Amherst “Sabrina Doesn’t Live Here Any More” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

To cite this Article: Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “’Sabrina Doesn’t Live Here Any More.’” Amherst, Spring 1985 (vol. 37, no. 3), 12-17, 21.

TermsofUse:

Thisarticlemaybeusedforresearch,teachingandprivatestudypurposes.Anysubstantialorsystematicreproduction,re‐distribution,re‐selling,loanorsub‐licensing,systematicsupplyordistributioninanyformtoanyoneisexpresslyforbiddenwithoutpermissionofAmherstCollege,OfficeofCommunications,Amherst,MA01002‐5000,info@amherst.edu

Sabrina is the main object of this solemn undergraduate occasion in the early 1900s.

“Sabrina doesn’tlive here anymore”By Eve Kosofsky SedgwickAssociate Professor of English

I WANTED to start by saying a littleabout the story of the first woman atAmherst. When she arrived here in1857, she was different from the otherstudents. Not only was she female, butshe weighed 350 pounds, she wasbronze in color, and she had no clothes.An historian of Sabrina writes:For a while she occupied a place of honorupon a terrace between old North Collegeand the Octagon. She remained here forseveral years and enjoyed comparativepeace and quiet. The first prank which wasplayed upon her occurred a few years laterwhen a youth arrayed the goddess in diversgarments stolen from a nearby girls’ school.Needless to say, the student was dealt withby the faculty and to this day, Sabrina’s faircheek bears remembrance of the student’sill-timed vengeance. From this time on,Sabnna was the butt of the undergraduatebody. She was whitewashed, indecorouslydecorated, and often anticipated her futurecareer by frequent changes of color. Manywere the humiliations Sabrina suffered atthe hands of various blades. After a whilethe faculty, having become vitally wary of

This is the text ofa talk, subtitled“Gender Pride and Gender Prejudiceat Amherst College,” which ProfessorSedgwick delivered in the ConverseAssembly Room last November as partofa “Forum on Diversity” sponsoredby the college’s OrientationCommittee.

the students’ rude treatment of the gift to thecollege of such a distinguished man — thegovernor who had donated her — decided toput an end to the affair. Then too, herappearance was becoming increasingly unattractive. Accordingly, the college janitorwas given the task of removing and doingaway with the statue. [You probably knowthe end of the story from Oedipus.] Thisfaithful servant of the college could notwithstand the mute appeal of the goddess formercy, and accordingly hid her away fromthe prying eyes of the students in his barn,where she remained hidden for two years asthe tradition of the hidden goddess tookroot.

The history of abuses to Sabrina hasbeen told in many articles. What I’dlike you to imagine is Sabrina’s point ofview on what was happening to herduring these years. What I think shemostly felt was confused. To beginwith: she is told that she’s a goddess,but she is compulsively degraded,humiliated, and treated like property.People pretend to feel awe for her, butthey treat her as the most familiar offamiliar objects. She is told that she isespecially sanctified and spiritual, butshe is totally identified with her body

both because it is a nude body andbecause it is a female body. She can’tmove, but other people’s actionstoward her are attributed to things thatshe mysteriously “does.” In one newspaper article, for instance: “Sabrinaeventually lures some susceptibleAmherst student to slice her off at thebase and stick her in a truck” (italicsES). Another confusing thing: Sabrinadoesn’t know her real name. She’s

never sure if she is Sabrina or TheSabrina. Are there other Sabrinas? IsSabrina a proper noun or a commonnoun? Is Sabrina a proper lady or acommon property? Is Sabrina a goddess or a whore?

Then again, Sabnna is supposed tobe important and powerful, but she is acompletely passive object of violenceand mutilation. Any time anybody isangry at anybody, they take it out onSabrina. And I go back to that sentencefrom the historian, “Needless to saythe student [who committed an indignity to Sabrina in the first place] was dealtwith by the faculty and to this daySabrina’ s fair cheek bears the mark ofthe student’s ill-timed vengeance” (italics ES). Faculty angry at student, student angry at faculty, student takes itout on Sabrina, which has been theproblem in the first place. Plus, Sabrinakeeps getting thrown down wells,buried in chicken guano, having herarms and her toes carelessly amputated— and everybody is giving her a hardtime because she doesn’t have a senseof humor! It’s confusing.

How do I know that Sabrina is confused? I asked Sabrina. I asked her ifshe wasn’t angry at the treatment thatshe had received. And you know whatshe said? She said, “I’m not angry, I’mjust confused.” But her teeth wereclenched so tightly together that it wasdifficult to hear her.

Why wasn’t Sabrina angry? Whenmen get angry, they beat up on Sabrina.Sabrina’s immobilized; she can’t beat

Spring 1985 AMHERST 13

up on anybody. If she got angry shecouldn’t take it out on anyone else, soshe’d fall to pieces. She said, “I’d fallto pieces. They wouldn’t take meseriously anymore.” As a final wordfrom Sabrina, I asked her if she had anyadvice for undergraduate women. Shesaid, “Don’t let anyone put you up on apedestal.”

I think in a lot of ways, womenstudents today are grandchildren of thisfirst alumna. Not that we’re very closewith granny, but every couple of years,the guys truss her up and dangle herfrom a helicopter and fly her across afield just so that we can get a sense ofwhere we’re coming from. Womenstudents today have some of the sameproblems that Sabrina has and somedifferent ones. But that basic structureof conflicting expectations — of a double bind — I think remains very muchthe same.

To start with, I think women studentsat a place like Amherst — recentlycoeducated, where you have only recently been admitted to the rights andprivileges of access to a dominant culture — on the one hand feel eager to fitin, grateful to be here, wanting to buyin as much as possible. At the sametime, there are other forces that pull usinto a position of adopting an oppositional stance toward that culture, Onthe other hand, the tug toward adoptingan oppositional stand isn’t all that immediate yet.

To begin with, as undergraduatewomen, you’re not experiencing manyof the very important forms of genderoppression yet. The college environment really is more egalitarian than a

lot of environments. And it’s especiallymore egalitarian toward students than itis toward staff and faculty. Part of thereason that you as students are lessdiscriminated against than womenfaculty and staff is that you are economically the equal of men studentsyou’re paying the same tuition dollarthat men students are. When you get tothe workplace, and your economicvalue doesn’t come from how muchyou’re paying but from how muchyou’re paid, you’ll find that your economic value, compared with that ofmen, plummets. Again, most of youwomen haven’t faced an unwantedpregnancy. Most of you haven’t had achild, either wanted or unwanted. Mostof you haven’t faced the difficulty ofchildrearing in a society that devalueschildrearing. You haven’t had muchtime to test out your hopes about romance and about work, so it’s still easyto imagine that finding the “right”mate, finding the “right” job, adoptingthe “right” attitude will let you avoidpitfalls that you see or hear about otherwomen falling into.

Another important point is thatyou’re still young, in a society wheremen’s status and entitlement increasewith age and women’s status and entitlement decrease with age. When yougo to the gynecologist and he calls youby your first name, you’re used to it:everybody calls you by your first namebecause you’re young. You haven’t yethad the experience of having a gynecologist who’syounger than you are callyou by your first name. It will come.Generally speaking, your relative inexperience with discrimination probablymakes it harder for you to imagine whatit will be like, and a little harder torecognize it when you do come acrossit.

Then again, a lot of people, evenpeople older than you are (althoughrelatively fewer women and relatively

fewer people of color) still believe thatthere is such a thing as reverse discrimination going on. They still believe thatit’s going to be easier for you and notharder for you to get that well-paying,visible, prestigious job because you’rea woman. Part of the reason this happens is that women are so rare inprestigious jobs that we’re very visible,so every time a woman gets a job, everytime a person of color gets a job, “thatperson got that job because she was awoman, he was black, she was Hispanic” etc., whereas all the many timesthat a white man gets a job, nobodyeven notices that another white man hasgotten a job. In study after study, thisreverse discrimination that’s such alarge part of America’s sense of whathappens on the job market can’t befound; it isn’t there. The same olddiscriminations are going on and on.

ALL THIS puts you in a tricky position if you’re an undergraduatewoman. On the one hand, if you’retrusting and interested in buying intothis culture, you know at some levelthat you’re making yourself vulnerableto some serious betrayals and disappointments. On the other hand, ifyou don’t want that to happen andyou’re wary and trying to protect yourself intellectually and emotionally forcoming across some heavy weather, alot of these discriminations haven’t arrived yet in your lives, and so you feelparanoid. You aren’t quite sure whatyou’re being so wary about, and otherpeople look at you and say, “Why somistrustful?” And again, if you’re awoman and you’re a feminist, or becoming a feminist, there’s always thatsword hanging over your head of beingcalled a lesbian. But a lot of the mostconcrete discriminations aren’t rainingdown on you yet.

At the same time, Elizabeth Tidball(George Washington University) did astudy a few years ago that showed thatby external measurements, like Who’sWho or graduate degrees or professional degrees, the life achievements ofwomen from quite mediocre women’scolleges were higher than the lifeachievements of women from evenvery good coeducational colleges.(Continued on page 15)

Spring 1985 AMHERST

You’re still young, in a society wheremen’s status and entitlement increase withage and women’s status and entitlementdecrease with age.

14

a-

(Sabrina, from page 14)Something’s already going wrong forwomen at places like Amherst. Tidballthinks that maybe, if she did the studyagain, some of these numbers would begetting closer, but she’s not so sure.But it’s not very easy to figure outwhat’s going wrong.

I think, though, we can point to someof the double binds that you’re alreadyrunning into, and I hope you’ll recognize some of these. One of them is adouble bind that all women share ofwhatever age. It’s easiest to describethis one by going to another experiment. The experimenter sends out threesets of questionnaires to three differentsets of psychotherapists. The first questionnaire says, ‘‘Give me a list ofadjectives that describe a healthy adultperson.” Second set: “Give me a list ofadjectives for a healthy adult man.”Third set: “Give me a list of adjectivesfor a healthy adult woman.” Thehealthy adult person and healthy adultman turn out to be very similar. For thehealthy adult woman, though, thereemerges a completely different set ofadjectives! That means as long asyou’re acting like a woman you’re notacting like a person, as long as you’reacting like a person you’re not actinglike a woman. You’re always going tobe doing something wrong.

This experiment may be hard to believe, but I ran across something thatmade it easier for me to believe: adescription of a test of psychologicalfemininity that was administered in the‘50s. According to this test, the thingsthat would show you to be psychologically feminine were the following: “1.acceptance of traditional roles and hobbies and acceptance of clean white-collar work [and of course that association of clean white collars with womenis very suggestive no ring around thecollar for these white-collar workers],2. social sensitivity, 3. timidity in bothsocial and physical situations, 4. compassion and sympathy, 5. lack of interest in the abstract, political, andsocial world, 6. lack of braggadocioand hyperbole, 7. pettiness and irritability, 8. niceness and acquiescence.”If you want to be that, you can be that,but it obviously means that you aren’t aperson. If you want to be a person, you

Spring 1985 AMHERST

can be a person, but it obviously meansyou aren’t being that woman.

Those of you who are women students are probably running into thisalready in a conflict between being“tough-minded” in that Amherst combative, abrasive, really-on-top-of-

things style, as you expect yourself tobe, your professors expect you to be,your friends expect you to be, andbeing nurturing, as you expect yourselfto be, your boyfriends, your girlfriendsexpect you to be. It’s hard to fit thesetwo together. Some people can do it,but it takes a particular kind of balancing act, and it’s not one that should bedemanded of everybody.

This is something that gets highlighted in the recent ad hoc committee’sreport on the conditions of womenfaculty at Amherst; it’s somethingwomen faculty feel too. To quote acouple of paragraphs from the report:

“A senior female faculty member commented, ‘There is a sense here atAmherst that bright people are abrasiveand less bright people are nice.’Recognize that? “Another woman feltthat intellectual toughness was oftenassumed to be inextricably linked topersonal toughness. Yet a female assistant professor noted that women are notsimply expected to assimilate stereotypical male behavior.” Here comesthat double bind again. For “There aretwo conflicting demands on women —

to be silent and decorous and to perform.” Then in another part of thereport on a discussion of advising:“Some women faculty report that ifand when they try to resist studentpressure to play a maternal supportiverole, they encounter deep resentmentand harsh criticism from the students.At the same time students sometimesequate supportiveness with a lack ofintellectual rigor.” So that there’s ademand for that supportiveness and atthe same time a contempt for the peoplewho provide it, as if “They’re justdoing my emotional housekeeping forme.”

There are more double binds students can run into. Be sexual, don’t besexual. Be sexual—dress up; look as ifyou’re on the sexual market or elseyou’re a man hater, you’re being unpleasant, you’re not making yourselfagreeable. On the other hand, don’t betoo sexual because then you’re askingfor it, you’re not intellectually serious.And of course these two categorieshave always overlapped. You’re always wrong, one way or the other.

Again, for students who come fromcultural backgrounds that aren’t theexact WASP background that we findhere, there’s going to be a whole otherlayer of double binds. If you’re comingfrom another culture of one sort oranother, that culture in itself is going tohave its own demands, often conflicting demands, on you as a genderedperson. So if you’re still figuring outwhat it means to be a Jewish woman(and I speak from my own experiencewith this), and what the demands on aJewish woman are for being, say, nurturant, warm, but not possessive, thento have to take up that position inrelation to a WASP culture that has awhole different set of conflicting ex

15

C”

CtU-

Sedgwick: Conflicting expectations conflicting with conflicting expectations

-4

pectations of you as a Jewish womanmeans that you’re facing conflictingexpectations conflicting with conflicting expectations. It’s going to be tough,because every issue of ethnic identity,racial identity, cultural identity, alsogets played out as an issue of genderidentity. I don’t come here just as aJew, I come here as a Jewish woman.

Another problem is tokenism.There’s a whole group of double bindsaround tokenism. You’re going to runinto this much more when you graduate, because every woman and personof color here is among other thingsbeing educated to be a terrific token.You’re going to be in demand to be theonly person of your kind on that boardof directors. Demands are going to bemade of you that will essentially askyou to deny who you are. And it takes alot of maturity to deal with that a lotmore maturity than anybody could expect you to have at this point. You’llfeel this even at the undergraduatelevel. For instance, you may be awoman who hangs out with guys, andguys say to you things like “I like youbecause when I’m with you I don’t feellike you’re a woman.” That means thateither you can have the friends youhave or you can be a woman, but you’realways doing it one way or the other.Be a woman, but be our kind ofwoman. But being our kind of womanmeans not being “like” a woman.

There are other speculations on whycoed schools tend sometimes to suppress women’s development. There is areluctance by women, relatively speaking, to speak in mixed groups. There’spressure on women to underachieve:that famous fear of success that MartinaHomer writes about. At the same time,there’s fear of failure. And when youget a fear of success it can be in theriptide of the fear of failure. There aresome very debilitating possibilities.Say you’re one of the five women inthat particular major or one of the threewomen in that math class: there’s pressure on you to represent your gender.And it’s a very frightening thing to failat something. It’s not just you failing,but women failing.

Also there’s a tendency for women tounderestimate not only their ownpotential but their own achievements.

Studies show that when a woman and aman get the same SAT scores in math,in the medium range, the man will say,“Great, I can be a math major,” andthe woman will say, “Gee, I reallydon’t think this is good enough. Youreally have to be awfully good to be amath major.” That same B— meansdifferent things to men and women.

There’s another interesting hypothesis that I don’t think has been testedout. I heard Elizabeth Tidball speakingabout this, and it was just starting to getresearched. It was about the effects oflong-term heterosexual relationshipson men and women undergraduates.What she said she was starting to findwas that when men were involved asundergraduates in long-term sexual relationships their self-image and self-esteem went way up. They felt greatabout themselves, their engagementwith the community increased, theirperformance in their classes got better;they were right on top of things. Whenwomen got involved in the same relationships, just the opposite thing happened. Their self-esteem tended to godown, they withdrew from the collegecommunity, from engagement withclasses; their grades went down. Something serious and detrimental to womenis happening within some of thosebonds.

r

One role model isn’tenough. One in eachdepartment isn’tenough. You need awhole smorgasbord.

The lack of female role models forwomen at a coed college also is aproblem. It doesn’t mean just one rolemodel, it means having five role models or fifty. None of you women aregoing to be me when you grow up.You’re not going to be Rose Olver,Andrea Rushing, Rosalina de la Carrera. You’re going to be somewhere in

among us. One model isn’t enough.One model in each department isn’tenough. You need a wholesmorgasbord.

There’s the additional problem of theabsence of women and gender perspective from the curriculum: this will surprise those of you who are freshmenand taking “Race and Sex” and English 11. There are 500 courses in theAmherst catalog; ten of them have to dowith women or gender, 490 of them donot. You’re going to be running into theother 490 very soon.

O NE THING that women studentshave in common with Sabrina isher fear of anger, her fear of her ownfury. I think this is related to a fear inwomen, a fear of starting to recognizethe things that are going to be comingdown on us: you know once you start tosee those things you’re going to getangry. But what you think is going tohappen to you when you get angry isjust what Sabrina thinks is going tohappen to her. You’re going to go topieces. You feel immobilized, disempowered, as though when you get angryit’s not going to do the same thing foryou that happens when your professorgets angry and he slams the table andlooks mightier and more in control thanever. Quite the opposite. You’re goingto burst into tears. You’re not going tobe able to talk anymore. You won’teven be able to finish the sentence.Who would want to get angry? Andworst of all, you’re going to be shownto be a woman because after all it’swomen who lose control. It’s womenwho burst into tears. You’ll really justblow it.

I think the proportion of women whohave thought, “I really can’t go in andtalk to that professor because I’m aboutto burst into tears” is probably equal tothe proportion of women faculty whohave thought “I really can’t go meetthat class today because I’m sure I’llburst into tears.” I sense a discrediting

16 Spring 1985 AMHERST

power of tears that is very very strong.Men talk a lot about how men aren’tallowed to cry, and it’s true men aren’tallowed to cry. Women do cry, but it’salways seen as a terrible liability.We’ve solved this problem of angerthat we aren’t allowed to feel by self-accusation, by turning anger againstourselves, by making up some otherstory about why our fists are clenched.“I’m not angry, just confused. ““I’mcold.” We’ve solved this problem ofanger by turning against ourselves withself-destructive behavior of all thekinds that are increasing among youngwomen smoking, alcohol abuse,anorexia, oblivious sexuality, and byhaving self-destructive feelings ofworthlessness and depression.

Don’t men have conflicting demandstoo? Of course. The majority of menwho aren’t WASP men have that wholeset of conflicting sets of conflictingdemands that we discussed in the caseof women. And then there’s a wholelitany of other conflicting demands thatI’m sure you men know better than I do.Be sensitive, but be macho. Be feminists. You can’t be a feminist, you’re aman. Be well groomed and well behaved, but don’t be effeminate. Bondclosely with other men. But don’t bondtoo closely with other men. Or if you dobond very closely with other men, findsome female figure to route it through,like the Sabrina. The greatest sentencein that one article about Sabrina issomething like, “Sabrina served as aninstrument for class bonding.” Andyou have to understand “class” in thebroadest possible sense!

It’s tough for men; it’s tough structurally in alot of the same ways that it’stough for women. Double binds aresimilar in shape. On the other hand, formen, the pathway from Amherst College to positions of real power in theworld is relatively clear and unobstructed. If you don’t ask too many questions and if you manage to get out ofhere with exactly the right mixture ofself-knowledge and self-ignorance, therewards for filing straight through thisdefile of double binds are power, love,money.

Even good, nice, loving, sympathetic men who are supportive to womenbenefit from the oppression of women.

They benefit from violent, threatening,and misogynist men, in the same waythat men who aren’t physically threatening benefit from rapists. What youprobably feel most strongly, if you’reone of these supportive men, is the lossthat you suffer because other men areviolent against women. You feel thatwomen don’t trust you as you wish theywould, and as you feel you deserve tobe trusted. You feel a loss in the possibilities of intimacy that you think youdeserve. Those are real damages. Butwhat you aren’t feeling is how highyour market level rises as a nonviolent,supportive, and sympathetic man: howmuch in demand you are, how rare youare, and how valued you are for thesetraits that really ought to be able to betaken for granted from all men.

Men do face these double binds, andall men lose something in navigatingthrough them. Some men lose a verygreat deal. But the general entitlementof men at the cost of women is sopervasive and so hard to pin down thatmen need to look seriously to see whereand how they’re moving ahead on thebasis of the oppression of women. Theycan’t do this just by introspection. Ifyou just look inside yourself and say,“Am I sexist?”, you’re not going tosee the structural things in the societythat let you profit from the oppressionof women. Just the way if, as anAmherst College student, you simplylook inside of yourself and say “Am I a

racist?”, you’re not going to realizehow, for instance, a lot of the moneythat’s supporting your education comesfrom investments in a racist society.You have to look analytically aroundyou.

I’ve had a lot of people say to me,“When I look at a woman I don’t see awoman. I see a person. How could I bea sexist?” But to say that is alreadydenying and devaluing and making invisible the experience of that woman asa woman, which is a large part of herexperience: her oppression as awoman, her acculturation as a woman,her resourcefulness in surviving as awoman, and her making of a femaleself for herself. And to blind yourself tothat, in the name of gender-blindness,fairness, not being a sexist, is thewrong tack to take, I think.

S O, WHAT CAN students do? Women,feel anger. Think about what to dowith the anger. If you know it’s anger,then you’re in control. If you feel thatanger and it’s a moment in which youjust can’t afford to blow up, as long asyou know it’s anger, you can say toyourself, ‘‘All right, this is anger. I’mnot going to blow up. I’ll do it later.”It’s if you don’t know it’s anger thatyou’re out of control. Think aboutthings you can do with anger. Thinkabout people you can share it with whowill validate it, and let you make something interesting out of it. Write it.Also, women, learn how to weep without stopping talking. Just let the watercome out of your eyes and keep talking.You know: you’re a woman, you crysometimes. It doesn’t mean that youcan’t finish the sentence. A lot of times,(Continued on page 2])

The proportion of women who think, “Ican’t go in and talk to that professor because I’m about to burst into tears,” isprobably equal to the proportion of womenfaculty who have thought, “I can’t meetclass today because I’ll burst into tears.”

Spring 1985 AMHERST 17

(Sabrina, from page 17)women burst into tears because of thatsense of strangled powerlessness, andthey always try to make themselvesstop crying because the anger is soupsetting. You can cry and talk at thesame time. And once you aren’t busytrying to make yourself stop crying,then your voice will be able to comeout. You can finish the sentence. Youcan finish the class whether you’re astudent in the class or a teacher in frontof the class. It’ll get said. The womenaround you and the men around youwill learn to listen to somebody talkingwho’s crying at the same time.

The next thing that students can do isto work actively — and get facultyworking actively, and get administration working actively to create anon-homophobic community on campus. You probably noticed when I wasgoing through that list of double bindsthat some of them for women, and avery high proportion of them for men,were structured in the first place by thethreat of homosexual labeling. If thatthreat stops being a threat, some ofthose double binds disappear, and so dosome of the ugly self-ignorances thatare enforced by those double binds.This isn’t just an issue of making thingsnice for gay students, though it is veryimportant to make a campus livablefor gay students. It’s very importantalso for heterosexual students or forstudents who are probably heterosexualthat the campus be livable for gaystudents. Otherwise, there’s that wholepotential for blackmailing yourself orfor other people blackmailing youabout your sympathy for women, yourlove for women, whatever, whetheryou’re a man or a woman. That threatsimply disappears if you’re in an environment that’s not homophobic.There’s a wave of homophobiaobviously sweeping the country,sweeping prestigious campuses in theNortheast now, which, is very, verydangerous. I’ve been told that a fewyears ago there were thirty to forty gay

and lesbian students out on this campus, and this year there are fewer thanhalf a dozen out. The proportion of gayand lesbian students who are out on thiscampus is a very good indicator of thelevel of general trust on campus. And ifthat trust isn’t there, women and mencan’t go about leading their affectiveand political lives safely, heterosexualor gay women and men. It’s got to be apriority.

Next, all students need to be aware— or at least need to have opportunities

Don’t go to menfaculty for brainstuff and womenfaculty for heartstuff. The womenfaculty have brains,and a lot of the menfaculty have hearts.

—~ ..“..,~3

to become aware — of gender structures in their lives, whether as oppressors or as oppressed — or, as in most ofour cases, as both just as all of usneed to become aware or have opportunities to become aware of class andeconomic and racial and technologicalstructures that are shaping our lives.What you as students can do is makethis faculty aware of your felt curricularneeds in all your courses, even the oneswhere they seem least likely to be met.Keep asking the questions that you arelearning to ask in those freshmencourses on gender. In your upperclasscourses, those questions are going to befresh and important and break opennew territory in the coverage of thecourses.

Again, though, don’t recycle yourdouble binds on the faculty. Don’tdemand emotional nurturance fromwomen faculty, and then devalue themfor giving it to you. Value the emotional nurturance you get from all of yourprofessors highly, and value it as partof their intellectual worth, not as

opposed to their intellectual worth.When you are dealing with men faculty, don’t either devalue the nurturanceyou get from them or deprive them ofthe opportunity to give you nurturance.Don’t go to men faculty for brain stuffand women faculty for heart stuff. Thewomen faculty have brains, and a lot ofthe men faculty have hearts.

Don’t let your interest in endinggender oppression stop at themetaphorical gates of the college. Ifyou want to have choices in the familystructures that you form, if you want tohave a choice of a nuclear family orextended family or a couple of one sortor another, you should be interested inthe wholesale regulation of familiesunder systems like apartheid. If youwant reproductive freedom, you shouldbe speaking out for all womenwhether it’s for their access to safe,legal abortion, or for their freedomfrom sterilization abuse. If you want tohave choices about child-rearing andday care, you’d better be working foreconomic and cultural recognition forchild-care workers. If you want to befree from the terrorism of rape, youneed to oppose all of the political andterroristic uses of rape: for instance, itsuse as torture in authoritarian societies.And in general if you want other peopleto reflect on how their entitlement canbe a tacit part of your oppression, youneed to be ready to do the same thing.

The final thing you can do is to valueyour own community. If you’re awoman, one of the things that means isthe community of women around you,and if you’re a man, one of the things itmeans is the community of like-mindedmen around you. One way to start thatis through a process of consciousness-raising groups.

I’m going to conclude in the mostobvious way, by asking you the threequestions that Rabbi Hillel would askyou now if he were standing up here:

If you are not for yourself, who willbe for you?

If you are only for yourself, what areyou?

And if not now, when?

Spring 1985 AMHERST 21