ABSTRACT
Women found opportunities to claim authority by invoking models that may appear at first only to reinforce women's subordination to their male relatives or authorities. Several of the essays in this collection demonstrate that by performing invoking models of femininity and adapting them to their circumstances, women found certain forms of authority privately and publicly. Since women more often than not did not write and had to dictate their words, does that mean those texts were not theirs? Even when women produced texts without male intervention they resorted to genres dominated by men. Women's lack of a language of their own in literature, politics, economics or even in their sexual and intimate relationships continued to keep women in the position of the second sex. The writings of certain medieval and early modern nuns and women mystics allegedly created a language that was closer to the world of sentiment and emotions.
