reading assignment

“Claiming an Education”

by Adrienne Rich

Speech delivered at the convocation of Douglass College, 1977.

For this convocation, I planned to separate my remarks into two parts: some thoughts

about you, the women students here, and some thoughts about us who teach in a women's

college. But ultimately those two parts are indivisible. If university education means anything

beyond the processing of human beings into expected roles, through credit hours, tests, and

grades (and I believe that in a women's college especially it might mean much more), it implies

an ethical and intellectual contract between teacher and student. This contract must remain

intuitive, dynamic, unwritten; but we must turn to it again and again if learning is to be reclaimed

from the depersonalizing and cheapening pressures of the present-day academic scene.

The first thing I want to say to you who are students, is that you cannot afford to think of

being here to receive an education: you will do much better to think of being here to claim one.

One of the dictionary definitions of the verb "to claim" is: to take as the rightful owner; to assert

in the face of possible contradiction. "To receive" is to come into possession of: to act as

receptacle or container for; to accept as authoritative or true. The difference is that between

acting and being acted-upon, and for women it can literally mean the difference between life and

death.

One of the devastating weaknesses of university learning, of the store of knowledge and

opinion that has been handed down through academic training, has been its almost total erasure

of women's experience and thought from the curriculum, and its exclusion of women as members

of the academic community. Today, with increasing numbers of women students in nearly every

branch of higher learning, we still see very few women in the upper levels of faculty and

administration in most institutions. Douglass College itself is a women's college in a university

administered overwhelmingly men, who in turn are answerable to the state legislature, again

composed predominantly of men. But the most, significant fact for you is that what you learn

here, the very texts you read, the lectures you hear, the way your studies are divided into

categories and fragmented one from the other -- all this reflects, to a very large degree, neither

objective reality, nor an accurate picture of the past, nor a group of rigorously tested observations

about human behavior. What you can learn here (and I mean not only at Douglass but any

college in any university) is how men have perceived and organized their experience, their

history, their ideas of social relationships, good and evil, sickness and health, etc. When you read

or hear about "great issues," "major texts," "the mainstream of Western thought," you are hearing

about what men, above all white men, in their male subjectivity, have decided is important.

Black and other minority peoples have for some time recognized that their racial and

ethnic experience was not accounted for in the studies broadly labeled human: and that even the

sciences can be racist. For many reasons, it has been more difficult for women to comprehend

our exclusion, and to realize that even the sciences can be sexist. For one thing, it is only within

the last hundred years that higher education has grudgingly been opened up to women at all,

even to white, middle-class women. And many of us have found ourselves poring eagerly over

books with title like: The Descent of Man: Man and His Symbols: Irrational Man: The

Phenomenon of Man: The Future of Man: Man and the Machine: From Man to Man: May Man

Prevail?: Man, Science and Society: or One Dimensional Man --books pretending to describe a

"human" reality that does not include over one-half the human species.

Less than a decade ago, with the rebirth of a feminist movement in this country, women

students and teachers in a number of universities began to demand and set up women's studies

courses -- to claim a women-directed education. And, despite the inevitable accusations of

"unscholarly," "group therapy," "faddism," etc., despite backlash and budget cuts, woman's

studies are still growing, offering to more and more women a new intellectual grasp on their

lives, new understanding of our history, a fresh vision of the human experience, and also a

critical basis for evaluating what they hear and read in other courses, and in the society at large.

But my talk is not really about women's studies, much as I believe in their scholarly,

scientific, and human necessity. While I think that any Douglass student has everything to gain

by investigating and enrolling in women's studies courses, I want to suggest that there is a more

essential experience that you owe yourselves, one which courses in women's studies can greatly

enrich, but which finally depends on you in all your interactions with yourself and your world.

This is the experience of taking responsibility toward yourselves. Our upbringing as women has

so often told us that this should come second to our relationships and responsibilities to other

people. We have been offered ethical models of the self-denying wife and mother; intellectual

models of the brilliant but slapdash dilettante who never commits herself to anything the whole

way, or the intelligent woman who denies her intelligence in order to seem more "feminine," or

who sits in passive silence even when she disagrees inwardly with everything that is being said

around her.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and

naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence,

grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which

to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our

minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and

love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre:

"I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights

should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give."

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--

predigested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life, taking "gut"

courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing

solid work, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of

already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short,

simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society

which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in

love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means

that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and

friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"; not to be continuously

available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of

others--parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children--that they respect our

sense of purpose and our integrity as persons. Women everywhere are finding the courage to do

this, more and more, and we are finding that courage both in our study of women in the past who

possessed it, and in each other as we look to other women for comradeship, community, and

challenge. The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal

of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible

to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.

Now comes the second part of the contract. I believe that in a women's college you have

the right to expect your faculty to take you seriously. The education of women has been a matter

of debate for centuries, and old, negative attitudes about women's role, women's ability to think

and take leadership, are still rife both in and outside the university. Many male professors (and I

don't mean only at Douglass) still feel that teaching in a women's college is a second-rate career.

Many tend to eroticize their women students--to treat them as sexual objects--instead of

demanding the best of their minds. (At Yale a legal suit [Alexander v. Yale] has been brought

against the university by a group of women students demanding a stated policy against sexual

advances toward female students by male professors.) Many teachers, both men and women,

trained in the male-centered tradition, are still handing the ideas and texts of that tradition on to

students without teaching them to criticize its antiwoman attitudes, it's omission of women as

part of the species. Too often, all of us fail to teach the most important thing, which is that clear

thinking, active discussion, and excellent writing are all necessary for intellectual freedom, and

that these require hard work. Sometimes, perhaps in discouragement with a culture which is both

antiintellectual and antiwoman, we may resign ourselves to low expectations for our students

before we have given them half a chance to become more thoughtful, expressive human beings.

We need to take to heart the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a poet, a thinking woman, and

a feminist, who wrote in 1845 of her impatience with studies which cultivate a "passive

recipiency" in the mind, and asserted that "women want to be made to think actively: their

apprehension is quicker than that of men, but their defect lies for the most part in the logical

faculty and in the higher mental activities." Note that she implies a defect which can be remedied

by intellectual training; not an inborn lack ability.

I have said that the contract on the student's part involves that you demand to be taken

seriously so that you can also go on taking yourself seriously. This means seeking out criticism,

recognizing that the most affirming thing anyone can do for you is demand that you push

yourself further, show you the range of what you can do. It means rejecting attitudes of "take-it-

easy," "why-be-so-serious," "why-worry-you'll-probably-get-married-anyway." It means

assuming your share of responsibility for what happens in the classroom, because that affects the

quality of your daily life here. It means that the student sees herself engaged with her teachers in

active, ongoing struggle for a real education. But for her to do this, her teachers must be

committed to belief that women's minds and experience are intrinsically valuable and

indispensable to any civilization worthy the name: that there is no more exhilarating and

intellectually fertile place in the academic world today than a women's college -- if both students

and teachers in large enough numbers are trying to fulfill this contract. The contract is really a

pledge of mutual seriousness about women, about language, ideas, method, and values. It is our

shared commitment toward a world in which the inborn potentialities of so many women's minds

will not longer be wasted, raveled-away, paralyzed, or denied.