Excerpt from the speech "Remembering the Witches", from Andrea Dworkin's "Our Blood"
"Men tell us that they too are "oppressed". They tell us that they are often in their individual lives victimized by women -- by mothers, wives and "girlfriends". They tell us that women provoke acts of violence through our carnality, or malice, or avarice, or vanity, or stupidity. They tell us that their violence originates in us and that we are responsible for it. They tell us that their lives are full of pain, and that we are its source. They tell us that as mothers we injure them irreparably, as wives we castrate them, as lovers we steal from them semen, youth and manhood -- and never, never, as mothers, wives, or lovers do we ever give them enough.
And what are we to think? Because if we being to piece together all of the instances of violence -- the rapes, the assaults, the cripplings, the killings, the mass slaughters; if we read their novels, poems, political and philosophical tracts and see that they think of us today what the Inquisitors thought of us yesterday; if we realize that historically gynocide is not some mistake, some accidental excess, some dreadful fluke, but is instead the logical consequence of what they believe to be our god-given or biological natures; then we must finally understand that under patriarchy gynocide is the ongoing reality of life lived by women. And then we must look to each other -- for the courage to bear it and for the courage to change it.
The struggle of women, the feminist struggle, is not a struggle for more money per hour, or for equal rights under male law, or for more women legislators who will operate within the confines of male law. These are all emergency measures, designed to safe women's lives, as many as possible, now, today. But these reforms will not stem the tide of gynocide; these reforms will not end the relentless violence perpetrated by the gender class men against the gender class women. These reforms will not stop the increasing rape epidemic in this country, or the wife-beating epidemic in England. They will not stop the sterilizations of black and poor white women who are the victims of male doctors who hate female carnality. These reforms will not empty mental institutions of women put into them by male relatives who hate them for rebelling against the limits of the female role, or against the conditions of female servitude. They will not empty prisons filled with women who, in order to survive, whored; or who, after being raped, killed the rapist; or who, while being beaten, killed the man who was killing them. These reforms will not stop men from living off exploited female domestic labor, nor will these reforms stop men from reinforcing male identity by psychologically victimizing women in so-called "love" relationships.
And no personal accommodation within the system of patriarchy will stop this relentless gynocide. Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.
Before we can live and love, we will have to hone ourselves into a revolutionary sisterhood. That means that we must stop supporting the men who oppress us; that we must refuse to feed and clothe and clean up after them; that we must refuse to let them take their sustenance from our lives. That means that we will have to divest ourselves of the identity we have been trained to as females -- that we will have to divest ourselves of all traces of the masochism we have been told is synonymous with being female. That means that we will have to attack and destroy every institution, law, philosophy, religion, custom, and habit of this patriarchy that feeds on our "dirty" blood, that is build on our "trivial" labor."
