“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (Whitman), 303, 307
When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen), 3
“When We Dead Awaken” (Rich), xiii, xix, 3–19
white male supremacy, 150
whiteness, 201, 257, 259, 263, 275–76
white southern culture, AR’s childhood experience of, 200–203
Whitman, Walt, 40, 291–92, 300–301, 302–4, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309–10, 317, 359
“Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts” (Rich), xiii, 319–25
Williams, William Carlos, 268, 302
Winters, Anne, xii
Witches, Midwives and Nurses (Ehrenreich and English), 161
witch persecutions, 162, 163, 168
With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (Nitzan and Back, eds.), 359–60
Wittengenstein, Ludwig, 307
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 236
“Woman and Bird” (Rich), 249–52
woman identification, 155, 157, 158
compulsory heterosexuality’s suppression of, 166
in history, 180–81
as source of power, 187, 190
see also lesbian continuum
Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (Gordon), 375n
Woman’s Worth (Leghorn and Parker), 378n
women:
in American frontier, 124
anger of, 12, 18–19
as betrayers, 281
black, see African American women
as both mothers and daughters, 144
connectedness of, see connectedness, of women; woman identification
creativity of, 149, 181, 241; see also women writers
degradation of, 149–50
Dickinson’s relationships with, 43–44
double life of, 163, 184–87, 188, 190, 193, 377n
economic exploitation of, 158, 161, 167–68, 170–71, 190, 241
enforced ignorance of, 150
illiteracy among, 151, 245
internalization of male values by, 174–76
male fantasies about, 161
male imagination’s polarization of, 99, 100
male-imposed confinement of, 167–68
male poets’ portrayal of, 7–8
male right of access to, 178
mothers as earliest source of emotional and physical nurture for, 165
as outsiders in patriarchal culture, 150–51, 153, 154
pornography and, 169–70, 173
as property of men, 158, 167, 168, 177
self-knowledge of, 4, 13–14, 149–50, 151, 155
as “special,” 7
subjection of, 6–7, 29
subservience of, 22–23
tokenism and, see tokenism, female
“unmothered,” 133–34
victimization of, 18–19
violence against, see violence, against women
waiting and, 104–5
women, education of, 149–56
compulsory heterosexuality and, 190
male control of, 168
outsider’s consciousness in, 150–51, 153, 154
patriarchal control of, 150
privilege and, 151–52, 153
as tool for unlearning teachings of patriarchal culture, 151–52, 155–56
women, in history, 149–50, 154, 155–56, 241
dialectic of necessity vs. choice in, 192, 196
erasure of lesbian existence in, 168, 178–79, 195
lesbian continuum in, 180–81
women, relationships between, 157, 158
of college women, 161
compulsory heterosexuality’s suppression of, 166
in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 43–44, 123–24, 163
Freudianism and, 125
motherhood and, 163
suppression of eroticism in, 179, 182
see also connectedness, of women; lesbian continuum; mother- daughter relationships
Women and Madness (Chesler), 22, 370n
women’s liberation movement, xiv, 215, 240–41, 268, 330–33, 358–59
black women and, 331–32
see also feminists, feminism
Women’s Studies, 150, 158, 190
women writers:
daemonic possession and, 55, 57–58
demands of family life on, 11–13
feminism and, 4
male judgment of, 5–7
in patriarchal society, 227
self-knowledge of, 5, 47
split personas of, 57–58
subjection of, 5
suppressed anger of, 6, 18
Woolf, Leonard, 116
Woolf, Virginia, xii, 6–7, 18, 33, 116–18, 127, 143, 180, 200, 242, 369n, 370n
on Jane Eyre, 20–21
“Word for You, A” (Bishop), 221
Wordsworth, William, 231, 280
Working in the Dark (Baca), 278–79
workplace, women in, 154–55
economic inequality and, 170
lesbians and, 170–71
sexual harassment and, 170–72, 241
World of Tomorrow, 261
World Trade Center, 298–99
World War II, 202, 232, 237, 261–62
Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë), 20–21, 57
Wylie, Elinor, 8
Yale Younger Poets, 268
Yale Younger Poets Prize, xiii, xv, 314, 317
Yeats, W. B., xii, xiv, 8, 232, 233–34, 235, 265
Zaturenska, Marya, 314
Zonsheine, David, 362–63, 364
BY ADRIENNE RICH
Collected Poems 1950–2012
Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010
A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 1997–2008
Poetry & Commitment: An Essay
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2001
Fox: Poems 1998–2000
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998
Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995
Collected Early Poems 1950–1970
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991
Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985
Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems
Sources
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977
Twenty-One Love Poems
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972
The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970
Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968
Necessities of Life
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954–1962
The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems
A Change of World
Copyright © 2018 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust
Copyright © 2009, 2003, 2001, 1993, 1986 by Adrienne Rich
Copyright © 1979, 1976 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2018 by Sandra M. Gilbert
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First Edition
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Essential Essays Page 44