"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 “Blooms-bury”—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. "

- Adriennce Rich, “On History, Illiteracy, Passivity, Violence, and Women’s Culture“ from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978