WHAT DO WOMEN NEED TO KNOW?

Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York & London: Norton, 1986) (From "What Does a Woman Need to Know? (1979): "Suppose we were to ask ourselves simply: What does a women need to know to become a self-conscious, self-defining human being? Doesn't she need knowledge of her own history, of her much-politicized female body, of the creative genius of women of the past--the skills and crafts and techniques and visions possessed by women in other times and cultures, and how they have been rendered anonymous, censored, interrupted, devalued? Doesn't she, as one of that majority who are still denied equal rights as citizens, enslaved as sexual prey, unpaid or underpaid as workers, withheld form her own power--doesn't she need an analysis of her condition, a knowledge of the women thinkers of the past who have reflected on it, a knowledge, too, of women's world-wide individual rebellions and organized movements against economic and social injustice, and how these have been fragmented and silenced?" "Doesn't she need to know how seemingly natural states of being, like heterosexuality, like motherhood, have been enforced and institutionalized to deprive her of power? Without such education, women have lived and continue to live in ignorance or our collective context, vulnerable to the projections of men's fantasies about us as they appear in art, in literature, in the sciences, in the media, in the so-called humanistic studies. I suggest that not anatomy but enforced ignorance, has been a crucial key to our powerlessness." Id. 1-2. "President Conway tells me that ever-increasing numbers of you are going on from Smith to medical and law schools. The news, on the face of it, is good: that, thanks to the feminist struggle of the past decade, more door into these two powerful professions are open to women. I would like to believe that any profession would be better for having more women practicing it, and that any woman practicing law or medicine would use her knowledge and skill to work to transform the ream of health care and the interpretation of the law, to make them responsive to the needs of a those--women, people of color, children, the aged, the disposed--for whom they function today as repressive controls. I would like to believe this, but it will not happen even if 50 percent of the members of these professions are women unless those women refuse to be made into token insiders, unless they zealously preserve the outsider's view and the outsider's consciousness." Id. at 7. [Note: I am in the process of rereading some Adrienne Rich prose and poetry, and was struck by the cited essay. It raised for me questions surrounding how much, or how little, has changed substantively in the nearly four decades since this essay was first written. Certainly law school enrollments hover around 50 percent nationally; a little more, a little less, from year-to-year. Yet, I suspect an overwhelming majority of women law students do not have an outsider's view or an outsider's consciousness. Why? Because most want the same perks and rewards as the guy. They don't want o transform law, but rather just get a greater slice of the pie. Gender diversity in law is a very good thing, but what lasting impact can it have when a majority of women lawyers have bought into the same rigged game? If women lawyers are just like the old, white guys, or if women take the "I-have-got-mine, you-get-your-own" attitude, where is the substantive change? I say this in the context of me asking these questions of myself; not just in terms of gender issues, but also of race, class, etc. In short, am I just another brick in the wall? Are you? Food for thought!]).