men have been in charge of according value to literature, and ... they have found the contributions of their own sex immeasurably superior.

Language helps form the limits of our reality.

Have you noticed that all the news, statistics, strategies about unemployment are provided by those who are employed? As soon as you are unemployed you cease to exist.

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.

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

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.

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.