Women Know a Lot of Things

"Women know a lot of things they don't read in the newspapers. It's pretty funny sometimes, how women know a lot of things and nobody can figure out how they know them. I know a Polish woman who works in the stockyards here, and she has been working there for a good many years. She came from Poland when she was a child, cam across the vast spaces of America, with blinders on, you might say, and yet she knows more than anybody I know, because she knows what suffering is and she knows that everyone is like herself, throughout the whole world. . . .

That's the way it is with women. They don't read about the news. They very often make it. They pick it up at its source, in the human body, in the making of the human body, and the feeding and nurturing of it day in and day out. They know how much a body weighs and how much blood and toil goes into the making of even a poor body. Did you ever go into a public clinic to weigh your child? And you feel of him anxiously when you put his clothes on in the morning. You pick him up trying to gauge the weight of his bones and the tiny flesh and you wait for the public nurses to put him on the scales, and you look, you watch her face like an aviator watches the sky, watches an instrument register a number that will mean life and death.

In that body under your hands every day there resides the economy of the world; it tells you of ruthless exploitation, of a mad, vicious class that now cares for nothing in the world but to maintain its stupid life with violence and destruction; it tells you the prices of oranges and cod liver oil, of spring lamb, of butter, eggs and milk. You know everything that is happening on the stock exchange. You know what happened to last year's wheat in the drouth, the terrible misuse and destruction of land and crops and human life plowed under. You don't have to read the stock reports in Mr. Hearst's paper. You have the news at its terrible source.

Or what kind of news is it when you see the long, drawn face of your husband coming home from the belt line and feel his ribs coming to the surface day after day like the hulk of a ship when the tide is going down?

Or, what price freedom and the American Way so coyly pictured on billboards, when you go up the dark and secret and dirty stairs to a doctor's office and get a cheap abortion because you can't afford another baby and wait for the fever that takes so many American women, and thank heaven if you come through alive, barely crawling around for months?

. . . Hunger and want and terror are a Braille that hands used to labor, used to tools, and close to sources, can read in any language."

Meridel Le Sueur
Ripening: Selected Work, 1927