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Title: Sex Slavery Author: Voltairine de Cleyre Language: en Topics: sexuality Source: Retrieved on March 24th, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/cleyre/sexslavery.html
Night in a prison cell! A chair, a bed, a small washstand, four blank
walls, ghastly in the dim light from the corridor without, a narrow
window, barred and sunken in the stone, a grated door! Beyond its
hideous iron latticework, within the ghastly walls,—a man! An old man,
gray-haired and wrinkled, lame and suffering. There he sits, in his
great loneliness, shut in from all the earth. There he walks, to and
fro, within his measured space, apart from all he loves! There, for
every night in five long years to come, he will walk alone, while the
white age-flakes drop upon his head, while the last years of the winter
of life gather and pass, and his body draws near the ashes. Every night,
for five long years to come, he will sit alone, this chattel slave,
whose hard toil is taken by the State,—and without recompense save that
the Southern planter gave his negroes,—every night he will sit there so
within those four white walls. Every night, for five long years to come,
a suffering woman will lie upon her bed, longing, longing for the end of
those three thousand days; longing for the kind face, the patient hand,
that in so many years had never failed her. Every night, for five long
years to come, the proud spirit must rebel, the loving heart must bleed,
the broken home must lie desecrated. As I am speaking now, as you are
listening, there within the cell of that accursed penitentiary whose
stones have soaked up the sufferings of so many victims, murdered, as
truly as any outside their walls, by that slow rot which eats away
existence inch-meal,—as I am speaking now, as you are listening, there
sits Moses Harman!
Why? Why, when murder now is stalking in your streets, when dens of
infamy are so thick within your city that competition has forced down
the price of prostitution to the level of the wages of your starving
shirt-makers; when robbers sit in State and national Senate and House,
when the boasted "bulwark of our liberties," the elective franchise, has
become a U. S. dice-box, wherewith great gamblers play away your
liberties; when debauchees of the worst type hold all your public
offices and dine off the food of fools who support them, why, then, sits
Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If he is so great a criminal,
why is he not with the rest of the spawn of crime, dining at Delmonico's
or enjoying a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in the name of
wonder did he ever get in the penitentiary?
Ah, no; it is not because he has done any evil thing; but because he, a
pure enthusiast, searching, searching always for the cause of misery of
the kind which he loved with that broad love of which only the pure soul
is capable, searched for the data of evil. And searching so he found the
vestibule of life to be a prison cell; the holiest and purest part of
the temple of the body, if indeed one part can be holier or purer than
another, the altar where the most devotional love in truth should be
laid, he found this altar ravished, despoiled, trampled upon. He found
little babies, helpless, voiceless little things, generated in lust,
cursed with impure moral natures, cursed, prenatally, with the germs of
disease, forced into the world to struggle and to suffer, to hate
themselves, to hate their mothers for bearing them, to hate society and
to be hated by it in return,—a bane upon self and race, draining the
lees of crime. And he said, this felon with the stripes upon his body,
"Let the mothers of the race go free! Let the little children be pure
love children, born of the mutual desire for parentage. Let the manacles
be broken from the shackled slave, that no more slaves be born, no more
tyrants conceived."
He looked, this obscenist, looked with clear eyes into this ill-got
thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage, and saw in it
the consummation of immorality, impurity, and injustice. He beheld every
married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name,
her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's
passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of
travail at his dictation,—not at her desire; who can control no
property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose
straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure, or
willed away while they are yet unborn. It is said the English language
has a sweeter word than any other,—home. But Moses Harman looked beneath
the word and saw the fact,—a prison more horrible than that where he is
sitting now, whose corridors radiate over all the earth, and with so
many cells, that none may count them.
Yes, our Masters! The earth is a prison, the marriage-bed is a cell,
women are the prisoners, and you are the keepers!
He saw, this corruptionist, how in those cells are perpetrated such
outrages as are enough to make the cold sweat stand upon the forehead,
and the nails clench, and the teeth set, and the lips grow white in
agony and hatred. And he saw too how from those cells might none come
forth to break her fetters, how no slave dare cry out, how all these
murders are done quietly, beneath the shelter-shadow of home, and
sanctified by the angelic benediction of a piece of paper, within the
silence-shade of a marriage certificate, Adultery and Rape stalk freely
and at ease.
Yes, for that is adultery where woman submits herself sexually to man,
without desire on her part, for the sake of "keeping him virtuous,"
"keeping him at home," the women say. (Well, if a man did not love me
and respect himself enough to be "virtuous" without prostituting me, he
might go, and welcome. He has no virtue to keep.) And that is rape,
where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed
by the marriage law to do it or not. And that is the vilest of all
tyranny where a man compels the woman he says he loves, to endure the
agony of bearing children that she does not want, and for whom, as is
the rule rather than the exception, they cannot properly provide. It is
worse than any other human oppression; it is fairly God-like! To the
sexual tyrant there is no parallel upon earth; one must go to the skies
to find a fiend who thrusts life upon his children only to starve and
curse and outcast and damn them! And only through the marriage law is
such tyranny possible. The man who deceives a woman outside of marriage
(and mind you, such a man will deceive in marriage too) may deny his own
child, if he is mean enough. He cannot tear it from her arms—he cannot
touch it! The girl he wronged, thanks to your very pure and tender
morality-standard, may die in the street for want of food. He cannot
force his hated presence upon her again. But his wife, gentlemen, his
wife, the woman he respects so much that he consents to let her merge
her individuality into his, lose her identity and become his chattel,
his wife he may not only force unwelcome children upon, outrage at his
own good pleasure, and keep as a general cheap and convenient piece of
furniture, but if she does not get a divorce (and she cannot for such
cause) he can follow her wherever she goes, come into her house, eat her
food, force her into the cell, kill her by virtue of his sexual
authority! And she has no redress unless he is indiscreet enough to
abuse her in some less brutal but unlicensed manner. I know a case in
your city where a woman was followed so for ten years by her husband. I
believe he finally developed grace enough to die; please applaud him for
the only decent thing he ever did.
Oh, is it not rare, all this talk about the preservation of morality by
marriage law! O splendid carefulness to preserve that which you have not
got! O height and depth of purity, which fears so much that the children
will not know who their fathers are, because, forsooth, they must rely
upon their mother's word instead of the hired certification of some
priest of the Church, or the Law! I wonder if the children would be
improved to know what their fathers have done. I would rather, much
rather, not know who my father was than know he had been a tyrant to my
mother. I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the
statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of
Nature. For what is it to be legitimate, born "according to law"? It is
to be, nine cases out of ten, the child of a man who acknowledges his
fatherhood simply because he is forced to do so, and whose conception of
virtue is realized by the statement that "a woman's duty is to keep her
husband at home"; to be the child of a woman who cares more for the
benediction of Mrs. Grundy than the simple honor of her lover's word,
and conceives prostitution to be purity and duty when exacted of her by
her husband. It is to have Tyranny as your progenitor, and slavery as
your prenatal cradle. It is to run the risk of unwelcome birth, "legal"
constitutional weakness, morals corrupted before birth, possibly a
murder instinct, the inheritance of excessive sexuality or no sexuality,
either of which is disease. It is to have the value of a piece of paper,
a rag from the tattered garments of the "Social Contract," set above
health, beauty, talent or goodness; for I never yet had difficulty in
obtaining the admission that illegitimate children are nearly always
prettier and brighter than others, even from conservative women. And how
supremely disgusting it is to see them look from their own puny, sickly,
lust-born children, upon whom lie the chain-traces of their own terrible
servitude, look from these to some healthy, beautiful "natural" child,
and say, "What a pity its mother wasn't virtuous!" Never a word about
their children's fathers' virtue, they know too much! Virtue! Disease,
stupidity, criminality! What an obscene thing "virtue" is!
What is it to be illegitimate? To be despised, or pitied, by those whose
spite or whose pity isn't worth the breath it takes to return it. To be,
possibly, the child of some man contemptible enough to deceive a woman;
the child of some woman whose chief crime was belief in the man she
loved. To be free from the prenatal curse of a slave mother, to come
into the world without the permission of any law-making set of tyrants
who assume to corner the earth, and say what terms the unborn must make
for the privilege of coming into existence. This is legitimacy and
illegitimacy! Choose.
The man who walks to and fro in his cell in Lansing penitentiary
to-night, this vicious man, said: "The mothers of the race are lifting
their dumb eyes to me, their sealed lips to me, their agonizing hearts
to me. They are seeking, seeking for a voice! The unborn in their
helplessness, are pleading from their prisons, pleading for a voice! The
criminals, with the unseen ban upon their souls, that has pushed them,
pushed them to the vortex, out of their whirling hells, are looking,
waiting for a voice! I will be their voice. I will unmask the outrages
of the marriage-bed. I will make known how criminals are born. I will
make one outcry that shall be heard, and let what will be, be!" He cried
out through the letter of Dr. Markland, that a young mother lacerated by
unskilful surgery in the birth of her babe, but recovering from a
subsequent successful operation, had been stabbed, remorselessly,
cruelly, brutally stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative
organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death, and yet there was
no redress!
And because he called a spade a spade, because he named that organ by
its own name, so given in Webster's dictionary and in every medical
journal in the country, because of this Moses Harman walks to and fro in
his cell to-night. He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex
slavery, and for it he is imprisoned. It remains for us now to carry on
the battle, and lift the standard where they struck him down, to scatter
broadcast the knowledge of this crime of society against a man and the
reason for it; to inquire into this vast system of licensed crime, its
cause and its effect, broadly upon the race. The Cause! Let woman ask
herself, "Why am I the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not to be the
equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his? Why must
my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the
household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my
children from me? Will them away while yet unborn?" Let every woman ask.
There are two reasons why, and these ultimately reducible to a single
principle—the authoritarian, supreme-power, God-idea, and its two
instruments, the Church—that is, the priests—and the State—that is, the
legislators.
From the birth of the Church, out of the womb of Fear and the fatherhood
of Ignorance, it has taught the inferiority of woman. In one form or
another through the various mythical legends of the various mythical
creeds, runs the undercurrent of the belief in the fall of man through
the persuasion of woman, her subjective condition as punishment, her
natural vileness, total depravity, etc.; and from the days of Adam until
now the Christian Church, with which we have specially to deal, has made
woman the excuse, the scapegoat for the evil deeds of man. So thoroughly
has this idea permeated Society that numbers of those who have utterly
repudiated the Church, are nevertheless soaked in this stupefying
narcotic to true morality. So pickled is the male creation with the
vinegar of Authoritarianism, that even those who have gone further and
repudiated the State still cling to the god, Society as it is, still hug
the old theological idea that they are to be "heads of the family"—to
that wonderful formula "of simple proportion" that "Man is the head of
the Woman even as Christ is the head of the Church." No longer than a
week since an Anarchist (?) said to me, "I will be boss in my own
house"—a "Communist-Anarchist," if you please, who doesn't believe in
"my house." About a year ago a noted libertarian speaker said, in my
presence, that his sister, who possessed a fine voice and had joined a
concert troupe, should "stay at home with her children; that is her
place." The old Church idea! This man was a Socialist, and since an
Anarchist; yet his highest idea for woman was serfhood to husband and
children, in the present mockery called "home." Stay at home, ye
malcontents! Be patient, obedient, submissive! Darn our socks, mend our
shirts, wash our dishes, get our meals, wait on us and mind the
children! Your fine voices are not to delight the public nor yourselves;
your inventive genius is not to work, your fine art taste is not to be
cultivated, your business faculties are not to be developed; you made
the great mistake of being born with them, suffer for your folly! You
are women! therefore housekeepers, servants, waiters, and child's
nurses!
At Macon, in the sixth century, says August Bebel, the fathers of the
Church met and proposed the decision of the question, "Has woman a
soul?" Having ascertained that the permission to own a nonentity wasn't
going to injure any of their parsnips, a small majority vote decided the
momentous question in our favor. Now, holy fathers, it was a tolerably
good scheme on your part to offer the reward of your pitiable "salvation
or damnation" (odds in favor of the latter) as a bait for the hook of
earthly submission; it wasn't a bad sop in those days of Faith and
Ignorance. But fortunately fourteen hundred years have made it stale.
You, tyrant radicals (?), have no heaven to offer,—you have no
delightful chimeras in the form of "merit cards"; you have (save the
mark) the respect, the good offices, the smiles—of a slave-holder! This
in return for our chains! Thanks!
The question of souls is old—we demand our bodies, now. We are tired of
promises, God is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy. Against it we
bring the charge of being the moral (or immoral) force which lies behind
the tyranny of the State. And the State has divided the loaves and
fishes with the Church, the magistrates, like the priests take marriage
fees; the two fetters of Authority have gone into partnership in the
business of granting patent-rights to parents for the privilege of
reproducing themselves, and the State cries as the Church cried of old,
and cries now: "See how we protect women!" The State has done more. It
has often been said to me, by women with decent masters, who had no idea
of the outrages practiced on their less fortunate sisters, "Why don't
the wives leave?"
Why don't you run, when your feet are chained together? Why don't you
cry out when a gag is on your lips? Why don't you raise your hands above
your head when they are pinned fast to your sides? Why don't you spend
thousands of dollars when you haven't a cent in your pocket? Why don't
you go to the seashore or the mountains, you fools scorching with city
heat? If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed
tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine
stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, "Why
don't the women leave!" Will you tell me where they will go and what
they shall do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself, the
politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live;
when, through this precious monopoly, already the market of labor is so
overstocked that workmen and workwomen are cutting each others' throats
for the dear privilege of serving their lords; when girls are shipped
from Boston to the south and north, shipped in carloads, like cattle, to
fill the dives of New Orleans or the lumber-camp hells of my own state
(Michigan), when seeing and hearing these things reported every day, the
proper prudes exclaim, "Why don't the women leave," they simply beggar
the language of contempt.
When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling men to catch their
fellows more brutally than runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic,
unrepublican Canada, still stretched her arms to those who might reach
her. But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex. Right where
we are, there we must dig our trenches, and win or die.
This, then, is the tyranny of the State; it denies, to both woman and
man, the right to earn a living, and grants it as a privilege to a
favored few who for that favor must pay ninety per cent. toll to the
granters of it. These two things, the mind domination of the Church, and
the body domination of the State are the causes of Sex Slavery.
First of all, it has introduced into the world the constructed crime of
obscenity: it has set up such a peculiar standard of morals that to
speak the names of the sexual organs is to commit the most brutal
outrage. It reminds me that in your city you have a street called
"Callowhill." Once it was called Gallows' Hill, for the elevation to
which it leads, now known as "Cherry Hill," has been the last touching
place on earth for the feet of many a victim murdered by the Law. But
the sound of the word became too harsh; so they softened it, though the
murders are still done, and the black shadow of the Gallows still hangs
on the City of Brotherly Love. Obscenity has done the same; it has
placed virtue in the shell of an idea, and labelled all "good" which
dwells within the sanction of Law and respectable (?) custom; and all
bad which contravenes the usage of the shell. It has lowered the dignity
of the human body, below the level of all other animals. Who thinks a
dog is impure or obscene because its body is not covered with
suffocating and annoying clothes? What would you think of the meanness
of a man who would put a skirt upon his horse and compel it to walk or
run with such a thing impeding its limbs? Why, the "Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" would arrest him, take the beast from
him, and he would be sent to a lunatic asylum for treatment on the score
of an impure mind. And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the
creatures you say you respect and love, to wear the longest skirts and
the highest necked clothing, in order to conceal the obscene human body.
There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to women. And you,
yourselves, though a little better, look at the heat you wear in this
roasting weather! How you curse your poor body with the wool you steal
from the sheep! How you punish yourselves to sit in a crowded house with
coats and vests on, because dead Mme. Grundy is shocked at the
"vulgarity" of shirt sleeves, or the naked arm!
Look how the ideal of beauty has been marred by this obscenity notion.
Divest yourselves of prejudice for once. Look at some fashion-slaved
woman, her waist surrounded by a high-board fence called a corset, her
shoulders and hips angular from the pressure above and below, her feet
narrowest where they should be widest, the body fettered by her
everlasting prison skirt, her hair fastened tight enough to make her
head ache and surmounted by a thing of neither sense nor beauty, called
a hat, ten to one a hump upon her back like a dromedary,—look at her,
and then imagine such a thing as that carved in marble! Fancy a statue
in Fairmount Park with a corset and bustle on. Picture to yourselves the
image of the equestrienne. We are permitted to ride, providing we sit in
a position ruinous to the horse; providing we wear a riding-habit long
enough to hide the obscene human foot, weighed down by ten pounds of
gravel to cheat the Wind in its free blowing, so running the risk of
disabling ourselves completely should accident throw us from the saddle.
Think how we swim! We must even wear clothing in the water, and run the
gauntlet of derision, if we dare battle in the surf minus stockings!
Imagine a fish trying to make headway with a water-soaked flannel
garment upon it. Nor are you yet content. The vile standard of obscenity
even kills the little babies with clothes. The human race is murdered,
horribly, "in the name of" Dress.
And in the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has
engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth
about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a
human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood. When they
come to you with a simple, straightforward question, which they have a
right to ask, you say, "Don't ask such questions," or tell some silly
hollow-log story; or you explain the incomprehensibility by another—God!
You say "God made you." You know you are lying when you say it. You
know, or you ought to know, that the source of inquiry will not be
dammed up so. You know that what you could explain purely, reverently,
rightly (if you have any purity in you), will be learned through many
blind gropings, and that around it will be cast the shadow-thought of
wrong, embryo'd by your denial and nurtured by this social opinion
everywhere prevalent. If you do not know this, then you are blind to
facts and deaf to Experience.
Think of the double social standard the enslavement of our sex has
evolved. Women considering themselves very pure and very moral, will
sneer at the street-walker, yet admit to their homes the very men who
victimized the street-walker. Men, at their best, will pity the
prostitute, while they themselves are the worst kind of prostitutes.
Pity yourselves, gentlemen—you need it!
How many times do you see where a man or woman has shot another through
jealousy! The standard of purity has decided that it is right, "it shows
spirit," "it is justifiable" to—murder a human being for doing exactly
what you did yourself,—love the same woman or same man! Morality! Honor!
Virtue!! Passing from the moral to the physical phase; take the
statistics of any insane asylum, and you will find that, out of the
different classes, unmarried women furnish the largest one. To preserve
your cruel, vicious, indecent standard of purity (?) you drive your
daughters insane, while your wives are killed with excess. Such is
marriage. Don't take my word for it; go through the report of any asylum
or the annals of any graveyard.
Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to
curb their love natures—restrained at every turn! Your blasting lies
would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish,
must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must
not do anything they desire to do which Madame Grundy has decreed
"improper." Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if
they want to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up,
"Oh! Men don't care for home or children as women do!" Why should they,
when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature
out of them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any animal, or any
plant, as you train your girls, and it won't be able to rough it either.
Now will somebody tell me why either sex should hold a corner on
athletic sports? Why any child should not have free use of its limbs?
These are the effects of your purity standard, your marriage law. This
is your work—look at it! Half your children dying under five years of
age, your girls insane, your married women walking corpses, your men so
bad that they themselves often admit Prostitution holds against PURITY a
bond of indebtedness. This is the beautiful effect of your god,
Marriage, before which Natural Desire must abase and belie itself. Be
proud of it!
Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought
equity anywhere—LIBERTY! Centuries upon centuries of liberty is the only
thing that will cause the disintegration and decay of these pestiferous
ideas. Liberty was all that calmed the blood-waves of religious
persecution! You cannot cure serfhood by any other substitution. Not for
you to say "in this way shall the race love." Let the race alone.
Will there not be atrocious crimes? Certainly. He is a fool who says
there will not be. But you can't stop them by committing the arch-crime
and setting a block between the spokes of Progress-wheels. You will
never get right until you start right.
As for the final outcome, it matters not one iota. I have my ideal, and
it is very pure, and very sacred to me. But yours, equally sacred, may
be different and we may both be wrong. But certain am I that with free
contract, that form of sexual association will survive which is best
adapted to time and place, thus producing the highest evolution of the
type. Whether that shall be monogamy, variety, or promiscuity matters
naught to us; it is the business of the future, to which we dare not
dictate.
For freedom spoke Moses Harman, and for this he received the felon's
brand. For this he sits in his cell to-night. Whether it is possible
that his sentence be shortened, we do not know. We can only try. Those
who would help us try, let me ask to put your signatures to this simple
request for pardon addressed to Benjamin Harrison. To those who desire
more fully to inform themselves before signing; I say: Your
conscientiousness is praiseworthy—come to me at the close of the meeting
and I will quote the exact language of the Markland letter. To those
extreme Anarchists who cannot bend their dignity to ask pardon for an
offense not committed, and of an authority they cannot recognize, let me
say: Moses Harman's back is bent, low bent, by the brute force of the
Law, and though I would never ask anyone to bow for himself, I can ask
it, and easily ask it, for him who fights the slave's battle. Your
dignity is criminal; every hour behind the bars is a seal to your
partnership with Comstock. No one can hate petitions worse than I; no
one has less faith in them than I. But for my champion I am willing to
try any means that invades no other's right, even though I have little
hope in it.
If, beyond these, there are those here to-night who have ever forced
sexual servitude from a wife, those who have prostituted themselves in
the name of Virtue, those who have brought diseased, immoral or
unwelcome children to the light, without the means of provision for
them, and yet will go from this hall and say, "Moses Harman is an
unclean man—a man rewarded by just punishment," then to you I say, and
may the words ring deep within your ears UNTIL YOU DIE: Go on! Drive
your sheep to the shambles! Crush that old, sick, crippled man beneath
your Juggernaut! In the name of Virtue, Purity and Morality, do it! In
the name of God, Home, and Heaven, do it! In the name of the Nazarene
who preached the golden rule, do it! In the name of Justice, Principle,
and Honor, do it! In the name of Bravery and Magnanimity put yourself on
the side of the robber in the government halls, the murderer in the
political convention, the libertine in public places, the whole brute
force of the police, the constabulary, the court, and the penitentiary,
to persecute one poor old man who stood alone against your licensed
crime! Do it. And if Moses Harman dies within your "Kansas Hell," be
satisfied when you have murdered him! Kill him! And you hasten the day
when the Future shall bury you ten thousand fathoms deep beneath its
curses. Kill him! And the stripes upon his prison clothes shall lash you
like the knout! Kill him! And the insane shall glitter hate at you with
their wild eyes, the unborn babes shall cry their blood upon you, and
the graves that you have filled in the name of Marriage, shall yield
food for a race that will pillory you, until the memory of your atrocity
has become a nameless ghost, flitting with the shades of Torquemada,
Calvin and Jehovah over the horizon of the World!
Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, "We are rid of this
obscenist"? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids!
The motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless,
folded hands, in their quietness would write the last indictment, which
neither Time nor you can efface. Kill him! And you write his glory and
your shame! Moses Harman in his felon stripes stands far above you now,
and Moses Harman dead will live on, immortal in the race he died to
free! Kill him!