For some reason last night I was remembering the early seventies, when I volunteered at the Women's Herstory Project run by Laura X in Berkeley. I was in charge of the poetry section. We were gathering all material about and by women throughout history. So there were poems with marginalia from Andrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood, and many women sent in their unpublished manuscripts for our library. I was excited. Our story, up until then mostly silenced, was about to speak.
We felt like revolutionaries. Our power was in our righteousness. We supported each other and told others the precious names of writers that could and should be read. I remember a paperback pamplet from the Boston's Women's Collective that listed women authors and titles. I read through it systematically, from Black women slave narratives to Canadian, Australian and New Zealand writers of whom I'd never heard. I read only women. I was catching up.
Later, in graduate school, I pleaded successfully with a professor to include Gertrude Stein in the syllabus of 20th century American writers. His was the class where I was introduced to Jane Bowles, a favorite of mine to this day. I discovered Muriel Spark on my own.
Right speech is speaking up for half the human race. For our voices. It was exhilarating and liberating in those days. And today our daughters and granddaughters have a cornucopia of female voices to listen to and learn from.
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