1. Adrienne Rich

2. Adrienne Rich Born and raised in a Jewish family in Baltimore, MD
Celebrated Poet
Won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award at the age of 22
A major voice in American feminism since the late 1960s
Explores the ways in which patriarchal society oppresses women and the ways in which women have responded to that oppression

3. Rich’s metamorphosis was noted by Carol Muske in the New York Times Book Review; Muske wrote that Rich began as a "polite copyist of Yeats and Auden, wife and mother. She has progressed in life (and in her poems …) from young widow and disenchanted formalist, to spiritual and rhetorical convalescent, to feminist leader...and doyenne of a newly-defined female literature."
Rich’s work has explored issues of identity, sexuality and politics; her formally ambitious poetics have reflected her continued search for social justice, her role in the anti-war movement, and her radical feminism.

4. She made headlines in 1997 when she refused the National Medal of Arts for political reasons. “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House,” she wrote in a letter published in the New York Times “because the very meaning of art as I understand it is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.”

5. Rich: “the experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.”
Necessities of Life (1966),
Leaflets (1969)
The Will to Change (1971),
A Change of World (1951)
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems (1963)
Diving into the Wreck: Poems (1973) won the National Book Award; Rich, however, accepted it with fellow-nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of all women.
Her controversial and influential collection of essays Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience (1976).
Her masterpiece Diving Into the Wreck, ensured Rich’s place in the feminist pantheon.

6. Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers (1951) Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand. When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) You, once a belle in Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud, still have your dresses copied from that time. ... Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact

7. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience
Marked the end of the “sisterhood” feminism – the assumption that all women were “sisters” in their shared oppression
Calls on feminism to acknowledge its fear of lesbians
Lesbianism was taboo in the feminist movement

8. Rich’s essay, along with the feminist work of women of color and working –class women, challenged a feminism that purported to speak for all women yet assumed the viewpoint of a heterosexual, middle-class white woman
Considered the ramifications of race, class, and sexual orientation for the category “woman” and to attending to how such differences would strengthen or weaken feminist activism
To consider the extent to which heterosexual desire and identity are fundamental to women’s oppression

9. For Rich, heterosexuality is not natural but social, and it should be analyzed as we would any social institution
Compulsory sexuality functions to ensure that women are sexually accessible to men, with consent or choice on the women’s part neither legally or practically taken into account
Compulsory sexuality is an institution that punishes those who are not heterosexual and systematically ensures the power of men over women
The issue feminists have to address is not simple gender inequality not the domination of culture by males not mere taboos against homosexuality, but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economic, and emotional access

10. Questions to Consider
How is heterosexuality established and maintained?
What groups resist it?
What alternatives must be suppressed for it to prevail?
Who benefits from and who is harmed by this institution’s dominance?
What forms of enforcement underwrite that dominance?
Most crucial, how is sexual identity formed?

11. The poet W.S. Merwin has said, "All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful."

12. We should all be feminists: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at TEDxEuston