My first article, published in 1970 in a movement journal entitled Women: A Journal of Liberation, was focused on the first historical figures that caught my attention: Sarah and Angelica Grimke. From there, I moved on to Seneca Falls and the early women’s rights movement and Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (to whom I have remained attached ever since).

I am a woman of faith and l find the Bible inspirational for living and writing.

I would love to be the first Nigerian woman to read through the Bible and represent Naija.

Learn to be worthy of the women of every class, culture, and historical age who did otherwise, who spoke boldly when women were jeered and physically harassed for speaking in public, who-like Anne Hutchinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Grimké sisters, [[Abby Kelley, [[Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Susan B. Anthony, Lillian Smith, Fannie Lou Hamer-broke taboos, who resisted slavery-their own and other people's. To become a token woman-whether you win the Nobel prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters-is to become something less than a man indeed, since men are loyal at least to their own world view, their laws of brotherhood and male self-interest. I am not suggesting that you imitate male loyalties; with the philosopher Mary Daly, I believe that the bonding of women must be utterly different and for an utterly different end: not the misering of resources and power, but the release, in each other, of the yet unexplored resources and transformative power of women, so long despised, confined, and wasted. (p9)

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented a resolution demanding equal political rights for Women in Seneca falls in 1848, the only person there willing to second it was Fredrick Douglas, … and it was his masterful arguments and matchless eloquence that the resolution passed despite powerful opposition. Therefore, whenever the women of this country pause long enough to think about the hard fight which had to be waged so as to enable them to enjoy their rights as citizens …they should remember the great debt of gratitude they owe to a colored man at a crucial occasion point when no other man was willing to come to their aid. pp. 169-170

When the early Woman Suffragists took their stand for a redress of the wrongs of women, they used no vague or ambiguous language. As early as 1838 Angelina Grimké and Abby Kelley, who were the first women orators I ever heard, uttered their protest against the wrongs of woman, from an anti-slavery platform. They severely denounced the custom of society which closed the doors of remunerative industries against women, and thereby condemned large numbers to abject dependence and compulsory poverty. Ten years later, when the first Convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York, and occasion commemorated by this weeks’ International Conference, women reiterated the protest and the denunciation, and demanded political equality as a remedy for these wrongs. Two years later another Woman’s Convention was held in Worcester, Mass., and again there rang out the demand for equal political rights for men and women, equal educational opportunities, and “partnership in the labors and gains, risks and remunerations, of productive industry.” It is impossible to-day to describe the fierce outburst of ridicule with which the public received these demands. Press and pulpit, legislatures and courts, public men and private citizens, society and fashion, all hastened to wash their hands of these innovators, and to label them with the opprobrious epithets so lavishly affixed to those who inaugurate a reform.

There's been some change, as is evident by the number of women writers who are read. And education itself has somewhat changed. There's a lot more encouragement, a lot more writing classes. It was the women's movement that gave women in academe a certain strength. If you'd look at the old reading lists, maybe George Eliot, the Bront‘s, Virginia Woolf might be taught. At Stanford, I think it was 1971, they needed somebody [to teach their first-ever course on women's literature], and my name was suggested. Well, I had no credentials. I had never gone to college. And there was quite a to-do about whether or not I had the qualifications. It was supposed to be a small class. I went into this auditorium. It was jammed. There were, I think, four guys, one of whom went out and then came back again and then went out and then came back again. There were over 100 women there, including faculty wives. By and large, none of this had ever been taught at Stanford before.

O woman, born first to believe us; Yea, also born first to forget; Born first to betray and deceive us, Yet first to repent and regret! O first then in all that is human, Lo! first where the Nazarene trod, O woman! O beautiful woman! Be then first in the kingdom of God!

Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.

The greatest women writers of the past (at least in the English language, which is the only language I know well enough to survey), with the possible exception of the Brontës, and of Emily more than Charlotte, are always constrained by some pinching corset of timidity, some obscuring veil of inhibition, absent in their male peers. Why did George Eliot punish or kill those heroines who were most restlessly and intelligently like herself? Why does Virginia Woolf explain that she did not write about the experiences of the body because to do so would have incurred censure, where D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce wrote and let censure and censors be damned? Why-this one pains me the most-if there are two poetic geniuses of equal immensity in mid-nineteenth century America, does one of them say "I celebrate myself" and "What I assume you shall assume," while the other one says, "I'm nobody?" Not because the women were more moral or less egotistical than the men, nor because they were obeying their natures, but because they were afraid. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," writes Emily Dickinson, not because evasion is intrinsically poetic, but because she is afraid.

For seventy years, the women leaders of this country have been asking the government to recognize this possibility. Every great woman who stands out in our history-Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, Mary Livermore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Willard, Lucy Stone, Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, Alice Stone Blackwell, Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Catt-all have asked the government to permit women to serve more effectively the national welfare. All have felt that the energy, the thought, and the suffering that was spent in trying to obtain permission to serve directly should as quickly as possible be turned to the actual service.

When contemporary feminist movement first began, feminist writings and scholarship by black women was groundbreaking. The writings of black women like Cellestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate, define, speak to and against the glaring omissions in feminist work, the erasure of black female presence.

There was only one period in history in which women were addressed among the people. This happened in the time of the early Christian movement. The words that were spoken to her then deeply penetrated into woman’s soul, arousing what was most beautiful and precious in her. All the hidden feelings and sensations that had lain dormant in her for millennia suddenly came to the fore and found a wonderful expression in it. With a holy earnestness, she answered its call, proving that the slavery of centuries had not broken her spirit. Such a call is again needed from us today to seize woman’s heart with tongues of fire and to lead her into our ranks as a fighter.

As woman was the first to be tempted, so did God's message of grace come first to a woman, and each time woman's assent determined the destiny of humanity as a whole.