Radical, awesome, ecstatic sense of otherness from what the patriarchy wants me to be

… Being a radical feminist involves a radical, awesome, ecstatic sense of otherness from what the patriarchy wants me to be. I am not a patriarchal woman. I do not want any of that. Least of all do I want their plastic passions; the bitterness, the depression, the resignation, foolfillment. Where is there to move?!

It implies a knowledge of the sanctions that will come down from the patriarchy. But I make this decision anyway because I know that I will be punished just as much for being an itty-bitty feminist as for going the whole way. And so I go the whole way.

Radical feminism means I experience moral outrage on behalf of women AS WOMEN. I don’t get sidetracked into other categories. I don’t get distracted into any male-identified categories. I feel for the foot-maimed women of China, who, for a thousand years, had the three-inch long foot. I feel for the genitally-mutilated women of Africa, at least 30 million of them. And, I will not be put down by ridiculous statements that this is RACIST. I feel for the women, the sisters who were massacred as witches in Western Europe during the so-called “Renaissance” and for those women now massacred in the perpetual witch craze of patriarchy.

Radical feminism means that I identify with women beyond all racial, ethnic, class, age bonds or bounds. It means that I see the oppression by gynecology and by our Western medicine, by Indian suttee which still goes on, by the dowry murders there, by the incest here, by the battering here, there and everywhere, of women, euphemistically called “domestic violence,” – that kind of reversal language, and for women who are raped, and for women who are victims of pornographic abuse.

Radical feminism involves steadfastness, and that means constancy, that means persistence, that means that when it is not cool to be a radical feminist, and it never really is, that I will be anyway for a very simple reason-and this makes me the Lunatic that I am: That even if I were the last one, I would be BECAUSE I AM A WOMEN! THAT’S WHO I AM!!

I’m not something else, to identify with something else, to be always for somebody else’s cause; March march march. Prance prance prance. Fight fight fight- some other boy’s or male-identified war. I AM A WOMAN!~Mary Daly

Painting by Elisabeth Slettnes