Voices Unbound

Socrates. Virgil. Sir Francis Bacon. The philosophers of Ancient Greece, the poets of Ancient Rome, and the essayists of late English Renaissance were men acknowledged as the great thinkers of their day. Later, men like Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Paine, and scores of others joined the prestigious circle of intellectual elites. While over time, the concept of the great thinker has evolved and redefined itself, it has not evolved to formally include women in its exclusive circle of members. Conspicuously absent are the names of female 'great thinkers' in intellectual studies_despite the skyrocketing interest in the American intellectual and the contribution by women to America's social and intellectual development. So, then, what does it mean to be an American woman intellectual in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries? How were/are women able to surmount the restrictive roles dictated by their respective societies? How have time and history silenced the contributions made by some women to the development of intellectual history? Voices Unbound: The Lives and Works of Twelve American Women Intellectuals addresses these questions. A collection of biographies and writings from the nineteenth century through the present, Voices Unbound speaks to the blatant omission of women from intellectual studies and at the same time begins the work of developing a women's intellectual tradition. Lydia Maria Child, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Mead, Susan Sontag, bell hooks_Voices Unbound recovers these and other notable yet neglected names from America's rich past and reintroduces these remarkable women and their writings to the American public. Thorough and insightful, Voices Unbound is an important book for all those studying American intellectual history and women's history.