A few years ago, on the eve of my giving a commencement address at Emma Willard, a girls’ boarding school in upstate New York, the mother of one of the graduates approached me with a question:

“If you could go back to your younger self—say, six years after you’d graduated from high school—what would you ask?”

I thought about it for a second and then said, “I’m not so sure I’d ask my younger self anything, but here’s what I’d tell her: that she needs to remember to listen more carefully to the voice inside her head, especially the one saying no.”

Not coincidentally, no was the subject of the address I was to give the next morning, a speech that started off with a riff on a beloved book from childhood, Harriet the Spy, whose protagonist is nosy and obstinate, unpredictable and sometimes explosive. She refuses to go to dancing school and is a girl who, as one critic put it, tells “inconvenient truths … [and is not] very interested in people telling her who she was or what she could do.”

Harriet the Spy was perhaps an odd choice for me to lead with—or at least sort of an old one. The book was published in the mid-1960s; I had devoured it in the mid-’80s. Had any of the Emma Willard seniors even read it? How would my speech land with the graduates’ families, who probably weren’t expecting me to reference a children’s chapter book in urging their daughters, granddaughters, and sisters to say no more often? As the world opened up to them, shouldn’t these young women be embracing yes? Maybe. But I’d come to believe that for women there’s something important to be gained by saying no, not just to dancing school, but to overcaution, to caretaking, to prim obedience, and, most of all, to making sure other people feel comfortable with the power we wield. Still, I was anxious about how the audience would react to my speech. I felt better when a school administrator sought me out before the speech to tell me how much she liked the idea of it, adding, “I like to tell my advisees that no is a complete sentence.”

But for many women and girls, yes comes far more easily than no. We learn from a young age that we should appear at once competent and kind, effortless and accommodating, graceful and ungregarious. As soon as we start learning to walk and talk, we are socialized to be pleasant, to share generously, to be patient, to do emotional caretaking, and to put others before ourselves. Except in cases where we’re asked to do things we believe are outside our capabilities or purview—and studies have shown that women, unlike men, are prone to demur when faced with offers of jobs or responsibilities that we believe are above or beyond us—we are expected to say yes.

From the July/August 2012 issue: Why women still can’t have it all

Women of color, in particular, have to find ways to survive within a society that sees our assertiveness as tantamount to aggression. (You know, the “angry Black woman” stereotype.) For us, reflexively saying yes, especially in professional spheres, is a way to preempt certain assumptions about how we express frustration, annoyance, or anger. Successful women of color are expected to obligingly—obsequiously, in fact—say yes as a way to demonstrate gratitude for successes we’ve earned on our own. If people of color have to, as the old adage goes, work twice as hard and be twice as good to succeed, th