feminish

What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self defining human being need a knowledge of her history, her much politicised biology, an awareness of the creative work of women in 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 organised 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 ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.

Adrienne Rich, “Taking Women Students Seriously,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1980)

What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self defining human being need a knowledge of her history, her much politicised biology, an awareness of the creative work of women in 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 organised 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 ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.

Adrienne Rich, “Taking Women Students Seriously,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1980)