Claiming an Education: An Analysis of Adrienne Rich's Enduring Message
Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 - 2012), a renowned poet, essayist, political activist, and self-described "woman, lesbian, and feminist," delivered a powerful convocation speech at Douglass College in 1977 titled "Claiming an Education." This essay remains relevant, offering a critique of the educational system, particularly from a woman's perspective, and urging students to take responsibility for their own intellectual growth.
Adrienne Rich: A Champion of the Oppressed
Born in Baltimore, USA, in 1929, Adrienne Rich's literary career began early, winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1951 for her book A Change of World. She continued writing poetry, publishing her second collection, The Diamond Cutters, in 1955. In the 1960s, Rich became a champion of the oppressed, advocating for the rights of women and sexual minorities, and participating in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War protests. Her works, including Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) and Leaflets (1969), reflected her political views. Rich's collection Diving into the Wreck (1973) won the 1974 National Book Award. Her writings questioned patriarchal assumptions and emphasized the need for change and the power of the will. The Dream of a Common Language (1978) argued for a shared women's language, a significant concern for feminists in the 1970s. Rich refused the National Medal for the Arts in 1997 due to disagreements with the US government's policies.
The Ethical and Intellectual Contract
Rich's essay begins by establishing that a university education should imply an ethical and intellectual contract between teacher and student. She argues that students should not passively "receive" an education but actively "claim" one. This distinction highlights the difference between being acted upon and acting, emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility in learning.
Responsibility to Oneself
Adrienne Rich elaborates on the concept of responsibility to oneself, urging students to refuse to let others do their thinking, talking, and naming for them. It involves respecting and using one's own brains and instincts, and grappling with hard work. She warns against easy solutions like predigested books, fleeting encounters, "gut" courses, and academic dishonesty. She encourages women to demand respect for their sense of purpose and integrity from those around them, including parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, and children.
Gendered Bias in Education
Rich points out the gendered bias in education, noting that men have historically perceived and organized knowledge, history, social relationships, and values. This perspective is reflected in college curricula, where even science can be influenced by racist and sexist viewpoints. She highlights that it has only been within the last 100 years that higher education has become accessible to women, and the books studied often bear titles like The Descent of Man, Man and His Symbols, and The Future of Man. Some male professors may view teaching at a women's college as a second-rate career.
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The Courage to Be Different
Rich emphasizes the importance of having the courage to be "different." This means that women should be able to demand from others to respect their sense of purpose and their integrity as persons. This "difference" is what separates a life lived actively from one of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Clear thinking, active discussion, and excellent writing are all necessary for intellectual freedom, and that these require hard work.
Claiming vs. Receiving: A Call to Action
The fundamental principle in Adrienne Rich’s article is that women, as students should not receive an education, but to claim one. Claiming an education sounds a lot like taking what’s rightfully yours. Do you receive an education for society or does society present it for a student to take? Rich seems to think that education is presented for those willing to claim it.
Rich explains that even all women colleges are ran by men. Claiming something from my perspective means to take and not look back. Receiving means that someone may have to given something they have away. If women were teachers and administrators, women would feel better about receiving an education from another woman. But unfortunately very few women are working in administration field. Rich’s argument is summed up when she informs the reader that the idea of claiming an education can be embraced by any sex, race, color or creed. She says that education is not for everyone but it is there for the ones willing to take it. Rich provokes her reader by letting telling them to discover their own journey to education. She finally says to the women student that they should not sell their talents and aspirations cheaply. They should have the courage to demand from others to respect their sense of purpose and their integrity as persons. Because we live in a society that embraces abstract thinking and making something out of nothing.
The Role of Women's Colleges and Studies
In her address, Rich extols the radical potential of women's colleges for resisting social forces that encourage women's passivity and self-denial. She asserts that if students and faculty are mutually committed to taking the education of women seriously, "there is no more exhilarating and intellectually fertile place in the academic world today than a women's college". Rich also commends the emerging field of Women's Studies for offering a "woman-directed education" that transforms curricula and develops critical thinking about androcentric scholarship and society. Her inspiring remarks imply that women's studies programs at women's colleges and universities are uniquely positioned; Women's Studies can and should take the lead in fulfilling the fundamental institutional mission of women's colleges to empower women by developing independence of thought, self-affirmation, and leadership skills.
Although insights from Women's Studies are sometimes used to radicalize the curriculum and mission of institutions for women, Rich's implicit vision for Women's Studies at women's colleges has yet to be fully realized at many women's colleges and universities throughout the United States. Regrettably, a large number of these institutions have disappeared during the last four decades. Furthermore, when surviving women's colleges face significant enrollment declines, serious financial difficulties, or legal threats to their gender-based admissions criteria, they sometimes choose to channel the energies of feminist faculty and staff toward the creation of isolated women's studies programs instead of intentionally designing university-wide curricula explicitly aimed at resisting women's social conditioning and developing critical thinking about social inequalities. In these institutional locations this approach to Women's Studies can sometimes function as a containment strategy, an effort to make the campus a "safer," more attractive place for politically conservative students and faculty or for the newly admitted male students. This approach is clearly useful for establishing independent programs in Women's Studies, which can and do serve as loci for transformative pedagogies and educating for critical consciousness. Yet this strategy can function to undercut the more far-reaching potential for women's colleges and universities to fulfill successfully the transformative mission for which Adrienne Rich so passionately argued.
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It is, of course, somewhat precarious for women's studies programs to be linked closely to the missions of women's colleges, since common stereotypes about women's colleges (that they are obsolete, promote antipathy toward men, or encourage lesbianism) are exacerbated by similar negative perceptions of Women's Studies and feminism. When faculty or community members raise questions about the mission and image of the school, their thoughts often turn automatically to the women's studies program; deliberations about altering the single-sex mission of the institution inevitably lead to debate about the value and purpose of Women's Studies at the institution. Women's studies programs at women's colleges and universities thus face unique challenges in negotiating their relationship to the institutions in which they are located, even as they are extraordinarily positioned to transform the lives of women through education. These observations can be illustrated by the example of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University (TWU), which is by far the largest university primarily for women in the nation and one of only three public universities of its kind in the United States. At TWU, where the women's studies program was relatively slow to develop, a graduate degree in Women's Studies was created in response to challenges to the institution's identity in 1995 when all academic programs were opened to men. Although Women's Studies at TWU has made great strides throughout the past decade, the program still strives to become more fully recognized as…
Enduring Relevance
Although "Claiming an Education" was written in 1977, its message remains timeless. Rich's points about gender bias, the importance of personal responsibility, and the need for women to be taken seriously in academia are still relevant today. As a female student, one can attest to the issues Rich raises about women not being taken seriously.
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