When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We’ll give him a hearty welcome then,
Hurrah! Hurrah! The men will cheer, the boys will shout,
The ladies they will all turn out...
Soldiers returning from World War I were hailed as heroes. They were even more celebrated after World War II when our boys fought the horrible fascists. Everybody hated Hitler—workers, Jews, Blacks, women, nice people, liberals. We watched the Nazis gobbling up the world with incredible brutality and we hated them and adored our brave soldiers. They were our champions and nothing was too good for them—jobs, the GI education bill, bonuses, social prestige. But today, after Korea and Vietnam, the veteran is not seen as a hero. And the U.S. Army and Air Force are the enemy. How did this happen? How did the Vietnam War become the most hated and resisted of all wars in American history? It started with the radicals. They said this was an imperialist war against a poor colonial country struggling to decide its own fate. They said the U.S. had no right to interfere. They said we were on the wrong side. They said this is not our war. Then the Blacks and other racial minorities began refusing to support the war.
They identified with the Vietnamese for valiantly resisting a brutal white invader. And they resented the heavy preponderance of Blacks, Chicanos, and Indians in the front lines—due to a draft system skewed against the poor and non-white. They said this is not our war. Then the students began resisting the draft. They wanted to fight injustice and vicious, oppressive conditions here, rather than conquering people elsewhere. And then a brand new group emerged on the anti-war scene: women. Women identified completely with the Vietnamese people, with the women and children being bombed and napalmed and raped and tortured on an unprecedented scale. And out of women’s experiences in the anti-war movement, a whole new movement was born—Woman’s Liberation. Women connected the rape of Vietnam with rape at home. They linked the plight of the Vietnamese prostitute who survives by selling sex, with their own dilemma as cheap labourers and enforced husband-hunters. Women realized that military aggression abroad was an expansion of the male domination they suffered—a sexual ascendancy propped up by economic supremacy, educational superiority, legal privilege, cultural habits, and old-fashioned brutality. At that very moment in history when the military was training males to be men, to find manhood in war, to be real males by being violent, belligerent and power-hungry—at the same time, women were vehemently denouncing this concept of masculinity.
They were denying that men are intrinsically despotic, competitive and warlike and that women are biologically passive, subservient and submissive. Feminists said these sex roles— tough Tarzan versus sweet, dumb pussycat— were a bunch of nonsense. Women announced they were in no way inferior or mentally different. They traced gender variations, including body strength and size, to cultural conditioning, educational channelling, and psychological terrorism. In addition, motherhood, far from being a mark of weakness, results in greater longevity, better health, and more general adaptability. Women discovered that in the past a matriarchy existed, where women were the main food providers, the political leaders, and the fighting force! Scientific studies in biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and law bore out all these new findings. So—a funny thing happened to a lot of you on your way back from Vietnam. Here you were—supermen, machismo operators, conquerors—and, yet, lots of the women you were running into weren’t impressed. They refused to be dominated. They declined to be patronized.
They wouldn’t play an exclusive domestic, sexual, caretaker role for you. They objected to being treated like a different breed of human being. They rejected your concept of manhood-murder and scorned your ideal of sweet, submissive femininity. They said we are all people! Many of you began to complain bitterly: what the hell happened to American women? It was harder to make it with the chicks. They were often insulted and repelled by your tone and approach and attitude, and you didn’t know why. You’d always treated broads like that! Sorry, pal. This is a new day and a changing country. You can’t treat Blacks and Chicanos and Indians and Asians and women and children and old people and convicts and the poor like dogs anymore; they won’t stand for it. The wretched of the earth are standing up tall and announcing to the white American male ruler of the earth that his godliness is no longer worshipped or even accepted. The people of the world, and the women of this country, are standing up and demanding their rights: equal rights and equal justice and equal respect and equal opportunity. All of you need to understand this and respect it. And learn to welcome and commend it. Because without this understanding of the basic equality and right to respect of all people, you will not be able to organize your projects or advance your goals.
In the face of this incredible new reality of women’s liberation, you have a choice: You can behave like the post-Civil War slaveholder who drowned his woes in booze; or the stockbroker who jumped off a building after the Wall Street crash; or the aging movie actor who couldn’t play romantic leads anymore and turned to dope. Or you can do what women have always had to do: adapt and adjust to the new reality, and become a better person by learning to work with 51% of the human race in a relation of equality instead of oppression, friendship instead of shuck and jive. You will learn that love means partnership, not tyranny, and that you yourself can never be free as long as you enslave others. After WWII, all the women went home from their jobs in the war industries and they didn’t emerge as a mass until the ’60s. But this time, they’ll never let themselves be shut up at home again. The war blasted them out of their feminine mystique, their adjustment to second-class citizenship, and their half-human social roles. The sisters are becoming increasingly militant and radicalized because they have become painfully aware that they are the bottom of the totem pole. Who are the poor? Women. Who are the lowest paid? Women.
Who are the most needy and desperate for decent housing, medical care, transportation and education? Women. Who are the most exploited and most oppressed by everybody else? Women. Who is beaten and raped and robbed and insulted and ridiculed and hated? Women. Everybody’s scapegoat, everybody’s doormat, everybody’s My Lai, everybody’s Vietnam. Women hate militarism because in life they are always the buck privates, the flunkies, the shit workers, the helpless victims, and the bereft mourners. As eternal underlings, women despise elites and bureaucrats and dictators and mindless discipline and the stupidities of officers and bosses and the regimentation of the human mind and human will. In your quest for a better life, women are a tremendous source of skills and energy.
But if you want to tap that well, you’ll need to display a new respect for women as your comrades, not your old ladies or your chicks. Women intend to create a new society where everybody can stop being sheep and stop being generals and start being human. You must play a part in bringing this about, because today’s world of war and sexism, poverty and brutality, racism and violence cannot endure. Together, we must either change the world or be blown up by it. Together, we can win.
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Clara Fraser was an American socialist-feminist, radical activist and trade union organiser. Founder and leader of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. Author of numerous articles and the book Revolution, She Wrote. Text Source: Marxist Internet Archive/Clara Fraser (1972). Men, Women and War in Revolution, She Wrote (published 1998, pp. 142–146). Red Letter Press, Seattle
