A Successful Approach to Reconstructing the Female

"What does a woman need to know?" Adrienne Rich asks. More powerfully articulate than any other statement in her speech, Rich combines a searching personal integrity and self-identification with a passion to change the future. First spoken to the 1979 graduates of Smith College, I believe that Adrienne Rich’s well-known words are capable of changing lives, even in 1999. The emphasis in her speech, "What Does a Woman Need to Know?" is on the re-construction of …

…s speech- which is what makes it so successful in inspiring others. It asks you, forces you to search within one’s self to understand fully what social forces have shaped your individuality and then locating that self in the world, understanding the true nature of masculine domination. With this speech, Rich, through her stylistic choices, brings females to a new responsibility for our actions, for the very act of living day by day itself.