The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the… - Adrienne Rich

People have to put bread on the table and they're trying to do political work as well.

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.

Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.