From Adrienne Rich

While doing some research this afternoon, I ran across this powerful passage from feminst poet, Adrienne Rich. It comes from her book Of Woman Born. It was a reminder to me of how important the contributions of radical feminism are to issues of personal and social transformation. What she is getting at - owning our selves and actualizing our interconnected relationships with everything in the world - seems relevant for anyone.

“I know of no woman – virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate – whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves – for whom the body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. There is for the first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into both knowledge and power…We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world, women will truly create life, bring forth not only children (if we choose) but the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence – a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin”