. Monopoly capitalism is be ginning to lose its elasticity. Something parallel to this is happening to the high culture of advanced industrial countries. Transplanted to a colony, this culture tended to ossify quickly. The re pressive function of the colonizer demands a high degree of rigidity in order to insure that assimilation goes one way only. Native imitations of themaster were thus sin gularly lifeless,while themaster would make forays into the heart of darkness, following Conrad's hero in his search for a vitality among the natives that had dried up at home. The dominant culture could draw life from the cultures it suppressed, just as in the economic sphere the colonizer could draw on the colonies as sources of profit to extend the economic life of themother country. But as these native cultures start feeding their own people and not theirmasters, the dominant culture has to fall back on its own dying resources and becomes as defen sive at home as it was in the colonies: self-mockery at the point of death. These developments in the dominant culture, among women and minorities at home, and among the dec olonized nations of the thirdworld, suggest to me that we can be more than fanciful in applying themodel for cultural struggle that Fanon used to describe the emerg ing culture of colonized Africans to emergingminority cultures in this country, and the culture coming out of the women's movement in particular. But to do this I must disagree with Fanon's suggestion that cultural struggle and political struggleparallel each other in time. Creating an opposition culture, even when done in the context of a community rather than by isolated people with talent, is still done by a relatively small group and invokes less opposition than creating a new society. When everyone participates you have not only culture
but also revolution. process. Yet continuous Gains revolutionary struggle are made. Conditions is not a

has disappeared, but rather because it has not. Affirma tive action may not be able to keep jobs forwomen and minorities at this point, but it has given them an under Our standing of why they are last hired and first firmed. as as the not in third been dramatic those has struggle world, nor has it involved all sectors of the female popu lation. Yet women have come together and discovered their strength, and in the process discovered also the strengthof the enemy. It is important, therefore, forwomen to keep inmind that their assaults on the dominant ideology were going on at the same time as the Vietnam war and African independence struggles that are by no means over. This iswhat gives them a different character from earlier fem inist struggles. The war is being brought home. Profits from the thirdworld are not so assured. Large payoffs to

a group

Failings become apparent. New problems arise. Fanon sees culture and politics merging in the revolu tionary phase of his model, and presumably remaining that way. I see the function of culture as that of illumi nating a much slower and more difficult political task. We have noted that oppressed or colonized people, both at home and in the third world, move as they become freer toward the lifestyle of their oppressors. This may be a political precondition formoving ahead, just as its equivalent in the sphere of culture is a precondition for imagining alternatives to that lifestyle. I see culture as reflecting trends thatmay become actualized in the poli tical sphere (fascism, for example) but capable of giving warnings only, not positive solutions. The third phase can only occur in times of intense political activity, but ifwe look at culture from the period after revolutionary struggle (Russian novels of the twenties, post-colonial African writing, recent writing from Cuba), we see art that does not correspond to any of the earlier phases. This is why I would add to Fanon's three phases a fourth, one inwhich artists,having acquired some of the

change.

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tools and resources previously denied them, having ex their group plored those realms of experience that define as a group, and having identified their strugglewith that of their group, incorporate all of these stages into their A writer working in this phase does not need to em body each of the previous stages inhis or her own work, though I find some poems from each stage in the work of Adrienne Rich, whose career spans the rebirthof fem inism. One can also look at the writing of a particular country like Ghana or Nigeria, or, as I propose to do, at some of the writing of American women in the last de cade to see how they have contributed to a developing culture of opposition, without insisting too rigidly on a chronological ordering within the representative selec
tions chosen. Fanon's art.

prescription, and as such can be found from the smallest unit, within the individual consciousness in the process of being "raised" to the largestunit, that of the political sphere which brings together a whole people. Culture is the link, in other words, between individual vision and mass political action. As artists speak for a wider and wider community of opposition, their art may come to approximate political action and may even, in the third stage, merge with it temporarily, becoming pamphlets, songs, Red Books, guerilla theater and the like. But struggle if it is not to degenerate into meaninglessness must be followed by assessment, and by the humbling realization that politics alone cannot bring an end to
pain.

stages

are

a model

only,

not

The Protestant ethic, mainstay of advanced capitalist culture, views pain as punishment, and therefore an ex perience one ought not to have. More traditional cul tures, according to Ivan Illich,
confront sponse cal made terpreting and death pain, impairment, them as challenges soliciting under stress; from an individual turns them into by in a re

medi

civilization

demands

on into the economy, by individuals or produced that can be managed problems . . . Culture out of existence. tol makes pain its necessity; erable by interpreting only pain perceived as curable is intolerable. 3

By positing all pain as either avoidable (through virtu ous conduct) or curable (through tranquilizers and other drugs) the dominant culture, through themedical estab lishment, rules out struggle as a response to pain. Some pain can be alleviated by redistributing resources. Some can only be understood through themedium of a culture aimed at facilitating that process. But only through struggle can "the wisdom to know the difference" emerge. This is the function, as I see it, of the fourth phase. But since this phase does not emerge from the head of Zeus but rather from a process, a look at some writing by women in the last decade might help to deter mine where we are in relation to that process. But first it is necessary to say something about the male culture that is the object of imitation in stage one. If you go back through the history of the novel, the genre I am going to focus on, you will notice that be

tween Fielding and D. H. Lawrence virtuous male char acters are remarkably passive. Initiatives of any sort tied them too closely to a world with which they were al ready more closely identified than women, a world in creasingly dominated by the inhumanities of industriali zation. To be virtuousmeant to stand at a distance from that system, to be an outsider. Even strong sexuality in a hero made him suspect until Lawrence led a revolt against what he saw as the "feminization" of themale. Millett rightly saw that an assertion of phallic power on the part of male writers did tie them into an oppressive system, yet denying sexuality does not break this con nection. It merely masks it. If we then criticize Law rence, Miller and Mailer, must we also criticize Alix Kates Shulman and Erica Jong,whose picaresque hero ines are attempting to do for the truewoman what their male predecessors did for the virtuous hero? One way thatmale writers have finessed their ambigu ous relationship to the dominant culture is to become confessional. Mailer and Roth in particular have devel oped a narrative voice that asks their readers to love them for being so honest about their guilt-ridden and not-so-guilt-ridden enjoyment of male power. The exer cise of female power has always been held in check by the powerful socializing force of male approval. The con fessional voice that Shulman and Jong have appropriated allows their heroines to seek and enjoy male approval while at the same time criticizing the constraints it Memoirs of an places on their freedom. Sasha Davis in Ex-Prom Queen has the quality that automatically elicits male approval: beauty. A hundred years ago Charlotte Bronte feltmorally compelled to create plain heroines in protest against this prejudice. Unlike the heroines from which Bronte wanted hers to differ, Sasha is conscious of her beauty as a trap, knows men don't take her seri ously because of it, desire her body but dismiss her mind, and so forth.What she is not conscious of is the fact that her "princess" qualities, however oppressive to herself, are also used to oppress other women through a system of rewards, all boiling down to male approval, that shemay disdain but does not give up. The novel ends with the dissolution of Sasha's second marriage over the issue of a new haircut she has gotten that he does not like.Fear of Flying ends with the hero ine lying in the intrauterinewarmth of her husband's bathtub. The ending is supposed to be ambiguous, with Isadora declaring, "Whatever happened, I knew I would survive it." Yet throughout the novel she defines herself primarily throughmen. At one point the lover forwhom she (temporarily) lefther husband asks her, "Why don't you just stop looking for love and try to live your own life?" and Isadora's new strength comes from her deci sion to follow his advice. But aside from the two (out of nineteen) chapters involvingflashbacks to her family life with her mother and sisters, there are virtually no wom en in the novel. And though I believe that profound changes of consciousness require confrontations with solitude, the idea that individual epiphanies are the only preparation needed for going out and forging in the

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smithy of one's soul the uncreated consciousness of one's race is neither a revolutionary nor a feminist one. It is simply the way middle-class people of both sexes deal, in the twentieth century,with their alienation from a social order they cannot respect. It is essential, there fore, that we look to Fear of Flying not, as critics of both sexes have done, as a model of feminist culture, but rather as an expression of that aspect of the women's movement that seeks for women a larger share of the capitalist pie. Art is Isadora Wing's escape hatch from oppression, and given a redistribution of the resources of of technol ogy, there is no reason why it should not be available to people who have not spent their lives being supported, advised, and taken around Europe, as Isadora has been, by fathers, husbands, and lovers.Most artists do not, in fact, live such sheltered lives. Yet except in periods of political ferment such as the thirties and the sixties, their struggle to survive is an isolated individualistic one.

through collective struggle or, in the case of Molly Bolt, heroines who explicitly reject political action. But Isa dora has not found anything in the world beyond her bathtub that will help her and her vision survive. She has not found it because it is not yet there, because con sciousness does not translate intomaterial reality except through political action. It will be therewhen she and others go out and make it together.And the novel about that will not be a novel in phase one, as Fear of Flying
is.

Molly Bolt, the heroine of Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, is a militant lesbian from a poor rural Pennsyl vania family who ends up in New York determined to make films. Yet Brown presents her heroine as an excep tion, as when her adopted father says to his wife, "Car rie, the child's high spirited, you got to remember that. That kid's quicker than all of us put together." Molly is strong by being judgmental, and though her sexual pref erence is forwomen, she has little compassion forwom en who suffer, and will admit no pain into her own

consciousness. She parts from loverswithout regrets,and her final response to the first of these, Leota, now a beaten-down housewife with two small children, is to slam the door saying, "She could have died on the spot 4 for all I know." Molly is responding to Leota's nervous assertion that all lesbians are sick. Surely what is needed here is some distance between author and character, some largerguid ing vision through which readers can assess and under stand the strengths and weaknesses of Molly's way of relating to the world. Yet this vision is characteristically absent in themodern and post-modernist canon of liter ary works that constitute the dominant culture of the English-speaking world. In George Eliot's novels, as in Greek drama, the voice of the larger community is pres ent in the narrator or the chorus. There is no such voice in the twentieth century canon because it speaks for an elite inwhose interest it is to pulverize communities into isolated individuals. Writing inwhat I would call the fourth phase has as a frame of reference for individual action and vision not 5 the "emancipated and humane community of culture" into which Northrop Frye would place the great litera ture of every age and clime, but a community of partici pants in a struggle to change the way we live. Art can show us how far we have come, and from where. But a only a mass movement can change the way we live in direction that is revolutionary, that is, one that will undo the damaging effects of colonial rule. The authors I mentioned create vehicles for consciousness not acquired

Novels that fall within the province of Fanon's sec ond phase have as their impetus "the secret hope of discovering, beyond the misery of today, beyond self contempt, resignation, and abjuration, some very beauti ful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us 6 both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others." Fanon is not referring to escape fiction-sentimental forays into the ante-bellum South and the like-though he does see the danger of escapism in a revival of the past, viewed as an end in itself. But with all the dispar agement that feminist activists have heaped, in the last decade, upon academic feminists, the scholarly redis covery of our history has given the recentmovement a continuing direction beyond the firstphase of conscious ness raising and marches up Fifth Avenue. Some of the research is speculative and questionable, informed too much by the "secret hope" that Fanon talks about. I am thinking particularly of the debate over an original matriarchy from which patriarchy was a "fall," and of the tendency among some feminist theorists to idealize the pre-industrial family, seeing it as everywhere extend ed. Yet ifwe cannot imagine alternatives to patriarchy we cannot bring them into being. This is the function of writing which makes imaginative use of research into the past, and which I would categorize as phase two of the cultural struggle. Two novels that embody this impulse are Monique Wittig's Les Guerrilleres and Isobel Miller's Patience and Sarah. Published in 1969 as A Place for Us, Miller's novel portrays lesbianism in positive terms, in contrast to Rad cliffe Hall's unhappy Stephen in her popular Well of Loneliness. Feminists are uncovering a vast body of liter ature representing lesbian relationships, and interest in the subject is no longer confined to a small coterie. But in her effort to counter the image of the lesbian as a Miller would-be man, warped and doomed to frustration, has shown a relationship in which there is virtually no conflict, either between the two women or between them and their rural Connecticut neighbours. Like Brown, she has left the pain out in reaction to a domi nant culture that views pain and social ostracization as just punishments for the sin of "inversion." Wittig's Utopian community of lesbians is distorted in the same direction. The novel follows the prescription for a nouveau roman in that everything is described from the outside. There are no individual women in this com munity, only participants in a collectively experienced ritual.Wittig's point is that life and art have become one, and therefore the women do not need culture. They do

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not need to recall theirpast nor tomake symbols out of theirpresent. Of theirwritten records they say: The women say that it may be that the femi
naries they with avoid set have have fulfilled no means texts no their function. of knowing. They They say say

that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are

ancient being to

seem to be outdated. All

encumbered them. That

longer by

they can do
useless be an

to hand,

these

to

knowl excuse

edge is to heap them up in the squares and

fire would for celebrations.

Symbols and symbol-making are rejected because The women say they perceive theirbodies in their entirety. They say that they do not favor any of its parts on the grounds that it was formerly a forbidden object. They say They have therefore ceased comparing their vulvas to other parts of nature, or to represent their bodies in abstract forms such as circles. One component of bourgeois ideology that the women's movement has tried to break down is the no tion that the realm of feeling is private and unique. But to remove entirely the subjective element of feeling, as Wittig does, is finally as dehumanizing as its opposite. Part of the point of the novel is to portray an Amazon community thatwas victorious in the battle against pa triarchy posited by Elizabeth Gould Davis and other advocates of an original matriarchy. Wittig's women join forces with a group of young men who, like Ferdinand the Bull in the children's story, prefer flowers to fight ing.Yet the termsof this selective admission of men into her model community makes me suspicious. First of all, misogynist males have always excepted the young, nubile, and malleable from their negative image of women. Here this has simply been reversed. Secondly, an ideal community inwhich everyone is strong,beautiful, and like-thinking, is on itsway to becoming a fascist
state. they don't want own ideology. to become prisoners of their

through his oppressors nor through a past that has ceased to grow and change, but rather in "the whole body of effortsmade by [his] people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps 7 itself in existence." By immersing himself in the on of his going struggle people, the artistwould transcend his class background and expensive education, often re ceived at the best schools of the advanced nations. These "been-to's," as they are called, are often looked to by Africans as the potential saviors of theirnative countries, yet they end up replacing a colonial structurewith divi
sions based on class.

One might argue that this book is not a program for revolution and should not therefore be criticized on these grounds. Yet the recreation, through the imagina tion, of "some very beautiful and splendid era" becomes itself reactionary if it does not look forward as well as we are working with a dynamic model back. Moreover, if
of

The seriousness with which African writers take up this problem in theirwritings is one reason why women in -thiscountry should look at thirdworld writing. Now that women are opening banks and getting credit cards in theirown names we need to ask, as African writers are doing, where our revolution is going. But one cannot locate oneself in themidst of a struggle and have at the same time the perspective necessary to criticize it. Per haps we should have been more self-critical in the sixties. Yet JulietMitchell could not have pointed out that femi nist theory had not gone deep enough had there been no feminist theory forher to talk about. Culture that is created in themidst of struggle takes an important step forward, yet it cannot have the rich ness that art can give us. Guerilla theater, the third phase art form par excellence, is a vital antidote to themonop oly on culture exercised by the elite, but its impact is very much of the moment, which is what is intended. This is only to say that art has limited usefulness as a vehicle for political education. It does other things bet ter, and prose exposition can explain why jobs are scarce better than any novel, poem or play. As we look to The Second Sex, not to the The Mandarins or The Prime of Life, for the content of present-day feminism, so we look to Mao's political writings, not to his poems, to understand the Chinese revolution. Songs, skits, leaflets and poems play an essential role in any struggle, but they are not thewhole of a revolutionary culture. One danger of recording a struggle as it is going on is that the record cannot capture the sharpness of the actual experience. This is a problem with a number of novels whose authors have undertaken to record the
emerging consciousness of one's own

seeds of the stage to come. This iswhat would differen tiateFear of Flying, which anticipates a woman-defined culture that is not actualized until phase two, from a novel such as Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, which imitates the well-crafted nihilism we find in the domi nant culture, yet contains nothing out of which an oppo

stages,

then

each

will

contain,

in some

measure,

the

characterized the recent upsurge of feminism. In these

novels the-way-we-live-now (perhaps labelled the-way-some-of-us-live-now) more there properly is very little

oppression

that has

sitional culture might grow. What is important to Fanon about the revolutionary phase of the cultural struggle is that the distance be tween artist and audience that characterizes the first two stages (the second less than the first) is obliterated. This is because he finds his identity and his material neither

selection of detail: so little has been recorded of women's experience from their own point of view that the basis of selection is not yet clear. Marge Piercy's Small Changes and Gail Godwin's The Odd Woman are two out of many in this category: brave, yet amenable to skimming. Any conversation between myself and a friend ismore interesting to me than any conversation between two characters inSmall Changes. Piercy authen tically represents what is going on around me, yet my act of observation affects my life,whereas Piercy's is.

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finally, "only a novel." The rise of feminism has given women a new audience to speak to: a female community that sees theworld theway they do. Iwant more from a writer than a validation of my own perceptions, though without that validation I cannot go beyond those per For many of us, the community we have discovered is a middle-class one composed of women whose oppres sion ismost immediately like our own. This oppression forms the content of novels ?ke Memoirs and Fear of Flying, whose authors have discovered a middle-class, college educated audience like themselves. Seeing oneself through the eyes of a sister is important forwomen, yet for working-class women to see themselves in Isadora Wing is almost as much i distortion as seeing oneself in Stephen Dedalus. One difference between phase one and phase four writing is that the collective modes of resis tence embodied in the third phase are present in the fourth, though treated imaginatively rather than as re cords of what happened. We now are coming to under stand how important it is to keep, and to have access to, records of these modes of resistance. The journals, let ters, leaflets, songs and other documentary evidence of past resistance must be uncovered and made available, since the colonialism under which we have lived has, to paraphrase Fanon, turned to our past and distorted, dis figured, and destroyed it. Yet exciting as these records are, I feel they can be used as material for an evenmore exciting kind of art. The absence of collective modes of resistance in phase one has to do with the fact that that phase reflects not only an earlier stage in a process but also the social relations of a class that does not resist oppression collec tively. This is why small groups were so necessary as a way of initiating these women into a larger struggle.Un likewomen who spend a large part of their lives in sex segregated industrial jobs, in typing pools, behind lunch counters, in elementary schools, or at home without paid help to diminish their unpaid labor, and who there fore need each other to help with small children, illness, and other crises, middle-class women had up to then little experience of support fromwomen. A number of white women writers who grew up with this experience brought it to their writing, directly or indirectly: the names of Rebecca Harding Davis, Hariett Arnow, and Tillie Olsen come tomind, but therewere others. Nevertheless, because of greater societal pressure and the inescapable fact of color, the Black community is at this point a richer source of opposition culture than the white working class. When I heard Toni Morrison speak two years ago, she said that she saw herself as the first Black writer to write consciously forBlack people rather than for white people. The response she wanted from her people, she said, was simply that they should nod their heads as they read. Last year I heard Paule Marshall speak of her mother's kitchen, and of how the stories she heard there formed the basis of her laterwritings. Such rituals give a context for present oppression, and are part of a collective strategy of resistance to it that women have always drawn on.
ceptions.

The writing of Morrison and Marshall, Toni Cade Bamb?ra and Alice Walker have transformed member ship in a stigmatized group into a source of strengthand cultural richness. Moreover, the "we" for whom these writers speak encompasses a wide range of experience: political and apolitical, rural and urban, illiterate and college-educated. Because their colonization ismore lit eral than that of women as a whole, because they are not cloistered to the degree that white women still are, it seems to me that Black women writers know things that white women are only beginning to learn: what it is like to head a household, to live in a community where diver sity is not concealed beneath a polite facade, to have friends in jail. These writers speak to their own com munity (part of it, at least) but also to those outside it we are going to win, together, who have things to learn if the next round of the struggle. Some of the pain with which thesewriters deal can be eradicated by political action, some can not. It is only after the death of her friend Sula thatNel, inToni Mor rison's Sula, realizes that she was her'most important friend. The pain of Pec?la Breedlove in The Bluest Eye is caused partly by racism, but partly by the fact that peo ple can not always help being cruel to one another. And even if all pain could be ended by a socialist feminist revolution, that revolution is a longway off and we have to live with it now, day by day, without being over whelmed and incapacitated for struggle. Ifwe concede that culture has as one of its functions "making pain tolerable by integrating it into a meaningful setting," as Illich says, then a culture thatmoves toward doing this for more and more people will be a revolutionary cul ture. But a wider audience will not materialize unless a political struggle isworking to remove the now artificial barriers of money, leisure, and education that have in the past made art inaccessible to themajority. We will not learn from culture how to do this, but the act of repossessing our culture may give us a sense of what is involved in the more difficult task of gaining as much control over our lives as ishumanly possible. FOOTNOTES
Franz Constance 2 Fanon, Farrington The Wretched (New York: translated by of the Earth, Grove Press, 1968), 222-23.

York:

See Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (New and Co., 1976); Elaine Showalter, The Female Doubleday Tradition and the English Novel, Princeton Univer (Princeton:

sityPress, 1976).
3 Ivan

1976), p. 29. 4
Daughters

Illich, Medical

Nemesis

(New York:

Pantheon

Books,

Rita Mae Brown,RubyfruitJungle (Plainfield, Vermont:

Inc., 1973), 35, 194. Criticism: 1957), Four p. 348. Essays

5 Frye, Northrop Anatomy of (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 6 7 Fanon, Ibid., p. 210. p. 233.

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