Moratorium: Front Lawn: 1970

Kate Jennings

watch out! you may meet a real
castrating female

or

you'/l say I'm a manhating braburning
/esb{an member of the castration
penisenvy brigade, which | am

I would like to speak.

I would like to give a tubthumpingtablebanging
emotional rap AND be listened to, not laughed at.
You don't laugh at what your comrade brothers
say, you wouldn’t laugh at the negroes, the black
panthers. Many women are beginning to feel the
necessity to speak for themselves, for their sisters.

| feel the necessity now.

It’s the moratorium. | would say, oh yes, the war is
bad a pig bosses war may the nlf win, | also say
VICTORY TO THE VIETNAMESE WOMEN. Now,
our brothers on the left in the peace movement
will think that what | am about to say is not justi-
fied, this is a moratorium. It's justified anywhere.
We've heard you loud and clear before, brother-
shits, we know we have to work towards the Revo-
lution and then join the ladies liberation auxiliary
if we have any time left over. I've worked my
priorities out, | will work towards what | know
about, what | feel, and | feel because I'm told ad
infinitum that I’'m a woman, I'm a second-class
citizen, and | should shutup right now because my
mind’s between my legs. | say you think with your
pricks. We should all get our priorities straight and
organise around our own injustices, our own con-
dition. There are a lot of people here who feel
strongly about the Vietnam war. But how many of
you, who can see so clearly the suffering and
misery in Vietnam, how many of you can see at
the end of your piggy noses the women who can’t
get abortions, how many of you would get off your
fat piggy asses and protest against the killing and
victimisation of women in your own country. Go
check the figures, how many Australian men have
died in Vietnam, and how many women have died
from backyard abortions. Yes, that’s cool, they're
only women, and you'll perhaps worry if your own
chickie gets pregnant. Can you think about all the
unwanted children, or the discrimination against
unmarried mothers. lllegal dangerous abortions
are going to be performed regardless. So make
them legal. And to these women who think an
abortion campaign, or women’s lib for that matter,
is reformist, | quote “in fighting for our liberation
we will not ask what is revolutionary or reformist,
only what is good for women” some of us are rev-
olutionaries, some of us are manhunting crazies,
but we are all working toward one thing, the lib-
eration of women, and most of us will recognise
that this will only happen in a socialist society.

We all feel very strongly about conscription and
freedom of the individual, some go to great lengths
to martyr themselves on the issue of the draft. |
don’t feel very strongly anymore about the ego
scenes of the mike jones’s around me. | do feel
strongly about my freedom and my sisters’ free-
dom. Women are conscripted every day into their
personalised slave kitchens, can you, with your
mind filled with the moratorium, spare a thought
for their freedom, identity, minds and emotions,
they're women, and your stomach is full. It suits
you to keep women in the kitchens, and underpaid
menial jobs, and with the children. You, by your

silence, apathy and laughter sanction the legis-
lators, the pig parliamentarians, the same men
who sanction the war in Vietnam. You won’t make
an issue of abortion, equal pay, and child minding
centres, because they're women’s matters, and
under your veneer you are brothers to the pig
politicians. And | say to all you highminded
intellectual women who say you're liberated with
such force and conviction, | say you make me
sick. So women’s lib doesn’t concern you. Ask your
companion what he would prefer—to talk to you
or fuck you? (and if you say you'd prefer to be
fucked, you've absorbed your conditioning well).
And the women in the suburbs are no concern of
yours? Your mother is no concern of yours? so long
as you think you're liberated, all’s well. You and
your sisters and the silent suburban women are all
part of a capitalist PATRIARCHAL society which
you cannot ignore.

And don’t start to trust the sympathetic men who
want a socialist society. Where will the women be
after the revolution? Go, ask them, the men on the
left stink—they stink from their motherfucking
socks to their long hair, from their jock straps to
their mao and moratorium badges. The ones who
pretend to espouse our aims are far worse than
those who at least wear their true colors on their
sleeves. And to my brothers on the drug scene.
Grass is good. Oh yes, but instead of becoming
happy and peaceful and oh so motherfucking lov-
ing all | can see is you sitting there, asserting, even
grooving on your maleness, dominating every joint
every puff. Chickies aren’t very good at rapping,
aren’t clever or subtle enough. | mean, it's a male
scene, isn’t it, you fat arrogant farts.

Okay, I've stopped trying to love and understand
my Oppressors.

| know who my enemy is.

| will tell you what | feel, as an individual, as a
woman.

| feel that there can be no love between men and
women.

Maybe after the revolution people will be able to
love each other regardless of skin color, ethnic
origin, occupation or type of genitals. But if that
happens it will only happen if we make it happen.
Starting right now.

| feel hatred.

| feel anger.

Without indulging in an equality or marxist argu-
ment | say all power to women because that’s what
| feel.

ALL POWER.

And | say to every woman that every time you're
put down or fucked over, every time they kick you
cunningly in the teeth, go stand on the street
corner and tell every man that walks by, every one
of them a male chauvinist by virtue of HIS birth-
right, tell them all to go suck their own cocks. And
when they laugh, tell them that they're getting
bloody defensive, and that you know what size
weapon to buy to kill the bodies that you've un-
fortunately laid under often enough.

ALL POWER TO WOMEN.

“Kate Jennings is a feminist. She believes in what Jane
Austen recommended at fifteen: ‘Run mad as often as you
chuse; but do not faint.””” This “biography” appears on the
jacket of Jennings’ book of poems (from which “Moratori-
um” is reprinted)—Come to Me Mv Melancholy Baby.
published in 1975 by Outback Press, Fitzroy (Victoria), in
her native Australia.

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