Sonia Johnson - Publications and Personal Views

Publications and Personal Views

Johnson became increasingly radicalized, especially against state power, as reflected in the books she published after 1987. They include:

• From Housewife to Heretic (Doubleday, 1981)
• Telling the Truth (pamphlet, Crossing Press, 1987)
• Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation (Crossing Press, 1987)
• Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution (Wildfire Books, 1990)
• The Ship that Sailed Into the Living Room: Sex and Intimacy Reconsidered (Wildfire Books, 1991)
• Out of This World: A Fictionalized True-Life Adventure (Wildfire Books, 1993)

In Going Out of Our Minds Johnson details the personal and political experiences that turned her against the state. In the book she rejects the Equal Rights Amendment, the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, equal opportunity laws, and other government benefits because she considers them cooptation by patriarchy.

In Wildfire Johnson elaborates on her beliefs and answers her many critics in and out of the feminist movement. Her bottom line argument is that state violence is male violence and that women relate to the male-dominated state much as women relate to battering husbands who alternately abuse and reward their wives to keep them under control. She compares both relationships to the Stockholm Syndrome in which hostages develop an emotional attachment to their captors.

In chapter three of Wildfire, entitled "The Great Divorce," Johnson writes: "I have heard women involved in male politics say about our political system almost the same words I have heard battered women use about their abusers: 'Of course our government isn't perfect, but where is there a better one? With all its faults, it is still the best system (husband) in the world.' Like a battered wife, they never think to ask the really relevant questions: who said we needed a husband, or a husband-state, at all?"

During this time Johnson also declared herself a lesbian and began a relationship with a woman. After ending that relationship, she wrote in The Ship that Sailed Into the Living Room that even relationships between female couples are a dangerous patriarchal trap, because "two is the ideal number for inequality, for sadism, for the reproduction of patriarchy", and that relationships are "slave Ships" (a concept from which she derived the title of the book).

"Nearly four years after I began my rebellion against relation/sex/slave Ships," she wrote, "experience and my Wise Old Woman are telling me that sex as we know it is a patriarchal construct and has no rightful, natural place in our lives, no authentic function or ways. Synonymous with hierarchy/control, sex is engineered as part of the siege against our wholeness and power."

Johnson also founded Wildfire, a short-lived separatist commune for women that disbanded in 1993. She published several of her books under the imprint "Wildfire Books."