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A Left-Handed Commencement Address

Chally

I wanted to share one of my favourite feminist texts, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address,” which was given to the Mills College Class of 1983 by the excellent science fiction writer and feminist Ursula K. Le Guin. She allows anyone to republish the address, but in this case I’ll quote some favourite parts and link you up.

‘Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

‘What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

[…]

‘That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever you’re good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that it’s second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they’re going to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country.’

You can read the rest of the Left-Handed Commencement Address at Le Guin’s website.

I managed to track down a delivery of the speech on YouTube. Here it is as given by Sparkle Grenade, a young woman from Grenada.

Le Guin is an excellent writer, as you can probably tell. If you’re not familiar with her work, I’d start off with 1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which is considered by many to have been the start of the great push in gender-conscious SF in the 1970s. (And, let’s face it, ‘The king was pregnant’ is one of the best sentences ever.) It has some problems, which Le Guin addresses in “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” (1976, 1987). Otherwise the Earthsea cycle, which is fantasy, is a good place to start, not just for the great writing but for the way Le Guin confronts the gender politics of the earlier books later on.

11 thoughts on A Left-Handed Commencement Address

  3. Any recommendation on whether to read her cycles in the order they were written or the order they take on internally? I read Dispossessed in a sweet, highly Feminist Utopian Fiction course in college but haven’t read more since, even though I own…2?…copies of the Left Hand of Darkness.

    Thanks for posting this. Watching…now.

  5. Ah, my bad. I doublechecked myself on Earthsea. I was thinking that like the Hainish cycle, it was written in a different order than the universe’s timeline. Thanks for that.
    Bah. I need to read more SF in general.

  6. LeGuin wrote a lovely short story in the 1970’s called The New Atlantis. Has anyone read it? Like much of her writing, it’s prescient, becoming more real as the decades pass.

  7. Personally, I’ve always thought that LeGuin’s short stories tend to be much nicer than her novel-length works.

  8. Thank you so much for posting this speech, which I’ve never read or heard before. And Grenade delivers it beautifully—got to love the audience response when she says the “equal pay for equal time” bit.

    Le Guin is one of my favourite sf/f writers ever—her work is full of nuance, ambiguity, comfortable darkness, and profound…human fellow-feeling?

    She is one of the very few white writers who makes a point of centring people of colour in her stories; she builds worlds where whiteness is not the norm, the beauty standard, or the default state of humanity. And she has vociferously spoken out against whitewashed adaptations of her work. This means more to me than I can express.

  9. My favourites of hers are probably the A Fisherman of the Inland Sea stories, especially “Another Story” and “The Rock that Changed Things,” and the Four Ways to Forgiveness suite.

    Oh, Tlönista, seconded on the centring of non-whiteness.

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