Living the Revolution Persuasive Speech
You may be surprised that I am a commencement speaker. You can possibly be as surprised as I
am. In my experience, commencement speakers are gray-haired, respected creatures, heavy with
the experience of power in the world and with Establishment honors. Which means, of course, that
they are almost always men.
But this is the year of Women’s Liberation. Or at least, it the year the press has discovered a
movement that has been strong for several years now, and reported it as a small, privileged, rather
lunatic event instead of the major revolution in consciousness—in everyone’s consciousness—male
or female that I believe it truly is.
It may have been part of that revolution that caused the senior class to invite me here—and I am
grateful. It is certainly a part of that revolution that I, a devout non-speaker, am managing to stand
before you at all. Clinging to the comfortable beliefs of the past serves no purpose, and only slows
down the growth of new forms to suit a new reality.
Part of living this revolution is having the scales fall from our eyes. Everyday we see small obvious
truths that we had missed before.
Much of the trouble this country is in has to do with the Masculine Mystique: the idea that manhood
somehow depends on the subjugation of other people. It’s a bipartisan problem.
The challenge to all of us, and to you men and women who are graduating today, is to live a
revolution, not to die for one. There has been too much killing, and the weapons are now far too
terrible. This revolution has to change consciousness, to upset the injustice of our current hierarchy
by refusing to honor it, and to live a life that enforces a new social justice.
Because the truth is none of us can be liberated if other groups are not. Women’s Liberation is a
bridge between black and white women, but also between the construction workers and the
suburbanites, between Nixon’s Silent Majority and the young people they hate and fear.
