Analysis Of Rich's Essay 'Claiming An Education'

In the essay ”Claiming an Education¨, Rich explains how women were treated by the male discourse for reconsidering them as sexual objects, rather than taking them seriously for their academics. Douglass College, which is a women’s college, was taking over by the male faculty, where they have made the women students inferior as they thought the women were not responsible or intelligent of their academics. Rich points out in her essay,” I believe that in a women’s college you have the right to expect your faculty to take you seriously.¨ ( 610). The majority of the women in college universities isn’t taken very seriously by the faculty, especially the male college professors, who thought the women are supposed to be simple minded and uneducated individuals, which

This means the white discourse in community colleges can only decide what is important or what is not important for the students to learn. This caused the racial and ethnic groups to doubt themselves as “human” because the white faculty was considering that their racial experience was not either accountable or recognized into the academics. Furthermore, this also caused some of the women to not understand about their exclusion of the male dominant discourse. In the essay,” Claiming an Education”, Rich explains how the women were being treated by the male discourse in community college, where the male college professors has doubted women for being responsible in their academics, but instead seeing them as sex objects. This caused the majority of the women to reject their own thinking to become more feminine, or to become passive, which they allow other people to think for them, even though they might disagree. Rich starts to talk about that we need to take responsibility for our actions, ” Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence,