ABSTRACT
The sense of the word "conversation" was one in which various women, friends and colleagues from throughout the USA and the new, "enlarged" Europe, would exchange ideas about the ways in which they came to feminism. The many flaws of that order, its sexism and its often violent and determined racism, have been the subject of passionate feminist critiques, critiques that have been made all the more powerful by their ability to represent the personal as the political. It is often remarked that feminism is something of a marginal political movement, yet what these papers suggest is that, on the contrary, feminism has been central to critical political engagement in the latter part of the twentieth century. To have systematically fractured that assumption is one of the great triumphs of feminism and prepared the way for the second context in which feminism has used, and re-made, the tools of the master.
