Shedding Someone Else's Baggage

“In pretending to stand for “the human,” masculine subjectivity tries to force us to name our truths in alien language, to dilute them; we are constantly told that the “real” problems are those men have defined, that the problems we need to examine are trivial, unscholarly, nonexistent.

Any woman who has moved from the playing-fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world, knows the extraordinary sense of shedding . . . someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate. It is not that thinking becomes easy, but that the difficulties are intrinsic to the work itself.” Adrienne Rich

Quoted in How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ