1、A LEFT-HANDED COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS (1983) Ursula Le Guin I want to thank the Mills College Class of 83 for offering me a rare chance: to speak aloud in public in the language of women. I know there are men graduating, and I dont mean to exclude them, far from it. There is a Greek tragedy where the G
2、reek says to the foreigner, “If you dont understand Greek, please signify by nodding.“ Anyhow, commencements are usually operated under the unspoken agreement that everybody graduating is either male or ought to be. Thats why we are all wearing these twelfth-century dresses that look so great on men
3、 and make women look either like a mushroom or a pregnant stork. Intellectual tradition is male. Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the mens language. Of course women learn it. Were not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatch
4、er from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a mans world, so it talks a mans language. The words are all words of power. Youve come a long way, baby, but no way is long enough. You cant even get there by selling yourself out: because there
5、is theirs, not yours. Maybe weve had enough words of power and talk about the battle of life. Maybe we need some words of weakness. Instead of saying now that I hope you will all go forth from this ivory tower of college into the Real World and forge a triumphant career or at least help your husband
6、 to and keep our country strong and be a success in everything - instead of talking about power, what if I talked like a woman right here in public? It wont sound right. Its going to sound terrible. What if I said what I hope for you is first, if - only if - you want kids, I hope you have them. Not
7、hordes of them. A couple, enough. I hope theyre beautiful. I hope you and they have enough to eat, and a place to be warm and clean in, and friends, and work you like doing. Well, is that what you went to college for? Is that all? What about success? Success is somebody elses failure. Success is the
8、 American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I dont even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure. Because you are human beings you are goi
9、ng to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find youre weak where you thought yourself strong. Youll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and
10、 afraid. What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign. Well, were already foreigners. Wom
11、en as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man, the only respectable god is male, the the only direction is up. So thats their country; lets explore our own. Im not talking about sex; thats a whole other universe, wher
12、e every man and woman is on their own. Im talking about society, the so-called mans world of institutionalized competition, aggression, violence, authority, and power. If we want to live as women, some separatism is forced upon us: Mills College is a wise embodiment of that separatism. The war-games
13、 world wasnt made by us or for us; we cant even breathe the air there without masks. And if you put the mask on youll have a hard time getting it off. So how about going on doing things our own way, as to some extent you did here at Mills? Not for men and the male power hierarchy - thats their game.
14、 Not against men, either - thats still playing by their rules. But with any men who are with us: thats our game. Why should a free woman with a college education either fight Machoman or serve him? Why should she live her life on his terms? Machoman is afraid of our terms, which are not all rational
15、, positive, competitive, etc. And so he has taught us to despise and deny them. In our society, women have lived, and have been despised for living, the whole side of life that includes and takes responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all
16、that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean - the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life. All that the Warrior denies and refuses is left to us and the men who share it with us and therefore, like us, cant play doctor, only nurse, cant be warriors, only civilians, cant be chi
17、efs, only indians. Well so that is our country. The night side of our country. If there is a day side to it, high sierras, prairies of bright grass, we only know pioneers tales about it, we havent got there yet. Were never going to get there by imitating Machoman. We are only going to get there by g
18、oing our own way, by living there, by living through the night in our own country. So what I hope for you is that you live there not as prisoners, ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives. That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your ow
19、n mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever youre good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that its second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while theyre go
20、ing to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember
21、 that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing - instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy
22、-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourished, where human beings grow human souls. Carrie Chapman Catt Speech Before Congress, 1917 Woman suffrage is inevitable. Suffragists knew it before
23、November 4, 1917; opponents afterward. Three distinct causes made it inevitable. First, the history of our country. Ours is a nation born of revolution, of rebellion against a system of government so securely entrenched in the customs and traditions of human society that in 1776 it seemed impregnabl
24、e. From the beginning of things, nations had been ruled by kings and for kings, while the people served and paid the cost. The American Revolutionists boldly proclaimed the heresies: “Taxation without representation is tyranny.“ “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
25、“ The colonists won, and the nation which was established as a result of their victory has held unfailingly that these two fundamental principles of democratic government are not only the spiritual source of our national existence but have been our chief historic pride and at all times the sheet anc
26、hor of our liberties. Eighty years after the Revolution, Abraham Lincoln welded those two maxims into a new one: “Ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.“ Fifty years more passed and the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in a mighty crisis of the nation,
27、proclaimed to the world: “We are fighting for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts: for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government.“ All the way between these immortal aphorisms political leaders have declared unabated f
28、aith in their truth. Not one American has arisen to question their logic in the 141 years of our national existence. However stupidly our country may have evaded the logical application at times, it has never swerved from its devotion to the theory of democracy as expressed by those two axioms With
29、such a history behind it, how can our nation escape the logic it has never failed to follow, when its last unenfranchised class calls for the vote? Behold our Uncle Sam floating the banner with one hand, “Taxation without representation is tyranny,“ and with the other seizing the billions of dollars
30、 paid in taxes by women to whom he refuses “representation.“ Behold him again, welcoming the boys of twenty-one and the newly made immigrant citizen to “a voice in their own government“ while he denies that fundamental right of democracy to thousands of women public school teachers from whom many of
31、 these men learn all they know of citizenship and patriotism, to women college presidents, to women who preach in our pulpits, interpret law in our courts, preside over our hospitals, write books and magazines, and serve in every uplifting moral and social enterprise. Is there a single man who can j
32、ustify such inequality of treatment, such outrageous discrimination? Not one Second, the suffrage for women already established in the United States makes women suffrage for the nation inevitable. When Elihu Root, as president of the American Society of International Law, at the eleventh annual meet
33、ing in Washington, April 26, 1917, said, “The world cannot be half democratic and half autocratic. It must be all democratic or all Prussian. There can be no compromise,“ he voiced a general truth. Precisely the same intuition has already taught the blindest and most hostile foe of woman suffrage th
34、at our nation cannot long continue a condition under which government in half its territory rests upon the consent of half of the people and in the other half upon the consent of all the people; a condition which grants representation to the taxed in half of its territory and denies it in the other
35、half a condition which permits women in some states to share in the election of the president, senators, and representatives and denies them that privilege in others. It is too obvious to require demonstration that woman suffrage, now covering half our territory, will eventually be ordained in all t
36、he nation. No one will deny it. The only question left is when and how will it be completely established. Third, the leadership of the United States in world democracy compels the enfranchisement of its own women. The maxims of the Declaration were once called “fundamental principles of government.“
37、 They are now called “American principles“ or even “Americanisms.“ They have become the slogans of every movement toward political liberty the world around, of every effort to widen the suffrage for men or women in any land. Not a people, race, or class striving for freedom is there anywhere in the
38、world that has not made our axioms the chief weapon of the struggle. More, all men and women the world around, with farsighted vision into the verities of things, know that the world tragedy of our day is not now being waged over the assassination of an archduke, nor commercial competition, nor nati
39、onal ambitions, nor the freedom of the seas. Do you realize that in no other country in the world with democratic tendencies is suffrage so completely denied as in a considerable number of our own states? There are thirteen black states where no suffrage for women exists, and fourteen others where s
40、uffrage for women is more limited than in many foreign countries. Do you realize that when you ask women to take their cause to state referendum you compel them to do this: that you drive women of education, refinement, achievement, to beg men who cannot read for their political freedom? Do you real
41、ize that such anomalies as a college president asking her janitor to give her a vote are overstraining the patience and driving women to desperation? Do you realize that women in increasing numbers indignantly resent the long delay in their enfranchisement? Your party platforms have pledged women su
42、ffrage. Then why not be honest, frank friends of our cause, adopt it in reality as your own, make it a party program, and “fight with us“? As a party measure-a measure of all parties-why not put the amendment through Congress and the legislatures? We shall all be better friends, we shall have a happ
43、ier nation, we women will be free to support loyally the party of our choice, and we shall be far prouder of our history. “There is one thing mightier than kings and armies“-aye, than Congresses and political parties-“the power of an idea when its time has come to move.“ The time for woman suffrage
44、has come. The womans hour has struck. If parties prefer to postpone action longer and thus do battle with this idea, they challenge the inevitable. The idea will not perish; the party which opposes it may. Every delay, every trick, every political dishonesty from now on will antagonize the women of
45、the land more and more, and when the party or parties which have so delayed woman suffrage finally let it come, their sincerity will be doubted and their appeal to the new voters will be met with suspicion. This is the psychology of the situation. Can you afford the risk? Think it over. We know you
46、will meet opposition. There are a few “women haters“ left, a few “old males of the tribe,“ as Vance Thompson calls them, whose duty they believe it to be to keep women in the places they have carefully picked out for them. Treitschke, made world famous by war literature, said some years ago, “German
47、y, which knows all about Germany and France, knows far better what is good for Alsace-Lorraine than that miserable people can possibly know.“ A few American Treitschkes we have who know better than women what is good for them. There are women, too, with “slave souls“ and “clinging vines“ for backbon
48、es. There are female dolls and male dandies. But the world does not wait for such as these, nor does liberty pause to heed the plaint of men and women with a grouch. She does not wait for those who have a special interest to serve, nor a selfish reason for depriving other people of freedom. Holding
49、her torch aloft, liberty is pointing the way onward and upward and saying to America, “Come.“ To you and the supporters of our cause in Senate and House, and the number is large, the suffragists of the nation express their grateful thanks. This address is not meant for you. We are more truly appreciative of all you have done than any words can express. We ask you to make a last, hard fight for the amendment during the present session. Since last we asked a vote on this amendment, your position has been fortified by the addition to suffrage territo
