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

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

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.

Language helps form the limits of our reality.

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.

I know there is no danger that I will ever forget that people construct their own reality, that human beings are not led to the same version of events and of the world by the same physical evidence.

men have their cake and get to eat it too, for while they decree themselves as representative of humanity, women who argue that men are not, are simply showing how little they know! And when men's standards are defined as human standards, then women who assert that women are different, demonstrate how 'inhuman' they are. It is a real 'Catch 22.