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... no woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 1 (1986).
From a 1979 commencement address delivered at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.)
Read more quotations about / on: woman
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2
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The lie of compulsory female heterosexuality today afflicts not just feminist scholarship, but every profession, every reference work, every curriculum, every organizing attempt, every relationship or conversation over which it hovers. It creates, specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteria in the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in the queasy strobe light of that lie. However we choose to identify ourselves, however we find ourselves labeled, it flickers across and distorts our lives.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and lesbian feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 3 (1986).
Written in 1980, not long after Rich had begun publicly to acknowledge her lesbianism. She had once been married and was the mother of three sons.)
Read more quotations about / on: today, light, work
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3
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When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you ... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul—and not just individual strength, but collective understanding—to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and lesbian feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 13 (1986).
From an essay written in 1984.)
Read more quotations about / on: strength, teacher, mirror, power, world
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We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write, on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 8 (1986).
From the Clark Lecture which she delivered at Scripps College in Claremont, California, on February 15, 1983.)
Read more quotations about / on: history
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5
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...Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 1 (1986).
From a 1979 commencement address delivered at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.)
Read more quotations about / on: women, freedom, history
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6
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...I ... believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a great deal—to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words, by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 5 (1986).
From "Toward a More Feminist Criticism," an address delivered by Rich at the opening of the "Feminist Studies in Literature" symposium, University of Minnesota, 1981.)
Read more quotations about / on: respect, believe
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7
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The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and lesbian feminist. What Is Found There, ch. 11 (1993).)
Read more quotations about / on: life, silence, work
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