When a woman looks in a mirror ...

Photo copyright Dan Tuffs

"... I hope you see yourself.. Not one of the myths. Not a failed man - a person who can never succeed because success is basically defined as being male - and not a failed goddess, a person desperately trying to hide herself in the dummy Woman, the image of men's desires and fears. I hope you look away from those myths and into your own eyes, and see your own strength. You're going to need it. I hope you don't try to take your strength from men, or from a man. Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot. I hope you'll take and make your own soul; that you'll feel your life for yourself pain by pain and joy by joy; that you'll feed your life, eat, 'eat as you go' - you who nourish, be nourished!

... On the maps drawn by men there is an immense white area, terra incognita, where most women live. That country is all yours to explore, to inhabit, to describe. But none of us live there alone. Being human isn't something people can bring off alone; we need other people in order to be people. We need one another.

... I think we have a responsibility to freedom ... especially to freedom of speech. Obedience is silent. It does not answer. It is contained. Here is a disobedient woman speaking (Wendy Rose, saying in a poem called The Parts of a Poet),

parts of me are pinned
to earth, parts of me
undermine song, parts
of me spread on the water,
parts of me form a rainbow
bridge, parts of me follow
the sandfish, parts of me
are a woman who judges.

Now this is what I want: I want to hear your judgements. I am sick of the silence of woman. I want to hear you speaking all the languages, offering your experience as your truth, as human truth ...

This is what I don't want: I don't want what men have. I'm glad to let them have their work and talk their talk. But I do not want and will not have them saying or thinking or telling us that theirs is the only fit work or speech for human beings ...

I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively - they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes.

... That's what I want - to hear you erupting ... I want to hear you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgement or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations. I want to hear you. Speak with a woman's tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don't let us sink back into silence. If we don't tell out truth, who will?

... So I end with a poem (Linda Hogan, The Women Speaking),

Daughters, the women are speaking.
They arrive
over the wise distance
on perfect feet.
Daughters, I love you."

An extract from Ursula's Bryn Mawr Commencement Address (1986), published in Le Guin, U. (1992) Dancing at the Edge of the World, Paladin, London, pp158-160.