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equal opportunity employer, we must break down the spurious argument that “diversity” and “quality” are oppositional terms, and we must insistthat the writers we teach “count” because their work matters.
    There is another sense in which the way we count is being challenged. Olsen drew our attention to what she called “virulent destroyers: premature silencers.” It is an accurate phrase to describe the devastating illness, HIV-AIDS. HIV-AIDS activists in this country have used the slogan “Silence = Death” in urging people to speak upfor urgent research and treatment, as well as for compassion and civil rights for HIV-AIDS victims. The amount of potential creativity lost to HIV-AIDS worldwide is staggering, yet still we are encouraged by some to “discount” that phenomenon as something that happens only to people who “don’t count.” Like the Danes who donned armbands identifying themselves as Jews to foil the Nazis’ efforts to determinewhom to count in their genocidal plans, we have to resist efforts to divide and conquer: we have to insist, as Silences taught us, that we all can and do count. Silences ’s legacy today is the courage to assert that “we all count”—and that we have the right to read—and write—ourselves.
    Notes
    This essay would not have been possible without the help of Tillie Olsen, who generously shared her timeand her thoughts with me during the spring of 1988, and who continued to make her personal papers and correspondence available to me during the years that followed. I am also grateful to Elaine Hedges, Carla Peterson, Lillian Robinson, Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, and Sarah Weddington for their critical comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Modern Language AssociationConvention in 1988.
    1 . Olsen 1988. She is considering reclaiming the by-line as “Ann Dothers.”
    2 . The individuals whose names I will be citing represent only a small fraction of the number of people—inside and outside academia—for whom Silences has been an extremely important book.
    3 . While Olsen herself refers to this talk as having taken place in 1962, the date on the transcript of the tapeof the talk in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin is March 15, 1963. For more information on Olsen’s experience at the Radcliffe Institute 1962–1963, see Diane Middlebrook’s essay in Listening to Silences (Hedges and Fishkin 1994). Olsen also gave several other undocumented informal talks around this time, such as one at the Boston Public Library in 1963 (Ferguson1988).
    4 . Other panelists were Adrienne Rich, Ellen Peck Killoh, and Elaine Reuben (see Hedges 1972).
    5 . See “Tillie Olsen’s Reading List,” a four-part series originally published between 1972 and 1974 in Women’s Studies Newsletter, 1:2, p. 7; 1:3, p. 3; 1:4, p. 2; II:1, pp. 4–5. The series is reprinted at the back of this volume.
    6 . Paul Lauter recalls the title of this course as “The Literatureof Poverty, Oppression, Revolution, and the Struggle for Freedom” (Lauter 1991).
    7 . The page where Olsen notes a period of silence in Jane Austen’s life, for example, is completely blank except for the following: “Jane Austen (1775–1817). The years 1800–1811. Woman reasons: she was powerless in all major decisions deciding her life, including the effecting of enabling circumstances for writing”(140).
    8 . The notes prefacing an early reading list suggest that “each entry should be read with the following in mind. (1) The hard and essential work of women, in and out of the home (‘no work was too hard, no labor too strenuous to exclude us’). (2) Limitations, denials imposed; exclusions and restrictions in no way necessitated by biological or economic circumstances. (3) How human capacitiesborn in women—intellect, organization, art, invention, vision, sense of justice, beauty, etc.—denied scope and development, nevertheless struggled to