Already in the fourth centiry BC, Plato recognized that an unbiased look at the reality of women's lives was an uphill struggle, in a culture long accustomed to restrict women to a domestic role. Socrates says to Glaucon in the Republic that most Athenians will find it ridiculous to think of women doing exercise out of doors, or studying philosophy - and therefore they will avoid asking sincerely and objectively whether women have the capacity to do these things. Any question that challenges deeply rooted habits seems threatening, especially when the challenge is to entrenched structures of power. But Socrates reminds Glaucon that many things we now know to be fruitful seemed  absurd when they were first introduced - for example, the custom of public exercising that is now at the heart of Greek culture. When people reflected well about that change, however, "the appearance of absurdity ebbed away under the influence of reason's judgment about the best". He reminds Glaucon, later, that rational reflection can be crippled by habit even at the level of language : if they do not use both the masculine and the feminine forms of the participle when they talk about rulers (equivalent to our practice of saying "he or she"), they will be likely to forget what they have agree : that women should have the opportunity to attain the highest functions in the city. Reason can falter through a failure of imagination.
   Women's studies, at its best, makes just such an appeal to reason. It asks the scholarly community not to surrender to the tyranny of habit and to habitual ideas of what is "natural", but to look for the truth in all its forms, using arguments that have been carefully sifted for bias. In this way, it has by now transformed virtually every major discipline in the social sciences, humanities and life sciences, not simply by altering the content of what is studied, but by devising new methods of research.

- Martha Nussbaum,  Through the prison of gender, in Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 1998, p. 3-4.