These were the 1940s, and we were told a great deal about the Battle of Britain, the noble French Resistance fighters, the brave, starving Dutch-but … - Adrienne Rich

Learn to be worthy of the women of every class, culture, and historical age who did otherwise, who spoke boldly when women were jeered and physically harassed for speaking in public, who-like Anne Hutchinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Grimké sisters, [[Abby Kelley, [[Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Susan B. Anthony, Lillian Smith, Fannie Lou Hamer-broke taboos, who resisted slavery-their own and other people's. To become a token woman-whether you win the Nobel prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters-is to become something less than a man indeed, since men are loyal at least to their own world view, their laws of brotherhood and male self-interest. I am not suggesting that you imitate male loyalties; with the philosopher Mary Daly, I believe that the bonding of women must be utterly different and for an utterly different end: not the misering of resources and power, but the release, in each other, of the yet unexplored resources and transformative power of women, so long despised, confined, and wasted. (p9)

I guess what I'm searching for always is a way of staying linked to the past, pulling out of it whatever you can use, and continuing to move on.

I believe in the potential, both tapped and blocked, within each one of you. I believe that the responses to the Simi Valley verdict where hundreds of white youth have joined in demonstrations and uprisings in city after city, where citizens of conscience, whatever their, our origins, are being compelled to consider their, our place in all this-I believe that the civil and moral unrest now moving through the inner nervous system of our country, has a chance of catalyzing one of the great shifts in our history. A chance of building not into some hierarchic, monolithic movement, but into many streams of movement, always in touch with and interrogating each other: African American, Arab American, Asian American, Jewish, Latino, white, lesbian, gay and straight: women and men, old and young. My hope, for you and for us all, is that you refuse docility and shallowness and lend your gifts and intelligence to a rising democracy movement here in the United States, sharing power with sisters and brothers at whose expense that power was acquired: learning what can only be taught by those who are not here today.