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"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.
In fact, we do have a long feminist tradition, both oral and written, a tradition which has built itself over and over, recovering essential elements even when those have been strangled or wiped out. Yet still a Mary Wollstonecraft (labeled ‘the hyena in petticoats’) is viewed without reference to her forebears, not only the sixteenth-century women pamphleteers but the wisewomen and witches, who had been the objects of wholesale persecution and massacre for three centuries. So also Simone de Beauvoir has been read without reference to the destruction of the political women’s clubs of the French Revolution, or the writings of Olympe des Gouges and Flora Tristan. So also has the articulate political feminism and socialism of Virginia Woolf been obscured by the notion that she was ‘Bloomsbury’—individualist, elitist, lacking class-consciousness, and ‘gay’ in the most frivolous sense, without reference to her connections with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, the Women’s Cooperative Guild, the antipatriarchal anthropologist Jane Harrison, the lesbian/feminist suffrage activist Ethel Smyth. So also is each contemporary feminist theorist attacked or dismissed ad feminam, as if her politics were simply an outburst of personal bitterness or rage."

— Adrienne Rich, foreword to On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978