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322 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions—whether of sex, race, or servitude.At the end of this book, Rich says something about women, even at the time of her writing, thinking in ways that were ignored, derided, or actively suppressed by mainstream ideologies. I don't know whether she intended this to be self-reflection or irony, or if she had any intent at all that reflected on her own building of structures rather than the broadside and seemingly exterior targets of patriarchy and gynephobia. To put this in a way less oblique, between the time I read On Lies, Secrets And Silence and now, I have become increasingly and horribly aware of the connotations of the phrase "radical feminism" with all its TERF and SWERF offshoots that invest certain "women" the divine right to define what "woman" is. If this were in anyway conducive to social justice movements, I would be perfectly right in defining woman as only those who undergo the risk of bleeding out every month as the result of perfectly natural biological processes, in addition to the uterus, in addition to the vagina, in addition to the breasts and the hormones and whatever else the gendered social construction has imbibed over the years. However, I don't. My main reason why? I'm not interested in participating in genocide.
“The woman’s body, with its potential for gestating, bringing forth and nourishing new life, has been through the ages a field of contradictions: a space invested with power, an an acute vulnerability; a numinous figure and the incarnation of evil; a hoard of ambivalences, most of which have worked to disqualify women from the collective act of defining culture.”