Life & Wisdom Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser doesn’t “celebrate women” so much as eavesdrop on the frequency of their lived reality: song as testimony, not decoration. “I hear the singing of the lives of women” turns biography into chorus. It’s a subtle political move. A chorus implies multiplicity and labor; you don’t get it from a lone muse on a pedestal. You get it from bodies moving through work, love, risk, and time, making something coherent out of pressure.

The phrase “clear mystery” is classic Rukeyser: she refuses the cheap binary where women are either inexplicable (“mysterious”) or fully legible (“explained”). The mystery is real - desire, motherhood, ambition, grief - but it’s “clear” because it can be spoken, named, and sung. She’s arguing against a culture that benefits from keeping women unreadable. Clarity here is not simplification; it’s permission.

Then she pivots to “the offering, and pride,” a pairing that corrects a familiar script. Women are often cast as offering without pride - sacrifice without ego, care without claim. Rukeyser insists the gift comes with self-possession. Pride isn’t vanity; it’s the refusal to be erased after you’ve given everything.

Context matters: Rukeyser wrote in a 20th-century America that loved women’s contributions as long as they stayed private, sentimental, or safely symbolic. Her intent is to relocate women’s lives into public art and public record - to make their singing audible as history, not background music.