Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

VIRGINITYJOAN OF A r c , s o l d i e r , m i l i t a r y s t r a t e g i s t , v i r g i n ,was born in Domremy, a parish in the province of Lorraine,circa 1412 (perhaps on January 6). She was female, illiterate, apeasant. In Rouen in 1431, at the age of nineteen, she was triedand burned as a witch. By the time of her arrest (taken prisonerin a military action) and imprisonment in 1430, she had routedthe English from much French territory and established themilitary and nationalistic momentum for their eventual expulsionfrom French soil; and she had gotten Charles VIIcrowned King of France, creating a head-of-state so that a nationmight emerge around him. Her will, her vision, and hermilitary acumen provided the impetus and groundwork for theemergence of a French nation-state, heretofore nonexistent;and she was, for better or worse, the first French nationalist, amilitary liberator of an occupied country that did not yet see itselfas she clearly, militantly, saw it— as a political and culturalunity that must repel foreign domination. The English, usingthe machinery of the Inquisition, got her convicted and killed;the Catholic Church did the actual dirty work. But no invader