Summer 1980 635 Barry, Daly, Griffin, Russell and van de ven, and Brownmiller, and her obsession with psychology to the neglect of economic and other material realities that help to create psychological reality ), I find utterly ahistorical Dinnerstein's view of the relations between women and men as"a collab- oration to keep history mad. " She means by this, to perpetuate social relations which are hostile, exploitive, and destructive to life itself. She sees women and men as equal partners in the making of"sexual ar- rangements, seemingly unaware of the repeated struggles of women to resist oppression(our own and that of others)and to change our condi tion. She ignores, specifically, the history of women who-as witches femmes seules, marriage resisters, spinsters, autonomous widows, and/or lesbians--have managed on varying levels not to collaborate. It is this tory, precisely, from which feminists have so much to lea arn a which there is overall such blanketing silence. Dinnerstein acknowledges at the end of her book that"female separatism, " though"on a large scale and in the long run wildly impractical, "has something to teach us: "Sepa rate, women could in principle set out to learn from scratch undeflected by the opportunities to evade this task that mens presence has so far offered--what intact self-creative humanness is. 9 Phrases like intact self-creative humanness"obscure the question of what the many forms of female separatism have actually been addressing. The fact is that women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, nonheterosexual, woman-connected existence to the extent made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the"only ones"ever to have done so. They have undertaken it even though few women have been in an economic position to resist marriage altogether; and even though attacks against unmarried women have ranged from aspersion and mockery to deliberate gynocide, including the burning and torturing of millions of widows and spinsters during the witch persecutions of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centurie in Europe, and the practice of suttee on widows in India. 10 Nancy Chodorow does come close to the edge of an acknowled ment of lesbian existence. Like Dinnerstein, Chodorow believes that the fact that women, and women only, are responsible for child care in the exual division of labor has led to an entire social organization of gender inequality,and that men as well as women must become primary carers for children if that inequality is to change. In the process of examining from a psychoanalytic perspective, how mothering- by-women affects the psychological development of girl and boy children, she offers docu mentation that men are "emotionally secondary"in women s lives; that 8. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape(New York: Simon Schuster, 1975 10.Daly,pP.18485;11433Summer 1980 635 Barry, Daly, Griffin, Russell and van de Ven, and Brownmiller,8 and her obsession with psychology to the neglect of economic and other material realities that help to create psychological reality), I find utterly ahistorical Dinnerstein's view of the relations between women and men as "a collab￾oration to keep history mad." She means by this, to perpetuate social relations which are hostile, exploitive, and destructive to life itself. She sees women and men as equal partners in the making of "sexual ar￾rangements," seemingly unaware of the repeated struggles of women to resist oppression (our own and that of others) and to change our condi￾tion. She ignores, specifically, the history of women who-as witches, femmes seules, marriage resisters, spinsters, autonomous widows, and/or lesbians-have managed on varying levels not to collaborate. It is this history, precisely, from which feminists have so much to learn and on which there is overall such blanketing silence. Dinnerstein acknowledges at the end of her book that "female separatism," though "on a large scale and in the long run wildly impractical," has something to teach us: "Sepa￾rate, women could in principle set out to learn from scratch￾undeflected by the opportunities to evade this task that men's presence has so far offered-what intact self-creative humanness is."9 Phrases like "intact self-creative humanness" obscure the question of what the many forms of female separatism have actually been addressing. The fact is that women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, nonheterosexual, woman-connected existence, to the extent made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the "only ones" ever to have done so. They have undertaken it even though few women have been in an economic position to resist marriage altogether; and even though attacks against unmarried women have ranged from aspersion and mockery to deliberate gynocide, including the burning and torturing of millions of widows and spinsters during the witch persecutions of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in Europe, and the practice of suttee on widows in India.10 Nancy Chodorow does come close to the edge of an acknowledg￾ment of lesbian existence. Like Dinnerstein, Chodorow believes that the fact that women, and women only, are responsible for child care in the sexual division of labor has led to an entire social organization of gender inequality, and that men as well as women must become primary carers for children if that inequality is to change. In the process of examining, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how mothering-by-women affects the psychological development of girl and boy children, she offers docu￾mentation that men are "emotionally secondary" in women's lives; that 8. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975). 9. Dinnerstein, p. 272. 10. Daly, pp. 184-85; 114-33. Signs