Truly, we're the warm and fuzzy kinds of academics. (Trust us, they do exist.) We're approachable and receptive—and we respect graduate students, which few high-falutin' academics do. Sadface.

Plus, we're not wacky dogmatic feminists. So people know that we can actually have a dialogue with the less informed and less experienced without going on the attack.

People like us. Not everyone likes our ideas, but people like us.

Comrades

Each other, silly

There's no overestimating our friendship. Did we mention that we met in an elevator? It's just such a cute story. We're more than comrades. We're like Lucy and Ricky, Brad and Angelina, Abbott and Costello, and Kate Moss and Sadie Frost, all rolled into one.

If we had a nickel for every time we've had to tell interviewers that we weren't lesbians, we'd be rich. Like women can't be super close, write at length about lesbian relationships, and just be friends? Come. On. It's almost like the media would feel less threatened by a sexual partnership than an intellectual one. (We have a lot of work to do, ladies.)

Anyway, it all started at Indiana University in the salad days of feminism. 1973, to be exact. So much possibility. So much hope. So much awful patriarchy to punch down.

Plus, not everything had been written into the ground at that time, so it was less hard to be original back then. We co-taught a class on women's lit, and then one syllabus led to another, until we realized, "OMG. We have a book here!" Thus, The Madwoman in the Attic was born.

And we didn't stop there. We went on to edit The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English (1985), plus two other biggies: No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words(1988) and No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges (1989).

Elaine Showalter

We've riffed off of a lot of Elaine's ideas on female writers and the patriarchy. We've always seen her as a kind of spiritual sister, you know? It helps that she writes positive reviews of our work.

She even called me, Sandra, "one of the great literary critics and influential prose stylists of our time." We three just aren't of that school of feminists where everyone is at each other's throats. We all support and love each other in a kind, woman-centered way.

Ellen Moers

Ellen was another intellectual and feminist model for us. She and Elaine basically laid the groundwork for our work. See how sisterly everything is?

In her 1976 book Literary Women, Moers digs deep into Anglo-American traditions of female literary production and expression. We like to think of ourselves as continuing her legacy. So long and thanks for all the fish—er, we mean help—Ellen.

Rivals

Third-Wave Feminists/Post-Feminists

Look, we're the first to acknowledge that to be a revolutionary intellectual, you have to question the established constructs of literary criticism. That's why we do not take it personally (sniff, sniff) when those third-wave feminists wash their tsunami of disapproval onto the shores of our agreeable feminist sewing circle.

Apparently, we ignore important identity factors that, according to third-wave feminists, crucially intersect with gender and sexuality—like class, ethnicity, race, and little things like that.

(BTW, not to be dismissive, but "post-feminist," really? Wow, we didn't realize women had achieved complete equality. What a relief.)

Judith Butler, famed Third-Wave Feminist

We don't count Judith as a friend. But she's not really a rival, either. How could we hate this famous queer theorist, rhetorician, and post-structuralist philosopher? We can't. We just flat-out disagree with her on a few key points.

One of the premises of Madwoman is that the downtrodden female writers of the Victorian era and their protagonists were trapped between wholesale rejection of patriarchal strictures and lighting out for their own territory. (We viewed their "choice" as kind of like being forced to choose between living on a scary commune in the middle of nowhere or working your butt off in college only to be saddled with a bajillion dollars of student loan debt that your adjunct professorship will never, ever allow you to pay off. Not that we'd know anything about that.)

As we see it, this is the fundamental plight of 19th-century women writers: they were bound by a regime of masculine privilege and power that was always everywhere and always annoying. Sort of like that "Gangnam Style" song. This masculine privilege also had deep psychological implications for women. Also sort of like that "Gangnam Style" song.

Judy politely disagreed with us on these points. She accused us of naively lumping all of women's experiences together. Plus, we supposedly ignore the whole multicultural route and just look at the experiences of Anglo-American women, which apparently means we're not nearly so smart as those Third-Wavers. As if.

Mary Daly

Mary might be considered slightly more radical than we are. So she shared a lot of Butler's criticisms of us and our work. She's also one of those (overly?) complex critics of the theory-loving generation.

We mean, come on, her book is titled Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. What in the world does that mean? Oh, and the book has a double-sided axe on the cover. Yikes.

If you do happen to figure out what "gyn/ecology" is, shoot us a text. All in all, her whole radical lesbian theorist/theologist gig was a little intense for us.

Rosemary Radford Ruether

Again, not a rival per se, but Rosemary is a formidable feminist who took a different path… and has not hesitated to disagree with us. We have maximum respect for this woman. And trust, us, do not let her delicate feminine name fool you.

Rosemary is an intellectual force who couldn't give much of a hoot about 19th-century women writers, mad or otherwise. She's down with social justice, reproductive rights, and combating racism. And to all of that, we say: rock on. You do your thing, and well, we'll do ours.