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ife’s Moment of Truth
ot us
= We have had
These 53 American women invite you to join
them in a campaign for honesty and freedom
Last year, 343 prominent and respected Frenchwomen were willing to sign a public mani-
festo declaring that they had undergone abortions. This acte de révolte dramatized their
individual determination to take their lives and liberation into their own hands. It also
showed their willingness to stand with and to speak for their less well-known sisters, who
were forced to suffer unwanted pregnancies or illegal abortions in silence.
To many American women and men it seems absurd, in this allegedly enlightened age, that
we should still be arguing for a simple principle: that a woman has the right to sovereignty
over her own body. Still, there are tragically few places in the country where a woman can
obtain an abortion without the expense and deception of conforming to inhuman laws, or
the expense and physical danger of going outside the law. (Organizations-offering infor-
mation on the laws and on abortion availability are listed on page 126 of this issue.) The
vast majority of abortion laws in this country are remnants of obscurantist attitudes and
medieval prejudices.
In fact, at least one of every four women in the United States has had an abortion. Until
the recent legal reform in two states, all of those had to be either therapeutic or illegal. Given
the difficulty of securing a therapeutic abortion, the great majority of abortions endured by
American women have been illegal—and therefore dangerous. This has caused untold suf-
fering, especially on the part of poor women who must resort to self-induced or butchered
abortions. Some idea of the lives to be saved by repealing abortion laws is suggested by
the recent drastic reduction in deaths from childbirth, a statistic that includes deaths from
bungled abortions, in New York City alone. During the first nine months of the new legal
abortion program, “deaths from childbirth” dropped by at least 60 per cent.
To save lives and to spare other women the pain of socially-imposed guilt, 53 respected
women residents in the United States have volunteered to begin the American Women’s
Petition by signing the statement below. Our purpose is not to alienate or to ask for sym-
pathy, but to repeal archaic and inhuman laws. Because of the social stigma still wrongly
attached to abortion, many women in public life, or with husbands in public life, have felt
unable to join us. We are mostly women active in community work, or in the arts. But we
invite all women, from every walk of life, to help eliminate this stigma by joining us in this
petition, and signing the statement below. The complete list will be sent to the White House,
to every State Legislature, and to our sisters in other countries who are signing similar
petitions for their lawmakers.
Barbaralee D. Diamonstein
34 Ms.
labortions
The attitudes and laws against abortion in this country are causing untold suffering. Approxi-
: mately one million American women had “illegal” abortions in 1971—many of them self-
: induced or performed by the unqualified, some of them fatal.
I have had an abortion. I publicly join millions of other American women in demanding a
repeal of all laws that restrict our reproductive freedom.
OOO OOOD OOO ODDOD ODS HOOSED OD POPSAOLHSOEDDLOOLD LOD OLOODDDD OD LD RODID CORED PAG 06880 OLD NE BOER OU DOSER ODS 006 008 000 00606065 66 6645555
: Name:
; Address:
: Identification:
: Send to: American Women’s Petition, “Ms,” 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017
Eve Auchincloss
Sunny Aurelio
Lorraine Beebe
Joan Bingham
Patricia Bosworth
Kay Boyle
Adelyn D. Breeskin
Susan Brownmiller
Hortense Calisher
Jaqueline Michot Ceballos
Lucinda Cisler
Shirley Clarke
Judy Collins
Mary Cunningham
Anselma Dell ’Olio
Karen De Crow
Barbaralee D. Diamonstein
Susan Edmiston
Nora Ephron
Lee Grant
Gael Greene
Nancy Grossman
Barbara Barrie Harnick
Lillian Hellman
Dorothy Pitman Hughes
Elizabeth Janeway
Lucy Jarvis
Jill Johnston
Billie Jean King
Maxine Kumin
Irma Lazarus
Viveca Lindfors
Marya Mannes
Dorothy Millstone
Marcia Colman Morton
Anais Nin
COSHH HSHHSHHEHHHSHOHHHEHEEHEHEEAEFEEEEEEHTESEEEHEHEEEEHEEEEOHEHEEEEEEEEER SESE HEOEEEEOEEEEEE ESE EEE OEE EEE OEEEEEEEESEEEEEEES
Grace Paley
Beverly Pepper
Eleanor Perry
Frances Fox Piven
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Mary Rodgers
Naomi Ellen Rubin
Nora Sayre
Anita Siegel
Marcia B. Siegel
Anne Sexton
Ruth P. Smith
Susan Sontag
Gloria Steinem
Lena Tabori
Barbara W. Tuchman
Shirley Ann Wheeler
Barbaralee Diamonstein is a freelance writer who was Director of Cultural Affairs for New York City. Her book of interviews
with 94 women, “Open Secrets,” will be published in February.
_ SPRING/72 35
Sisterhood
Gloria Steinem
“These deep and per-
sonal connections of
women often ignore
barriers of age, eco-
nomics,worldly expe-
rience, race, culture—
all the barriers that,
in male or mixed so-
ciety, seem so difficult
to cross.”
A very. very long time ago (about three
or four years), I took a certain secure
and righteous pleasure in saying the
things that women are supposed to say.
I remember with pain—
“My work won't interfere with mar-
riage. After all. I can always keep my
typewriter at home.” Or:
“I don’t want to write about women’s
stuff. I want to write about foreign pol-
icy.” Or:
“Black families were forced into ma-
triarchy, so I see why black women
have to step back and let their men get
ahead.” Or:
“I know we're helping Chicano groups
that are tough on women. but that’s their
culture.” Or:
“Who would want to join a women’s
group? I've never been a joiner. have
you?” Or (when bragging):
“He says I write about abstract ideas
like a man.”
I suppose it’s obvious from the kinds
of statements I chose that I was secretly
non-conforming. (I wasn't married. ¢
was earning a living at a profession I
cared about. and I had basically—if quiet-
ly—opted out of the “feminine” role.)
But that made it all the more necessary to
repeat some Conventional Wisdom, even
to look as conventional as I could man-
age, if I was to avoid the punishments
reserved by society for women who don't
do as society says. I therefore learned to
Uncle Tom with subtlety. logic. and
humor. Sometimes. [ even believed it
myself.
If it weren’t for the Women’s Move-
ment, I might still be dissembling away.
But the ideas of this great sea-change in
women’s view of ourselves are conta-
gious and irresistible. They hit women
like a revelation, as if we had left a small
dark room and walked into the sun.
At first my discoveries seemed com-
plex and personal. In fact, they were the
same ones so many millions of women
have made and are making. Greatly sim-
plified, they went like this: Women are
human beings first, with minor differ-
ences from men that apply largely to the
act of reproduction. We share the dreams,
capabilities, and weaknesses of all human
beings, but our occasional pregnancies
and other visible differences have been
used—even more pervasively, if less bru-
tally, than racial differences have been
used—to mark us for an elaborate divi-
sion of labor that may once have been
practical but has since become cruel and
false. The division is continued for clear
reason, consciously or not: the economic
and social profit of men as a group.
Once this feminist realization dawned,
I reacted in what turned out to be pre-
dictable ways. First, I was amazed at the
simplicity and obviousness of a realiza-
tion that made sense, at last, of my life
experience: I couldn’t figure out why I
hadn’t seen it before. Second, I realized,
painfully, how far that new vision of life
was from the system around us, and how
tough it would be to explain the feminist
realization at all, much less to get people
(especially, though not only, men) to
accept so drastic a change.
But I tried to explain. God knows (she
knows) that women try. We make anal-
ogies with other groups that have been
marked for subservient roles in order to
assist blocked imaginations. We supply
endless facts and statistics of injustice,
reeling them off until we feel like human
information-retrieval machines. We lean
heavily on the device of reversal. (If
there is a male reader to whom all my
pre-realization statements seem perfectly
logical, for instance, let him substitute
“men” for “women” or himself for me
in each sentence, and see how he feels.
“My work won’t interfere with mar-
riage....” “. .. Chicana groups that are
tough on men. . . .” You get the idea. )
We even use logic. If a woman spends
a year bearing and nursing a child, for
instance, she is supposed to have the
primary responsibility for raising that
child to adulthood. That’s logic by the
male definition, but it often makes wo-
men feel children are their only function
or discourages them from being mothers
at all. Wouldn’t it be just as logical to
say that the child has two parents, both
equally responsible for child-rearing, and
that therefore the father should compen-
48 Ms.
“T have met brave women who are exploring
the outer edge of human possibility, with no
history to guide them, and with a courage
to make themselves vulnerable that I find
moving beyond words.”
sate for that extra year by spending
more than his half of the time with the
child? Now that’s logic.
Occasionally, these efforts at explain-
ing succeed. More often, I get the feeling
that we are speaking Urdu and the men
are speaking Pali. As for logic, it’s in the
eye of the logician.
Painful or not, both stages of reaction
to our discovery have a great reward.
They give birth to sisterhood.
First, we share with each other the
exhilaration of growth and self-discov-
ery, the sensation of having the scales fall
from our eyes. Whether we are giving
other women this new knowledge or re-
ceiving it from them, the pleasure for
all concerned is enormous. And very
moving.
In the second stage, when we're ex-
hausted from dredging up facts and argu-
ments for the men whom we had pre-
viously thought advanced and intelligent,
we make another simple discovery. Wo-
men understand. We may share experi-
ences, make jokes, paint pictures, and
describe humiliations that mean nothing
to men, but women understand.
The odd thing about these deep and
personal connections of women is that
they often ignore barriers of age, eco-
nomics, worldly experience, race, cul-
ture—all the barriers that, in male or
mixed society, had seemed so difficult
to cross.
I remember meeting with a group of
women in Missouri who, because they
had come in equal numbers from the
small town and from its nearby campus,
seemed to be split between wives with
white gloves welded to their wrists and
students with boots who talked about
“imperialism” and “oppression.” Plan-
ning for a child care center had brought
them together, but the meeting seemed
hopeless until three of the booted young
women began to argue among them-
selves about a young male professor, the
leader of the radicals on campus, who
accused all women unwilling to run mim-
eograph machines of not being suffi-
ciently devoted to the cause. As for child
care centers, he felt their effect of allow-
ing women to compete with men for jobs
was part of the “feminization” of the
American male and American culture.
“He sounds just like my husband,”
said one of the white-gloved women,
va
“only he wants me to have bake-sales
and collect door-to-door for his Repub-
lican Party.”
The young women had sense enough
to take it from there. What did boots or
white gloves matter if they were all get-
ting treated like servants and children?
Before they broke up, they were dis-
cussing the myth of the vaginal orgasm
and planning to meet every week. “Men
think we’re whatever it is we do for
men,” explained one of the housewives.
“It’s only by getting together with other
women that we'll ever find out who
we are.”
Even racial differences become a lit-
tle less hopeless once we discover this
mutuality of our life experience as
women. At a meeting run by black
women domestics who had formed a job
cooperative in Alabama, a white house-
wife asked me about the consciousness-
raising sessions or “rap groups” that are
the basic unit of the Women’s Movement.
I explained that while men, even minor-
ity men, usually had someplace where
they could get together every day and
be themselves, women were isolated in
their houses; isolated from each other.
We had no street corners, no bars, no
offices, no territory that was recognized
as ours. Rap groups were an effort to
create that free place: an occasional
chance for total honesty and support
from our sisters.
As I talked about isolation, the feel-
ing that there must be something wrong
with us if we weren't content to be house-
keepers and mothers, tears began to
stream down the cheeks of this dignified
woman—clearly as much of a surprise
to her as to us. For the black women,
some barrier was broken down by see-
ing her cry.
“He does it to us both, honey,” said
the black woman next to her, putting an
arm around her shoulders. “If it’s your
own kitchen or somebody else’s, you still
don’t get treated like people. Women’s
work just doesn’t count.”
The meeting ended with the housewife
Organizing a support group of white
women who would extract from their
husbands a living wage for domestic
workers and help them fight the local
hierarchy: a support group without which
the domestic workers felt their small
and brave cooperative could not sur-
vive.
As for the ‘matriarchal’ argument that
I swallowed in pre-feminist days, I now
understand why many black women re-
sent it and feel that it’s the white soci-
ologist’s way of encouraging the black
community to imitate a white suburban
life style. (“If I end up cooking grits for
revolutionaries,’ explained a black
woman poet from Chicago, “‘it isn’t
my revolution. Black men and women
need to work together for partnership,
not patriarchy. You can’t have libera-
tion for half a race.’’) In fact, some black
women wonder if criticism of the
strength they were forced to develop isn't
a way to keep half the black commu-
nity working at lowered capacity and
lowered pay, as well as to attribute some
of black men’s sufferings to black wom-
en, instead of to their real source—white
racism. I wonder with them.
Looking back at all those male-ap-
proved things I used to say, the basic
hang-up seems clear: a lack of esteem
for women—black women, Chicana
women, white women—and for myself.
This is the most tragic punishment that
society inflicts on any second-class group.
Ultimately, the brainwashing works, and
we ourselves come to believe our group
is inferior. Even if we achieve a little
success in the world and think of our-
selves as “different,” we don’t want to
associate with our group. We want to
identify up, not down (clearly my prob-
lem in not wanting to write about women,
and not wanting to join women’s groups).
We want to be the only woman in the
office, or the only black family on the
block, or the only Jew in the club.
The pain of looking back at wasted,
imitative years is enormous. Trying to
write like men. Valuing myself and other
women according to the degree of our
acceptance by men—socially, in politics,
and in our professions. It’s as painful as
it is now to hear two grown-up female
human beings competing with each other
on the basis of their husbands’ status, like
servants whose identity rests on the
wealth or accomplishments of their em-
ployers.
And this lack of esteem that makes
us put each other down is still the major
enemy of sisterhood. Women who are
conforming to society’s expectations view
the non-conformists with justifiable
alarm. ‘“‘Those noisy, unfeminine
women,” they say to themselves. “They
will only make trouble for us all.”
Women who are quietly non-conform-
ing, hoping nobody will notice, are even
more alarmed because they have more
to lose. And that makes sense, too.
Because the status quo protects itself
by punishing all challengers, especially
women whose rebellion strikes at the
most fundamental social organization:
the sex roles that convince half the pop-
ulation its identity depends on being first
in work or in war, and the other half that
it must serve as docile (“feminine”) un-
paid or underpaid labor. There seems to
be no punishment inside the white male
club that quite equals the ridicule and
personal viciousness reserved for
women who rebel. Attractive or young
women who act forcefully are assumed
to be male-controlled. If they succeed, it
could only have been sexually, through
men. Old women or women considered
unattractive by male standards are ac-
cused of acting only out of bitterness,
because they could not get a man. Any
woman who chooses to behave like a full
human being should be warned that the
armies of the status quo will treat her as
something of a dirty joke; that’s their
natural and first weapon. She will need
sisterhood.
All of that is meant to be a warning
but not a discouragement. There are so
many more rewards than punishments.
For myself, I can now admit anger,
and use it constructively, where once I
would have submerged it and let it fester
into guilt or collect for some destructive
explosion.
I have met brave women who are ex-
ploring the outer edge of human possi-
bility, with no history to guide them,
and with a courage to make themselves
vulnerable that I find moving beyond
the words to express it.
I no longer think that I do not exist,
which was my version of that lack of
self-esteem afflicting many women. (If
male standards weren't natural to me,
and they were the only standards, how
could I exist?) This means that I am less
likely to need male values to identify
myself with and am less vulnerable to
classic arguments (“If you don’t like me,
you're not a Real Woman”=—said by a
man who is Coming On. “If you don’t
like me, you are not a Real Person, and
you can’t relate to other people’’— said by
anyone who understands blackmail as
an art).
I can sometimes deal with men as
equals and therefore can afford to like
them for the first time.
I have discovered politics that are not
intellectual or superimposed. They are
organic, because I finally understand
why I for years inexplicably identified
with “out” groups. I belong to one, too.
It will take a coalition of such groups to
achieve a society in which, at a mini-
mum, no one is born into a second-class
role because of visible difference, be-
cause of race or of sex.
I no longer feel strange by myself, or
with a group of women in public. I feel
just fine.
I am continually moved to discover
I have sisters.
I am beginning, just beginning, to find
out who I am. s
Gloria Steinem is a writer and feminist
whose work has appeared in most major
magazines. She is a member of the
Policy Council of the National Women’s
Political Caucus.
SPRING/72 49
Jane O'Reilly
The Housewife’s
“The women in
the group
looked at
each other,
and click! The
shock of rec-
ognition.. .
One little click
turns on a
thousand
others ”’
Last June, 40 people
were lying on a floor in
Aspen, Colorado, float-
ing free and uneasy on
the indoor/outdoor car-
pet, eyes closed, being
led through the first
phase of a “Workshop
in Approaching Unisex-
uality.” It would turn
out later that the aim
of the exercise was not
. to solve the problem of
who does what and to whom, but to reveal to
the participants that adjectives such as warm,
violent, soft, timid, peaceful, and aggressive are
not necessarily definitions for male or female.
We closed our eyes and cleared our minds.
Slowly we perceived a lake in the distance,
and as we walked toward it, the surface became
smooth as a mirror into which we could look
and see our reflection. There was no reflection.
Infinitely slowly, we began to evolve into the
animal that most expressed our own ideas of
ourselves—of our sensual selves. Minutes
passed and we became aware of the other
animals around us. At last we opened our
eyes and those animals that felt like it did
whatever seemed natural. Most of the women
twittered or purred. Most of the men growled,
or attempted to wag tails. I was a cat, black,
with a lovely long tail, sitting under a red
geranium in a sunny window. We formed groups
in our part of the conference-room forest, and
told each other what we had become.
“T was a snake,” said a beautiful young
woman, a professional designer. “As I was
moving through the grass, enjoying my slith-
ering, curving progress, I realized I had no
fangs. No bite. I couldn’t even hiss. My only
protection was that I could change color in
reaction to the people that passed by. I started
to go through my garden and I saw that there
were panthers draped over all the lawn furni-
ture. I went into my house, and there were
panthers everywhere, filling every chair, curled
up in groups in all the rooms. They were eat-
ing, rather elegantly, and no one paid any
attention to me, even when I asked if they
wanted anything more to eat. I was interested,
but I was different, and finally I withdrew.”
The women in the group looked at her,
looked at each other, and. . . click! A moment
of truth. The shock of recognition. Instant sis-
terhood. “You became a housewife,” we said,
excited, together, turning to the men to see if
they understood. “She is describing a house-
wife. Do you know that?”
“Hmm, yes, well, uh . . .” they said, sensi-
tized for the morning, but eager to recount
their own stories of becoming spotted leopards
in green forests, of turning to griffins with
human heads who know and see all. The next
time, or perhaps the time after that, they will
recognize the click! of recognition, that paren-
thesis of truth around a little thing that com-
pletes the puzzle of reality in women’s minds—
the moment that brings a gleam to our eyes
and means the revolution has begun.
Those clicks are coming faster and faster.
They were nearly audible last summer, which
was a very angry summer for American women.
Not redneck-angry from screaming because we
are so frustrated and unfulfilled-angry, but
clicking -things -into-place-angry, because we
have suddenly and shockingly perceived the
basic disorder in what has been believed to be
the natural order of things.
One little click turns on a thousand others.
I had been sitting in that Aspen room, feeling
a very liberated cat—alone on my window sill,
self-sufficient and self-enclosed, able to purr
or scratch as I chose. I was fooling myself.
If my free-association had had any connection
with my actual life, I would have evolved as a
pig. But I followed the pattern of my socializa-
tion: cued by the word sensual, I became a
nice, domestic cat, sitting under a healthy well-
watered geranium, watching the sunlight fall
through a clean window, over a dust-free win-
dow sill, across a polished floor. The room
was cozy, with a tea tray by the fire. In another
five minutes of meditating evolution, I would
have jumped off the window sill and started
curling around the leg of a dog.
In fact, parables are unnecessary for recog-
nizing the blatant absurdity of everyday life.
Reality is lesson enough. In Houston, Texas, a
friend of mine stood and watched her husband
step over a pile of toys on the stairs, put there
to be carried up. “Why can’t you get this stuff
put away?” he mumbled. Click! “You have
two hands,” she said, turning away.
Last summer I got a letter, from a man
who wrote: “I do not agree with your last
article, and I am cancelling my wife’s subscrip-
IHustrated by Miriam Wosk
Moment of Truth
tion.” The next day I got a letter from his
wife saying, “J am not cancelling my subscrip-
tion.” Click!
On Fire Island my weekend hostess and I
had just finished cooking breakfast, lunch, and
washing dishes for both. A male guest came
wandering into the kitchen just as the last dish
was being put away and said, “How about
something to eat?” He sat down, expectantly,
and started to read the paper. Click! “You
work all week,” said the hostess, “and J work
all week, and if you want something to eat,
you can get it, and wash up after it yourself.”
In New York last fall, my neighbors—named
Jones—had a couple named Smith over for
dinner. Mr. Smith kept telling his wife to get
up and help Mrs. Jones. Click! Click! Two
women radicalized at once.
A woman I know in St. Louis, who had
begun to enjoy a little success writing a grain
company’s newsletter, came home to tell her
husband about lunch in the executive dining
room. She had planned a funny little anecdote
about the deeply humorous pomposity of ex-
ecutives, when she noticed her husband rocking
with laughter. “Ho ho, my little wife in an exec-
utive dining room.” Click!
Last August, I was on a boat leaving an
island in Maine. Two families were with me,
and the mothers were discussing the troubles
of cleaning up after a rental summer. “Bob
cleaned up the bathroom for me, didn’t you
honey?” she confided, gratefully patting her
husband’s knee. “Well, what the hell, it’s vaca-
tion,” he said, fondly. The two women looked
at each other, and the queerest change came
over their faces. “I got up at six this morning
to make the sandwiches for the trip home from
this ‘vacation,’ ” the first one said. “So I won-
der why I’ve thanked him at least six times
for cleaning the bath-
room?” Click! Click!
Attitudes are ex-
pressed in semantic
equations that simply
turn Out to be two lan-
guages; one for men
and another for women.
One morning a friend
of mine told her hus-
band she would like to
hire a baby sitter so she
could get back to her
painting. “Maybe when you start tomake money ‘| qg not agree
from your pictures, then we could think about
it,” said her husband. My friend didn’t stop to
argue the inherent fallacy in his point—how
could she make money if no one was willing to
free her for work? She suggested that, instead
of hiring someone, he could help with the
housework a little more. “Well, I don’t know,
honey,” he said, “I guess sharing the housework
is all right if the wife is really contributing
something, brings in a salary. . . .” For a ter-
rible minute my friend thought she would kill
her husband, right there at breakfast, in front
of the children. For ten years, she had been
covering furniture,
hanging wallpaper, mak-
ing curtains and refin-
ishing floors so that
they could afford the
mortgage on their apart-
ment. She had planned
the money-saving men-
us so they could afford
the little dinners for
prospective clients. She
had crossed town to
save money on clothes
so the family could have a new hi-fi. All the
little advances in station—the vacations, the
theater tickets, the new car—had been made
possible by her crafty, endless, worried manipu-
lation of the household expenses. “I was under
the impression,” she said, “that I was contrib-
uting something. Evidently my life’s blood is
simply a non-deductible expense.”
In suburban Chicago, the party consisted of
three couples. The women were a writer, a
doctor and a teacher. The men were all law-
yers. As the last couple arrived, the host said,
jovially, “With a roomful of lawyers, we ought
to have a good evening.” Silence. Click! “What
are we?” asked the teacher. “Invisible?”
In an office, a political columnist, male, was
waiting to see the editor-in-chief. Leaning
against a doorway, the columnist turned to the
first woman he saw and said, “Listen, call
Barry Brown and tell him Ill be late.” Click!
It wasn’t because she happened to be an editor
herself that she refused to make the call.
In the end, we are all housewives, the natural
people to turn to when there is something un-
pleasant, inconvenient or inconclusive to be
with your last
article, and I
am cancelling
my wife’s sub-
scription’”’
SPRING/72 55
pT RENE ee = Se
Ns
First Voice:
I am slow as the world. I am patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon’s concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse,
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.
When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.
Second Voice:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
It watched the men walk about me in the office. They were
so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I
had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed—and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,
And the man I work for laughed: ““Have you seen something
awful?
You are so white, suddenly.” And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it. Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from those black keys, and these black
keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts.
Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit. I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
From the forthcoming book, ‘Winter Trees,” by Sylvia Plath, published by Harper & Row.
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These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs. I am found wanting.
This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death. Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I suck up? Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then? This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?
Third Voice:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine—
It had a consequential look, like everything else.
And all I could see was dangers: doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold—conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing
And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it—small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.
I wasn’t ready. The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn’t ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence—
But it was too late for that. It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.
Second Voice:
It is a world of snow now. I am not at home.
How white these sheets are. The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me: they are terrible.
SPRING/72 85
They have too many colors, too much life. They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.
I have had my chances. I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.
I did not look. But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces. The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.
It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat! They are
jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
“Let us make a heaven,” they say.
“Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.”
First Voice:
I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors. It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten. Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!
I am dumb and brown. I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness! —
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?
I talk to myself, myself only, set apart—
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Watting lies heavy on my lids. It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea. Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.
Third Voice:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind. They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.
And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have soon the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks. It is not happy.
“This is where you will come: when you are ready.”
The night lights are flat red moons. They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.
First Voice:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am drugged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last. I last it out. I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?
Can such innocence kill and kill? It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street. The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of
instruments
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good: O let me be!
A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world. There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness. I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick. It is thick with this working.
I am used. I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.
Second Voice:
I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world
conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint. It is red.
I lose life after life. The dark earth drinks them.
She is the vampire of us all. So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind. Her mouth is red.
I know her. I know her intimately—
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly. She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down. I die. I make a death.
First Voice:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales. He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.
Second Voice:
There is the moon in the high window. It is over.
How winter fills my soul! And the chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty
Offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches. O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation. This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar
sleepers—
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?
I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.
I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.
I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor those stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.
Third Voice:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.
I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth. Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.
First Voice:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they’ve come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
\Ilustrated by Anita Siegel
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.
I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars onto the world—
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images. They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched. They are walkers of air.
Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry. It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.
Second Voice:
I am not ugly. I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that. I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic. Here is my lipstick.
I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago. It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.
And so I stand, a little sightless. So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs. And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.
SPRING/72
87
Third Voice:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting: Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing. It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been
cared for tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.
There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages:
I go.
Second Voice:
I am myself again. There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped,
begun again.
These little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows—she is neat.
So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
How shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
Itis I. ItisI— —
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.
First Voice:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?
How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my. hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open: it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.
Third Voice:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.
First Voice:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back. They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows. I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.
Il am reassured. I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again. I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless
hands.
They are not mine. They do not belong to me.
I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. He does not speak a word.
He is still swaddled in white bands,
But he is pink and perfect. He smiles so frequently.
I have papered his room with big roses,
I have painted little hearts on everything.
I do not will him to be exceptional.
It is the exception that interests the devil.
It is the exception that climbs the sorrowful hill
Or sits in the desert and hurts his mother’s heart.
I will him to be common,
To love me as I love him,
And to marry what he wants and where he will.
Third Voice:
Hot noon in the meadows. The buttercups
Swelter and melt, and the lovers
Pass by, pass by.
They are black and flat as shadows.
It is so beautiful to have no attachments!
I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?
The swans are gone. Still the river
Remembers how white they were.
It strives after them with its lights.
It finds their shapes in a cloud.
What is that bird that cries
With such sorrow in its voice?
I am young as ever, it says. What is it I miss?
Second Voice:
I am at home in the lamplight. The evenings are lengthening.
I am mending a silk slip: my husband is reading.
How beautifully the light includes these things.
There is a kind of smoke in the spring air,
A smoke that takes the parks, the little statues
With pinkness, as if a tenderness awoke.
A tenderness that did not tire, something healing.
I wait and ache. I think I have been healing.
There is a great deal else to do. My hands
Can stitch lace neatly onto this material. My husband
Can turn and turn the pages of a book.
And so we are at home together, after hours.
It is only time, that weighs upon our hands.
It is only time, and that is not material.
The streets may turn to paper suddenly, but I recover
From the long fall, and find myself in bed,
Safe on the mattress, hands braced, as for a fall.
I find myself again. I am no shadow
Though there is a shadow starting from my feet. I am a wife.
The city waits and aches. The little grasses
Crack through stone, and they are green with life.
Perhaps the most important thing about Sylvia Plath was just
this: she was a poet. “Ariel” and other collections of poems
written before her death in 1963 have made her a heroine, al-
most a cult figure, to millions of women. This play is the long-
est unpublished work remaining from her brief creative life.
She died a mother of two, estranged wife of English poet Ted
Hughes; a suicide at thirty.
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