ABSTRACT
At the end of 1981 the prestigious academic journal Critica/lnquiry published its first (and to date only) feminist issue. Entitled "Writing and Sexual Difference," that special issue was "guest edited" by the feminist literary critic Elizabeth Abel, at the time an assistant professor and the only woman of the journal's six coeditors. The issue opens with Abel's Introduction which concludes: "this moment of feminist inquiry allows new figures to provide a different and enabling mythology.,,1 In "this moment," Winter 1981, Critical Inquiry has become "feminist inquiry," and the momentary substitution of terms-"feminisf' for "critical"-allows new figures (the guest editor, for example) to provide a different and en-Abel-ing mythology.
