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to free them from their neglect and the oppression of silence forced upon them because they were black and they were women.
    But please remember, especially in these times of groupthink and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world. That is why historians are generally enemies of women, certainly of blacks, and so are, all too often, the very people we must sit under in order to learn. Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.
    I am discouraged when a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence says there is not enough literature by black women and men to make a full year’s course. Or that the quantity of genuine black literature is too meager to warrant a full year’s investigation. This is incredible. I am disturbed when Eldridge Cleaver is considered the successor to Ralph Ellison, on campuses like this one—this is like saying Kate Millet’s book Sexual Politics makes her the new Jane Austen. It is shocking to hear that the only black woman writer white and black academicians have heard of is Gwendolyn Brooks.
    Fortunately, what Sarah Lawrence teaches is a lesson called “How to Be Shocked and Dismayed but Not Lie Down and Die,” and those of you who have learned this lesson will never regret it, because there will be ample time and opportunity to use it
    Your job, when you leave here—as it was the job of educated women before you—is to change the world. Nothing less or easier than that. I hope you have been reading the recent women’s liberation literature, even if you don’t agree with some of it. For you will find, as women have found through the ages, that changing the world requires a lot of free time. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money, and, as Virginia Woolf put it so well, “a room of one’s own,” preferably one with a key and a lock. Which means that women must be prepared to think for themselves, which means, undoubtedly, trouble with boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, which means all kinds of heartache and misery, and times when you will wonder if independence, freedom of thought, or your own work is worth it all.
    We must believe that it is. For the world is not good enough; we must make it better.
    But it is a great time to be a woman. A wonderful time to be a black woman, for the world, I have found, is not simply rich because from day to day our lives are touched with new possibilities, but because the past is studded with sisters who, in their time, shone like gold. They give us hope, they have proved the splendor of our past, which should free us to lay just claim to the fullness of the future.
    Having mentioned these subjects briefly, from the heart, I must tell you about one other thing I have learned since becoming an advanced ten-year-old. Any school would be worthless without great teachers. Obviously I have some great teachers in mind.
    When I came to Sarah Lawrence my don was Helen Merrell Lynd. She was the first person I met who made philosophy understandable, and the study of it natural. It was she who led me through the works of Camus and showed me, for the first time, how life and suffering are always teachers, or, as with Camus, life and suffering, and joy. Like Rilke, I came to understand that even loneliness has a use, and that sadness is positively the wellspring of creativity. Since studying with her, all of life, the sadness as well as the joy, has its magnificence, its meaning, and its use. She continues to teach me in her role as Older Woman. I had always thought, before knowing her, that after retirement people did nothing. She works and enjoys herself as she did before. Now, of course, she has more time to devote to writing her newest book. This, younger women need to know,