Abstract
Joan Kelly's Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 14001789 (Signs 8, no. 1 [Autumn 1982]: 4-28) surveys European women's literary responses to the pervasive misogyny of their times. Although this subject is of obvious significance and interest to feminist scholarship, for me the primary importance of Kelly's article lies in its methodology. We could perhaps describe her approach as both and multitemporal. By antitemporal I mean that Kelly does not define her chronological period according to the traditional epochs of historiography-the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so forth-but creates her own era, 1400-1789, which supersedes the others. As Kelly argued earlier in Did Women Have a Renaissance? traditional historiography conceptualizes the past mainly in terms of male experience, making of the tasks of women's history ... to call into question accepted schemes of periodization.1 In Early Feminist Theory, Kelly takes the next step: she dismisses these accepted schemes and devises one that more closely reflects female experience in the past. Kelly's approach is multitemporal in the sense that, having reconceptualized the past, she freely mingles our present with this past and this past with our present, as in her statement, To this day, every feminist who has followed Christine de Pisan has had to pass through a
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