The Creation of Feminist Consciousness : From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy

In this pioneering study, Gerda Lerner documents the twelve-hundred year struggle of women to free their minds from patriarchal thought, to create Women's History, and to achieve a feminist consciousness. She paints a series of fascinating portraits of figures who resisted patriarchal indoctrination, from mystics like Hildegard de Bingen, and Julian of Norwich, to women of great literary talent like Mary Wollstonecraft, and Emily Dickinson. These were the women who made individual, often similar, attempts to express women's thinking in male-dominated societies and which have led to the establishment of a now widespread feminist consciousness.