Deer Park: The Dream of Feminism
On the local library channel I have been listening to a reading of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips. Born in 1915, Alice Bradley Sheldon was the daughter of wealth, privilege and intellectual accomplishment. Her father was a lawyer and naturalist and her mother a prolific writer. She was a graphic artist, an art critic, worked in air intelligence for the US Army in WWII and was later recruited into the CIA which she left in 1955 to get a doctorate in Experimental Psychology at George Washington University. She was an attractive, bisexual tomboy. She also had an open marriage despite being deeply in love with her husband.
Alice Sheldon wrote mostly science fiction and did most of her writing under the name James Tiptree, Jr. Many women writers have written under male pseudonyms. Mary Anne Evans wrote under the name of George Elliot, Charolette Bronte wrote as Currer Bell, Emily Bronte as Ellis Bell, and feminist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin as George Sand. But all that was long ago. Despite the bias of the science fiction community against female scifi writers there seems limited reason for Sheldon to have assumed a male persona and to have clung to it for so long. It wasn’t just that she used a male pen name for her published work, it was that she corresponded volumously with many other science fiction writers and fans and even in these personal letters maintained the Tiptree persona and repeatedly denied she was a woman.
Of course eventually she was discovered.
But that is not what struck me as I listened to her book. It was this:
In February 1975 he[Tiptree/Alice Sheldon] wrote Russ that women were “a little–a little–like a beautiful deer in a game park where they have temporarily suspended hunting season. There are few such parks and god knows how long this will last.” In a subsequent letter he said he meant that women should consolidate their power base, watch their backs, and try to make their freedom last.
That is the gist of it for me. Freedom for women is such a new thing in the world. Women have been enslaved everywhere, never free, never in history. We have always been property. Always slaves, first to men, then to our bodies popping out babies that we are genetically programmed to love and care for. Our freedom seems fragile, fragile and very precious, fragile and easily snatched away. In much of the world, especially the Moslem world, that freedom still does not exist and as long as women are enslaved anywhere, my freedom is not secure. As long as some women are not free, I cannot be free. At any moment my freedom might be snatched from me. I and the women around me might be put back into chains. Just as in Nazi Germany qualified women were fired from their jobs because “motherhood” was the only permitted role for women. Just as in the US after World War II women were forced from their jobs and back into the role of maids, sex slaves, brood males and parasites, aka wives. Just as in Russia and the Soviet Republics after the end of communism women were the first to lose the jobs and rights till, for many of them, the only choice was starvation or prostitution. http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_02/uk/ethique/txt1.htm
On every side there are attacks on women’s freedom. The Supreme Court only recently ruled that women can be prevented from certain forms of abortion without considering any health consequences to the woman. After all, once a male’s DNA carrier is present in a woman’s body that body is no longer hers. Her health no longer matters. That is the implication. Russell Shaw in the Catholic Herald proclaimed that this was “only the first step” as the 5 Catholic men on the Supreme Court worked to overturn the right of women to determine what happens to their own bodies. This, the religious right declared, is only the beginning!
In Germany a Moroccan woman who was frequently beaten by her husband was told she could not get a quick divorce because the Koran gives a husband the right to beat his wife. A Lebanese-German man strangled and beat his daughter for refusing to marry the man he had chosen for her and was given mere probation because his cultural conditioning was a mitigating factor. A Turkish-German who killed his wife for violating his “honor” was given the least possible sentence because she had offended his moral precepts. A Lebanese-German who raped his wife while beating her was given only probation. Across Europe Moslem Imans give their flocks advise on how to beat their wives (so the infidels will not see the bruises).
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2496657.ece
In Canada Sharia courts are set up to deal with “family” matters. All this is nothing compared to how women are treated in Moslem countries. When women in countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia try to protest for rights they are beaten by mobs of men. Or arrested. Or killed.
As capitalists lure more Moslem men to western countries for cheap labor they explicitly promise them they will still be able to keep women subjugated. Then the capitalists claim this subjugation must be tolerated in the name of “multiculturism.”
Have we women in the west been living in a sanctuary where the males did not prey on us, like a deer park with a suspended hunting season, a sanctuary that is ending. We have been living in a dream if we think our rights are secure. All women MUST “consolidate their power base, watch their backs, and try to make their freedom last.” We must fight for the freedom of all women and against the loss of our own freedom with all we have.
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© Alllie 2007
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