Francine du Plessix Gray
"The Courage of Commitment"
Commencement Address to the Class of 2006
May 16, 2006
Francine du Plessix Gray with alumna and Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of Writing Mary Gordon |
A great American who died last month, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a neighbor of yours who long served as pastor of Riverside Church, often preached that courage is humankind's cardinal virtue, because ''it makes all other virtues possible."
These words from one of my most beloved mentors led me to choose courage as the topic for today's talk--courage, and how it might relate to women being launched into the world in 2006.
Since the beginning of recorded time, courage, along with love, has been the most frequent subject of myth, of literature and of ethical debate. In earlier periods of Western history, such as ancient Greece, physical bravery was the principal condition of public virtue--heroes such as Ajax, Ulysses, or Agamemnon could only attain and maintain their social rank by proving their mettle on the field of battle.
Throughout the ages, courage has also been seen as a pre-condition of freedom: That particular link is imbedded into our national anthem--"O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." Right into the 19th and 20th centuries, the martial courage of fictional characters such as Tolstoy's General Kutuzov, or, later, of the heroes in the Vietnam novels of Tim O'Brien and Philip Caputo, have continued to serve as models of public valor.
And yet, however fundamental, compared to such qualities as generosity or compassion, courage is the most complex and the most widely debated of all virtues. From Plato on, philosophers have spent a lot of quality time pondering what inner mechanism makes the courageous tick.
One particular debate: Do the truly courageous never experience the emotion of dread, are they perpetually fearless, as General Ulysses S. Grant is said to have been? Or are those who overcome fear even more heroic than those who have no fear to overcome? And what about those who feel that certain wars are unjust?
The paradoxical nature of courage is exemplified by the hero of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel If I Die in a Combat Zone , who feels that joining a war he judges to be immoral would jeopardize, in his words, "his very soul;" and yet he discovers that he lacks the courage to desert. He allows himself to be sent to Vietnam, he confesses, because "I am a coward." No virtue has been debated with more tortuous logic.
But we've only touched on one kind of courage-the aggressive male kind, the military-style bravery that until recently has been upheld to be the only true form of valor. For the ideology, the diction of courage has always been very misogynous: it has assumed women's natural cowardice, and intimated that we were incapable of true bravery.
The most frequently used word for "coward" is "sissy," a shortening of the word sister. In Homer's Iliad , Hector describes Diomedes, when he flees from the Trojans, as being "no better than a woman." The drill instructor in Tim O'Brien's novel Going after Cacciato refers to the less valorous guys in his command as "a couple of college pussies."
Even the mother of modern feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, who in the index of her groundbreaking book The Second Sex lists most female virtues and conditions--authenticity, alienation, altruism, caprice, coquetry, exhibitionism, ennui, even kleptomania--nowhere is there mention of the notion of female courage.
Yet there has always existed a kind of courage radically different from the male martial kind: however undervalued, however more concealed, it exemplifies the very origin of the word--courage comes from the Latin cor, or heart, and this etymology immediately suggests values of heartfelt commitment, of stoic fortitude, of compassionate patience.
With the exception of a few aberrant figures--Joan of Arc, the legendary Amazons, or fabled Queens such as Christina of Sweden and Catherine of Russia--until recently this quieter, far less valued bravery of tenacity and perseverance was the only kind of valor allotted to women.
There are formidably resilient heroines of ancient literature, and of the early Church, who have given hell to the establishment by exemplifying the power of commitment. Such is Antigone, beloved Antigone, who chooses her own death by giving her brother the proper burial rites, thus defying the laws of the male-led secular state personified by her uncle Creon, King of Thebes.
The female martyrs of the early Christian Church are considerably more numerous, according to historians, than male martyrs: Saint Catherine of Siena, tortured on a fiery wheel for refusing to marry a Pagan king; and my favorite model of female fortitude, Santa Cecilia, patron saint of music, who, having survived the suffocation imposed on her by her Pagan captors, was ordered to be beheaded, but even survived that and continued to speak, nearly headless, for several days--long enough to convert many Pagan onlookers by her teaching. That's true grit.
Our country is uniquely rich in less lethal but similarly intrepid acts of non-
violent resistance--so well exemplified by Jesus Christ himself--which we often refer to as Civil Disobedience. The Boston Tea Party was a founding act of our nation.
Those American citizens who defied the Fugitive Slave Act to participate in the Underground Railroad helped tens of thousands of African Americans reach safety in the Northeast and Canada. I don't need to remind you of Henry Thoreau.
Women's right to vote might have been delayed for decades without the acts of non-violent protest committed by British and American suffragettes--the fact that French women passively waited for suffrage and didn't get it until after World War II is a case in point.
And if I'll dwell on Martin Luther King and his close friend William Sloane Coffin, it's because these two valiant trouble makers, by giving hell to the regional and national establishments that supported segregation and the Vietnam War, and being jailed umpteen times for their acts of witness, played an important role in forcing us to re-evaluate the two apposite forms of courage we've been considering--the martial male aggressive valor, and the courage of commitment and stoicism long associated with women.
This reassessment is quite recent and very significant; we might trace it to the revulsion against warfare provoked by the horrors committed in the century just past by totalitarian regimes such as Hitler's, Stalin's, and Pol Pot's, and also by the deceptions of Vietnam.
As we study these conflicts and genocides many of us have come to believe that the stoicism needed to survive internment in a Soviet gulag or a Nazi concentration camp may well be an even more exemplary form of courage than the traditional martial valor of excelling as swordsmen, riflemen or bomber pilots.
So we're experiencing a curious convergence of the public and the female view of courage: we are witnessing a displacement of traditional male notions of bravery by those more subtle forms of courage--those of endurance and commitment--that had traditionally been associated with the female gender.
Will this democratization and femininization of our notions of courage be of benefit to you, class of 2006? It might be, but there's an important caveat. Who do you have as models of civic valor? Certainly not Beyoncé. It strikes me that you have far fewer such exemplars than my generation did.
Look at all the role models who helped to guide my class of 1952 through the tumult of the 1960's and 70's: Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi; Martin Luther King and Bill Coffin and Julian Bond; that great fighter for farm workers's rights, Cesar Chavez; Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who like King and Coffin went to jail, but for far longer terms--years at a time--for their protests against the Vietnam war; the superbly vocal feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, and that other outspoken model of commitment, Susan Sontag.
Abroad, we could look up to the great Russian dissident historian Evgenia Ginzburg, who survived nearly 15 years of internment in various Soviet prisons and gulags, from Kolyma to Magadan, and recorded the horrors of the Soviet regime in her extraordinary book Into the Whirlwind , in which she often comments on women's greater capacity for fortitude and endurance: Having survived centuries of oppression and abjection, women, Ginzburg observes, have been toughened by their lot.
Almost all of these paradigms of the courage of commitment have left us, but
how fortunate we were, members of the class of 1952, to have them there when we needed them.
You, class of 2006, will be working in far greater isolation, in far greater solitude than my generation because of the dearth of such models.
Let me share with you just one contemporary heroine from the Asian continent, in case you have not yet heard of her: Ang Sen Suu Kyii, the Buddhist peace activist and Nobel laureate from the country of Myanmar, formerly called Burma, which is led by one of the world's most brutal military dictatorships.
Although in 1990 the pro-democracy party founded by Suu Kyii won a landslide victory with 80 percent of the vote, Myanmar's dictatorship refused to recognize the results, and Su Kyii has spent some 15 years, on and off, under house arrest.
Few heroines have had to make more painful choices: In 1999,when Suu Kyii's British husband was dying of cancer in England, the government of Myanmar shrewdly offered to release her so that she might visit him in England. She refused, choosing patriotism over love, fearing that if she ever left Myanmar she would never again be allowed to return, and lead the fight to liberate her country from its oppressors.
Class of 2006, take heart, I'm not urging you to be an Ang Sen Suu Kyii, or an Antigone, or an Evgenia Ginzburg. I'm merely introducing you to some models of heroic commitment at a time when such exemplars are in pathetically short supply.
Back in the 19th century, Britain's great military hero, the Duke of Wellington, commented that the notorious courage of his officer corps at the battle of Waterloo was forged, I quote, "on the playing fields of Eton." It is a very elitist remark which overlooks the equal valor of less educated commoners, and it harps back to totally outdated male ideals of military virtue; yet it does say something about the role of great schools in our lives.
I would like to think that the playing fields and thinking fields of Barnard have equipped you, class of 2006, with that alternate form of bravery--with that valor of resilience and fortitude, and most particularly of passionate commitment, which have long been looked on as female virtues, and which finally are finally being recognized as equal or superior to the Homeric martial model of bravery in armed battle.
Passionate commitment is a hard value to come by these days, and it may incur great solitude.
For we're living in a cesspool of information revolutions which constantly beckon us, like an ocean filled with sirens, to alter our beliefs for the sake of careerism and popularity--a cesspool of hedonism and escapism increasingly polluted by the entertainment industry.
It is indeed ironic that two of the most visible models of civic valor in our current society are entertainers: our gratitude to Susan Sarandon and Oprah Winfrey for their good works, but do we really have to be performers to have our voices heard?
Some 37 years ago, as a bunch of us spent a night in a cozy jail cell for protesting the Vietnam War, we noticed the graffiti on a wall of our cell which said: "What do we ask for? Freedom. What do we get? Bologna sandwiches." The phrase has stuck with me: You have to ask for a lot to get a smidgeon of freedom.
And I dare you to ask for a lot, I dare you to hold fast to your ideals and to expound them as publically and as fearlessly as Martin Luther King and Bill Coffin and Betty Friedan and those dozens of grandmothers arrested a few weeks ago for protesting the war in Iraq.
Most such paradigms of valor and commitment have been galvanized by the belief that you have to give hell to entrenched power when it violates our notions of human justice. So my final message to you is this: Whether it be on the issue of racial integration or gay rights or sexual equality or the pathetic state of health care in this country or one of the dumbest military excursions ever waged by an American government--the Iraq War--your motto should be: Give 'em hell, give 'em hell, give 'em hell!
There are never enough troublemakers fighting for justice, so go out there and give them 'em hell to create a better world for you and your children to grow into. You know one of Barnard's mottoes--say it with me: "Change the world, one woman at a time."
I love you, I thank you.
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