We look at the more stable period just past, and we think that such basic and terrifying change has never happened before. Clearly, we are living in a time of myths being torn down. There are three periods in history, he says–one in which myths are built up, one in which they obtain, and one in which they are torn down. Rollo May has a theory that I find comforting. Whether it’s woman’s secondary role in society or the paternalistic role of the United States in the world, the old assumptions just don’t work anymore. Clearing our minds and government policies of outdated myths is proving to be at least difficult. Indeed, there are quite a few Irish who doubt that they have done it yet. It wasn’t easy for the English to give up their mythic superiority. There are a few psychologists who believe that anti-Communism may eventually be looked upon as a mental disease. The apes-and-angels example is an extreme one, but so may some of our recent assumptions be.
Or when I’m reading Lionel Tiger on the inability of women to act in groups. I try to remember that when I’m reading Arthur Jensen’s current and very impressive work on the limitations of black intelligence. It was beautifully done, complete with comparative skull-measurements, and it was a rationale for the English domination of the Irish for more than 100 years. Using the most respectable of scholarly methods, for instance, English scientists proved definitively that the English were descended from the angels, while the Irish were descended from the apes. They gather their proof around it, and end by becoming the theoreticians of the status quo. Unfortunately, authorities who write textbooks are sometimes subject to the same Popular Wisdom as the rest of us. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior–these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there. We are filled with the Popular Wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to un-learn. The important thing is that we are spending this time together, considering the larger implications of a movement that some call “feminist” but should more accurately be called humanist a movement that is an integral part of rescuing this country from its old, expensive patterns of elitism, racism, and violence. It is certainly a part of that revolution that I, a devout non-speaker, am managing to stand before you at all: I don’t know whether you will be grateful or not. It may have been part of that revolution that caused the senior class to invite me here–and I am grateful. Or at least, it the year the press has discovered a movement that has been strong for several years now, and reported it as a small, privileged, rather lunatic event instead of the major revolution in consciousness–in everyone’s consciousness–male or female that I believe it truly is. But this is the year of Women’s Liberation.
Which means, of course, that they are almost always men. In my experience, commencement speakers are gray-haired, respected creatures, heavy with the experience of power in the world and with Establishment honors. You can possibly be as surprised as I am. You may be surprised that I am a commencement speaker. President Simpson, members of the faculty, families and friends, first brave and courageous male graduates of Vassar- and Sisters. GLORIA STEINEM, “LIVING THE REVOLUTION” ()
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