Adrienne Rich, a well-known and influential American poet, essayist and feminist, wrote Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying in 1977 in the midst of civil rights movements. Rich graduated from Radcliffe University in 1951 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World that same year. Later in the 1960s, Rich focused her work towards women’s role in society, racism, and the Vietnam War. She was influenced to write this essay by the feminist and civil rights movements that occurred in the 1970s and was later awarder the National Book Award.
Rich wrote this essay for the purpose of explaining that lying should not be overlooked as something natural. She argues to that truthfulness is an important aspect in a personal relationship. This essay begins with a juxtaposition that compares men’s honor to women’s honor and then is followed by motives for why we lie. She explains how lies have changed due to the demand of what is accepted at the time. She points out that we “lie with our bodies” and explains that we are lying when we “pluck our eyebrows” or “glaze finger and toe nails.” Not only do we unknowingly lie with our bodies, Rich adds that we lie “depending on what the men of the time needed to hear.” The essay is capped off by Rich explaining how important she believes truthfulness is when it comes to personal relationships and that truthfulness is equivalent to extending “the possibility of life between us.” Rich appeals to her female audience by using repetition as a rhetorical strategy. She uses diacopes such as “the complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire" and anaphoras such as “It is important” and “The liar” in order to clearly achieve her purpose of expressing the importance of truthfulness. Rich accomplished her purpose clearly with the use of repetition and her educated background.
