The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Webster's First New intergalactic WICKEDARY of the English Language

Conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi

With an Experimental Webbing by Alexiares

A FOURTH PHASE
More Experimental Webs
by Alexiares

A-Musing on Mary Daly's Philosophy

ontology : the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. [O.E.D.]

metaphysics : the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. [It] has also concerned itself with a discussion of whether what exists consists of one substance or many, and whether what exists is inevitable or driven by chance. [O.E.D.]

To date, all too few Radical Feminists, let alone Radical Feminist philosophers, have truly engaged with Mary Daly's philosophy. Even the wide-ranging selections in the 2000 anthology Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, selected and edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye are disappointing on this score. There are chapters in the book that do this, but all too many get lost in extensive reflections on whether Daly was racist or not, and how supposedly the Wickedary format is impossible to use in any other language and inappropriate outside of the particular social context of Daly herself. It is a truly unfortunate display of being distracted from the real material by the sorts of matters that patriarchal cultures and societies prefer. By this I do not mean that questions of racism, class, applicability and such are not relevant to understanding Daly's work. Indeed, they certainly are, and she has a great deal to say about them as she develops her philosophy further in her subsequent books. However, the problem is how often her interlocutors then and now have become entangled in reifications and obsessions with all the things that were supposed to be wrong with Daly. She insisted, and I think properly, on her right to change and develop, and she strove to present herself as deepening and correcting her understanding and philosophical methodology. The purpose of this was not to avoid ever being critiqued or found to be wrong, but to insist on the right to be wrong and make mistakes, provided she continued to learn and grow. This was a right that Daly firmly believed all women have as an aspect of their Be-ing.

Admittedly it probably does not help that the early days of the still not quite respectable term "thealogy" was as always presented in oversimplified ways by its detractors, such that it was not a technique but a straw woman for those critics to burn. Tragically Emily Erwin Culpepper's dissertation in which she originally defined the word still doesn't seem to have made it into print. As defined there and elaborated by Daly among others, thealogy is a "word coined by Emily Erwin Culpepper and several Other creative women theorists including Naomi Goldenberg. It uses the ancient greek word for Goddess, 'thea,' to create a word to refer to recovery and study of Goddesses, their associated symbols, mythologies, and rituals. Culpepper defines it in her dissertation as referring 'to that aspect of Goddess interest which focuses on 'The Goddess,' understood as external Divine Being as well as internal reality." For her part, Daly does not appear to have called herself a thealogian, she was very clear that she was a philosopher, something of a taboo profession for women to this day. She was specifically engaged with the areas of ontology and metaphysics, and while her studies and research led her to explore the meaning and impact of the reality of non-patriarchal religions and spiritualities, she did not focus on recovering and studying Goddesses. This was a key point of misunderstanding between Daly and Audre Lorde. Daly considered such recovery and study deeply important, but her own concern was, to the extent possible, to recognize and understand Goddess as Verb. This can be understood as a striving also to find a means to understand divinity without dragging in dangerous and cruel claims of "chosenness" that have been so brutally destructive over the past 6 000 – 10 000 years.

Daly's autobiography Outercourse is an intriguing read on these matters. From the very start of the book, and in her own life, Daly found herself particularly captured by concern about who exists, who can experience existence. She began making her way determinedly to the question of what existence is, in all its strangeness and seeming tautology. Frequently Daly's puzzlement over these issues corresponded with what she describes as intuitions of distorted patriarchal reversals of pre-patriarchal practices. I say describes as "intuitions" not to deny their reality, but to point out that unusual word for a knowing or understanding without conscious reasoning. Despite the way this word has been distorted into a mystification of women's knowledge in particular, it is not so mysterious at all if we recognize "intuition" as one manifestation of pattern matching, a critical ability we make intensive use of every day. Daly also recounts her interest in identity, describing what must have been a rather crushing moment when her father declared she didn't have much of a personality. On finding that a confirmation or confidence in one's identity could not necessarily be vested in parents or birth certificates, Daly seems to ask, well then where does proof of or a basis of identity come from? Identity is simply who or what a person is, why should this be denied to girls and women who exist as much as any boy or man? Why is identity denied to animals and plants?

Among the touchstone experiences in Daly's life is an encounter with a clover blossom, which she returns to several times in Outercourse. Perhaps the most revealing reference is when she writes, "...I had my encounter with the clover blossom that gave me an intuition of be-ing. Then I really began to know what I should write about." Daly was not interested in writing abstruse works of no use in thinking about real life, or wasting time on such pointless questions as "why are we here?" which as Barbara G. Walker noted wryly is a profoundly neurotic question. But the fact the question is even possible to ask for some people is redolent of disconnection. As Daly pursued her studies, she came to understand that many women had become disconnected from the Whole of Be-ing, and she wished to help re-connect them via her books and talks. She continued to work hard at the questions of what a real source of knowledge is, and how to tell that we are on the right track when what we know contradicts what we have been told is true. How do we check our divergent view is not merely a divergence of convenience, one meant to license us to do what we want merely because we want to do it, as opposed to a genuine challenge to a received at best incomplete, at worst outright wrong claim? Daly was very clear that genuine information is often caught up in amongst a pile of distracting nonsense meant to keep us in line with the patriarchal foreground world.

The level of hostility Daly faced in her lifetime, and that both she and her work have attracted since is remarkable. No male philosopher gets this kind of treatment, not even such men as Martin Heidigger or Michel Foucault, both profoundly execrable men on the basis of their actions. The arguments over whether their philosophies were designed to license their actions or are somehow completely separable from their political and personal actions continue, but they are regularly cited and taken seriously while Daly is not. Evidently to this day it is worse to be an out lesbian Radical Feminist philosopher who challenges the catholic church than it is to be a male nazi or sadist. But then again, the two parts of my description of where a woman can run into trouble are optional, as the late musician Sinead O'Connor's example reveals. Still, in many ways Mary Daly's powerful critique and subsequent abandonment of the catholic church and christianity in general are the surface excuses for ignoring her work, of a marginally more sophisticated quality than attempts to dismiss her as racist or more politely as ethnocentric. In fact, these accusations are very telling. As Marilyn Frye observed in her analysis of women practising separatism, if a practice or analysis can raise such hostility and outrageous accusations, ranging from the extreme to the relatively facile, then the women engaged in the practice or analysis must be on the right track.

If we try to identify another meta-question Daly considered besides how to describe a way of positively experiencing Life, connecting with Life and sharing and encouraging such positive experiences and connections in others without denying their right and need to do so each in their own unique ways, there is one, and it is among the most transgressive. That question could be framed as: what would a philosophy of be-ing, one respectful of interconnections between all beings, consist of? Is it possible to recognize and describe such a philosophy? I think Daly sought in part to answer both of these questions, and she came far closer than most. She absolutely did not want any approach or method that could be used as a pretence to a right to literally kill or torture others into compliance with her philosophy. The example of the world all around us is of a complex web of wildly diverse Life, and as more and more archaeological and other information reveals, humans as much as any other creature are capable of living in this positive web of Life without relentlessly destroying or oppressing other creatures or one another. This is both incredibly Hopeful, and incredibly hard to accept, because while we can choose to Live, our choices alone can't instantly stop all that is wrong in the world. It is bitter to have to face up to the fact so many people, especially men, choose otherwise no matter what. Daly faced up to these matters, and developed an analysis of how any person, woman or man, can be fooled into making destructive and outright evil choices even while thinking they were in fact doing good. That we can be fooled in this way is rightly terrifying. But if we don't face these things, and pursue the broader approach Daly advocated, our chances of having a Biophilic Future are all too slim.

A-Musing On Mary Daly's Books

Mary Daly wrote eight books over her lifetime, two of them after she was forced out of her academic post. The first of her books, The Church and the Second Sex, was published in 1968 when she was forty years old. Her last major work in the academic and philosophical sense is her autobiography Outercourse, published in 1992, between the ages of 64 and 65. Her last two books, Quintessence and Amazon Grace,written six years and fourteen years after her autobiography, are strikingly different from their predecessors. They remain full of wordplay and rigorous thought, but they have a paradoxical and wistful quality that some readers find off-putting. Some of those same readers or others still dislike the apparent spiritual expressiveness of these two books, and there is probably a serious temptation to consider them inferior works reflective of a loss of seriousness or discipline. Any author may take up topics some or many readers will find uninteresting or even alienating, and in this these last two books are no different than Daly's earlier works. I do think these last two books are underestimated as well as seriously affected by the conditions Daly was living in at the time of writing and publishing them.

For readers who find Daly's work congenial enough to delve into her footnotes as well as her chapter endnotes, there is a strong contrast between Quintessence and Amazon Grace from the others. Unlike those others, the references to recent conversations and new ideas developed with other women are few to entirely absent. Of the few, most of them cite much earlier instances, many of them familiar from her other books. Further examination of the social and political context reveals in stark terms how the women's community in scholarship and activism had been torn apart and dispersed in north america by 1998. Even the old epistolary and telephone networks appear to have disintegrated, with little sign of formidable elder scholars like Daly in regular connection with even their former students, despite having computers and email access. Optimistic as Daly's visioning of Lost and Found Continent in Quintessence is, it also contains a gentle reproach to the many women who have apparently vanished from the scene, apparently dropping interest in maintaining the badly needed women's community in the present. Her warning and encouragement to rebuild were barely heard at the time, and today women are finally engaged in the restoration work. However, this restoration so far seems to be mostly a product of being under siege, so it is often lopsided in favour of managing acute emergency, and therefore to ad hoc, not necessarily hardy creations. This is changing, and women are considering again the challenge of creating and maintaining lasting structures and resources, including how to curb the temptation to trust others to do the work. Neither men nor any woman who prioritizes men can be trusted to value and preserve women's culture and organization, even if they are wholly well-meaning. Their loyalties are inevitably split, and they will be prone to seeing women's resources as ripe for pillage whenever men claim to "need" them. By now we should all be forewarned of the bad habit men and male-identified women have learned to claim they "need" what they want and think men have a right to merely for wanting.

So far I have described matters as I understood them up to circa 2020. By then the process of bringing together materials for this project was well on its way, and a strange lacunae revealed itself very quickly. Despite her substantial body of work, Daly seemed to have nearly vanished in terms of citations and published works explicitly building on her philosophy and thealogy. The strikingly uneven 2000 anthology Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye did not herald an improvement. After Daly's death, there was no sign of even a Feminist version of a posthumous festschrift, and there are no follow-up anthologies to speak of. The closest approach to an attempt to honour her life and work in peer reviewed print or otherwise appears to be a single, 2012 issue of Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR, volume 28, number 2) when it was under editorship by Judith Plaskow and Melanie Johnson-DeBeaufre. It provides this brief overview in the Editor's Introduction:

Mary Daly's death on January 3, 2010, marked in a JFSR editorial in the fall 2010 issue, deprived the feminist community of a brilliant and radical thinker who catalyzed the feminist explorations and scholarship of innumerable women. When Mary's friends in the American Academy of Religion (AAR) learned of her death, they immediately got to work organizing a session to honor her life and thought at the 2010 AAR annual meeting in Atlanta. The session – appropriately scheduled for Halloween – was meant to be a critical celebration and reflection on Mary and her impact rather than an exercise in hagiography (pun intended!). The papers from the session collected here consider Mary's legacy from a wide range of perspectives, including different religious traditions, generations, social locations, and activist commitments. The presentations were followed by a rich and wide-ranging discussion. Although the recording of the discussion was not clear enough to transcribe, we hope the papers themselves convey enough of the energy and substance of the session and continue the project of remembering Mary and learning from both the strengths and weaknesses of her work.

Fair enough, although there is an uneasy note here. It is heart-warming to learn on consulting the selection of papers in this issue of JFSR about "Team Mary," the group of old friends and younger students "The Hedge Hags" who studied with Daly at her apartment and together helped ensure her well-being in the last years of her life. Emily Erwin Culpepper sets the scene in her Introduction to the collection of papers:

Of course, numerous others formed wider circles of support for Mary and in turn for those who insured her care. Creating and participating in these radical circles of care are important feminist ethical acts, especially when done for someone like Mary, who had no living relatives. The women's movement was her family. We also arranged for Mary to be buried at historic Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where many important women and feminists associated with religion and social justice have also been buried. A small group of us committed her ashes to the ground with loving remembrances.

Unfortunately, more than one of the subsequent papers were not so much constructive and challenging examinations of Daly's ideas, but attacks on her as a person. The condescending claims by several authors that her strong views of the recent developments in the development of women's spirituality and the anti-woman, anti-Feminist backlash as mere evidence of her lack of understanding and reflection on them. The shocking illustrations of how elder women are disregarded even by many of those genuinely seeking to care for them were crowned by the revelation in an anecdote from Mary E. Hunt's paper, which she describes as "short and sweet."

Jennifer Rycenga and I were part of the team that cleaned Mary's apartment and helped her settle into assisted living. We went to see her in her new place, taking a few books and pictures we thought would be a comfort to her. One of our choices – rather a lucky guess – was a well-used copy of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. Mary was delighted to have it with her.

There is a shocking unawareness of the cruelty inherent in the description here. It is hard to read it in any other way as indicating that Daly herself was at best unable to select items to take with her into assisted living for herself. By writing this I do not mean to suggest Hunt was being cruel or ever intended to be. Evidently considerable context is missing here, including the nature of the health issues Daly was facing near the end of her life.

These additional details, although woefully incomplete, still make the intellectual conditions Daly was coping with much clearer. Against the odds, she continued teaching in an informal school at her apartment. Her speaking opportunities were much reduced, and in the new neoliberal era often impossible as publishers and conference organizers offered minimal or no travel funding. As usual, Radial Feminists were broadly denounced as "out of touch" and having the goal to insist on the importance of women maintaining their own separate spaces and institutions because despite the best of wills, patriarchy is still real. The pool of women able to live with comparatively minimal impacts on their lives in it are still by far the minority of women as a whole, and Radical Feminists remained and remain aware of that. Then just as now, Radical Feminists recognize backlash and how it hurts all women, no matter what those women's position was or is concerning Feminism.

Therefore it seems to me that in her last two books, Daly did her best to capture a meaningful vision of women's solidarity and survival. The times did not call for another dense philosophy book, they demanded something broadly accessible, something manifesto-like, but necessarily longer in order to set out the latest expressions of patriarchal madness, analyse them, and set out ways to recognize Ways Out. Quintessence is more detailed, and for the more patient reader, arguably both a vision and an analogy to aspects of the present. That vision includes a clear argument for lesbian and women's separatism alongside an expression of remarkable, yet profound faith that it is possible for women and men to live together in non-oppressive ways. Nevertheless, Daly is convinced that there will always be a role for separate women's community, because women's solidarity is a positive force and an important resource first for women, second for society at large. In both Quintessence and Amazon Grace Daly presents analyses of what remain current trends on necrophilic developments in the world using Radical Feminist theory, including her own analytical framework, the Sado-Ritual Syndrome. To my mind, these two volumes are in fact workbooks. Daly did not write a set of overt problems or exercises to follow each chapter in the form of a numbered or bulleted series. Nevertheless, the pointers are there. Knowing her legacy would be her philosophy as embodied in her books, and the likelihood they would be taught in courses whether in academia or out, Daly set out two books supporting independent study. In fact, Quintessence may be the best introduction to Daly's thought, as it can get the reader started. Equipped with its introduction to the basics of Daly's philosophy and perspective, they can turn to Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology ready to dig into the details.

Amazon Grace is better read after Daly's other books in part because it plays at least two additional roles Quintessence understandably does not. One of those roles is capturing a snapshot of the state of women's Feminist organization and activity and that of the contemporary sadosociety Daly was observing in the united states. She understood that the backlash was certainly not just about women and Feminist gains, but also about a dying united states empire lashing out against the world. The other is an expression of Faith in Women and the Cognitive Majority of Life-loving Be-ings on Earth, from the sane humans to all animals and plants. Unwilling to take on the pompous tones of the snools and phallocrats, Daly takes care to do this in a firm, yet whimsical manner. In my own experience, many people who are irreligious find such expressions heartily irritating, despite it being what I think is one of the few examples of concretely based Faith available to us. So far as we can tell based on scientific observations of all kinds, life as we know it on Earth is technically wildly improbable, and profoundly persistent. This suggests to me that if there is any such thing as a real miracle, Life is it. Earth is not a miracle as such, since our observations indicate planets are quite common, even small rocky planets able to hang onto the collection of gases the Earth has that make it so hospitable for Life as we know it. All evidence available indicates the Earth is not going to spontaneously vanish or blow up. Therefore Earth and Life stand as two uniquely solid bases for vesting trust and confidence in. Then again, maybe what those who find this sort of expression irritating is that they consider this obvious, and perhaps a bit too personal, and so unnecessary to state. For those in that camp who are nevertheless interested in Mary Daly's work, then the most congenial way to go about exploring it is to start at Beyond God the Father and read Daly's books in order all the way up to Outercourse.

A Web of Feminist Authors

The following women are among the many Daly cited in the quoted sections of the Wickedary, all of whom had more or less feminist or at least women-friendly careers. Many have controversial legacies, either because they have passed on or due to the specific changes in their views and actions over the course of their careers. Consistent with majority Radical Feminist practice, Daly strove to acknowledge and cite women-friendly and comparatively feminist statements by women we might not expect. This was not a mere "a broken clock is right twice a day" sort of backhanded compliment. It is consistent with Daly's insistence on learning from and applying the valuable comments and aspects of others' work, especially other women's work because it is not taken seriously and treated respectfully nearly often enough. She sought to build Women's traditions and encourage women to participate in that creation, and warned against the sorts of self-destructive actions men push women to take instead, actions cutting us off from our own knowledge and history and thereby putting us and all those who depend on us in serious danger. Among the women below are scholars, scientists, authors, poets, lawyers, and artists. Let them be threads to follow on to the many other women Out There who have made and shared so much with the world. You are very likely to be surprised by who you find.

As set out below, it is quite possible to simply read through from beginning to end. Alternatively, it is possible to use one of the possible paths below instead. Alternatively, clicking the disclosure triangle will show the links in a path and the path can be traced from there. In all cases, clicking a link will switch to a new page with the series as a menu on the right side and the sequence of author miniprofiles in the main area of the page.

• Lucy R. Lippard : An early champion of feminist art who is now more often referenced for being a champion of "conceptual art" thanks to such institutions as the brooklyn museum. But what does "feminist art" mean in this context? Well, first of all, Lippard took serious steps to counter the underrepresentation of women artists in art shows and galleries, including her famous 1971 show, "Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists." She also challenged preconceptions about the characteristics of "women's art," observing it included far more than the fibre arts or realistic painting. She is still busy writing, curating shows, and teaching. Lippard's profile at Curator's International provides a list of her most recent books.
• Kate Clinton : Among the first out lesbian comics in the united states (her performing career began in 1981), Clinton specializes in political comedy and motivational speaking today. Her partner Arvashi Vaid, a renowned lesbian activist passed away in 2022. Like Daly, Clinton comes from an irish catholic background, in her case from a family based in buffalo, new york.
• Laurie Lisle : An author whose first mention in Daly's work is via her biography of Georgia O'Keefe. She is a notable feminist thinker, and besides her own memoirs and another biography of artist Louise Nevelson, has written one of the few thoughtful books on women who do not have children, Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness. Also see her long love letter to the women's college she attended, Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own.
• Edith Sitwell : Poet, critic, and advocate of modernism, she was painted by Roger Fry. In common with many of the prominent women artists of the early to mid twentieth century, her parents were difficult and eccentric, and found her way to constructive and unique work, eventually moving to a shared flat with her former governess. She wrote several successful non-fiction books, but her primary focus was poetry.
• Eudora Welty : Best known as a novelist born in mississippi whose books focussed on the southern united states, highly regarded by Toni Morrison. According to the biography published by the foundation created in her honour, Welty also produced a profound body of short stories and photographs subsequently selected and annotated into several other books. And yes, the classic eudora email client is named after her.
• Carolina Maria de Jesus : A brazilian memoirist thrown into sudden fame and riches by the publication of her diaries as Child of the Dark, who nevertheless stayed true to herself. It can be difficult to find sensible accounts of de Jesus because she lived in a favela and eked out a living collecting waste paper. The descriptions of her work veer violently between describing her as someone who merely wrote about her life on scrap paper, and as the product of an extraordinary self-destructive literary genius àla Byron. A much better introduction is provided at favelissues.com, Sharing Stories: Favela Authors From "Child of the Dark" to Flupp Pensa.
• Emily Brontë : Possibly most famous as the writer of Wuthering Heights, one of three remarkable writing sisters, the others being Charlotte and Anne. The standard biography of Bontë and her sisters is recounted briefly at online-literature.com. Yet she was also a poet, posthumously considered one of the best english lyric poets and revered by Emily Dickinson.
• Katharine Cook Briggs : Co-creator of the jungian Myers-Briggs scale with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, a scale that for good or ill many north americans who have worked in offices have had to take. To be fair, their scale and the questions used to derive it are the product of a remarkable pair of women who pursued highly unusual careers for their time and made a serious marketing success while they were at it. The new york times published a retrospective on the scale and Briggs and Myers in 2022. Myers was also a minor novelist who published several mysteries.
• Mina Loy : Modernist writer, actor, painter, composer of the 1914 "Feminist Manifesto" (an inconsistent one with some infamous clauses), captor of one of the best book titles of all-time, The Last Lunar Baedecker. She has a fine scholarly website dedicated to her life and works, featuring photographs and samples of her visual art, sculptures, and some of her writing. She was a remarkable businesswoman, and a prominent member of the network of expatriates living on the left bank of paris during the early to mid twentieth century.
• Arlene Eisen : A major united states born and based landscape painter and designer. She creates in almost every medium, including digital art and website design (for a gallery of samples, see her website Arlene Eisen Fine Art). She is also a pioneering out lesbian artist, long partnered with Catherine Pearson, also an artist and designer.
• Barbara Roberts : A now retired united states doctor with a liberal feminist bent, she entered politics in the 1980s. Her main claim to fame seems to be that she was the first woman governor or oregon.
• Sylvia Plath : Poet and novelist who struggled mightily to write through serious depression and abusive family relationships. Her poetry is sometimes overshadowed by her famous novel, The Bell Jar. She has a lesser known body of visual work, especially drawings, now widely published along with her letters and journals. Rather than look up mainstream biographies of Plath, which are generally travesties, it is better to read her work. In fact, it is even possible to hear a recording of Plath reading a series of her poems courtesy of openculture.com, Hear Sylvia Plath Read 18 Poems From Her Final Collection, Ariel, in a 1962 Recording.
• Jan Zimmerman : Feminist social scientist and technology critic, she helped found a critical school of technology analysis with major resonances to this day. Her classic article include "Technology and the Future of Women: Haven't We Met Somewhere Before" (Women's Studies International Quarterly, 1981) remains groundbreaking, but she may be best known for the important early anthology Technological Woman. According to her contributor biography in that books, "[She] directed the Conference on Future, Technology and Woman in 1981 at San Diego State University, where she is an adjunct faculty member of the Women's Studies Department. A writer and consultant in the fields of telecommunications, computers, and technology, she initiated the National Women's Agenda Satellite Project in 1977 to connect 100 women's organizations using a NASA satellite. In January 1980 she was named by Ms. magazine as one of '80 Women to Watch in the 80s.'"
• Margaret A. Murray : Archaeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, WSPU member, and key researcher into the witch hunts in europe, Murray may be most famous for her controversial reconstruction of pre-christian european spirituality. Yet Murray was a major egyptologist who carried out one of the earliest mummy unwrappings that included an autopsy. Born in india, she began her adult career as a nurse, refusing to settle down into a the sex-role stereotyped career most women found themselves pressured into during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She wrote 28 books, numerous articles, and lectured regularly throughout her career, believing firmly in the importance of public education.
• Muriel Rukeyser : Writer, poet, essayist, feminist, Rukeyser was bron and lived much of her life in new york city. Among the many poets and writers she influenced is Adrienne Rich. She was a sensitive and politically active poet, opposing the vietnam war, and her famous question and answer, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." captured the powerful shift experienced by many women through consciousness raising in the 1970s. There are few well-documented biographies of Rukeyser online (Fembio has one), but much of her poetry is back in print.
• Zora Neale Hurston : African american author, playwright, anthropologist, film maker, and photographer, it is hard to know where to start to describe her work. Among her most famous are her books Their Eyes Were Watching God and the posthumously published Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo.' As her biography on her eponymous website recounts, her earlier and comparatively idyllic childhood was followed by tougher years of struggle to complete her education and make a decent living. She was so poor at her passing that her grave had no headstone until 13 years later, 1973. This was rectified by another african american author deeply influenced and inspired by her work, Alice Walker.
• Barbara Starrett : Author of I Dream in Female: The Metaphors of Evolution, Starrett was a feminist and jungian psychologist. Her obituary published 22 july 2010 in the vineyard gazette (martha's vineyard), Barbara Starrett Lived a Full Life summarized her career in college teaching, art, and psychology along with her great love of books and music. That acknowledged, Starrett's book and essays became something of a lightning-rod for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, as some were deeply threatened by challenges to patriarchal religion.
• Paula Giddings : Lawyer, civil rights activist, historian, and biographer of ida B. Wells. It is possible to have heard of her first book without realizing what the reference is to, the classic When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. She took part in the Freedom Rider movement and eventually joined the faculty of Douglass college at rutgers university, before moving on to smith college where she taught until her retirement in 2017.
• Olive Schreiner : South african feminist, socialist, social theorist, and writer still perhaps best known for her novel The Story of a South African Farm. Yet she was also an important and still underrated philosopher, whose posthumous legacy is still being recovered and restored to counter the impact of her husband's hamfisted (at best) editing. Her letters are available to read online in a major project based in the uk. During her life she was politically active, becoming well-known as both an advocate of women's suffrage and for peace.
• Ann Petry : African american journalist, historian, and novelist, her books ranged from gritty novels to important historical books for children. Her fembio entry notes that she was an important public speaker and teacher, working at times with the naacp. Since her death literary awards have been founded in her honour, and her short stories, articles, and novels have returned to print in special editions.
• Brenda Walcott : African american poet, member of the Umbra Collective. According to the global poetics project, this collective and their magazine grew out of a manhattan-based workshop that ran from 1962 - 1965. Walcott was still active politically and poetically as recently as 2015, and it is possible to read a selection of her work courtesy of the trilingual haitian journal Tanbou*Tabbour in Liberation Poetry: An Anthology edited by Tontongi and Jill Netchinsky.
• Jane Anger : The 16th century english author of the first full length defence of women in english, Jane Anger: Her Protection for Women. Nothing is really known about her besides speculation and the seemingly inevitable attempt to claim she was actually a man writing under a woman's name. If the name is a woman's pseudonym, few are as brilliantly chosen to throw readers and later scholars into conniptions, with "Jane" being so common and "Anger" being so evocative.
• Sylvia Townsend Warner : Another member of the remarkable network of women authors of the early twentieth century, an important contemporary of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes who has an eponymous society with a thorough and growing website. Her partner, poet Valentine Ackland overshadowed her somewhat later in life, but both are well-recognized today. Townsend Warner's posthumous account of her love and life with Ackland in one of the most famous lesbian relationships of the era, I'll Stand By You, consists of her annotation of the their nearly forty years of correspondence.
• Judy Grahn : Poet, lesbian feminist, and storied leader of the feminist spirituality movement. She has recently published an autobiography and her official website provides a lightly annotated catalogue of her works and several sample poems. She was born in 1940, and her career includes stints in the airforce, many years as a laboratory technician, and a live poetry performance and teaching career. Among her best loved books are the hard to find Edward the Dyke, her first poetry collection; Blood, Bread, and Roses; and Another Mother Tongue.
• Nelle Morton : A pioneering feminist theologian, widely revered by women interested in preserving the christian church and those firmly committed to leaving it behind due to her scintillating analysis of how women may hear one another to speech and develop new understandings of divinity. Her best known publication is her 1985 collection The Journey is Home, which includes such famous pieces as "Beloved Image" and "The Goddess as Metaphoric Image."
• Virginia Woolf : A profoundly radical feminist whose depth and range of analysis was better known and understood through the 1970s and 1980s than today. She was born in 1882 to Julia Prinsep, a well-known beauty of the time and niece of the art photographer Julia Cameron, Woolf survived a difficult childhood to develop into a unique writer and philosopher. Her keen analysis of time and consciousness is often treated as something of an self-indulgent artistic conceit. Yet Woolf was in fact unpacking and critiquing the hideous nature of the "victorian middle class family" and subsequently british patriarchal society. The classic treatment of the first part of this work is Louise DeSalvo's Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989). The second part is unmatched in its intensity and directness in Woolf's famous book, Three Guineas.
• Matilda Joslyn Gage : A powerful advocate for women's rights, abolition of slavery, Indigenous rights, and freedom from religion. In the course of her 72 years, Gage raised five children, spoke and wrote regularly in politics, most famously the suffrage movement. She edited at least two newspapers, co-authored the first three volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage, and the profound analysis in her monograph, Woman, Church, and State. Her critique of the christian church was so devastating her former colleagues in advocating for women's suffrage took part in an effort to vanish her from the record of the movement as they sought to keep its favour. Her last home in fayetteville, new york is now a museum.
• Andrée Collard : Collard moved to massachussetts from belgium in 1945, pursuing key work as a founding feminist activist and scholar alongside her literary specialty in spanish baroque literature. Her translation and annotation of Bartolomé de las Casas' History of the Indies remains a respected and widely used classic. She helped establish brandeis university's original Women's Studies program in 1971 – 1973. Collard and Daly were good friends, and Daly wrote the foreword to Rape of the Wild, a founding english-language text in eco-feminism. Collard's papers are held and archived at harvard university.
• Suzette Haden Elgin : Linguist, science fiction author, folk singer, and visual artist. Her most famous books include the Native Tongue trilogy, in which she introduced her conlang Láadan, and Peacetalk 101. Less famous today, but still often included in public library collections are one or more volumes of her series of books on The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and related books, written with clarity, wit, and a firm refusal of technical jargon. Her profile site at the science fiction and fantasy writers association remains online, a fine monument to her work since her passing in 2015.
• Monique Wittig : One of the most infamously and dishonestly quoted french feminists, especially today. Philosopher and novelist, she helped found the french women's liberation movement, including its original flagship journal, Question Féministes. Her novel Les Guérillères electrified many north american women on the release of its english translation in 1971, although many lesbians may be at least as fond of Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, written and later translated with her partner Sande Zeig. Her collection of essays, The Straight Mind, has just had its fiftieth anniversary. All that said, this is just a hint of the range and depth of Wittig's work.
• Gertrude Stein : When trying to learn about this prominent american poet, novelist, and art connoisseur, it can be tricky to find a way through her remarkable reputation. She lived the majority of her adult life in france with her partner Alice B. Toklas, who convinced her to write the perennial best seller The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Her novels and poetry are widely considered unreadable, although Judy Grahn argues in The Highest Apple that Stein was engaged in a particular poetic project of minimal words set into a recognizable form that is in fact quite approachable. Nevertheless, Stein has had something of a renaissance over the past five years or so, including thoughtful feature articles at bbc.com and deutsche welle. Remarkably, it is possible to listen to Alice B. Toklas describe her first meeting with Stein in the recording Readings From the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. There is a second, cleaner copy via pacifica radio as well.
• Susan Griffin : Prolific author and speaker, whose key work women and nature the roaring inside her is out in a new edition. Radical feminist, ecologist, and playwright her books span history, reverie, autobiography, and critique all at once. A noted stylist, any writer seeking to learn about how to integrate multiple voices in a text without using the usual quote marks or speaker markers. Among her most controversial and anthologized essays is "Rape: The All American Crime."
• Barbara G. Walker : A somewhat mysterious and profoundly prolific author and professional researcher. Her great Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets is steadily in print, although still missing an index even though one is available. She also has a wonderful collection of Feminist Fairy Tales and The Essential Handbook of Women's Spirituality and Ritual. She is a notable freethinker and religious skeptic, and an expert in knitting. Alas, it doesn't look like she has connected with mathematician Daina Taimina and her Hyperbolic Crochet.
• Janice G. Raymond : One of Mary Daly's first graduate students, Raymond is a hard working scholar and activist engaged in opposing sex and child trafficking as well as arguing for an end to forcing anyone to behave according to sex role stereotypes. Today her two most famous books are probably The Transsexual Empire and Doublethink. It is trickier to find copies of her 1986 study A Passion for Friends: A Philosophy of Female Friendship, and important analysis and source of understanding for women working to build solidarity and community with one another.
• Patricia Monaghan : Few radical feminists with an interest in developing positive imagery of women and female divinity lack at least ready access to an edition of her The Book of Goddesses and Heroines. Taking a somewhat different approach from Merlin Stone, in time Monaghan would revise and expand the first edition into a new book with serious coverage beyond the anglosphere and europe. A dual irish-american citizen, Monaghan spent considerable time in ireland, complementing her major works on goddesses and feminist spirituality with four books of poetry and several albums. She was a generous mentor of many young women scholars and writers, and helped found the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology and the Black Earth Institute. For a lovely overview of her career, see one of the many tributes to her by Dawn Work-MaKinne at Feminism and Religion.
• Robin Morgan : New york-based author, poet, and activist, part of the women's group who seized the leftist newspaper Rat, publishing among other pieces the famous "Goodbye to All That" calling out the virulent sexism on the left. The same year she edited the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, going on to a continuing career of radical feminist public speaking and activism. She cofounded W.I.T.C.H. and contributed to its famous manifesto, and her pithy aphorisms feature on many t-shirts, buttons, and website taglines. The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism is underrated and still all too relevant.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman : A major feminist, sociologist, and economist, whose book Women and Economics was adapted as a textbook in the field. A remarkably prolific writer and effective public speaker, Gilman wrote short stories, novels, and for several years an entire magazine by herself. Unfortunately too few women are introduced to her work through just one short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." That story alone gives almost no sense of Gilman's wide ranging analysis or keen sense of humour. Furthermore, she was a skilled graphic designer and illustrator. Gilman's other often cited work is the first part of her study of what a non-patriarchal society could be and how to get there, Herland, the other half being With Her in Ourland. A wide selection of her work is accessible at Jennifer Semper Siegel's Gilman-focussed blog.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton : One member of the famous suffragist trio in the united states, the others being Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Like them and many other women's suffrage activists, Stanton began her activist career working for the abolition of slavery. She is widely credited with leading the production of the 1848 women's rights convention at seneca falls, and primary authorship of the famous "Declaration of Sentiments." Stanton went on to take part on work towards dress reform for women, The Women's Bible, and temperance as a means to curb men's violence against women and children.
• Susan B. Anthony : Anthony is the more visible of the trio of powerful feminist activists of her time, in part because she never married. This enabled her to travel more extensively and be something of the "face" of the women's movement of the early to mid nineteenth century in the united states. In terms of her posthumous fame, her relatively conventional religiosity helped prevent her from being buried in obscurity, thereby forcing feminists to relocate her again. A keen practitioner of civil disobedience, Anthony was arrested repeatedly for trying to vote. She developed a critical analysis of labour relations and tried to develop political alliances with labour leaders in the movement for women's suffrage. Her final home, like Gage's is now a museum and heritage site.
• Valerie Solanas : The (in)famous author of The SCUM Manifesto, a powerful analysis and critique of patriarchal society. Mainstream sources like wikipedia often label her a radical feminist because of this manifesto, her open lesbianism, and her eventual diagnosis of mental illness after attempting to shoot Andy Warhol. However, it must be acknowledged that Solanas did not claim this label for herself, and apparently did not realize there were other feminists besides "liberal" ones, whom she did not respect. She deemed "liberal feminists" at best unserious and ineffective. Like Virginia Woolf, she endured sexual abuse through her childhood and later as an adult dealing with mental illness, but unlike Woolf she did not have a stable income or legacy.
• Elizabeth Gould Davis : In 1971, Davis' groundbreaking book The First Sex challenged the sexist renderings of women's evolution and argued for a very different pre-patriarchal history in which women were not barred from full participation in society by oppressive sex role stereotypes. While earlier books had taken up the second theme, hers was among the earliest popular treatments to take on the first. The book was controversial and attacked by malestream scholars, while Davis calmly set about applying constructive critiques and updating her models. Unfortunately she passed away before completing her follow up text, The Female Principle. Nevertheless, her papers and that manuscript are held in the UCLA special collections, and there is still a chance feminist scholars could work with them.
• Alice Walker : For many feminists, Walker's pulitzer prize winning novel The Color Purple was a powerful revelation in its depiction of the lives of black women and girls in early twentieth century georgia. Just over a decade later she would collaborate with Pratibha Parmar on the non-fiction book, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Binding of Women. She almost single-handedly restored Zora Heale Hurston to public memory, locating her grave and seeing it marked at last with a proper gravestone. Walker was and is no stranger to controversy, from her coining of the term "womanism" for the black women's feminism to accusations of antisemitism.
• Jane Caputi : One of Mary Daly's earliest students and colleagues during her time at boston college. Caputi completed her PhD at bowling green university, subsequently published in 1987 as The Age of Sex Crime. Over the years she has worked as a professor of american studies, women's studies, and today women, gender and sexuality studies at florida atlantic university. Her 1993 and 2004 books are Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth (Bear and Company Inc.) and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (University of Wisconsin Press). She shifted primarily to documentary film until circa 2020, with a new, transactivism inflected book, Call Your "Mutha": A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene (Oxford University Press).
• Pauli Murray : A civil rights activist from early in life, she overcame all obstacles to a black woman in the 1930s to become a civil rights lawyer and prominent feminist. She co-founded the national organization for women in the united states, and by the mid-1960s she completed a doctorate in law and began working in academia alongside her other political activities. Murray eventually became an episcopalian priest, wrote two volumes of autobiography and at least one volume of poetry as well as her legal writing.
• Sande Zeig : New York-born Film director, writer, and partner of Monique Wittig now working on a documentary of her late partner's life. She has led important work on distribution and showings of foreign and lesbian and gay films, programming festivals and founding a film distribution company. Among her unique and more recent film projects, as recounted by Women Make Movies are: "The Girl, based on a short story by French writer Monique Wittig," "Apache 8, a documentary about the first all-women wildland firefighting crew from the White Mountain Apache Tribe," and "Sister Jaguar’s Journey, completed in 2015, which tells the story of a Dominican nun who finds peace and forgiveness through plant medicine in the Amazon rainforest."
• Sonia Johnson : A feminist activist who broke free of the mormon church, going on to write the wonderful but often difficult to find Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution and the brilliant article "Taking Our Eyes Off the Guys." She has continued to write although her more recent books are self-published, including The SisterWitch Conspiracy released in 2010. She lives today in arizona with her partner Jade DeForest.
• Alice B. Toklas : Best known as the life partner of Gertrude Stein, Toklas tends to be presented as wholly in Stein's shadow. Her own reputation is in fact separate and belies that characterization. She had a remarkable voice, and was Stein's first and best editor and critic, with a real knack for gauging the potential audiences for Stein's work. She was a talented chef, writing several cookbooks. However, she suffered considerable difficulty in her last years due to poor health and poverty. The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook has far more in it than her infamous fudge recipe.
• Vita Sackville-West : At the moment Sackville-West is probably best known as Virginia Woolf's lover, which would be unfair if it wasn't able to point the interested to Woolf's remarkable novel Orlando, which is undeniably Woolf's great love letter to her it is reputed to be. For her part, Sackville-West was a prolific writer, especially of novels, letters, poetry, and journalism. She was also a notable garden designer and became an important supporter of the hogarth press founded and run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. As a quick perusal of biographies and profiles online reveals, Sackville-West was bisexual and lived what would today be called an "open marriage," but did not take an overt feminist position.
• Sylvia Beach : A leading figure among the ex-patriate american women's community in paris, a prominent bookseller and publisher. She founded the original Shakespeare and Company, and was nearly ruined by her determination to publish James Joyce's novels. Among her friends and supporters that helped her keep her beloved bookstore running through the 1930s included the poet Bryher. She managed to keep going until 1941, but was never able to return the store to life. Despite suffering a period of internment during the second world war, Beach survived and was able to maintain her relationship with Adrienne Monnier, who ran another bookshop across the street. Their partnership that lasted 39 years, when alas Monnier committed suicide.
• Louise Bernikow : A remarkable poet and speaker who began her publishing life in journalism, and then as she recounts on her website, "The women's movement changed who I was and what I wrote." Indeed, she wrote two major books referenced by many second wave feminists since, The World Split Open and Among Women, the latter an exploration specifically of women-only spaces.
• Judith Plaskow : Jewish feminist theologian, founder of the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion and recently retired from a long academic career. She made and contributed the key analysis of Lilith, reframing her as a positive figure who ultimately joins forces with Eve to make a better world. Plaskow has written five books and many articles, including Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective and The Coming of Lilith : Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, alongside many collaborations with Carol Christ. She and her partner Martha Ackelsberg have been together for over 30 years.
• Naomi Goldenberg : Best known as a religious studies professor today, she is in fact a founding feminist critic of patriarchal religion, and has also worked with Carol Christ. Her 1979 book Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions went promptly into a popular and best selling edition with beacon press, and remained in print into the 1990s. Goldenberg started out as a classicist, and so began her research and writing with a powerful analysis of mythology and symbolism. Today she is still busy teaching and is a popular keynote speaker.
• Margaret Fuller : A remarkable feminist whose life was cut short at 40 by a bizarre ship sinking in sight of new york city, Fuller seems like a woman out of time. She was born in 1810, joining the era's growing numbers of women journalists as a young adult. From there she went on to serve as an editor, critic, translator, and the first female war correspondent from the united states. Her major feminist work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published in 1845, compiled and revised from essays she had published in her transcendentalist magazine, the Dial. Maria Popova of the excellent literary website The Marginalian has written several thoughtful essays exploring Fuller's life and ideas, and includes a longer exploration and biography of Fuller in her book Figuring.
• Valentine Ackland : The poet partner of Sylvia Townsend Warner, who struggled with alcoholism and had an unfortunate determination to have other lovers at the same time. It was of course no consolation that her poetry did not win serious notice until after her death. Both she and Warner joined the communist party of england early in their relationship, and towards the end of her life Ackland became a catholic. This suggests her deep concerns with justice and the cruel impacts of poverty, and that she felt a certain despair at the state of the world. But before all of that, Ackland and Warner published the famous poetry collection Whether a Dove or a Seagull, which included frank discussion of lesbianism, still a risqué thing to do in 1934. Yet, it must be noted that it was not necessarily as controversial as we may be inclined to think today.
• Jane Ellen Harrison : A remarkable scholar whose original and searching reinterpretations of ancient greek mythology based on archaeological finds and comparing and contrasting the visual representations to the written versions are now widely accepted, yet she herself is typically elided or sneered at some sort of eccentric today. This in spite of her now widely accepted methods of combining physical and written evidence, further supported by her remarkable philological talents supported by her knowledge of 16 languages. She was a feminist and Mary Beard argues that she was the first fulltime woman academic. Many of her books are available online today, including the often cited, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion .
• Dale Spender : An irrepressible and wonderful feminist linguist and historian, whose talks on women's history and speech are fascinating and infuriating and hilarious by turns as she points out sexist nonsense then skewers its perpetrators. For anyone who wishes to see at least the front page of her website, it is best to check it now because sadly she has just passed away, on 21 november 2023. Spender co-founded Pandora Press, and on encountering repeated claims that women had no history or could be assumed to be terrible writers without reading them, set out to see if the evidence bore these claims out. The result was over 20 books of women's history and feminist analysis, at least 5 co-authored books in the same areas, and editorship of a series of novels for Pandora Press, anthologies of women's short stories, and the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women.
• Anne Cameron : Best known as the compiler and editor of the anthology of Nuu-Chah-Nulth women's stories Daughters of Copper Woman, she went on to write over thirty books, as well as screenplays and plays. She wrote the script and the novelization of her 1979 film Dreamspeaker. Cameron's career took an important turn when Sto:Lo author Lee Maracle asked her to stop compiling and republishing Indigenous stories, to stop allowing herself to be used to block Indigenous writers space to publish. Before her passing in 2022, she oversaw the release of a new edition of her unexpected early best seller, the selfsame Daughters of Copper Woman.
• Sojourner Truth : A key and revered abolitionist, feminist, and civil rights activist who freed herself from slavery, successfully taking away her baby daughter with her. The rather mangled transcription of her most famous speech, colloquially referred to as the "Ain't I a Woman" speech has spawned considerable controversy because of the difficulty of disentangling the impact of the transcribers on the text. Plausible recreations of it as she spoke it are featured on The Sojourner Truth Project, in which black women of similar linguistic background perform it. Once free, she made a living by her powerful public speaking, and in time was able to buy her own home. Truth was a prominent suffragist, and made it much harder for the media of the day to pretend and attempt to depict women's activism as a mere hobby of wealthy white women. In 2002 a Sojourner Truth was honoured with a memorial statue.
• Andrea Dworkin : One of the most powerful and prolific Radical Feminist theorists and writers of the twentieth century, albeit also among the most misrepresented. She write fundamental analyses of violence against women including its manifestation in pornography, heterosexual intercourse, and women's participation in right wing politics. Dworkin struggled with poverty through much of her writing career, having escaped an abusive husband and prostitution to pursue her analytical work presented in non-fiction works, novels, and short stories. Her evisceration of the ACLU is epic and should be read by everyone wondering how it can be such an enemy of women today.
• Cicely Hamilton : Author, journalist, actor, suffragist, feminist, Hamilton's period of greatest productivity stretched from the decade before the first world war to nearly a decade after the second. Among her 32 books is the still little-known science fiction novel Theodore Savage and the much better known non-fiction analysis of marriage, Marriage as a Trade. Hamilton firmly refused to marry, and remained an active feminist throughout her life. An excellent short biography of Hamilton is available at the site devoted to the nineteenth century publication Time and Tide.
• Emily Erwin Culpepper : Another of Mary Daly's students, she went on to become a professor at the university of the redlands, where she founded the women's studies program and began a long career of teaching and feminist challenge to patriarchal religion. Now retired from teaching, she continues participating in the women's spirituality movement. She led the team of women who supported Daly in her retirement and eventually arranged and officiated her wake and funeral in 2010. In lieu of her difficult to access dissertation, Culpepper has a number of iconic articles available, from "Ancient Gorgons: A Face For Contemporary Women's Rage" and "Philosophia: Feminist Methodology for Constructing a Female Train of Thought" to "Ageism, Sexism, and Health Care: Why We Need Old Women in Power."
• Toni Morrison : African american novelist, playwright, editor, and professor, Morrison went on to win the nobel prize for literature among many other awards for her novels and plays. Her books typically centre on women and their daughters, and although she spoke freely on many political issues, she refused to call herself a feminist. She is somewhat unusual in that she never wrote an autobiography or explicitly personal and political text.
• Aphra Behn : A late sixteenth century writer and playwright, she was famously eulogized by Virginia Woolf, who wrote of her, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." There is little confirmed detail available about her life, such as how she achieved her education and the facility in languages that allowed her to do translation work. She was an early opponent of slavery and questioned the sex role stereotypes and injustices inflicted on women in her day. It is suggestive that her first play is titled The Forc'd Marriage.
• Christine de Pisan : One of the earliest french women who supported herself and her family by her pen, and widely considered one of the first feminists, in the sense that she argued for the humanity and full rights of women. She wrote at least 18 books which remained in print from her lifetime, 1364 to ~1430 into the next two hundred to three hundred years. Pisan's books began returning to print on a broader scale in the twentieth century with new translations, especially of The Book of the City of Ladies. Her original french is sometimes criticised for being too "latinesque" and difficult to read, but it does not seem that Pisan is always read in the context of other authors in her own time. She was widely read and her books reprinted, so clearly her writing style was not opaque for her core audience, and it is unlikely she was an outlier compared to others composing in the same genre.
• Florynce Kennedy : Prominent african american feminist, and civil rights attorney, Kennedy's quick wit and incisive mind made her not only a brilliant activist, but also one of the finest aphorists of the twentieth century. Many of her sharp comments feature on women's liberation and women's rights buttons, including the famous comment, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." Born in 1916, Kennedy suffered serious health issues in her childhood. Having overcome those, she went on to break racist and sexist barriers to her goal to become a lawyer, and challenged black and white women to work together towards feminist goals, which meant taking down racism too since it is fundamentally inconsistent with women's liberation.
• Monica Sjöö : A prominent feminist artist whose main works are paintings and the book she wrote with Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother. Her most famous painting, "God Giving Birth," which unmistakably depicts a divine woman, nearly got her into legal trouble. It also made it possible for Judy Chicago to paint her own famous depiction of a birthing Goddess. An important leader and theorist in both the ecofeminist and feminist spirituality movements, Sjöö created many paintings, articles, and several more books. Her archived memorial site provides a fine selection of scans and samples of her work.
• Barbara Mor : Poet and author, Mor worked with Monica Sjöö to expand what was originally a pamphlet into the wide ranging book The Great Cosmic Mother. It is among the founding books of the feminist spirituality movement, and an early example that combined archaeological, historical, and anthropological materials to describe and support its themes. Despite the book's success, Mor did not receive royalties in a timely fashion and spent several years homeless. In a profoundly unjust twist, she was never able to win an academic position even though her book became a staple of so many religion and women's studies programs.
• Sandra M. Gilbert : English professor specializing in women's writing, she wrote the classic text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-century Literary Imagination with Susan Gubar. Among the many important elements of this book is its analysis of the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, which uncovers her rigorous preparation for her future career, including her reading and language studies. Gilbert has continued a project of restoring the record of women's writing in english via both independent productions and other items with Gubar.
• Susan Gubar : A professor of both english and women's studies, Gubar has written seven books with Sandra M. Gilbert, including The Madwoman in the Attic. Women writers played a notable role in the development of modernism, which Gubar helped document via her role as editor of The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic. Considering modernism's special concern with the representation of reality, especially its constantly changing nature, it seems an era of choice for philosophers concerned with epistemology and ontology. In the meantime, Gubar is still writing in spite of having to cope with the impact of ovarian cancer.
• Françoise d'Eaubonne : a prolific feminist author who coined the term "eco-feminism," and was good friends with Simone de Beavoir and a founder of Front homosexual d'action révolutionnaire in france. Her book Le féminisme ou la mort had a profound influence on Daly among many other feminists, but it was not published in english translation until 2022. It is likely that the prompt for this edition was the best selling translation of Pauline Harmange's controversial essay I Hate Men, published in 2020. Harmange includes Le féminisme ou la mort in her recommendations for further reading.
• Simone de Beauvoir : The famous and conflicted feminist philosopher, whose perspectives are often derived solely from her original breakthrough work, The Second Sex. Even though the first english translation was mutilated by its editors, its arguments still came through clearly enough to become a powerful touchstone to the women;s liberation movement in the anglosphere. Today it is possible to read a full and unabridged translation with better overall quality by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier. Beauvoir developed her own strand of existentialism with its concern with good and bad faith, and the challenge of taking meaningful and principled action even under severely constrained conditions. She went on to become a cofounder of the women's liberation movement in france and the important journal Questions Féministes.
• Margaret Atwood : Canadian best known for her novels, which often centre on women main characters and feminist themes. Two of her novels have won particular acclaim among feminists, the speculative fiction work The Handmaid's Tale and her historical set piece Alias Grace. Despite a lengthy record of literary criticism including a series of important lectures and essay collections, she has not taken a very explicit perspective. Her poetry is perhaps underrated and not as well known as it should be. Just two of her most remarkable poems are Variation on the Word Sleep and Siren Song, the latter encapsulating one of the most feminist statements in her oeuvre.
• Susan Brownmiller : A united states feminist best known for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, in which she carried out an unflinching analysis of the complete failure of the american justice system and general effective legalization of rape so long as the man in question is attacking "his own women." She went on to analyze and critique the nonsense stories of "femininity" and other topics via her freelance and journalism career. A fine selection of quotes from several of her works features on DeadWildRoses, and she published her memoirs in 1999, Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution , giving lucky readers a chance to learn how she came to her focus on radical feminist sociological analysis.
• Gena Corea : A leading radical feminist analyst and critic of the so-called "new reproductive technologies" supporting a growing market for "bespoke" babies and legalized exploitation of women as effectively broodmares for the rich. Among her important published books are The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats Women, a bestseller in the 1980s, The Mother Machine, and The Invisible Epidemic: The Story of Women and AIDS. She is not as visible in Radical Feminism today, focussing more on her work at a retreat centre in vermont. She founded Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) with Renate Klein, which was most active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is a great interview with them by Resistenze al nanomondo.
• Julia Penelope : An important radical lesbian feminist and linguist who carried out and published extensive research and anthologies on how language encodes and is used to oppress women, and on lesbian community and culture. Sadly, many of her books are out of print, from her text Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers' Tongue to her collaborative hilarious catalogue with Morgan Grey, Found Goddesses: Asphalta to Viscera. Born in 1941, Penelope participated directly in the end of the original extreme lesbian role playing culture, leading her to question how lesbians were persuaded into choosing to live in such abusive relationships, examining the role of language and class. However, she was effectively driven out of feminist activism during the backlash against feminist through the 1990s, which also activated extremes of anti-lesbian fervour among straight women trying to be "respectable feminists" by developing the toxic mimic of "liberal feminism."
• Kathleen Barry : A feminist sociologist who has worked her entire career to end trafficking of women and children in the international sex trade. She played an important role in development of the nordic model which insists on criminalizing sex buyers and traffickers, not the women and children trafficked and struggling to survive in this vicious industry. Today she is a busy public speaker and instructor as well as continuing her actions with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Her breakthrough feminist book is Female Sexual Slavery, published in 1979, and she has a newer book today released in 2010 Unmaking War, Remaking Men.
• Phyllis Chesler : One of the most controversial feminist psychologists still active in radical feminist action, now in her early 80s. She began her remarkable feminist writing career with the classic Women and Madness, and went on to write multiple follow up books striving to lay out how women are trained and persuaded to attack one another, and especially successful radical feminist advocates. She has moved firmly onto the internet with her own website and a busy public speaking schedule. Her 2018 memoir A Politically Incorrect Feminist, although mercilessly let down by the editorially imposed title, is an important personal account of the early american women's liberation movement as it moved onto the international scene.
• Louky Bersianik : French canadian lesbian novelist and poet, whom mainstream critiques try to push into Luce Irigaray's nonsense movement of "écriture féminin." She pubilished the classic Tryptique lesbien in 1980, a collection of poetry, essays, and scripts. Bersianik is featured in the StudioD documentary Firewords : Louky Bersianik, Jovette Marchessault, Nicole Brossard. Bersianik's collaborative work with Nicole Brossard, France Theoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupre, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky, Theory, a Sunday was finally released in english translation in 2013.
• Barbara Ehrenreich : An important journalist and social critic who composed and developed the original pamphlet "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses" into the still in print For Her Own Good: Two Centuries Of The Experts' Advice To Women. Her major writing tended to focus on issues of class and historical research and writing to explore the nature of warfare and the economy as it has developed in the united states. Ehrenreich and her partner developed the powerful concept of the professional managerial class (PMC) as a means to help explain the social group often referred to extremely loosely as the "middle class" for fear of using the dreaded term "bourgeoisie." Practically speaking, both terms are out of date and the analysis and description of the PMC is a powerful explanatory tool for understanding the anti-feminist backlash including the heavy participation in that backlash by specific women.
• Deirdre English : Feminist journalist and today a professor of journalism at UCLA. She pursued important research into the sexual politics of medicine, especially in the united states. Starting out as a journalist and magazine editor, English collaborated with Barbara Ehrenreich on three books, the original pamphlet and subsequent fulsome book version of For Her Own Good: Two Centuries Of The Experts' Advice To Women and Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. She edited tMother Jones for eight years, and published a beautiful article about her fifty year friendship with Ehrenreich there in 2022.
• Jill Johnson : Journalist and lesbian feminist based in new york, a columnist with the Village Voice and somewhat infamous experimental writer. A long interview she had with Radio Free Women is available now as part of their No More Invisible Women Exhibition. Johnson had a knack for publicity stunts and getting the eye-catching titles for her published work she preferred, most famously Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. Most controversially, she argued for women to become "political lesbians" meaning not forcing themselves to sexually interact with other women regardless of their sexual orientation, but to refuse to work with or otherwise support any men or boys. She insisted on the necessity for women to stop supporting those oppressing them. In the 1970s, when Lesbian Nation hit the bookstores, it was a common slur to insist that all feminists were lesbians anyway, so Johnson was seeking to take the power of that accusation away from the accusers.
• Gloria Steinem : A troubling example of a media figurehead created for "liberal feminism," whatever Steinem's own issues or intentions. Photogenic and "feminine" in malestream terms, through the 1960s and 1970s she was a popular speaker and regularly featured in interviews. Fundamentally she was and still is a journalist, (in)famously working in a playboy club in order to write articles on the treatment of so-called "playboy bunnies" in 1963. The radical feminist Redstockings collective challenged her for seeming connections to the american central intelligence agency. But her most important act may be co-founding Ms. magazine in 1972, which likely helped get feminist ideas into more libraries and households across class lines than any other mass market publication of the time in the united states. She has been consistent in stating that feminism's goals will come not through reform but revolution.
• Emily Dickinson : An originally obscure poet whose complex body of work has been reaching the public through successively closer to her own presentation forms over the past forty years. Electronic archives of her poetry, letters, and other materials established in the early 2000s. Dickinson lived her whole life in amherst, massachussetts, remaining single and quietly putting together a sequence of poems containing some of the most startling feminist revelations and analyses of her place and time. She also wrote what Maria Popova of The Marginalian describes as electric love letters to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert. Her life is still somewhat overwhelmed by ridiculous sexist mythology, although here again the wondrous Maria Popova has written a sensitive and careful treatment of her life that is well worth reading.