The works of the creative spirit last, they are essentially imperishable, while the world-stirring historical activities of even the most eminent men are circumscribed by time.
Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.
This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.
It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
Later, I went one step further, by putting in some invented "historical" bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror, because "my" parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant.