Writers & Books

This assessment is just one aspect of self-rereading in the 1986 edition, in which Rich confesses that in generalizing her own life she had failed to address the complexities of other classed and raced experiences. By the 1980s she’d learned better from reading and talking with Black women like Audre Lorde and Angela Davis, Chicana women like Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Asian women like Joy Kogawa and Nellie Wong, Native American women like Paula Gunn Allen, and working-class white women like Tillie Olsen, all of whom she cites as writers who have “challenged and amplified my thinking.” Rich insists in the 1986 introduction that “race and class make a difference of even the most basic shared experiences among women.” Among others, she offers the concrete example of sterilization: as a young “white, middle class, educated woman in the late 1950s,” Rich “had to plead and argue for sterilization after bearing three children”—she even had to provide her husband’s signature—and, at first, she counted this a generalizable feminist concern for reproductive rights. Only later did Rich realize that the same institutions she had to fight for the right to not bear more children “were exerting pressure and coercion to sterilize large numbers of American Indian, Black, Chicana, poor white, and Puerto Rican women.” Notably, racialized sterilization abuse persists to this day. “Little has changed and much has changed.”