It’s that idea of disguise that I find myself coming back to. You can really, in a sense, be anybody or anybodies, plural, in writing. - Joanna Russ

The same professors who talked about literature as an absolute value never talked about the sexist messages we were getting from it. The rules of conduct of that time, in the 1950s, were completely different for women, on campus, from what boys were permitted to do. There was a peculiar kind of tacit agreement to pretend that the absolute values were classless and sexless, even though they aren't.

A lot of reviewers froth at the mouth whenever someone takes a hallowed situation and refuses to reinforce all the usual capitalist, imperialist, Americans-can-do-anything attitudes associated with it.

Women traditionally do an enormous amount of interpersonal work, but there's no public vocabulary for this sort of activity-just as there's no public vocabulary for what mothers do raising children, or what housewives do. Anne Wilson Schaef has pointed out that there is this public male reality and anything that isn't in it is either crazy or trivial or nonexistent. There's no consensual way of talking about what makes up the daily lives of most women, so it's not surprising that women have been exploring telepathy, ESP, magic, and alternative forms of communication. Marion Zimmer Bradley does, Le Guin does, I do, even Suzy Charnas-really, just about every contemporary woman SF author I can think of has worked in these areas.