Advice and then some from empowered women
It’s Women’s Month and to observe it, we recall here the best lines from the commencement speeches given by seven formidable women. For those who wish they had stayed sober the night before graduation or regret not having been attentive to some last-minute words of wisdom from their speakers, here’s a second chance. Heed the advice of women who are brilliant in their chosen careers in journalism, writing fiction, building memorials, the movies and the Senate.
Nora Ephron, filmmaker
Wellesley College, 1996
My class went to college in the era when you got a master’s degree in teaching because it was “something to fall back on” in the worst-case scenario, the worst-case scenario being that no one married you and you actually had to go to work. As this same classmate said at our reunion, “Our education was a dress rehearsal for a life we never led.” Isn’t that the saddest line? We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them.
Things are different for you than they were for us … The women’s movement has made a huge difference, too, particularly for young women like you … But at the same time, the pay differential between men and women has barely changed.
In my business, the movie business, there are many more women directors but it’s just as hard to make a movie about women as it ever was, and look at the parts the Oscar-nominated actresses played this year: hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker and nun.
It’s 1996 and you are graduating from Wellesley in the Year of the Wonderbra. The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.
One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, “Don’t take it personally,” but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: Every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: Get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you … Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you—whether or not you believe in abortion.
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. Because you don’t have the alibi my class had—this is one of the great achievements and mixed blessings you inherit: Unlike us, you can’t say nobody told you there were other options. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.
www.humanity.org/voices/commencements/ nora-ephron-wellesley-college-speech-1996
Alice Greenwald, museum director
Sarah Lawrence College, 2007
My 19-year affiliation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum taught me many other lessons about memory.
I came to understand that the space between cognitive understanding and emotional intelligence is where memory resides. Let me give you two examples:
In 2005, during the week when the country mourned the loss of civil rights activist Rosa Parks and her body lay in repose at the US Capitol Rotunda, every bus in Montgomery County, Maryland, carried a sign on a seat at the front of the bus: it read simply, “Reserved for Rosa Parks.” This simple gesture—to leave a seat empty—conveyed more than the words themselves could express: a sense of respect, an affirmation of shared history and a celebration of the power of collective memory to compel reflection, if not action.
Here’s another example: In Berlin—a city quite literally sprouting with memorials—there is a small, rather subtle but omnipresent memorial scattered across the city, around the country and, I understand, other countries; and it is surprisingly effective. It is the Stolpersteine project (which means, literally, “stumbling stones”). You’ll be walking down a street and as you pass a house, there’s a small, brass-topped cobblestone set into the pavement at your feet. Inscribed on the cobblestone is a simple set of facts, something like this: “Here lived Alice Greenwald, born Jan. 2, 1918. Deported May 24, 1943.” These stones are not only there as markers … They are meant to “trip you up”—cognitively, psychologically, and spiritually.
So, what’s the connection between the buses in Maryland and the stones in Berlin?
Both point to absence and the encounter with the void. Through the lens of absence, we are brought to another level of understanding. We can see the world differently.
www.humanity.org/voices/commencements/
alice-greenwald-sarah-lawrence-college-speech-2007
Barbara Kingsolver, novelist
Duke University, 2008
We’re a world at war, ravaged by disagreements, a bizarrely globalized people in which the extravagant excesses of one culture wash up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Our climate, our oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs…
Now we can watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient orders. A few degrees looked so small on the thermometer.
We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control. How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts and push new diseases like dengue fever onto our doorsteps? It’s an emergency on a scale we’ve never known…
Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy or find another place to live. Imagine it: We raised you on a lie. Everything you plug in, turn on or drive, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears. We gave you this world and promised you could keep it running on a fossil substance, dinosaur slime, and it’s running out. The geologists only disagree on how much is left, and the climate scientists are now saying they’re sorry but that’s not even the point. We won’t get time to use it all…
The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time, it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules and those who said, “We already did. We have made the world new.”
The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities and hang on. If you run out of hope at the end of the day, to rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won’t give in, burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it.
www.humanity.org/voices/commencements/
barbara-kingsolver-duke-university-speech-2008
J. K. Rowling, novelist
Harvard University, 2008
There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty.
They had been poor themselves and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
www.humanity.org/voices/commencements/j.k.rowling- harvard-university-speech-2008
Anna Quindlen, novelist
Grinnell College, 2011
Your parents, proudly here today, and their parents before them, perhaps proudly here today, understood a simple equation for success: Your children would do better than you had … But I suggest that this is a moment to consider what “doing better” really means.
If you are part of the first generation of Americans who genuinely see race and ethnicity as attributes, not stereotypes, will you not have done better than we did? If you are part of the first generation of Americans with a clear understanding that gay men and lesbians are entitled to be full citizens of this country with all its rights, will you not have done better than we did? If you are part of the first generation of Americans who assume women merit full equality instead of grudging acceptance, will you not have done better than we did? …
If you can bring critical thinking—which is the basis of all you’ve learned here—to the table, you will be ready for work no matter what that work may be. We need that critical thinking at this moment. We need you to do it for us.
If you have bright ideas about how to restore confidence in Wall Street, teach kids with disabilities, serve customers and clients and patients, get books into the hands of readers or run schools that work, we are waiting breathlessly to hear them…
We need you to make this a fairer place, a more unified nation, a country that wipes out the bright lines that have created an apartheid, an apartheid too long denied. I know you hate to hear your parents say it when they’re driving, but we are lost…
But it’s not simply the obligation to live an examined life, to embrace each moment as though it might be last. It’s also to live each moment as though it might be the first. To throw your arms wide to the new, the unexplored, even to that of which you may be afraid.
retro.grinnell.edu/offices/confops/ commencement/archive/2011/anna-quindlen/transcript
Christiane Amanpour, television journalist
University of Southern California, 2012
I asked, what is the point of this fantastic job and this great platform, what is the purpose? I began to understand that it was a position of unique responsibility, this journalism that I’m doing and this incredible platform that reaches so far, just because of the technology that enables it to reach so far…
So I do this, and I continue to go into danger, and I continue to really sort of … what’s the right word? … To lust, really, on behalf of this unbelievable passion and this incredible profession, because I believe in it and I believe that journalism matters. And I believe that even though so much of our profession, sadly, is awash in a sea of sensationalism, a sea of trivia and a shortage of seriousness, I remain convinced that good journalism still matters and still can and does make a difference.
And where we journalists go and where we choose to shine our lights, the words we use, all of those have consequences…
And I believe that every robust democracy … needs an informed citizenry, which often does, in fact depend, or at least somewhat, on journalists of integrity who are robust, who are rigorous, who will ask the tough questions and who will always report without fear or favor.
And I do it because I believe we must all speak the truth, whether as a journalist or whatever job, whatever profession, whatever role you find yourself in, whether it’s comfortable or not.
commencement.usc.edu/files/2012/12/ PastSpeeches-Amanpour.pdf
Miriam Defensor-Santiago, senator
University of the Philippines College of Medicine, 2012
Your graduation is not an endpoint in your education. Now that your proud professors have done their best, you must start the adventure of learning from life itself.
Michelangelo said that genius is eternal patience. And Gandhi put it in another way, by saying that there is more to life than increasing its speed.
I will simply say that life is what you make it. Dare beyond your strength, hazard beyond your judgment, and in extremities, proceed in excellent hope. Bear the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.
To paraphrase the advice of a wise man, you should live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws. You should be led by permanent ideals. If you do that, you will be patient when the world ignores you, and you will be calm and unspoiled when the world praises you.
You are trained doctors—heal yourselves. The wise man said that we should seek elegance rather than luxury, refinement rather than fashion, worth rather than respectability, and wealth rather than riches. You have studied hard. Now think quietly, talk gently with your patients, and act frankly. In addition, listen to stars and birds, leaders and sages, with open hearts. Await occasions and never hurry.
Your most important lesson is that in the common, mundane things in life, the spiritual, the hidden, and even the unconscious will slowly enlighten you.
miriam.com.ph/newsblog/2012/05/21/a-date-with-destiny/
