To sing of Wars, of Captaines, and of Kings,
Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun,
For my mean Pen, are too superior things,
And, how they all, or each, their dates have run:
Let Poets, and Historians, set these forth,
My obscure Verse, shal not so dim their worth.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who sayes my hand a needle better fits,
A Poet's Pen all scorn I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits:
If What I doe prove well, it wo'nt advance,
They'l say it's stolne, or else, it was by chance.

Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are,
Men have precendency, and still excel,
It is but vaine unjustly to wage war;
Men can doe best, and Women know it well;
Preheminence in each and all is yours,
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

Anne Bradstreet
1612? - 1672
The first American poet.

"Sarah Grimke, in the opening paragraph of her pioneering work wrote: "In attempting to...give my views on the Province of Woman, I feel that I am venturing on nearly untrodden ground."75 Nearly untrodden ground, after more than a thousand years of women's Bible criticism... As one looks back at this unknown, monumental effort one is struck above all by the repetitiveness of the process. Over and over again, individual women criticized and re-interpreted the core biblical texts not knowing that other women before them had already done so. In fact, present-day feminist Bible criticism is going over the same territory and using the very same arguments used for centuries by other women engaged in the same endeavor. Just as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage undertook the monumental task of writing The Woman's Bible in total ignorance of the similar work done by generations of predecessors, so do some current feminist critics consider them their earliest antecedents, when in fact the tradition of feminist Bible criticism goes back to the 3rd century A.D.

This is no trivial point. I believe it marks the very essence of the different relationship men and women have to historical process. Isaac Newton, in his famous aphorism -- which actually originated with Bernard of Chartres -- "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," expressed the mode by which the thought of men was shaped into the major concepts of Western civilization. Men created written history and benefited from the transmittal of knowledge from one generation to the other, so that each great thinker could stand "on the shoulders of giants," thereby advancing thought over that of previous generations with maximum efficiency.76 Women were denied knowledge of their history, and thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written. Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, generation after generation. Men argued with the giants that preceded them; women argued against the oppressive weight of millennia of patriarchal thought, which denied them authority, even humanity, and when they had to argue they argued with the "great men" of the past, deprived of the empowerment, strength and knowledge women of the past could have offered them. Since they could not ground their argument in the work of women before them, thinking women of each generation had to waste their time, energy and talent on constructing their argument anew. Yet, they never abandoned the effort. Generation after generation, in the face of recurrent discontinuities, women thought their way around and out from under patriarchal thought."

The Creation of Feminist Consciousness - From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy; 1993
Gerda Lerner