These essays owe their greatest debt to the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Funding provided by Brown, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities supported an intense and exciting intellectual environment. The center would not have run smoothly without the skill, patience, and enthusiasm of Barbara Anton and Elizabeth Barboza; in fact it would not have run at all. I learned a great deal from both of them about what a cooperative enterprise really means and about the support women can provide for one another. I learned most of all from Elizabeth Weed, at once my colleague, mentor, and friend. She taught me how to think about theory and gender. She read and criticized each of these essays more than once and held out exacting standards that I have tried, not always successfully, to meet. Her influence on this book has been profound; for that reason it is dedicated to her.
Friends and colleagues have been unstinting with their time, advice, and criticism. I am especially indebted to Denise Riley whose work has had an important influence on my own. I am grateful, too, for close and attentive readings of the entire manuscript by Elisabetta Galeotti and Lynn Hunt.
Sarah Johns not only typed and retyped the manuscript but provided extraordinary and efficient organization for every aspect of my working life. This book owes a great deal to her energy, warmth, generosity, and intelligence. It owes a good deal, too, to the Institute for Advanced Study, my current “home,” and to its unstinting support for scholarly activity.
For Donald Scott, gratitude is an inadequate expression. He has read and criticized these essays many times. He first pointed out that they warranted publication in a single volume and he both insisted on and encouraged the project. As an intellectual and emotional partner he has empowered all aspects of my life, proving that men can share in the feminist project and that equality is not only desirable but worth striving to achieve.