What do you think?
Rate this book
Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying
Adrienne Rich explique la nécessité personnelle et politique pour les femmes de se décrire la réalité aussi précisément et complètement que possible et surtout celle de leurs rapports intimes.«Le privé est politique», cette affirmation provocante prend tout son sens dans le texte de Rich.
Paperback
First published June 1, 1977
About the author
Adrienne Rich
147 books1,642 followersWorks, notably
Diving into the Wreck
(1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
April 28, 2009
The type of book you read after a break-up.
May 1, 2025
get my ass Adrienne
April 1, 2012
Well worth reading and pertinent today, so many decades later.
March 29, 2020
Highly recommend this feministic read if you're too bored to read long and complicated texts, but reading this will make you look intelligent without much effort.
April 7, 2025
“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her”
“We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: "In 1950 1 lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville." You tell me: "She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends." You tell me: "It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining." …
Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning's weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you”
“We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: "In 1950 1 lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville." You tell me: "She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends." You tell me: "It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining." …
Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning's weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you”
December 16, 2017
Why would I ever want to give up the serendipity of a used bookstore for gloss and planning? It found me right when it needed to.
Not long at all and definitely a document of its time. It's really tempting to try and reconnect the little gaps in the life of Adrienne Rich, which says as much about the community of women reading as it does about anything else. I wish it were more kneaded through. Little, strong morsels to chew over but not a lot to hold onto.
Not long at all and definitely a document of its time. It's really tempting to try and reconnect the little gaps in the life of Adrienne Rich, which says as much about the community of women reading as it does about anything else. I wish it were more kneaded through. Little, strong morsels to chew over but not a lot to hold onto.
March 30, 2012
Amazing.
September 1, 2022
crying at work rn
June 21, 2023
adrienne slayed
July 8, 2024
This ripped my shit up!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Made me sob at work)
June 9, 2025
“Women have been forced to lie, for survival, to men. How to unlearn this among other women?”
Read
May 12, 2026Wow wow wow. Printing this out and gifting it to my beloved friends
May 3, 2024
"Lying is done with words, and also with silence."
"The woman who tells lies in her personal relationships may or may
not plan or invent her lying. She may not even think of what she is doing in a calculated way. "
"We have had the truth of our bodies withheld from us or distorted;
we have been kept in ignorance of our most intimate places. Our instincts have been punished: clitoridectomies for "lustful" nuns or for
"difficult" wives. It has been difficult, too, to know the lies of our complicity from the lies we believed. "
"Patriarchal lying has manipulated women both through falsehood·
and through silence. Facts we needed have been withheld from us. False
'witness has been borne against us. "
"An honorable human relationship - that is, one in which two people
have the right to use the word "love" - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths
they can tell each other. "
"Women have been forced to lie, for survival, to men. "
"In the struggle for survival we tell lies. To bosses, to prison guards,
the police, men who have power over us, who legally own us and our
children, lovers who need us as proof of their manhood. "
"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a
profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our
reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other. "
"The void is not something created by patriarchy, or racism, or capitalism. It will not fade away with any of them. It is part of every woman.
"The dark core;' Virginia Woolf named it, writing of her.mother. The
dark core. It is beyond personality; beyond who loves us or hates us. "
"Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people."
"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body.
The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper . "
"The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of
people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in
life"
"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know,
beforehand, everything I need to tell you"
"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility
of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not de-·
structive, to me. That I feel strong enough io hear your tentative and
groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend
the possibilities of truth between us.
The possibility of life between us."
Short but profound!
"The woman who tells lies in her personal relationships may or may
not plan or invent her lying. She may not even think of what she is doing in a calculated way. "
"We have had the truth of our bodies withheld from us or distorted;
we have been kept in ignorance of our most intimate places. Our instincts have been punished: clitoridectomies for "lustful" nuns or for
"difficult" wives. It has been difficult, too, to know the lies of our complicity from the lies we believed. "
"Patriarchal lying has manipulated women both through falsehood·
and through silence. Facts we needed have been withheld from us. False
'witness has been borne against us. "
"An honorable human relationship - that is, one in which two people
have the right to use the word "love" - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths
they can tell each other. "
"Women have been forced to lie, for survival, to men. "
"In the struggle for survival we tell lies. To bosses, to prison guards,
the police, men who have power over us, who legally own us and our
children, lovers who need us as proof of their manhood. "
"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a
profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our
reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other. "
"The void is not something created by patriarchy, or racism, or capitalism. It will not fade away with any of them. It is part of every woman.
"The dark core;' Virginia Woolf named it, writing of her.mother. The
dark core. It is beyond personality; beyond who loves us or hates us. "
"Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people."
"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body.
The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper . "
"The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of
people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in
life"
"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know,
beforehand, everything I need to tell you"
"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility
of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not de-·
structive, to me. That I feel strong enough io hear your tentative and
groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend
the possibilities of truth between us.
The possibility of life between us."
Short but profound!
October 22, 2026
And she may also tell herself a lie: that she is concerned with the other's feelings, not with her own.
But the liar is concerned with her own feelings.
The liar lives in fear of losing control. She can-not even desire a relationship without manipu-lation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control.
The liar fears the void.
We begin out of the void, out of darkness and emptiness. It is part of the cycle understood by the old pagan religions, that materialism denies. Out of death, rebirth; out of nothing, something.
The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy.
*""The liar in her terror wants to fill up the void, with anything. Her lies are a denial of her fear; a way of maintaining control."""*
It isn't that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.
It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me.
*"That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words."*
That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.
But the liar is concerned with her own feelings.
The liar lives in fear of losing control. She can-not even desire a relationship without manipu-lation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control.
The liar fears the void.
We begin out of the void, out of darkness and emptiness. It is part of the cycle understood by the old pagan religions, that materialism denies. Out of death, rebirth; out of nothing, something.
The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy.
*""The liar in her terror wants to fill up the void, with anything. Her lies are a denial of her fear; a way of maintaining control."""*
It isn't that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.
It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me.
*"That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words."*
That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.
Read
February 23, 2026I didn't read this book, but I just finished another book by/about Adrienne Rich that isn't on Goodreads, and I want to log it. The book I read was about her teaching at CUNY. I'm logging it under this title because this book is about lying, and I'm lying that I read it.
November 6, 2024
I don't understand how I missed this. I found the PDF online.
October 2, 2026
i needed that punch in the gut!
October 18, 2026
Damn good truth
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews