Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

The essay was about women, how they lie, and the reasons for this lying. She starts with talking about the old ideas of honor, and how this problem of women lying may have begun. She continues to talk about ways women lie, and how the way they talk to each other and to men is different, and why lying in relationships affects people so much, and how women have only recently begun to discover themselves after so long being under the control of the patriarchy. The author, Adrienne Rich, was a poet, essayist, and feminist, all of which makes sense when reading this essay. She is well known for declining the National Medal of Arts because the House of Representatives ended funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. One of the main strategies I noticed was anaphora and other repetition, such as when she begins three paragraphs with "women have". She also repeats many other phrases throughout the essay, and I think this does help achieve the purpose. The purpose of the essay is to speak to other women in an attempt to describe and explain the phenomenon of female lying. I think she definitely does achieve this purpose, and does it quite well. As the title says, they are "notes" on lying, and how this results from the idea of honor, and how female honor was different from male honor, which resulted in the lying, that "honesty in women has not been considered important. We have been depicted as generically whimsical, deceitful, subtle, vacillating. And we have been rewarded for lying." She explains how this image has led to women lying, and why this doesn't occur in men. It results from being considered inferior to men, expected to be obedient and faithful. We lie in relationships "with people who do not have power over us" because we are so used to doing it in other relationships. She also discusses lesbian women, and how they have been erased throughout history, saying that women who are lesbians are "criminals", or "sick". And finally, she describes how the liar is afraid and lonely, and why lying in relationships is makes us "feel slightly crazy".

The comic below shows some of the ways people lie to each other, many of which were addressed throughout the essay.