When women are supposed to be quiet, a talkative woman is a woman who talks at all.

Every medium - oral, written, print, and now electronic - has its own associated thought patterns and mind sets.

Men who teach only men are called scholars. Women who teach only women are called political agitators.

This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy, and consequently have ensured the invisibility or 'other' nature of females.

Feminism has fought no wars ... killed no opponents ... set up no concentration camps ... starved no enemies ... practiced no cruelty. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety in the streets ... for reforms in the law.

When I learnt, however, that in 1911 there had been twenty-one regular feminist periodicals in Britain, that there was a feminist book shop, a woman's press, and a woman's bank run by and for women, I could no longer accept that the reason I knew almost nothing about women of the past was because there were so few of them, and they had done so little.

For centuries women have been saying many of the things we are saying today and which we have often thought of as new.