On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

by Adrienne Rich

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence is a sort of travel diary, documenting Adrienne Rich's journeys to the frontier and into the interior. It traces the development of one individual consciousness, "playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language".
A. Rich has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing. "I find in myself both severe and tender thoughts toward the women I have been, whose thoughts I find here".

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, LGBT, Queer

310 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Works, 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).

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edit 7/16/2020: Due to the kind of traffic this review has been attracting of late, I'm putting out a disclaimer that, radfems, this review is not for you. Any part of my writing that uncritically normalizes radfem ideologies is an error on my part, and such will eventually be revised at an appropriate time.

I've been considering getting a gun since the Isla Vista shootings. My pacifist ideals are all very well, but it's my sister I'm concerned with, my sister who once desired to go to UC Santa Barbara, to commit to four years amongst that population currently sensationalized by the media eye for its tears, its terror, its #YesAllWomen and countercurrent #YesAllPeople. Going to college next year for her means a 20% chance of rape, a laughable chance of respectful retribution, and an opportunity to be killed by trigger-happy mysognistic extremists. Existing in general weighs her inherent value as a daughter (of men) or a sister (of men) or a potential mother (of men). I am a woman, she is my sister, and I would kill and die for her in a heartbeat. The popular treatment of the former as serious and the latter as expected is a consequence of a society exulting in its homicidal ignorance.

One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own...as if her politics were simply an outburst of personal bitterness or rage.

I've been called despicable for pushing my agenda in response to this latest patriarchal monstrosity, complete with gynephobic manifesto and religiously agenda’d showings of solidarity and "Yes but not ALL men..." paired with the requisite pointing at mental illness. Not all drunk drivers commit involuntary manslaughter. Not all smokers give cancer to nonsmoking bystanders. Not all speeders cause accidents. Women's bodies are a political agenda with every mention of abortion, every talk of slut shaming, every sexualization of the female form that places the blame on her, not him. Mental illness is an issue, not an argument, unless you have some statistics showing that both men and women participate equally in shooting massacres. Playing devil's advocate when you are an inherent holder of privilege and have never had to equate conversation with the opposite sex with welcoming physical assault makes you a sadist, not a saint.

A woman I know was recently raped; her first—and typical—instinct was to feel sorry for the rapist, who held her at knife-point. When we begin to feel compassion for ourselves and each other instead of for our rapists, we will begin to be immune to suicide.

My thoughts on The Royal Family, The Second Sex, The Bell Jar, any literature, any media, and any content I have engaged with on the critical level have been, are, and will always merge rhetoric with empathy, for it is an error of patriarchal culture that ethos and pathos and logos can be spat out and calibrated along an axis of increasingly qualified that ranges from objectivity at the top to sensitivity at the bottom. I feel for others who are not myself; the fact that the sentiment does not make for sustainable living is a sociocultural obscenity.

[Virginia Woolf’s] answer was that [the patriarchy] is leading to war, to elitism, to exploitation and the greed for power; in our time we can also add that it has clearly been leading to the ravagement of the nonhuman living world.

Yet the very concept of "professionalism," tainted as it is with the separation between personal life and work, with a win-or-lose mentality and the gauging of success by public honors and market prices, needs a thorough revaluation by women.

A father leers at his daughters whatever the clothing they wear, turns hysterical at mentions of other males' verbalized assault with cries of "shotguns" and "teach him a lesson." A mother pays her daughters' way forward through economical opportunities, kowtows before the stock market and the future son-in-law and doesn't even pretend to know the meaning of love. Everywhere, everyone is playing the game of civilization, where the only guarantee against complete and utter disconnection between humans in the throes of their monetary lust is motherhood. Thus, the world of the womb: keep it secret, keep it safe, keep it locked up for the needed counterbalance, vaunt it to the skies and fear it in the places of true solidarity and power. Never mind the infantileness that males never outgrow; that’s what the legalized amputation of every aspect of female is for.

It will be objected that this is merely “reverse chauvinism.” But given the intensive training all women go through in every society to place our own long-term and collective interests second or last and to value altruism as the expense of independence and wholeness-and given the degree to which the university reinforces that training in its every aspect—the most urgent need at present is for women to recognize, and act on, the priority of recreating ourselves and each other, after our centuries of intellectual and spiritual blockading.

Certainly a major change will be along the liens already seen in women’s studies: a breakdown of traditional departments and “disciplines,” of that fragmentation of knowledge that weakens thought and permits the secure ignorance of the specialist to protect him from responsibility for the application of his theories. It is difficult to imagine a woman-centered curriculum where quantitative method and technical reason would continue to be allowed to become means for the reduction of human lives, and where specialization would continue to be used as an escape from wholeness.

There was an article recently about using trigger warnings in literature, giving forewarning to those who have those who have suffered from prejudice and assault in all their physical, mental, and emotional forms. Such a small, insightful, forward thinking proposition, but of course, the majority of responses to the concept of mixing empathy with pedagogy was ridicule. Thirty-four years it’s been since the publication of this book, one of many indicting the current state of the US for systematized oppression that begins from the cradle and forgoes the grave, and still we do not give a fuck for those who do not fit. We tolerate bigotry in our reading as if it were a silly old fossil of our modern day life, believe ourselves the supreme judge of which book when without the consideration of the prevalence of old white phallicies, and “boys will be boys”. Again, again, again, boys will rape, boys will kill, boys will annihilate, and all those boys will find themselves in positions of unhinged power and control. Can you imagine if all those massacres had been committed by women? You’d be able to tell who had balls by the shit stains trailing down their legs.

…a man experiences the violation of some profound “right” when a woman leaves him: the “right” to her services, however lacking in mutuality the relationship. Through patriarchal socialization, men learn to think in terms of their “rights” where rights are not actually the issue: in areas like sexual behavior, maternal behavior, which are seen, not as springing from a woman’s choice and affections but as behavior to which the male is entitled to as a male.

We do not "save" men by bending to violence, nor do we "save" our children by letting them see, in their own homes, their first community, violence prevailing as the ultimate recourse in human relations, and victimization accepted in the name of "love."

I read women because they have shared their world with me from the get go. Men will never have to overcome the fear of the outspoken stranger, the flirtatious heterosexual grin, the monthly reoccurrence of waking up in a pool of their own blood and feeling as if their insides were a pit sagging through its rotting fruit, the myriad political threats to their body and freedom, much as I will never be afraid of contests of masculinity and all its sordid baggage. In light of that, why should I bother?

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text form a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

For young adults trying to write seriously for the first time in their lives, the question “Whom can I trust?” must be an underlying boundary to be crossed before real writing can occur. We who are part of literary culture come up against such a question only when we find ourselves writing on some frontier of self-determination, as when writers from an oppressed group within literary culture, such as black intellectuals, or, most recently, women, begin to describe and analyze themselves as they cease to identify with the dominant culture. Those who fall into this category ought to be able to draw on it in entering into the experience of the young adult for whom writing itself—as reading—has been part of the not-me rather than one of the natural activities of the self.

I will read. I will write. I will go to school. I will become a professor. I will keep on the lookout for prejudice in the classics and the contemporary, no matter what the academics try to mewl about “literary objects” and “back then…” I will come back to texts of worth I’ve found and break out of my comfort zone of ideologies every chance I get, for if I can sympathize with so many White Male Others in literature, I can empathize with anyone. I will read the difficult white whales every so often for ethos’ sake and the opportunity to sharpen my feminist paradigm; many may have read and commented and critiqued already, but not I.

Casual objectifiers of my being in the classroom and on the street, I will see my anger at your inhuman contempt as justified, and I will come after you.

And beyond the exchange and criticism of work, we have to ask ourselves how we can make the conditions for work more possible, not just for ourselves but for each other. This is not a question of generosity. It is not generosity that makes women in community support and nourish each other. It is rather what Whitman called the “hunger for equals”—the desire for a context in which our own strivings will be amplified, quickened, lucidified, through those of our peers.

To do this work takes a capacity for constant active presence, a naturalist’s attention to minute phenomena, for reading between the lines, watching closely for symbolic arrangements, decoding difficult and complex messages left for us by women of the past. It is work, in short, that is opposed by, and stands in opposition to, the entire twentieth-century white male capitalist culture.

The work is hard and the companions are few and sometimes it takes all that I am to keep on thinking. As a result, the work is mine for the keeping, the companions are worth the world, and women like Adrienne Rich assure me that, for all the same old shit keeps repeating ad nauseam, I am not alone.

For us, to be “extraordinary” or “uncommon” is to fail. History has been embellished with “extraordinary,” “exemplary,” “uncommon,” and of course “token” women whose lives have left the rest unchanged. The “common woman” is in fact the embodiment of the extraordinary will-to-survival in millions of obscure women, a life-force which transcends childbearing: unquenchable, chromosomatic reality.

Our struggles can have meaning and our privileges—however precarious under patriarchy—can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts—and whose very being—continue to be thwarted and silenced.

I am a woman. I will not stop.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel rejuvenated. I can use a lot of this book as inspiration for my life's work. Some of it is a little 1970s for me, but some of it rings so true, that I fear we haven't come very far at all since she wrote this. Like the precariousness of birth control and women's reproductive rights. Like the general disrespect society and culture have for women, even with the positive stereotypes of the angel of the house and the self-sacrificing mother. Sure, everyone wants to HAVE one of those, but if you have to BE one, that's lesser. And the negative treatment non-mothers get from society, and the idea that "non-fathers" sounds even more ludicrous. I loved the essay on Jane Eyre--it made me like my dad a bit more again, seeing as how he loves that book. Maybe there's hope for him. Maybe I'll show him that essay.

And there are so many useful ideas and definitions. Some of my enthusiasm for this book is probably my general lack of reading in Women's Studies. I am woefully underread in U.S. history and definitely in important social thinkers and activists. This is something I hope to remedy. But here are some things I got out of this, that I want to keep in the forefront of my mind and use to further the cause of changing the world!

"Language is such a weapon [for a new integration in society], and what goes with language: reflection, criticism, renaming, creation." (68) This articulates some of the things I've been thinking about language and rhetoric and its liberating potential. "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*." (235) Again, I feel relieved to see my inarticulate feelings brought to light so perfectly. I almost want to write them into my syllabus. I think about what I want students to take away from my class. It is less a series of names and dates and more a way of making connections between events, people, and ideas. And, I'd like them to become more aware of their thinking and writing process. The names and dates fade (or can be looked up on wikipedia), but the discipline and communication and research skills can go on. The critical thinking skills will tell them that wikipedia is not good enough.

Other things: a definition of patriarchy I can use. "By [patriarchy] I mean to imply not simply the tracing of descent through the father, which anthropologists seem to agree is a relatively late phenomenon, but any kind of group organization in which males hold dominant power and determine what part females shall and shall not play, and in which capabilities assigned to women are relegated generally to the mystical and aesthetic and excluded from the practical and political realms. (It is characteristic of patriarchal thinking that these realms are regarded as separate and mutually exclusive.)" (78) Why sexist language DOES MATTER AND IS DAMAGING: "Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women [and no doubt boys and young men, too] a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are the deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision." (241)

Quoting a syllabus: "You must question my assumptions, my sources, my information; that is part of learning to learn. You should also question your own assumptions. Skepticism about oneself is essential to continued growth and a balanced perspective." (145) Claiming an education vs. receiving one (231).

I feel like I should read this book periodically for the rest of my life, to remind myself to work hard, to push myself, to create community wherever I can, to CREATE in general. I have too long been hibernating and soaking up information and ideas. It's time to squeeze the sponge out.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich was a fierce poet, but also an academic, and this is an academic collection. It includes lectures to students, speeches to administrators, presentations to commissions, articles, essays, reviews and columns. At times it was a bit too academic for a general reader like me, but what brilliance.

She spoke from experience, of patriarchy and feminism, motherhood and teaching. But the parts I enjoyed most were when she applied her knowledge and experience to literary analysis.

On Wuthering Heights:
“The bond between Catherine and Heathcliff is the archetypal bond between the split fragments of the psyche, the masculine and feminine elements ripped apart and longing for reunion.”

On Jane Eyre:
“Coming to her husband in economic independence and by her free-choice, Jane can become a wife without sacrificing a grain of her Jane Eyre-ity.”

On Poetry:
“But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.”

My favorite was her essay “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” from a 1975 Brandeis University lecture. Understanding Dickinson from Rich’s intellectual-feminist-poet point of view is a treat no Dickinson fan should miss. A revelation.

For those who think this collection may be dated, I offer this:
“One of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and the sharing of words. This hearing and saying of women has been able to break many a silence and taboo; literally to transform forever the way we see.”

The “past decade” referenced was 50 years ago, but it sounds remarkably like a certain movement going on right now. As we know, silences continue, and there are many more secrets we must go on sharing in order to move the transformation forward. We still have much to learn from Adrienne Rich.

[Luzma Umpierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

This essential book in Feminist thought taught me the value of having no lies, no secrets and no silence in the relationships among women. She has an essay/chapter on Re/vision that is a must read in dealing with the concept of what Lesbian revisionism is. Now there are authors who think that this term comes out of the new culture as used today but it goes back, exemplarily so, to Rich who although constantly glorified is not used as a role model for the intestinal wars among women writers such as Castillo against Cisneros, and others like Nemir Matos Cintron who praises women writers in person and then stabs them in the back with her comments in private. Thus in the case of the Castillo against Cisneros the "ring fight" advertised in the old La tolteca page on Facebook, would never have been advertised if Castillo had read and taken into account Rich's essay. She would have never publicized a war in which the opponent had no way of fighting that fight since Cisneros was a friend/writer of Castillo and the bought would have been perceived by Rich as a lie to feminist thought in that it is about envy among writers and not in line with Castillo's Xicanism derived from Feminism. In the case of Matos it is about secrets as she praises to the sky books by fellow young writers like Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro and even Sandra Maria Esteves and in private comments warns that they are worthless and she would not touch their books with a ten foot poll; especially the Esteves' collections of poems. As to silence, it has been bestowed upon me after having a stroke for demanding, in Rich's legacy, to speak truth to these writers and others so that truth would emerge as victorious in these intestinal battles among women Lesbian and Bisexual colleagues and all hatches set to burn in a huge bonfire to create the vision of Rich in her book The Dream of A Common Language another classic

[Andreea · Rating 2 out of 5]

One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own. (p. 11)

This was, hm, disappointing. I really enjoyed some of the essays, especially 'Toward a Woman-Centered University' (1973-4) and 'Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson' (1975), but most of the others had unsettling passages. For example, I had no idea that Rich was very, very anti-medication for mental health problems. In the brief article on Anne Sexton she also talks about how women "destroy themselves" by being "addicted to depression" which she calls "the most acceptable way of living out a female existence, since the depressed cannot be held responsible, doctors will prescribe us pills, alcohol offers its blanket of blankness" (122).

???

She also has the distasteful tendency to talk about, for example, lack of male approval as "psychological rape". In her 1976 MLA address she talks about how "it is the lesbian in us who is creative" but at the end she discusses women's responses to her speech and their objections are 350% more convincing than her initial argument. Moreover, I got this book because it was mentioned in a book about Emily Dickinson and about the different kinds of feminist responses to it. I expected it to be more focused on literature, especially since the two longest essays on literature (one on Dickinson, the other one on Jane Eyre, there are also some short articles / reviews on poetry mainly) were quite good although a bit obvious. I guess this is an important book to get a sense of the history of feminist thought (which is why I like the quote from the foreword), but I'm going to stick to her poetry from now on.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because I like some of Adrienne Rich's poetry. Turns out I like her prose too! It's depressing that much of what she said about feminism in the 60s and 70s is still true. It made me feel more motivated to do things about it.

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Highly recommend

[Eleanor Cowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich is one of my magnificent mentors, so welcomed by women like me who spent desperate decades evolving out of dissociation and disconnection. Children whose little brains are co-opted from the get-go have to work extra hard to re-inflate. From learning that I was born with original sin on my soul ("...sin like little black tar dots on a sparkling white handkerchief." Sister Brebeuf) and that I needed to serve, sacrifice, and suffer to please a male deity - to the expansive reality I now enjoy, is due to the writers such as Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, and Christopher Hitchens.
Rich's essay about the brilliance of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre was stunning. Her comparison of the crazy 'first wife' in the attic to the woman Jane could also have become if she'd strayed from her values, was fabulous. As I read, I finally had compassion for my misguided Self who wanted an 'education' so I could 'be somebody.' I spent six years studying the literature of white misogynist males who disliked women. Wow! I could have been out swing dancing and having so much fun instead of contorting myself to fit a preformed shape that wasn't me. Poor me. Well, I'm out of it now and offer my forever thanks to you, Adrienne Rich.

Eleanor Cowan, Author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this collection mainly for "Vesuvius at Home," which didn't disappoint. It was intricate-yet-familiar in its emotion, the simple culmination of a road trip a poet took to witness another poet's relationship to power. The prose was beautiful (of course it was), and I loved spending my time reading it slowly. The other essays and lectures were very Adrienne Rich On Top of Her Game In the Seventies: another generation's feminism, with that generation's emerging consciousness. This is slightly pre-Kimberlé Crenshaw, although, I don't think we can or should give Rich credit for inventing intersectional consciousness. She definitely thinks fiercely and forwardly about her place within social systems and movements, and yet I still felt her running into familiar 1970s feminist problems. I think that a lot of these pieces will strike most contemporary gender studies readers as important time capsules to be shelved in someone's 20th century archive, yet too dated to be our collective assigned reading.

[Ioana Pintea · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Every effort that left no trace... The efforts of women in labor, giving birth to stillborn children, children who must die of plague or by infanticide; the efforts of women to keep filth and decay at bay, children decently clothed, to produce the clean shirt in which the man walks out daily into the common world of men, the efforts to raise children against the attritions of racist and sexist schooling, drugs, sexual exploitation, the brutalization and killing of barely grown boys in war. There is still little but contempt and indifference for this kind of work, these efforts. (The phrase 'wages for house-work'has the power to shock today that the phrase 'free love'possessed a century ago.)"

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Months ago, my decision to purchase this book was an act of intellectual calculation. I’d heard an excellent recommendation on a podcast, and believed dipping into the mind of Adrienne Rich would be edifying. In the wake of the recent election, however, I grabbed this collection of essays off my bookshelf in an act of desperation. What was I seeking? Solace in the words of a radical writer from my mother’s generation of feminists? A reminder that courageous people struggled for equality in America well before I was born? An escape to a moment when America’s problems, dire as they were, seemed ultimately surmountable?

I suppose I was seeking all of those things; what I found was much richer. The first thing anyone will notice when taking up one of these essays is Rich’s voice: verbose, melodic, contemplative, harsh and soothing at once:

"Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way, become present to us in sensuous form. The knowledge and use of this magic goes back very far: the rune; the chant; the incantation; the spell; the kenning; sacred words; forbidden words; the naming of the child, the plant, the insect, the ocean, the configuration of stars, the snow, the sensation in the body. The ritual telling of the dream. The physical reality of the human voice; of words gouged or incised in stone or wood, woven in silk or wool, painted in vellum, or traced in sand." (248, emphasis hers)

Even when I disagreed with Rich’s views, I relished floating through her mind. This book is enough to make anyone wish for poets to write more academic essays, and for academics to write more poetry.

I have a long list of notes from reading this book. They describe themes, reactions, comparisons to the politics of today. They grasp at meanings that can be distilled, polished, reproduced. They are, historically speaking, male reactions, received directly from training in male institutions. They seek to possess and subdue, wrapping a weary reality in the illusion of control.

The spirit of Rich’s writing is profoundly orthogonal to all that. Whether writing about poetry, poets themselves, politics, feminism, or history, Rich exhausts the reader with possibility and sheer force; her prose blows open the doors of the stuffy room and peers outside into the wilderness. Rich annihilates untruths by celebrating unnamed or misunderstood truth-tellers and life-livers:

"Like Virginia Woolf, I am aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing dishes and looking after the children. Nearly fifty years after she spoke, the fact remains largely unchanged. And I am thinking also of women whom she left out of the picture altogether––women who are washing other people’s dishes and caring for other people’s children, not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children. We seem to be special women here…we are teachers, writers, academicians; our own gifts could not have been enough, for we all know women whose gifts are buried or aborted. Our struggles can have meaning and our privileges––however precarious under patriarchy––can be justified only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts––and whose very being––continue to be thwarted and silenced." (38)

The dynamics described here appear everywhere between the powerful and the powerless, between the privileged and the wanting, between the celebrated and the forgotten. Gender is just one arena––albeit an extraordinarily important one––amongst many where people all over the world are struggling to gain some ground, or stand their ground, or claim ground from underneath others. Rich’s understanding of the dynamics of oppression, which is both general and highly specific, offers a wealth of insight to anyone concerned with the nature of the world’s brokenness and possible paths of progress: “The lie is a short-cut through another’s personality” (192).

The salutary effect of these essays springs from how they blend the intellectual and the emotional, reminding us that rational analysis is inescapably suffused with a bodily energy in every human that outruns itself. The uncatchable prey is always ten steps ahead of the following hunter, and we delude ourselves by pretending we are one and not always also the other. The fist that smashes the mirror is language:

"When we become acutely, disturbingly aware of the language we are using and that is using us, we begin to grasp a material resource…Language is as real, as tangible in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations. We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every recognized technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary” but not transformative." (247-8)

This review feels inadequate, but only because I am so accustomed to coming to conclusions about what a piece of writing means to me. The cavalier attitude with which I pass judgment on books––smearing the work forever with calculations and summaries––is something of a disgrace. I doubt it will change much, given that it is also a powerful addiction. But this book defies me, and I love it for that.

This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if Adrienne Rich was ahead of her time, but she definitely tackles some issues that still have to be explained to others - race colorblindness is idiotic, a woman's status to motherhood/marriage still forms some of her primary descriptors, and how anti-feminist women are backed by men who are served by their messages. I also appreciate her citing of Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective Statement - something that I shamefully did not learn about until earlier this year. Other chapters discuss lesbians, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, and a women's relationship to the university system.

[Meadow · Rating 5 out of 5]

When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1971) was full of heart, anger, and thus relatability for me. Rich gains a consciousness, one aware that her position as a female writer, and the woman's position, is constantly blustered and spat on. This fact is confronted with upmost vulnerability. Her most energising acknowledgement, she puts most simply: 'The creative energy of patriarch is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction. As women, we have our work cut out for us.'

[Lady V. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very glad I did ultimately read this book, even though I was greatly put off once I learned of Rich's history regarding trans women, because it helped explain to me how and why a person reaches such conclusions. While I obviously cannot offer an exclusive, comprehensive answer, there is one thing that really tipped me off, and it is her assumption that women fundamentally cannot truly be exploiters. I mean this particularly when it comes to men, although you can see her hesitation even when she describes relations between white and black women. The final essay in this collection particularly underscores this contradiction, as she both elaborates on the betrayals and misdeeds of white women, while always speaking of the relationship between them, as if they both need to reach across. This sort of soft-dualism becomes even more apparent when you realize how she fails to notice that the black men in the same essay (Disloyal to Civilization) is also being raped.

The source of this bias is her reductive analysis of cis womanhood above all else, with all the disastrous consequences that entails. For the things she does acknowledge, her analysis is spot on, but when the dynamic between rises in complexity (such as in the interaction between white gay men and white women), it falls extremely flat. Her perpetual dismissal of the capacity of women to do harm is not only misogynistic, but will ultimately expose the most vulnerable groups to further violence and marginalization.

She got some things right, she was biased about a lot of others, fuck her for her involvement with Janice Raymond.

[Ming Jiu Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the foreword, A.R. writes in response to the question, 'how shall we ever make the world intelligent on our movement' - "I do not think the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention."

This work fully embodies its initial promise. It is not an easy read, but by difficult it is not in the mold of male-dominated academic writing, deliberately obscuring and mystifying to deny access. It is challenging because of its expansive range - covering poetry, motherhood, education, lesbianism/feminism, feminism across racial boundaries etc.; and its lucidity of thought, understanding feminism to be a radical historical movement that expands our love for women.

[Erol Yeşilyurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a male reader of A. Rich, I must say, I am glad to have read this book. She is writing in a style that is personal, direct and without irony. There are many points that she makes I am not agreed with, but she is asking the right questions and searching for answers from a feminist stand point. In 1970's it must have outraged many, but, provides a liberating point of view for males too. This book is a must read in order to examine the life as it is. She is also sharply warning about turning feminism into a life style choice and which is a warning for all from radical socialists to environmentalists alike. It is also a non-conformist book, it is not easy to read, it is forcing the reader to close the book and think personally and make connections with aspects of the life and culture.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

WOW -- how can a book so many decades old continue to have such relevance? The sad answer is that the issues Rich discusses so eloquently are still in need of fixing. The chapters simultaneously riled me up in their clear articulation of the issues faced by women and provided a careful recourse to those issues. Of course the fact that the issues are still at hand left me with despair, but the articulation and responses gave me a way to talk about them to others, and think about them for myself. I wish she were still here to give us new articulations of the issues we face, but I'm so glad she left these writings behind.

[Pilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like how authentically honest the feminist author of these writings is, how she analyses her feelings and thoughts throughout the years.
Let`s see how she says it at the end of the Foreword:
"The essays in this book represent the journey of my own thought which is not linear: The contradictions and repetitions speak for themselves. I disagree with myself in this book, and I find in myself both severe and tender feelings toward the woman I have been, whose thoughts I find here."

[Bridgett · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are essays in this book that I will reread the rest of my life. "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" and "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision" are as compelling as they were when I first read them 15 years ago nearly 20 years after they were first written."

[Alex Kudera · Rating 4 out of 5]

rereading a few essays from here including "When We Dead Awaken". . .

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://winterlief.blogspot.nl/2016/12...

[Kyra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea that a women's history is so perishable it may not qualify as history at all, and through much of what qualifies as history, women were essentially born to be forgotten unless immortalized by a man, his poetry, his wars, his gods -- this is Rich's territory in this slim and passionate book of essays from the late sixties to late seventies. She wants to explain that women have always been missing in action; as anything other then objects of male fascination, constantly vulnerable to forgetting or being forgotten, or having never been known at all, beyond the category they fit into, their family, their men.
These are essay's of scholarship, sophistication, passionate complexity. Sometimes she's at the temple, destroying sacred cows, other times she is urging us to look a little deeper at our own experience and our own lives and be more accountable to them, on our own.

Her passion is most poignant as she explores the connections between women, politically, as mothers, as citizens, as lovers. She embarks with the notion that relationships between women are fraught as mediated by the Patriarchy, but nonetheless what the world needs now, then, forever.

She is hopeful. Relationships between women, as lovers friends partners allies enemies - all of it is messy, but the devotion to a cause is naked, raw even; worth it. I found the tone of her essays almost dizzying with possibilities and reckonings. You find yourself at first noting how deep her analysis is and how frighteningly contemporary.

Why is it Rich's fundamental cause - that women are to be considered full-fledged human being spossessing all human capabilities - has proven a remarkably hard sell? Can you believe the ERA never got passed!? That last week 35 states enacted new legislation preventing women's right to choose, that our last President is a serial rapist and nearly 78M people including a majority of women voted for? Yes, we still have lessons to learn from Adrienne Rich.

Adrienne just wants you to get it, woman! She just wants you to feel awesome about yourself and take yourself seriously even if the odds are long because there is a lot of work to do and you can do it and it even might be fun. She wants us to pull together in a way that we'd now call intersectional. It's rare enough for the time she was writing that you can see how uphill the battle to talk about relationships between black and white women in America and what they have consisted of. This is still work as yet undone in the 50-60 years since many of these essays were first published.

She reminds us of the fact that self-definition is what awaits us in a fully feminist future. That is her definition of freedom. And if there are so few free women she might attribute that to the fact that for most of human history women were not literate so they can be forgiven for having a smaller library and fewer stories. We also can be forgiven for having to rediscover what women before us documented for us to build upon.. Never mind, she seems to say to the next generation, give birth to yourselves! and lift someone else up if you can.

[christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Any person who is acquainted with some of the more common criticisms levelled at patriarchy will find Richs' analysis familiar. What is striking about Rich's essays are her impassioned tone; you feel, at times, her desperation to be heard so that the bevy of women that she attempts to speak for can be heard as well. This makes many of the essays endearing, even though many of the ideas and arguments begin to repeat themselves as you read further into the collection.

One quality that I respect about Rich is her acknowledgement of her own privilege as a white woman; she knows she cannot speak on behalf of other women, only for herself, her race, and class but the acknowledgement opens doors to possible improvement. If only she didn't just acknowledge this in her addendum but again, this was between 1966-1978, so I grant the larger issue of women -- as a gender -- needed to be highlighted before the nuance of women as a group of individual characters could be addressed.

My favourite portions of this collections were her analysis on literature and poetry through the lens of gender inequity. I found her perspective on Jane Eyre enlightening as I had always felt Jane Eyre was inferior to Wuthering. Whilst I will still hold Wuthering as a masterpiece, I have a newfound respect for Jane Eyre due to Rich's pronounced reading. Equally, her intense analysis of Dickinson's poetry was -- actually all the poets she analysed -- astounding to me in its complexities and its insights. BUT I am a lit and poetry nerd, so there is an extreme bias present...

Overall, it's a good collection but shouldn't really be read cover to cover or all at once. Rather, these should be used as a guide to the study of one part of feminist history and a reminder that some arguments made in 1966 are still being made now, pointing to the slowness in progress Rich often alludes to, despite her fervent belief that there will be a time in which women will be defined by their character and their merits rather than their gender.

[Hannah Gadbois · Rating 3 out of 5]

“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.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”

This book had some beautiful and insightful observations about the importance of access to language in order to share experiences and create a new world order. I especially enjoyed the titular essay and its discussion of the way women withhold truth from themselves and their relationships by submitting to silence. However, for Rich, every societal issue is subsumed by gender. Although she does have some useful discussions of the intersections of race and gender, she continuously minimizes other issues as offshoots of gender-based issues, issues that she implies would disappear in a world created around feminine love and values. (Particularly jarring is the implication that mental illness in women is exclusively a product of the patriarchy). Underlying this is the absence of a real engagement with gender. Rich contributed heavily to Janice Raymond's, "The Transsexual Empire," a book devoted to the concept that trans women are colonizing the female body violently. Although Rich doesn't discuss trans people explicitly, her gender essentialism is unsettlingly apparent behind every otherwise good and powerful point she makes.

I really struggled deciding what star rating to give this book. Upon discovering her problematics, I initially wanted to go no higher than one or two stars. However, I also recognize that I happily read white male authors without interrogating their politics (and they are likely much worse).

[Annelie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful and incendiary selection of essays. As someone who attends a woman's college, this reaffirmed my choice to attend an institution that would help me find women mentors and attribute my future successes to an institution that encourages female leadership and female scholarship. Beyond this, I learned a lot about Rich's personal values, in particular her condemnation of love as a concept that men use to distract women from the equally fulfilling realms of work and activism, as well as her condemnation of lying, which is best addressed in her essay "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" but also comes through in later essays, in which she stresses (controversially) the need for gay people to come out of the closet to create a world where doing so is more acceptable.

In general, I don't know if I agree with many of her arguments: in particular, I struggle to identify a common woman experience that transcends oppression, and wonder if the assertion of such is a little transphobic. I also am confused, but interested in hearing more, about her thoughts on love, and what role it should play in someone's life.

I recommend this book to women, but also to male professors. Hopefully, it can help the latter better understand their role in guiding women to positions of power in a female world.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book came to me as a mention in another work I've read. I expected something very different and was taken with a pleasant surprise of how powerful this book actually is.
Feminism in 21st Century is oftentimes controversial label, many people do not want to be associated with 'men haters', but this is not the gist of feminism. But what saddens and even angers me, is how many female-centered issues are not resolved since the 60s, not much has changed.

I have learned new facts I was unaware of and became more sympathetic to fellow women who are less fortunate with the access to education or the profession I posses.
We are stronger when we fix each others' crowns, fight for our rights, our decisions, our bodies.

A powerful collection of the feminist essays.

[GwenViolet]

A lot that is good here (some that I do have problems with, like I think it is reflective of a certain distrust of socialist politics, etc. etc.), but then you get the *wonderful* experience of remembering that despite whatever solace and power you find in reflection on a woman's experience under patriarchy you then get come across passages celebrating the eventual unnecessity of trans people and denegrating trans healthcare as a waste of time brought on by patriarchy. Oh well, a lot that did make me feel better about *being a woman* before that.

Well, eh, the literary criticism is good.

Not rating, because my brain is in too many places

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest, I’ve often thought that Adrienne Rich was a better (more compelling) essayist and analyst, than she was a poet (“Diving Into The Wreck”, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”, and a few other poems, might be exceptions).

I really loved this collection (particularly her writings on Emily Dickinson, and on the “Lesbian Continuum”), and it was very important to me in college.

Looking back, I think (hope) that Ms. Rich is viewed as one of the most important feminists, thinkers, and public intellectuals, of the 20th Century. 🙂

[Stu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Rich now in the 2020s feels like she was way ahead of her time - many of her arguments would still be trenchant and acute today, despite the half-century gap since their composition.

It brings me hope to see that her words have had so much impact, and how the fight continues. Sad to see that it still suffers from many of the same, seemingly intractable issues, especially around culture, and sad also at the dragging pace of change.

These essays deserve to be re-read, especially in dialogue with more contemporary works on feminism, class, and critical race theory.

[P. Henry]

SURPRISINGLY Transphobic but it only gets really bad in the second to last essay for a paragraph but that got me into researching Rich's contributions to transphobic rhetoric and all that and ultimately: still v glad I read it, will probably read more bcuz imo if Rich had lived to today she probably would've grown to accept transwomen as part of the women's movement! And as a nonbinary AMAB it was an interesting thought experiment to wonder where I would fit into Rich's ideas.