On Feminist Intellectual History

Abstract

In teaching the Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies on my campus over the past several years, I find first-year college students to be generally receptive to feminist encouragements to find voice, to speak of difficult truths, to express themselves honestly, to break silences imposed by family or culture, to transgress taboos. I point to the same cluster of quotations from the same great feminist intellectuals each semester, and my selections would be familiar, I think, to most women’s studies professors in the United States. First, there is “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde whose words flood me with urgency: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.” Then, there’s bell hooks, in “Talking Back,” on the risk and dare of speaking when not spoken to: “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice” (9).

I want to give her the courage to say the next hard thing, without fear of ridicule or expulsion if she strays across the borders of good taste, good sense, or good judgment demarcated by a tradition she has had no part in forming. I want her to do the same for me.

This is what we can all do to nourish and strengthen one another: listen to one another very hard, ask hard questions, too, send one another away to work again, and laugh in all the right places.

—Nancy Mairs, “Voice Lessons,” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer