Relations of power, as I began to decipher them, have infused a great deal of my work over time—both poetry and prose. But poetry was where I could c… - Adrienne Rich

The belief that established science and scholarship-which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making-are "objective" and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture.

At different times in my life I have wanted to push away one or the other burden of inheritance, to say merely I am a woman; I am a lesbian. If I call myself a Jewish lesbian, do I thereby try to shed some of my southern gentile white woman's culpability? If I call myself only through my mother, is it because I pass more easily through a world where being a lesbian often seems like outsiderhood enough?

we need to know where we have been: we need our history.