Women of Ideas
And What Men Have Done to Them: From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich
Author: Dale Spender Series: Routledge Library Editions: Women in Society
First published in 1982, this is a classic reference work and, from beginning to end, a provocative and stimulating read. With characteristic energy, humour and learning, Dale Spender has dug into the hidden past and uncovered shining examples of women’s creativity and intellectual prowess which had been suppressed or stolen by men.
Hardcover
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
First published in 1982, this is a classic reference work and, from beginning to end, a provocative and stimulating read. With characteristic energy, humour and learning, Dale Spender has dug into the hidden past and uncovered shining examples of women’s creativity and intellectual prowess which had been suppressed or stolen by men.
Description
Originally published in 1982, with characteristic energy, humour and learning Dale Spender traces three hundred years of women’s ideas. She uncovers not only the ways and words of women, but the methods of men. While men control knowledge, she argues, they are in a position to take women’s ideas. If they like them, they use them; if they don’t, they lose them.
Every fifty years women are required to reinvent the wheel, for every generation of women is initiated into a world in which women’s traditions have been denied and buried.
Providing convincing evidence that women’s absence from the record as creative intellectual beings is not women’s fault, but men’s, Dale Spender claims at least 150 women from the past and suggests how such erasure can be avoided in the future. Given that men take what they want from women’s ideas, Dale Spender advocates that women withdraw their labour, that they go on a knowledge strike, for if women cannot control the knowledge they produce, at least they can ensure that it cannot be used as evidence against them.
Exposing the inadequacies of much modern (male) scholarship, the author provides the readers with the opportunity to share in her own discoveries, excitement, and ‘mistakes’ in the process of researching and writing this book. The result is that Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them is an ambitious and provocative book which will be used as a reference for many years to come, and which is also, from beginning to end, a stimulating read.
Critic Reviews
Reviews for the original edition:
‘In the Penguin Modern History of the World, Turkey takes up more index space than do women; that is all women who have ever lived at any time. Thank God for Dale Spender.’ – Jeanette Winterson
‘This is no string of biographies; it is a holistic study of feminist political theory.’ – Harriet Gilbert, New Statesman
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