Source of Inspiration: Adrienne Rich

You may have noticed that Facebook has this new thing where you can list the people who inspire you. While I know this is just a way for Facebook to get its users to link to more pages and thus expand its already enormous and thoroughly permeating presence on the Web, I don't care (I've given up my fight with Facebook). I think it's cool to have people who inspire you, and so I'm going to write about those who inspire me here. The first is Adrienne Rich - an American poet, feminist, mother, activist, and all around amazing woman. I am reading her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, which was originally published in the mid 1970's, and the edition I have is a reissue she released in 1986. I'm about 100 pages in and fully absorbed. I don't have time to mention everything I would like to here (Jason surprised me by renting Fight Club so we're going to go watch that!), but I want to at least share one passage about what feminism is:

Like patriarchy itself, the extent and influence of the antipatriarchal women's movement is difficult to grasp. It is not defined by specific organizations, groupings, or factions, though these exist in abundance. It exists in many stages of development throughout the world, at the most local, pragmatic levels, as a network of formal and informal communications, as a growing body of analysis and theory, and as a profound moral, psychic, and philosophic revaluation of what it means to be "human."

I am going to amend my "Feminism Matters" page to include this definition, which is one of the most accurate, if not the most accurate definitions, of feminism I have ever come across. There's much more to share from this wonderful, truly inspiring book (especially inspiring for women, most inspiring for mothers, but inspiring also for everyone), and this book is already changing my life, or at least the way I think about my life (which is the foundation for change anyway), but I'll have to wait until a later time to share.

Happy Night (imagine me holding up my glass of red wine in a toast to you).