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.

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.

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

... 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.

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.