... for centuries there has been a long and honorable tradition of women who have resisted and protested against men and their power.

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.

what has been termed 'correct' English is nothing other than the blatant legitimation of the white middle-class code.

It is partly the absence of recorded history which sends women now to the lives of women past for the detailed documentation of their daily lives.

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

Language helps form the limits of our reality.

Well into the 19th century there were pronouncements from just about every branch of science and medicine that reading, writing, and thinking were dangerous for women. Articles in the Lancet declared that women's brains would burst and their uteruses atrophy if they engaged in any form of rigorous thinking. The famous physician J.D. Kellogg insisted that novel reading was the greatest cause of uterine disease among young women and urged parents to protect their daughters from the dreaded consequences of print.