![]() ![]() I don’t know about Vassar, but at Smith we learned almost nothing about women. The truth is that we need Women’s Studies almost as much as we need Black Studies, and for exactly the same reason: too many of us have been allowed from a “good” education believing that everything from political power to scientific discovery was the province of white males. I confess that, before some consciousness-changing of my own, I would have thought the Women History courses springing up around the country belonged in the same cultural ghetto as home economics. Inhabited countries were “discovered” when the first white male set foot there, and most of us learned more about any one European country than we did about Africa and Asia combined. Our histories, for instance, have generally been written for and about white men. Everyday we see small obvious truths that we had missed before. Part of living this revolution is having the scales fall from our eyes. Clinging to the comfortable beliefs of the past serves no purpose, and only slows down the growth of new forms to suit a new reality. We look at the more stable period just past, and we think that such basic and terrifying change has never happened before. Clearly, we are living in a time of myths being torn down. There are three periods in history, he says–one in which myths are built up, one in which they obtain, and one in which they are torn down. Rollo May has a theory that I find comforting. Whether it’s woman’s secondary role in society or the paternalistic role of the United States in the world, the old assumptions just don’t work anymore. Clearing our minds and government policies of outdated myths is proving to be at least difficult. Indeed, there are quite a few Irish who doubt that they have done it yet. ![]() It wasn’t easy for the English to give up their mythic superiority. There are a few psychologists who believe that anti-Communism may eventually be looked upon as a mental disease. The apes-and-angels example is an extreme one, but so may some of our recent assumptions be. Or when I’m reading Lionel Tiger on the inability of women to act in groups. I try to remember that when I’m reading Arthur Jensen’s current and very impressive work on the limitations of black intelligence. It was beautifully done, complete with comparative skull-measurements, and it was a rationale for the English domination of the Irish for more than 100 years. Using the most respectable of scholarly methods, for instance, English scientists proved definitively that the English were descended from the angels, while the Irish were descended from the apes. They gather their proof around it, and end by becoming the theoreticians of the status quo. Unfortunately, authorities who write textbooks are sometimes subject to the same Popular Wisdom as the rest of us. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior–these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there. We are filled with the Popular Wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to un-learn. The important thing is that we are spending this time together, considering the larger implications of a movement that some call “feminist” but should more accurately be called humanist a movement that is an integral part of rescuing this country from its old, expensive patterns of elitism, racism, and violence. It is certainly a part of that revolution that I, a devout non-speaker, am managing to stand before you at all: I don’t know whether you will be grateful or not. It may have been part of that revolution that caused the senior class to invite me here–and I am grateful. Or at least, it the year the press has discovered a movement that has been strong for several years now, and reported it as a small, privileged, rather lunatic event instead of the major revolution in consciousness–in everyone’s consciousness–male or female that I believe it truly is. But this is the year of Women’s Liberation. Which means, of course, that they are almost always men. In my experience, commencement speakers are gray-haired, respected creatures, heavy with the experience of power in the world and with Establishment honors. You can possibly be as surprised as I am. You may be surprised that I am a commencement speaker. President Simpson, members of the faculty, families and friends, first brave and courageous male graduates of Vassar- and Sisters. GLORIA STEINEM, “LIVING THE REVOLUTION” () ![]()
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