Speaking as an omniscient presence, in subsequent works, Rich championed marginalized groups in scenes that challenge the white male overlord. She began teaching English at City College and composed When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1972), a frank autobiographical essay and challenge to literary politics, and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), a prose exposé of the inequalities that undermine modern marriage. A bolder statement fueled Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980), a terse monograph that disclosed her lesbianism.
Rich's powerful, evocative work suited late-twentieth-century poetry texts and anthologies and energized feminist coursework in women's studies departments in American colleges and universities. She reprised titles from Twenty-One Love Poems (1976) in an expanded volume, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (1978). Feminism and an independence mark two prose collections, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (1979) and Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1987 (1986); and verse in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981 (1981); Sources (1984), an exploration of Jewish roots; and The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984 (1984), a backward glance at the territory she had explored.
After three years at Douglass College, Rich left teaching to settle in western Massachusetts with her mate, poet Michelle Cliff. She produced reflective verse on lesbian feminism, anti-Semitism, and gender violence in Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988 (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 (1991), and What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993). Filled with a jubilant self-discovery, the urgent later works compel young students still innocent of the greed and coercion around them.
