This book has two objectives: to demonstrate that, despite extensive evidence indicating a wholesale suppression of early women's speech, women were actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were both complicitous with patriarchal ideology, and yet subversive in undermining that ideology. Further, this book dissociates early women's self-expression from, solely, licentiousness by greatly expanding the scope, the consequences, and the cultural forces of early women's speech. | 
