"This year my brother and I will observe Christmas as we did a year ago; in prison.
"Our mother, eighty-five years old, will observe the holiday at home, waiting, pondering, hoping. She waits, not for our release home, but for the release of all prisoners, here and everywhere. She awaits in her prayer the release of humanity from the iron, conscienceless prison of war.
"We who are her sons see in her many aspects of women's place in America. Her life has spanned two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, urban upheavals, depression, political assassination of those on whom our best hopes had rested, the agonies of our poor. She saw four of her sons off to the Second war, two of her sons ordained Catholic priests; she supported us during our 'crime,' our trial, and visited us in prison. She said on television when asked about our breaking the law: 'But it was not God's law they violated.'
"She had gone, I feel, to the heart of the matter; not only for us, but for all Americans, and more especially, for American women. Modern war is by necessity total war; it mobilizes literally everyone and everything, resources, moneys, families, human lives, conscience itself, on its ugly behalf. It is absurd then that women could think they stand apart from the issue of war. It is doubly absurd that they would dream of liberation, apart from the common task; which is the liberation of all from the bloody yoke that weights unbearable on all.
"Certainly the trouble is not that we do not want peace. We have seen enough war, we are sick of it, unto death. The war has come home like a stalking corpse, tailing its blood, its tears, its losses, its despairs — seeking like an American ghost the soul of America. We want the peace; but most of us do not want to pay the price of peace. We still dream of a peace that has no cost attached. We want peace, but we live content with poverty and injustice and racism, with the murder of prisoners and students, the despair of the poor to whom justice is endlessly denied. We long for peace, but we wish also to keep undisturbed a social fabric of privilege and power that controls the economic misery of two thirds of the world's people.
"Obviously there will be no genuine peace while such an inherently violent scheme of things continues. America will in time extricate herself from the bloody swamps, the ruined villages, the mutilated dead of Vietnam. But nothing will be settled there, nothing mitigated at home. Nothing changed, that is, until a change of heart leads us to a change of social structures in every area of our lives. In this change women will of necessity play a great part. Only thus will they liberate themselves.
"To do this they must see clearly the nature of their enslavement. The modern state is perpetually mobilized for war, a mobilization of conscience, appetite, cupidity, and fear. Such a dragnet necessarily takes captive the 50 per cent of Americans who are women.
"Women are part of the war-making state. It is absurd to conclude from some high-brow idealism that keeps women mesmerized in their place that American women do not want what American men want. The fact that women are taught to 'want for their men,' to extend male aggression into the home, into the children, into the schools and churches, does not change the fact one whit. Women have learned their lesson well. They are irreplaceable, efficient cogs in a cyclic machinery of cupidity and consumerism; they produce the children who fight the hot wars and accept cold wars as inevitable. They guard private property, demand lilywhite schools, resist neighborhood integration, reinforce the corrupt 'nine points of the law' politics of those in possession.
"Liberation from all this will mean something quite simple. For some women liberation will mean casting off the role of preordained poverty and exploitation; they will refuse any longer to be victims. Women must also refuse to act as the exploiters of others, realizing how cruelly dispassionate the will to power is, knowing that those who enslave inevitably become the victims of their own violence, greed, and hate.
"The season we celebrate is one of the liberation of peoples. In Jewish and Christian tradition the liberation is both the gift of God and the achievement of men and women. It costs: blood, tears, energy, imagination — above all and including all, love, the instrument and end of all human striving.
"Greetings to you, from prison. Peace and liberation."