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.

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.

The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.

Paradoxically, the most constructive thing women can do is to write, for in the act of writing we deny our muteness and begin to eliminate some of the difficulties that have been put upon us.

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

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.