The point is that feminists have ceased to be feminists in order to study feminism. In our zest to define ourselves, we have forgotten that it was the traditional definitions of women that ultimately led to our outrage. We have merely replaced patriarchal definitions with feminist definitions. Refusing to admit that the process of defining, rather than defamations themselves. is the true source of power. We fear that if we don't defame ourselves we won't exist. The question is whether after twenty years of liberating ourselves from societal-enforced definitional confinement we have not begun to confine ourselves anew.

This becomes especially interesting when pondered alongside the much heralded crisis in literacy. If, in fact, we have begun to confine ourselves by our own definitions, have we not simultaneously begun to exclude the majority of the very sex we sought to make equally included in society? Have we not, even as Allan Bloom calls us "the latest enemy of the vitality of classic texts" (65), become just as elitist as the institutions we sought to make more equitable for everyone, regardless of gender, race or income?

As Lillian Robinson points out, "'Elite' is a literary as well as a social category. It is possible to argue for taking all texts seriously as texts without arguments based on social oppression of cultural exclusion, and popular genres have therefore been studied as part of the female literary tradition... But in a context where the ground of struggle - highly contested, moreover - concerns Edith Wharton's advancement to more major status, fundamental assumptions have changed very little" (116). It is ironic, of course, that, even as Robinson admits that "conclusions about 'women's fiction' or 'female consciousness' have been drawn or jumped to from considering a body of work whose authors are all white and comparatively privileged' (114), she chooses Edith Wharton as her example, rather than Leslie Silko or Toni Morrison.

I dare say that in our quest to create a "literacy" of our own, a feminist language, a feminist vision, a space where Catharine Stimpson says "women of language become richer, deeper, at once more enigmatic and more clear" (xii), we have done as much to perpetuate illiteracy as to create a new literacy. As Andrew Sledd aptly notes, "...literacy and illiteracy develop together, defining each other" (495), while Robert Pattison claims "literacy must not be treated as a constant in human affairs but as an evolving and adaptable attribute of the species" (18). As a result, Sledd contends that the much publicized crisis in literacy is actually no crisis at all, "that both the crisis and the means to resolve it have been manufactured" (495) by "a two-tiered educational system producing... a minority of overpaid engineers and managers to design technology and provide supervision for a majority of docile data processors and underpaid burger burners" (506).

Feminists, of course, would be the first to point out that the majority of over-paid engineers and managers are men, while the majority of data processors and burger burners are women, and that these facts of life have hardly been manufactured by female academicians seeking a marketable dissertation topic. Still, the female burger burner, more attuned to Janet Jackson than Hélène, Cixous, should be able to ask the female academician, "What have you done for me lately?" and be answered a tad more specifically than, "We are stealing the language and writing the body."

The burger burner asks, "What can I be?"

Julia Kristeva answers, "A woman cannot 'be'; it is something which does not even belong in the order of being" (137).

The single, working mother exclaims, "I feel like I'm going out of my mind." Sonia Johnson soothes her with, "Since truth is reversed in patriarchy, to go out of our minds is to become truly sane. (vi).

Or perhaps a better example is a colleague's outrage at Women Who Love Too Much being placed in the feminist theory section at a bookstore. "Can you imagine?" Trash right next to important theory." No, I can't imagine. Have we become more concerned with writing the body than with protecting it from abuse?

While these conversations make light of the barriers that exist between academic and non-academic women, they show why many women, obviously with good reason, are "word-phobic and will even classify the written word as an instrument of oppression that has too often been used against them - an echo of the theme of 'words as weapons'" (Belenky, etal.74). Indeed, feminists must begin to realize that while we may not have manufactured a sexist society, we are, in fact, creating a two-tiered woman's society in which a minority of academically educated women have begun to tell the majority of alternatively educated women what constitutes "woman." We have done nothing to change the Aristotelian idea that to be literate about something is to understand its definition. Even as we still complain about being silenced, we have done nothing with our words to change the concept of what constitutes literacy.