Stover+Rich's+Claiming+an+Education

Sarah Stover Reading Response

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//﻿// First off, I love how Adrienne Rich starts the essay. She says how you are here to **claim** an education, not to just simply receive one. I like the idea that we come to college to work hard to acheive what we want and to earn that diploma rather than just have it given to us. But, besides this idea, I loved her main topic throughout the essay - taking responsibility for yourselves.

In the first paragraphs of her essay, she mentions a contract between student and teacher, an "intellectual and ethical" contract. Our end of the contract as students is take responsibility for ourselves and to "demand to be taken seriously so that you can go on taking yourself seriously." She went into great detail on how we, especially women, should do this. For example, "Refuse to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you....Learn to respect and use your own brains and instincts...Insist that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind...Don't fall for shallow and easy solutions...Have the courage to be different." When Rich wrote this essay, women in college was still a relatively new idea (higher education had only been open to women within the last hundred years). Male professors still felt teaching at a women's college was a secondrate career, and some treated their female students as sexual objects. But even though Rich was writing this essay to encourage women to take responsiblity for themselves, it applies to all students. We need to take ourselves seriously and get what we want out of our own college experience. We learn how to stand on our own two feet and take charge of our lives. We show ourselves what we really can do.

Another thing that I hadn't thought about until I read this essay, was about what women learned when they first were allowed into colleges. Rich mentions that what is learned (read from textbooks, heard from lectures) is how men have "perceived and organized their experience, their history, and thier ideas of social relationships." Students have been hearing about what men have decided is important. It's something I never thought of. I think I thought that the real battle was just getting women into college, and I never thought about all the changes that would be made even still after women were allowed to attend universities.

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