Good Essay On Taking Women Students Seriously: Reading Response

The question of women’s place and role in the world has always been the concern of the generations of feminists. As a true fighter for the rights of females, Adrienne Rich wrote an article “Taking Women Students Seriously”, in which she defends the honor of women students, in particular, and the whole “Womankind”, in general. Teaching students at university, the author notices that the problem of women’s perception by the men as well as by the women themselves initially lies in the system of education. “Taking Women Students Seriously” is the article of woman, about woman, and for woman. However, it seems that Adrienne Rich seeks to convince females not only of their exclusiveness, importance, and significance as equal part of the “man’s world”, but she also tries to make women forget about their initial purpose as fair sex. Moreover, the article makes women feel themselves more victims that they are, and promotes the radical ideas that may lead to the distorted imagination about gender roles and organization of society.
The main idea of the article is that girls and young women have to be taught to respect and perceive themselves as of full value citizens of the world allegedly “organized by and for men”. The author claims that in the context of the education that females receive they still remain ignorant of themselves, and the main problem of this lies in “the concept of ‘coeducation’.” In this sense, Ms. Rich posits that her aim as female professor as well as the aim of other females who teach students is to educate “to think like a woman in a man’s world”, meaning to think critically, “refusing to accept the givens, making connections between facts and ideas which men have left unconnected.”
On the other hand, in her article, Adrienne Rich presents this idea in exaggerate and restricted manner. The talks about the necessity “to think independently, to take intellectual risks, to assert ourselves [women] mentally” as about the only possible way of females’ development and mission in the world. Such proclamation can be wrongly accepted by girls and young women who can thus become so feminized and free-thinking that will consequently forget about family making, child reproduction, housekeeping, and care about men. The author is right since she talks about the need for women to be well-educated and perceived not as the part of the man’s world, but as the part of humanity. At the same time, Ms. Rich tries to impose the idea that women were not created for homes, children, and husbands, and this can distort the initial imagination about females’ role in the world. The truth lies in the fact that real woman has to be able to combine in herself intellect and caring for close people.