At the Roots: Some Thoughts on Radicalism
Sonia Johnson
One night in a Mormon Church meeting about the Equal Rights Amendment, I had an epiphany. In a blaze of clarity, I saw that all was fundamentally wrong with just about everything that had to do with women in this world, and heard my own voice inside my head say with unquestionable authority, "Because men hate us." Horrified, I began to moan softly, "Oh, no! Oh, no!" Then suddenly, though I had never given either of them much thought, I understood what feminism and the Women's Movement were all about.
On the way home I turned to my husband and said, "I'm a feminist. In fact, I'm a radical feminist." Though I had much to learn, I knew that "radical" meant "at the roots," and that I'd been changed that night at the roots of my soul.
Even so, I understood feminism only in the most general way. That's why, in the ensuing months and years, I searched for the details of it, reading the brave books of dozens of feminist writers. Their clarity and courage--and often their fury--sustained me as I learned more than I could almost bear to know about men's violence against women throughout recorded history.
Along this torturous path, I kept in mind something Flannery O'Connor was once quoted as saying: "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." If I wanted to know the truth of women's lives, and therefore my own life, I couldn't allow any detail to be too grotesque, too ugly, or too monstrous to face. I needed to know all of it.
I also wanted to be involved in the fight for the ERA. But when I looked to the National Organization for Women for guidance, I was seriously disappointed ("bummed" as my teenagers would have said) to find that its political strategies were appeasement and non-threatening "femininity": make-up and skirts, for instance, soft voices sans the big sticks. My models were Alice Paul, the Pankhursts, Margaret Sanger, Matilda Gage--women so single-minded in their admiration for women and their passion for justice that they had no room for fear; women blazing with radical fire. I thought that, insofar as it was possible, NOW should be providing twentieth-century feminists with a model or two like them.
But since this didn't seem realistic, a group of us passionate, energetic, and disillusioned NOW members who lived near Washington, D.C. began a series of civilly disobedient actions ourselves, exploiting the ripe political climate created by ERA politics to raise the consciousness of American women. We planned our actions ostensibly to educate them about their exclusion from the Constitution, but also indirectly about men's entire agenda of marginalization and diminution of their lives.
We chained ourselves to the White House fence, went over the fence, and made it across the lawn almost to the front door with our list of demands for women's rights, sat down in the White House driveway, burned Reagan's total volume of vapid, embarrassingly puerile words in large metal garbage cans in front of the White House (cleansing flames shooting dramatically up into the night!), stopped traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue a half-dozen times, chained ourselves to the Republican National Committee's front door for an entire morning, preventing anyone from getting in and out except through the windows. And on and on for more than two years.
When it finally became clear to us that the ERA was going down--no surprise in this ferociously misogynist country--eight of us fasted on water alone for 37 days in the rotunda of the Illinois State Capitol building under the banner, "Women Hunger for Justice." This was our way of sending one last, compelling message to American women that their freedom was worth risking our lives for.
Over a period of nearly three years, we staged one civilly disobedient action after another, and fasted, were arrested and appeared in court several times--all this carried to every corner of the country by national media; we had done the best we could to demonstrate for our countrywomen that feminism's most radical tenet was allegiance to women.
A month or two after the death of the ERA, three alternative political parties banded together to nominate me as their candidate for President of the United States, even agreeing without much fuss to my feminist platform. For an activist, what a marvelous gift this was! Where could I have found a broader, more media-covered forum from which to continue to reach women? For a year we campaigned as brilliantly as if we expected to win, hundreds of amazing and dedicated radical feminists in the state campaign offices as well as those in the Washington office. Together we ran such a fine campaign that soon, even though the public knew we couldn't win, the snickering pretty much stopped.
Running for President was my last public and socially-disobedient protest.
While it's true that protests themselves are reformist, not radical, and well within our country's political tradition, they can have radical effects. At best, they can shock a woman into taking the first and most essential step into radicalism--seeing men with eyes cleansed of illusion ("first" and "essential" being synonyms of "radical").
For instance, if any woman felt her heart skip a few beats as she watched us kneeling in Pennsylvania Avenue, singing and holding hands as we stopped cars in front of the White House; if she feared for us and cheered us on as police on horseback and with attack dogs confronted us; and if these emotions pushed her to the realization that we were there because of men's uncaring, even malevolent, feelings toward her as a woman, she would not only have become a feminist, but a potentially radical feminist.
If any woman, watching us in Illinois as we grew thin and pale under our brave banner, wept in such confusion of admiration and outrage that a crack split open in her brainwashing and she glimpsed, even for a second, the reality that we were risking our lives for the freedom men had stolen from her, she was a good candidate for radical feminism.
If any woman dared put her regular life on hold for an entire year to help in a woman's campaign for president when there was not the slightest hope of winning and instead an absolute certainty that she would be laughed at, pitied, scorned, and considered crazy, that woman was well on her way to radicalism; well on her way, that is, to rejecting at least some of the lies men had persuaded her to use to build her life's foundation.
Radical means foundational, it means essential, it means the beginning (as in original); radical is getting to the bottom of things, plowing one's way through the mountains of lies, illusions, and terrors of our universal Stockholming by men. For women, facing the truth about men is the beginning of radicalism. And the truth is that in the ontological contest between "nature" and "nurture," "nature" holds the winning hand for men and women alike. Both "nature (essence)" and "radical" are, in many contexts, synonyms for truth.
Now, looking back, I see that on the night of the epiphany, I mistook the mild quaking of my own foundation for its collapse. Only in after-years did I realize how very sturdy my patriarchal underpinnings had been then and in comparison how delicate and shaky was my new-born worldview. As time went on, I learned that nearly everyone's foundations were constructed just as solidly on the patriarchal lies about men's nature as mine had been.
These lies all began to come apart for me 25 years ago on an airplane, en-route to my giving a speech. Sitting there, I had another much smaller but ultimately very powerful epiphany: I realized that as long as there were men, there could be no peace or health or equality or safety on earth; that, in fact--and most painfully--the world for which I longed could never come into being. By the time we landed, my hopelessness was nearing suicide pitch. Since men had always been here (hadn't they?) what was the point of going on?
But that very evening a woman attending my speech took me aside and repeated what an old Australian Aboriginal woman had recently told her. When asked what her tribe considered the most important belief about women, she had replied that once, and for thousands of years, all things had been female and that someday everything would be female again.
On the way home I turned to my husband and said, "I'm a feminist. In fact, I'm a radical feminist." Though I had much to learn, I knew that "radical" meant "at the roots," and that I'd been changed that night at the roots of my soul.
Even so, I understood feminism only in the most general way. That's why, in the ensuing months and years, I searched for the details of it, reading the brave books of dozens of feminist writers. Their clarity and courage--and often their fury--sustained me as I learned more than I could almost bear to know about men's violence against women throughout recorded history.
Along this torturous path, I kept in mind something Flannery O'Connor was once quoted as saying: "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." If I wanted to know the truth of women's lives, and therefore my own life, I couldn't allow any detail to be too grotesque, too ugly, or too monstrous to face. I needed to know all of it.
I also wanted to be involved in the fight for the ERA. But when I looked to the National Organization for Women for guidance, I was seriously disappointed ("bummed" as my teenagers would have said) to find that its political strategies were appeasement and non-threatening "femininity": make-up and skirts, for instance, soft voices sans the big sticks. My models were Alice Paul, the Pankhursts, Margaret Sanger, Matilda Gage--women so single-minded in their admiration for women and their passion for justice that they had no room for fear; women blazing with radical fire. I thought that, insofar as it was possible, NOW should be providing twentieth-century feminists with a model or two like them.
But since this didn't seem realistic, a group of us passionate, energetic, and disillusioned NOW members who lived near Washington, D.C. began a series of civilly disobedient actions ourselves, exploiting the ripe political climate created by ERA politics to raise the consciousness of American women. We planned our actions ostensibly to educate them about their exclusion from the Constitution, but also indirectly about men's entire agenda of marginalization and diminution of their lives.
We chained ourselves to the White House fence, went over the fence, and made it across the lawn almost to the front door with our list of demands for women's rights, sat down in the White House driveway, burned Reagan's total volume of vapid, embarrassingly puerile words in large metal garbage cans in front of the White House (cleansing flames shooting dramatically up into the night!), stopped traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue a half-dozen times, chained ourselves to the Republican National Committee's front door for an entire morning, preventing anyone from getting in and out except through the windows. And on and on for more than two years.
When it finally became clear to us that the ERA was going down--no surprise in this ferociously misogynist country--eight of us fasted on water alone for 37 days in the rotunda of the Illinois State Capitol building under the banner, "Women Hunger for Justice." This was our way of sending one last, compelling message to American women that their freedom was worth risking our lives for.
Over a period of nearly three years, we staged one civilly disobedient action after another, and fasted, were arrested and appeared in court several times--all this carried to every corner of the country by national media; we had done the best we could to demonstrate for our countrywomen that feminism's most radical tenet was allegiance to women.
A month or two after the death of the ERA, three alternative political parties banded together to nominate me as their candidate for President of the United States, even agreeing without much fuss to my feminist platform. For an activist, what a marvelous gift this was! Where could I have found a broader, more media-covered forum from which to continue to reach women? For a year we campaigned as brilliantly as if we expected to win, hundreds of amazing and dedicated radical feminists in the state campaign offices as well as those in the Washington office. Together we ran such a fine campaign that soon, even though the public knew we couldn't win, the snickering pretty much stopped.
Running for President was my last public and socially-disobedient protest.
While it's true that protests themselves are reformist, not radical, and well within our country's political tradition, they can have radical effects. At best, they can shock a woman into taking the first and most essential step into radicalism--seeing men with eyes cleansed of illusion ("first" and "essential" being synonyms of "radical").
For instance, if any woman felt her heart skip a few beats as she watched us kneeling in Pennsylvania Avenue, singing and holding hands as we stopped cars in front of the White House; if she feared for us and cheered us on as police on horseback and with attack dogs confronted us; and if these emotions pushed her to the realization that we were there because of men's uncaring, even malevolent, feelings toward her as a woman, she would not only have become a feminist, but a potentially radical feminist.
If any woman, watching us in Illinois as we grew thin and pale under our brave banner, wept in such confusion of admiration and outrage that a crack split open in her brainwashing and she glimpsed, even for a second, the reality that we were risking our lives for the freedom men had stolen from her, she was a good candidate for radical feminism.
If any woman dared put her regular life on hold for an entire year to help in a woman's campaign for president when there was not the slightest hope of winning and instead an absolute certainty that she would be laughed at, pitied, scorned, and considered crazy, that woman was well on her way to radicalism; well on her way, that is, to rejecting at least some of the lies men had persuaded her to use to build her life's foundation.
Radical means foundational, it means essential, it means the beginning (as in original); radical is getting to the bottom of things, plowing one's way through the mountains of lies, illusions, and terrors of our universal Stockholming by men. For women, facing the truth about men is the beginning of radicalism. And the truth is that in the ontological contest between "nature" and "nurture," "nature" holds the winning hand for men and women alike. Both "nature (essence)" and "radical" are, in many contexts, synonyms for truth.
Now, looking back, I see that on the night of the epiphany, I mistook the mild quaking of my own foundation for its collapse. Only in after-years did I realize how very sturdy my patriarchal underpinnings had been then and in comparison how delicate and shaky was my new-born worldview. As time went on, I learned that nearly everyone's foundations were constructed just as solidly on the patriarchal lies about men's nature as mine had been.
These lies all began to come apart for me 25 years ago on an airplane, en-route to my giving a speech. Sitting there, I had another much smaller but ultimately very powerful epiphany: I realized that as long as there were men, there could be no peace or health or equality or safety on earth; that, in fact--and most painfully--the world for which I longed could never come into being. By the time we landed, my hopelessness was nearing suicide pitch. Since men had always been here (hadn't they?) what was the point of going on?
But that very evening a woman attending my speech took me aside and repeated what an old Australian Aboriginal woman had recently told her. When asked what her tribe considered the most important belief about women, she had replied that once, and for thousands of years, all things had been female and that someday everything would be female again.
About the author
Forty years ago, the Mormons made me a feminist by organizing nationwide to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But they made a serious mistake by excommunicating me for telling the press that they were doing so, and how and where they were, like termites, for secretly undermining the popularity of the Amendment. The excommunication received tremendous and world-wide coverage, and gave me a platform from which to write and speak about women for the next 20 years. In 1984 three alternative political parties extended that platform by choosing me as their candidate for President of the United States, allowing my feminist message to reach thousands of women who otherwise might never have known what the Women's Movement was all about.
Along the way, and not as an afterthought either then or now in this bio, I came to love women profoundly in every way. Just as feminism continues to provide the daily nourishment for my soul, being a lesbian is my central necessity and joy. Now finally, because of the miracle of having found and lived with her for 25 years, last year I finally persuaded my darling Jade to marry me.
Along the way, and not as an afterthought either then or now in this bio, I came to love women profoundly in every way. Just as feminism continues to provide the daily nourishment for my soul, being a lesbian is my central necessity and joy. Now finally, because of the miracle of having found and lived with her for 25 years, last year I finally persuaded my darling Jade to marry me.