Adrienne Rich

she sensed a profound symbolism embodied in the denial of suffrage to women:

Rachel Speight, Jane Anger, Elizabeth Carey, and Anne Askew, the latter tortured to death and burned as a heretic

The entire history of women’s struggle for self-determination has been muffled in silence over and over. One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.