Finding Our Giants

When I was in high school, I read the book Hyperspace  by Michio Kaku. It was my first introduction to string theory, but also my first intr...

Although I read many of Plato's dialogues at St. John's College, I had not read Menexenus , in which Aspasia of Miletus is named as ...

It seems unfair that rhetoric and writing were so limited in the centuries between Plato and Julian of Norwich that when we search for women...

Catherine's "Letter 83: To Mona Lapa, her mother, in Siena" includes appeals to logic. "You were glad, I remember, for th...

In the introductory portion of the section on Christine de Pizan, the editors of  Available Means  stress how often she used the "I...

The piece of Margery Kempe's story that is presented in Available Means  gives an interesting example of how women are expected to act a...

In her speech, "To the Troops at Tilbury," Queen Elizabeth uses her femininity as a rhetorical tool. She contrasts her "weak...

It seems impossible that I had not heard of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz before. A woman so driven by curiosity and scholarship that she entere...

The very title of this selection speaks to what Mary Astell sought:  A  Serious  Proposal to the Ladies.  Serious. At a time when women'...

I would like to believe that "Petition of an African Slave" was written by Belinda herself in the third person, although it is pos...

To the disappointment of some of my classmates, Mary Wollstonecraft focuses her arguments for women's rights in the selection we read fr...

It seems as if this bit of text is almost included more to give the background of the place of women in the Cherokee culture than for partic...

It is interesting that in the biographical portion on Maria W. Steward her race is not mentioned except by implication. And yet, the fact th...

The selection Available Means provides from Sarah Grimke is a letter in reply to a letter from her brother-in-law ("Letter to Theodore ...

The editors of Available Means  saw fit to include from Angelina Grimke Weld, sister to Sarah and wife to the writer of the letter to which ...