TAKING WOMEN STUDENTS SERIOUSLY

by Adrienne Rich

Editor's Note: As a teacher of minority and Third World students at the City College of New York in the l960's and then of women at Douglass College in the l970's, the poet Adrienne Rich asked herself some basic questions that applied to both groups of students. One such question was, how can the poor and non- white, and women, gain a sense of self in an educational system and society that undermines and devalues them? In this article she shares her reflections on women students. Here are three brief excerpts that convey the spirit of her essay, the full text of which can be found in the book, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, by Adrienne Rich, published by W. W. Norton Inc. and Co. in l979. "Suppose we were to ask ourselves, simply: What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self-defining human being, need a knowledge of her own history, her much-politicized biology, an awareness of the creative work of women of the past, the skills and crafts and techniques and powers exercised by women in different times and cultures, a knowledge of women's rebellions and organized movements against our oppression and how they have been routed or diminished? Without such knowledge women live and have lived without context, vulnerable to the projections of male fantasy, male prescriptions for us, estranged from our own experience because our education has not reflected or echoed it. I would suggest that not biology, but ignorance of our selves, has been the key to our powerlessness." "Look at a classroom: look at the many kinds of women's faces, postures, expressions. Listen to the women's voices. Listen to the silences, the unasked questions, the blanks. Listen to the small soft voices, often courageously trying to speak up, voices of women taught early that tones of confidence, challenge, anger, or assertiveness, are strident and unfeminine." "At a time when adult literacy is generally low, we need to demand more, not less, of women, both for the sake of their futures as thinking beings, and because historically women have always had to be better than men to do half as well. ... To think like a woman in a man's world means thinking critically, refusing to accept the givens, making connections between facts and ideas which men have left unconnected."