what isn't named is often more permeating than what is - Adrienne Rich

Feminist history charges us, as women committed to the liberation of women, to know the past in order to consider what we want to conserve and what we want not to repeat or continue. To see patterns, connections, which the false assimilation of liberal humanism obscures. To draw strength: Memory is nutriment, and seeds stored for centuries can still germinate.

Those of us who came into activism in the sixties and before, who have continued as engaged citizens through the seventies into the nineties-as welfare rights organizers, as feminists, as members of a critical and oppositional press, as community organizers, as lesbian and gay activists, as anti-racism educators, as new and challenging voices in the labor movement, as builders of battered women's shelters and rape crisis centers, as coalition builders among racial and ethnic communities, as creators of socially responsive art-we did not intend for you or any young people to face at your coming-of-age so manipulated and demoralized a society, at once so fearful and so complacement, as this one. But it's not commiseration I feel for you, standing here, but hope. You have had not just educational privilege of a high order, but the privilege of having a time of youth, when you could try on different selves, without fear of being locked into any one of them. Most people your age in this country don't have a time of youth. And for those young men and women, who will not stand today or any day soon in academic robes under a threatening or a clear blue sky, who were early locked by racism and poverty into manhoods and womanhoods they had no time to choose, I also feel, not despair, but hope.

I'm one of the lesbians who came out through the women's movement. And I don't mean I wouldn't have come out without a women's movement, but it's very hard to imagine the world without the women's liberation movement at this point. However, in my own history, that was the point. It was a time of tremendous intensity among women — women of all kinds. Women who had known they were lesbians all their lives, women who were then coming out, women who were then and have remained heterosexual. There was a kind of intensity around the politics that was very profound and passionate. It was very moving and very exciting to see women taking their strength and taking hold of each other's strength and bringing out the power in each other. ... The passion was political, and the politics was passionate. Yes, it was very sexual, and it was also a milieu and a time that was very political.