Feminist Scholarship Quotes

Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.

I really want to help write women back into history.

There was a bad patch in the '80s and early '90s when feminist thinking had become sort of a monopoly and had developed a series of litmus tests.

Feminism, in all fields, has yet to produce a single scholar of the intellectual rank of scores of these learned men [e.g., Bruno Snell, Albin Lesky, Denys Page] in the German and British academic tradition.

Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one 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.

There's really educated women out there who are feminists and they have read up on their stuff. They can talk to me right now, and school me on some things I've never known, and that's amazing, you are a scholar, you are wise, you are educated. But the unfortunate thing is also the reality, and the fact is, millions of people might not even know who these educated feminists are - hundreds will, thousands maybe.

The biggest thinker that's influenced my feminism is definitely Bell Hooks, who's a feminist cultural critic, because of her accessibility but also just because she's a genius.

But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the women's movement did not either.

I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means.

Many feminists in the academy and in the major women's groups are knocking down open doors. It's 2016, not 1950. But you wouldn't know that if you looked through a typical women's studies textbook or website.

Theories by women about women have only recently begun to appear in print. Theories by men about women are abundant.

I'm glad that we have a history at all and that we can talk about feminist history. But I do think that it doesn't really pay attention to the complexity and the nuance that is feminist thought.

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.

I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.