What do you think?
Rate this book
Going out of our minds: The metaphysics of liberation
Women's Studies, Politics, Spirituality
359 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1987
6 people are currently reading
413 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 17, 2007
For me, this book is essential feminism lit. Sonia Johnson tells about her journey, from being banned from the Mormon Church to the struggle of women to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified. I found this book enlightening and I think every woman should read it.
February 27, 2010
What can I say about this book? I think that you have to be open to the concepts articulated in it. Some of it can and probably will go over your head but the reason I love this book is because sonia opened my mind to the possibility that I could make an impact on my world. I control my actions and what I do affects me and others. I must re-read it some time soon.
January 5, 2012
I am always amazed and so fascinated to learn about the radical women who have come out of this conservative valley that I live in. This book is memoir-y, with interesting details on Sonia Johnson's participation in the fight for the ERA and her presidential campaign. Her chapter on "Telling the Truth" made me cry, and her vision of a world free of gender oppression is really beautiful.
October 24, 2023
This book had a lot of gems and was overall an insightful and useful read; definitely it was one that helped me understand the overall mentality and consciousness among radical feminists during the women’s liberation movement. There were many sections which I marked with sticky notes or took photos of to look at later. However, the overall style of the writing wasn’t really my type - it’s hard to explain. Also, though I agreed with Johnson’s general mentality, on some more specific points, I found myself disagreeing, being baffled, or just finding it difficult to relate. Like another reviewer, I found the chapter titled Telling the Truth the most touching.
Some quotes from the book:
It is unthinkable and monstrous in patriarchy for women to demonstrate that we care as much about justice and dignity, as much about freedom for ourselves and our sisters -- to the laying down of our lives, if necessary -- as men and women have always cared about justice and freedom for men. It is the ultimate anti-patriarchal act. It is heresy. It is revolution. (2)
Mary Daly puts it more elegantly and succinctly: ‘As long as God is male,’ she says, ‘the male is God.’ Which is why changing our view of God has everything to do with changing the world. (5)
Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. (Susan B. Anthony, 15)
I knew that women have been deeply socialized to obey the law. Obeying the law is a large part of obeying men generally, and the male god has ordained that obeying men is the fundamental law governing women’s lives. Matters of life and death hinge upon obedience to it. So when we prepare to break the law, our spirits bark their shins sharply against the killer taboo. Unconsciously, we make the lethal connection and are overwhelmed with fear for our lives.
But when we stand fast despite our fear and do indeed break the law (leaving our battering husbands, or our battering churches, or stop cleaning up after our husbands and kids, or love another woman), preparing on some deep level to die, the miracle happens: We live! Though the taboo tells us we can’t disobey the men and live, we are nevertheless alive! In fact, we’ve never been so alive! How can we account for feeling more alive by the second? Has it all been a lie, then? Just a plot to keep us terrified and trapped in our subordinate caste?
No, it’s not a lie; it’s a paradox. The truth is that to displease men, to disobey them, is still deadly for women. But the truth also is that only when we stop obeying men do we truly begin to live. (21-22)
After I had given proper credit to Susan for her perspicacious remarks about the Constitution, I pointed out that apparently Susan B. ANthony was too radical to be elected president of NOW.
Of course. We are much more conservative and timid than the women who went before us. They would probably affright and offend us at every turn. Some of the women who do research into the lives of our foremothers gloss quickly over evidence that perhaps these women were not “politically mature” -- i.e., polite and deferential. While I was writing this book and trying to find the exact source of the “overthrow this government” quote, [Overthrow this government! Commit its bloodstained Constitution to the flames; blot out every vestige of that guilty bargain of the Fathrees; break every fetter, and let the oppressed go free!] I was directed to a woman who is supposed to be an expert on Anthony. She told me she had never read the liens I quoted to her, and moreover, she was sure ANthony had never said them. “It doesn’t sound like her at all!” she huffed. Actually, it sounds very much like her indeed. That we have lost sight of her radicalism in less than a century (or, more exactly, of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s, since it was probably she who wrote Anthony’s speech), is astonishing and ominous. (24)
The theme of the women’s movement is female is beautiful, female is lovable; its agenda is for us to love ourselves as women, to deeply honor and respect ourselves and all women: not just women we agree with, not just other Lesbians or other heterosexual women, not just white or brown or black women, not just poor or working-class or middle-class or upper-class women, not just “well-adjusted” women, or healthy women, or women who smell good and brush their teeth regularly, or women who have accepted Jesus as their savior, or women who worship the Goddess. All women. And not just to like them, not just to find them non-disgusting, tolerable, okay. But to love them -- completely, passionately, madly. To be full of compassion for one another, to be slow to take offense and quick to forgive. To conquer in ourselves the fierce pangs of competition and jealousy, and to rejoice genuinely in one another’s successes.
This doesn’t mean we have to like the things all women do, or agree with them, or ignore the difficulties, or deny that what some women do is harmful. It means that we must learn to know in our bones and blood that women are not the enemy. It means that we must all stand together as the global class called women or we will fail as individual Lesbians and Jews and old women and women of color. It means that we must give highest priority to hanging in there with one another no matter what and working out our difficulties with skins of unparalleled thickness and the largest of hearts. (60-61)
Back in 1980 the most exhilarating experience of my newly-divorced life was the discovery that I could be whole and happy without a man; that the fierce brainwashing to the contrary, which I’d sustained all my life, was not only composed of lies from start to finish, but was a total reversal of the truth: it’s not women who need men, but men who need women. The slave never needs the master in order to survive and flourish; it’s the master who needs the slave. One of the important offices of male culture is to keep this intelligence from both master and slave, both male and female, because male supremacy depends on women’s belief that we cannot do without men (though millions of us do it splendidly every day, everywhere in the world).
This all became so clear to me that I marveled constantly at how successfully propaganda had hidden it. Nothing seemed to undermine the authority of the myth that women can’t do without men, including the well-documented and publicized facts that single men are less healthy, less happy, and die younger than married men, whereas single women are healthier, happier, and live longer than married women. (101-2)
I had been lonely as an adolescent, lonely all my married life, lonely with a husband and children, parents, brothers and a sister, and many friends. It took my becoming a feminist to learn that throughout that lifetime of loneliness I was lonely for myself. When feminism gave me to myself at last, that painful insatiable loneliness finally ended. (104)
The third life of the fathers about power is that there is a scarcity of it. The strength of this nurtured delusion was thrown into bold relief for those of us in the campaign when Geraldine Ferraro became the Democratic Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate. Angry, desperate letters began to appear at my campaign headquarters, pleading with me to drop my campaign so as not to deflect women’s votes away from her. Equally irrational reporters asked me every day from then until November, “Why are you still running now that Geraldine Ferraro is out there?”
I always answered, nonplussed, “Did you ask Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson this same question all those months they were running against Walter Mondale? Did you say, ‘Really, Gary, really, Jesse, why are you running? There’s already a man running!’ Or did you ask Fritz, ‘Why are you running for President, Fritz? We already have a man in the White House?’”
Even though we weren’t even running for the same office, Ferraro and I were instantly perceived as in competition for the very same sliver of the pie. This mentality of tokenism is necessary to keep our present system intact, and will not, cannot give way in patriarchy.
So in addition to the potent lie that there is only so much power, and only in the amount and of the kind men choose to give us, in patriarchy women are presumed to be clones. Slaves must be dehumanized, must be stereotyped by slaveholders to justify slavery. The assumption was that because both Geraldine Ferraro and Sonia Johnson were women, they were the same, would say the same things, appeal to the same people, have the same goals in running, have a similar ideological impact -- if on a different scale (since it was clear Ferraro was going to get far greater exposure). So why did I continue, when by doing so I would hurt the movement? Why didn't I just go home -- and bake a cake, or something?
There are always many roles for women, despite male views to the contrary. Ms. Ferraro and I were playing two very different ones. (184-5)
The situation was very difficult for all of us, but it rapidly became unbearable for the male assistant coordinator. “There’s no role for men in this campaign,” he’d storm, though men were working in the campaign all over the country. What he meant was that since there has been only one generally acceptable role for men in relation to women for many millennia -- the leader -- when he couldn’t be leader, there was no other role visible to him as a possibility. Though he was actually playing a very important role in the campaign, since it wasn’t that role, he didn’t perceive it as a role at all. (221)
One of the basic tenets of radical feminism is that any woman in the world has more in common with any other woman -- regardless of class, race, age, ethnic group, nationality -- than any woman has with any man. To be female is reason in itself to be in servitude, to be hated, wounded, and killed in every country, every culture of the world. As Andrea Dworkin writes in Right-wing Women:
…There is no state of being or act of will that protects a woman from the basic crime against women as women or puts any woman outside the possibility of suffering these crimes. Great wealth does not put a woman outside the circle of crimes; neither does racial supremacy in a racist social system or a good job or a terrific heterosexual relationship with a wonderful man or the most liberated (by any standard) sex life or living with women in a commune in a pasture. (239)
I ran for president to reach millions of people with the urgent message of radical feminism, the most transformative and dangerous -- because the most taboo-defying -- philosophy in existence: the message that the oppression of women is the archetypal oppression, the one upon which all others are modeled. Feminism posits that men raped and exploited and enslaved women before they went across the river and invaded the neighboring tribe. It posits that men learned the power-over paradigm in their kitchens and bedrooms, their caves and huts, through their most intimate, most formative relationships, which were with mothers, lovers, and wives, and that they subsequently applied it in all areas of their lives, operating within that dominant/submissive, dichotomous mindset in all subsequent affairs. Thus did the sadomasochistic paradigm, which is patriarchy, slouch into the world.
Radical feminism holds that out of their experience in dominating women, men developed, perfected, and established the hierarchical world view which now threatens all life. As Virginia Wolf writes in Three Guineas: “The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” (241)
Men speak humorously, or so they say, of “the war between the sexes” -- a transparent and guileful attempt to mislead us into thinking that there is a natural enmity between women and men, and that the “sides” are evenly matched. Nothing could be further from the truth on both accounts. The “war between the sexes” is man made, and it is not between anybody. It is against women. (257)
Men’s lives (in relation to the women’s of their group) are so saturated with privilege, in fact, that even if a well-meaning man should wish to, he could not divest himself of it, not even of one evidence of it. For instance, one of the basic entitlements of maleness is to be listened to, to be taken seriously. This privilege seems “natural” to most men; they take it so for granted that they are nearly oblivious to it. Though study after study verifies it, men often laugh at the suggestion that it exists. But women don’t need studies to know it does because we always have the opposite experience, and every time we do we know that it would be different if we were male. (318)
Some quotes from the book:
It is unthinkable and monstrous in patriarchy for women to demonstrate that we care as much about justice and dignity, as much about freedom for ourselves and our sisters -- to the laying down of our lives, if necessary -- as men and women have always cared about justice and freedom for men. It is the ultimate anti-patriarchal act. It is heresy. It is revolution. (2)
Mary Daly puts it more elegantly and succinctly: ‘As long as God is male,’ she says, ‘the male is God.’ Which is why changing our view of God has everything to do with changing the world. (5)
Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. (Susan B. Anthony, 15)
I knew that women have been deeply socialized to obey the law. Obeying the law is a large part of obeying men generally, and the male god has ordained that obeying men is the fundamental law governing women’s lives. Matters of life and death hinge upon obedience to it. So when we prepare to break the law, our spirits bark their shins sharply against the killer taboo. Unconsciously, we make the lethal connection and are overwhelmed with fear for our lives.
But when we stand fast despite our fear and do indeed break the law (leaving our battering husbands, or our battering churches, or stop cleaning up after our husbands and kids, or love another woman), preparing on some deep level to die, the miracle happens: We live! Though the taboo tells us we can’t disobey the men and live, we are nevertheless alive! In fact, we’ve never been so alive! How can we account for feeling more alive by the second? Has it all been a lie, then? Just a plot to keep us terrified and trapped in our subordinate caste?
No, it’s not a lie; it’s a paradox. The truth is that to displease men, to disobey them, is still deadly for women. But the truth also is that only when we stop obeying men do we truly begin to live. (21-22)
After I had given proper credit to Susan for her perspicacious remarks about the Constitution, I pointed out that apparently Susan B. ANthony was too radical to be elected president of NOW.
Of course. We are much more conservative and timid than the women who went before us. They would probably affright and offend us at every turn. Some of the women who do research into the lives of our foremothers gloss quickly over evidence that perhaps these women were not “politically mature” -- i.e., polite and deferential. While I was writing this book and trying to find the exact source of the “overthrow this government” quote, [Overthrow this government! Commit its bloodstained Constitution to the flames; blot out every vestige of that guilty bargain of the Fathrees; break every fetter, and let the oppressed go free!] I was directed to a woman who is supposed to be an expert on Anthony. She told me she had never read the liens I quoted to her, and moreover, she was sure ANthony had never said them. “It doesn’t sound like her at all!” she huffed. Actually, it sounds very much like her indeed. That we have lost sight of her radicalism in less than a century (or, more exactly, of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s, since it was probably she who wrote Anthony’s speech), is astonishing and ominous. (24)
The theme of the women’s movement is female is beautiful, female is lovable; its agenda is for us to love ourselves as women, to deeply honor and respect ourselves and all women: not just women we agree with, not just other Lesbians or other heterosexual women, not just white or brown or black women, not just poor or working-class or middle-class or upper-class women, not just “well-adjusted” women, or healthy women, or women who smell good and brush their teeth regularly, or women who have accepted Jesus as their savior, or women who worship the Goddess. All women. And not just to like them, not just to find them non-disgusting, tolerable, okay. But to love them -- completely, passionately, madly. To be full of compassion for one another, to be slow to take offense and quick to forgive. To conquer in ourselves the fierce pangs of competition and jealousy, and to rejoice genuinely in one another’s successes.
This doesn’t mean we have to like the things all women do, or agree with them, or ignore the difficulties, or deny that what some women do is harmful. It means that we must learn to know in our bones and blood that women are not the enemy. It means that we must all stand together as the global class called women or we will fail as individual Lesbians and Jews and old women and women of color. It means that we must give highest priority to hanging in there with one another no matter what and working out our difficulties with skins of unparalleled thickness and the largest of hearts. (60-61)
Back in 1980 the most exhilarating experience of my newly-divorced life was the discovery that I could be whole and happy without a man; that the fierce brainwashing to the contrary, which I’d sustained all my life, was not only composed of lies from start to finish, but was a total reversal of the truth: it’s not women who need men, but men who need women. The slave never needs the master in order to survive and flourish; it’s the master who needs the slave. One of the important offices of male culture is to keep this intelligence from both master and slave, both male and female, because male supremacy depends on women’s belief that we cannot do without men (though millions of us do it splendidly every day, everywhere in the world).
This all became so clear to me that I marveled constantly at how successfully propaganda had hidden it. Nothing seemed to undermine the authority of the myth that women can’t do without men, including the well-documented and publicized facts that single men are less healthy, less happy, and die younger than married men, whereas single women are healthier, happier, and live longer than married women. (101-2)
I had been lonely as an adolescent, lonely all my married life, lonely with a husband and children, parents, brothers and a sister, and many friends. It took my becoming a feminist to learn that throughout that lifetime of loneliness I was lonely for myself. When feminism gave me to myself at last, that painful insatiable loneliness finally ended. (104)
The third life of the fathers about power is that there is a scarcity of it. The strength of this nurtured delusion was thrown into bold relief for those of us in the campaign when Geraldine Ferraro became the Democratic Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate. Angry, desperate letters began to appear at my campaign headquarters, pleading with me to drop my campaign so as not to deflect women’s votes away from her. Equally irrational reporters asked me every day from then until November, “Why are you still running now that Geraldine Ferraro is out there?”
I always answered, nonplussed, “Did you ask Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson this same question all those months they were running against Walter Mondale? Did you say, ‘Really, Gary, really, Jesse, why are you running? There’s already a man running!’ Or did you ask Fritz, ‘Why are you running for President, Fritz? We already have a man in the White House?’”
Even though we weren’t even running for the same office, Ferraro and I were instantly perceived as in competition for the very same sliver of the pie. This mentality of tokenism is necessary to keep our present system intact, and will not, cannot give way in patriarchy.
So in addition to the potent lie that there is only so much power, and only in the amount and of the kind men choose to give us, in patriarchy women are presumed to be clones. Slaves must be dehumanized, must be stereotyped by slaveholders to justify slavery. The assumption was that because both Geraldine Ferraro and Sonia Johnson were women, they were the same, would say the same things, appeal to the same people, have the same goals in running, have a similar ideological impact -- if on a different scale (since it was clear Ferraro was going to get far greater exposure). So why did I continue, when by doing so I would hurt the movement? Why didn't I just go home -- and bake a cake, or something?
There are always many roles for women, despite male views to the contrary. Ms. Ferraro and I were playing two very different ones. (184-5)
The situation was very difficult for all of us, but it rapidly became unbearable for the male assistant coordinator. “There’s no role for men in this campaign,” he’d storm, though men were working in the campaign all over the country. What he meant was that since there has been only one generally acceptable role for men in relation to women for many millennia -- the leader -- when he couldn’t be leader, there was no other role visible to him as a possibility. Though he was actually playing a very important role in the campaign, since it wasn’t that role, he didn’t perceive it as a role at all. (221)
One of the basic tenets of radical feminism is that any woman in the world has more in common with any other woman -- regardless of class, race, age, ethnic group, nationality -- than any woman has with any man. To be female is reason in itself to be in servitude, to be hated, wounded, and killed in every country, every culture of the world. As Andrea Dworkin writes in Right-wing Women:
…There is no state of being or act of will that protects a woman from the basic crime against women as women or puts any woman outside the possibility of suffering these crimes. Great wealth does not put a woman outside the circle of crimes; neither does racial supremacy in a racist social system or a good job or a terrific heterosexual relationship with a wonderful man or the most liberated (by any standard) sex life or living with women in a commune in a pasture. (239)
I ran for president to reach millions of people with the urgent message of radical feminism, the most transformative and dangerous -- because the most taboo-defying -- philosophy in existence: the message that the oppression of women is the archetypal oppression, the one upon which all others are modeled. Feminism posits that men raped and exploited and enslaved women before they went across the river and invaded the neighboring tribe. It posits that men learned the power-over paradigm in their kitchens and bedrooms, their caves and huts, through their most intimate, most formative relationships, which were with mothers, lovers, and wives, and that they subsequently applied it in all areas of their lives, operating within that dominant/submissive, dichotomous mindset in all subsequent affairs. Thus did the sadomasochistic paradigm, which is patriarchy, slouch into the world.
Radical feminism holds that out of their experience in dominating women, men developed, perfected, and established the hierarchical world view which now threatens all life. As Virginia Wolf writes in Three Guineas: “The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” (241)
Men speak humorously, or so they say, of “the war between the sexes” -- a transparent and guileful attempt to mislead us into thinking that there is a natural enmity between women and men, and that the “sides” are evenly matched. Nothing could be further from the truth on both accounts. The “war between the sexes” is man made, and it is not between anybody. It is against women. (257)
Men’s lives (in relation to the women’s of their group) are so saturated with privilege, in fact, that even if a well-meaning man should wish to, he could not divest himself of it, not even of one evidence of it. For instance, one of the basic entitlements of maleness is to be listened to, to be taken seriously. This privilege seems “natural” to most men; they take it so for granted that they are nearly oblivious to it. Though study after study verifies it, men often laugh at the suggestion that it exists. But women don’t need studies to know it does because we always have the opposite experience, and every time we do we know that it would be different if we were male. (318)
Read
November 27, 2007Feminist Theory at its best or craziest!!
June 11, 2021
The author wrote from her ex-Mormon experience - which is very valid - but like Mormonism, was very American-centric.
I understood her points about the universality of patriarchy but that quotes like "I recognized all churches as the Mormon church in various guises I was surveying the national and international world through my new wide-angled lens when suddenly everything clicked into place - the whole world is the Mormon Church" lacked nuance and expansion, and displayed an inadequate understanding of non-Mormon, non-Christian theologies.
Other faiths/religion groups justify and enforce misogyny in very different ways, and it's not always strictly related to theology.
I wish the author explored the values and downfalls of organisational hierarchy and structurelessness within the feminist movement more; I found The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman to make more compelling arguments, those of which opposed Sonia Johnson's opinions.
Overall I'm not disappointed in this book, but I'm also not inspired by it either.
I understood her points about the universality of patriarchy but that quotes like "I recognized all churches as the Mormon church in various guises I was surveying the national and international world through my new wide-angled lens when suddenly everything clicked into place - the whole world is the Mormon Church" lacked nuance and expansion, and displayed an inadequate understanding of non-Mormon, non-Christian theologies.
Other faiths/religion groups justify and enforce misogyny in very different ways, and it's not always strictly related to theology.
I wish the author explored the values and downfalls of organisational hierarchy and structurelessness within the feminist movement more; I found The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman to make more compelling arguments, those of which opposed Sonia Johnson's opinions.
Overall I'm not disappointed in this book, but I'm also not inspired by it either.
Read
December 29, 2022fascinating commentary on roe v wade in this. she really called it.
August 21, 2007
This is the kind of new agey, feminist stuff I read when I was 20. Sonia Johnson officially scares me now.
Read
September 7, 2008My great-aunt wrote this book, but I have never met her. It's an interesting look at radical feminism through the lens of a recovering Mormon.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews