"On the Contrary"

We mustn't judge harshly- after all, we must always remember that many times our own actions may be misconstrued.

One of my most favorite things to do on an idle day at home is to go through book shelves and leaf through passages from some beloved books.
I laid my hands on "On the Contrary: Essays by Men and Women" edited by Martha Rainbolt and Janet Fleetwood. This book has the finest articles contributed by social and political thinkers like Aristotle, Maya Angelou, Eldridge Cleaver, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, Lillian Hellman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy, John Stuart Mill, Susan Sontag, E.B.White, Virginia Woolf..and many more.

Adrienne Rich in an article titled "Taking Women Students Seriously" writes:
Suppose we were to ask ourselves, simply: What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self-defining human being, need a knowledge of her own history, her much-politicized biology, an awareness of the creative work of women of the past, the skills and crafts and techniques and powers exercised by women in different times and cultures, a knowledge of women's rebellions and organized movements against our oppression and how they have been routed or diminished? Without such knowledge women live and have lived without context, vulnerable to the projections of male fantasy, male prescriptions for us, estranged from our own experience, because our education has not reflected or echoed it. I would suggest that not biology, but ignorance of our selves, has been the key to our powerlessness. 

Its disheartening to see that the situation hasn't improved at all, 40 odd years after the article has been published. Women still rank low in higher education sectors, girl children often receive a minimal education owing to different social conditions- poverty, patriarchy, economics in asian countries. And, while we need to do everything that can uplift the lives of women, coming from poor social and economic backgrounds, a whole new revolution lies in waiting. Generations must now awake from their deep slumber to activate channels of education, economic and individual freedom, self-reliance to truly being about a change in the society and towards being a gender-neutral human community.