Introduction

The essays in this collection were written over a fifteen-year period. Their composition was labored and difficult; each was separated from the next by a long and sometimes agonized period of waiting during which I thought I would never have another idea. These papers tell of my emergence and development as a feminist thinker and of the way in which my own intellectual odyssey reflects many of the shifting themes and approaches, the preoccupations· and controversies, that have characterized feminist philosophical writing since the early seventies.