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The History of Feminism

Students of feminism and women's history have often sought to explain both the emergence of feminist thinking in some periods and its disappearance in others. In this, the second volume of her study of women and history,1 Lerner addresses this question with a sweeping study of particular themes in women's intellectual history. Lerner argues that from the early Middle Ages onwards there is evidence of feminist consdousness; it did not give rise to a feminist movement until the nineteenth century because of patriarchy's suppression of feminist writings. Without the knowledge of earUer feminist thinkers, individual women had to reinvent the challenge to patriarchy. The exclusion of women's achievements from the history of knowledge meant that women did not learn from one another, but instead each worked in isolation. This important book is a study of women's relationship to knowledge and authority. Feminist consdousness could only emerge when women found a basis for challenging the established order and using their own voices. They did this, of course, in a sodety which denied them any place from which to speak, any legitimate, recognized source of authority. Given this, any woman speaking or writing is almost ipso facto a feminist, though she may not have the consciousness with which Lerner is concerned. For Lerner, feminist consciousness is: