Women have written almost every imaginable type of work: novels, poems, letters, biographies, travel books, religious commentaries, histories, economic and scientific works.
Women writers are often known by multiple names. They may have written under both their maiden names and married names (sometimes several!) They may have used pseudonyms (male or female) or written cooperatively as a joint identity.
 
Saint Theresa, born in Old Castile in 1515; a nun, and one of the most enthusiastic of devotees. She thus describes her feelings in a Life of herself:
Saint Clara, a celebrated abbess, born at Assisi in 1193. She put herself under the direction of St. Francis d'Assisi, and by his assistance founded a convent of which she became abbess. Her whole life appears to have been employed in the work of enforcing cloister discipline;
Saint Catharine of Sienna was born in the city whence she takes her name in 1347. She vowed virginity at eight years of age, and soon after assumed the Dominican habit. She became famous for her revelations; and being ingenious, a good writer for her age, and distinguished for piety and charity
Mr. Southey's noble and eloquent introduction to his translation of The Chronicle of the Cid. "The continuance of polygamy was his (Mahommed's) great and ruinous error: where this pernicious custom is established, there will be neither connubial, nor paternal, nor brotherly affection; and hence the unnatural murders with which Asiatic history abounds. The Mahommedan imprisons his wives, and sometimes knows not the faces of his own children; he believes that despotism must be necessary in the state, because he knows it to be necessary at home: thus the domestic tyrant becomes the contented slave, and the atrocity of the ruler and the patience of the people proceed from the same cause. It is the inevitable tendency of polygamy to degrade both sexes: wherever it prevails, the intercourse between them is merely sexual. Women are only instructed in wantonness, sensuality becomes the characteristic of whole nations, and humanity is disgraced by crimes the most loathsome and detestable. This is the primary and general cause of that despotism and degradation which are universal throughout the East." &c.

in the history of Alboin king of the Lombards, and in that of the northern pirates, that a truly chivalrous spirit of honour and generosity had been introduced into the commerce of warriors with each other, in all the relations of peace and war, long before the refinements of gallantry, or even a tolerable decency of behaviour towards the weaker sex, came to be considered as incumbent on the brave and the noble.
manners were still gross, and morals extremely corrupt. In France, the nuptial tie, seldom cemented by mutual preference and inclination, has in no age been sufficient to restrain the wanderings of the imagination, or preserve the innocency of domestic life. In Spain, an absurd spirit of jealous rigour long fostered in both sexes the taste for clandestine amours; and the Spanish or Portuguese author of Amadis de Gaul, accounted the most moral as well as popular work of its kind, has represented his adorable and peerless Oriana herself as more fortunate in the constancy of her lover, but not more discreet in her loves, than the hapless Dido of ancient story. In England and the northern parts of the continent, if morals were somewhat more pure during these ages than in the south, manners were still more coarse. I
Madame Roland's "Appeal to impartial Posterity," containing memoirs of her own life,; and her apostrophe to the statue of Liberty, on passing it in her way to the guillotine, "O Liberty, how many horrors are perpetrated in thy name!" Her noble fortitude during her imprisonment was also conspicuous.
Sir Thomas More is highly commended by Erasmus for making his daughters partakers in all the benefits of a learned education. His favourite daughter, Margaret, wife of William Roper, esq. "became a mistress of the Greek and Latin languages, of arithmetic, and the sciences then generally taught, and of various musical instruments. She wrote with elegance both in English and Latin. In the latter her style was so pure, that cardinal Pole could scarcely be brought to believe that her compositions were the work of a female."
lady Jane Grey, the power of learning and philosophy to fortify and tranquillize a youthful and feminine mind under the severest trials,
The admirable Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, by his widow, ought to be known to every reader capable of being warmed to a noble emulation. The work is inscribed to her children, and is introduced by a kind of dirge, in which after mentioning that some mourners, who have doted on "mortal excellencies," are only to be consoled by removing every thing that may "with their remembrance renew their grief," she proceeds: "But I that am under a command (of her husband at his death) not to grieve at the common rate of desolate woemen, while I am studying which way to moderate my woe, and if it were possible to augment
Spenser, that no poet has given such pure and perfect, such noble, lovely, and at the same time various drafts of female characters. His Belphoebe, his Amoret, his Canace, his Britomart and his Pastora, are a gallery of portraits, all beautiful, but each in a different style from all the rest.

Why is feminism talked about so much? Why does it seem to be an important--sometimes the most important, and sometimes the only--factor to look at? Why does it come in virtually all English classes? And does it have to?
with the history of ideas about gender.
Historically, thinking about gender happens in cultures where gender configurations--the social meaning systems that encode sexual difference--undergo changes or shifts. The same is true with thinking about race (that race as a construct becomes apparent when ideas of race are shifting) or economics, or politics, etc.: all of these concepts are reevaluated when social practice (i.e. what people do) shifts. So gender, or masculine and feminine qualities, or male/female social roles, comes up as area for analysis whenever gender roles are shifting. You can trace this back to medieval times (Chaucer's Wife of Bath is certainly an example of questioning gender configurations
Certainly in the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States, gender was a matter for much public discussion and debate.
So. Why is gender important? The simplest answer is because it's there. "Gender," meaning the differentiation, usually on the basis of sex, between social roles and functions labeled as "masculine" and "feminine," is universal: all societies known to us in all time periods make some sort of gender distinctions. As a central feature of all cultures, gender seems worth some attention.
But perhaps the question is not about universality, but about the prominence of gender studies in the university today, where you encounter gender as a topic (if not a preoccupation) in all courses, and particularly in all English courses.
Let me begin to answer this by talking about the word "feminism" and "feminist" (as in "feminist theory").
1). A "feminist" is someone who is interested in studying and understanding gender as a system of cultural signs or meanings assigned (by various social mechanisms) to sexually-dimorphic bodies, and who sees these cultural signs which constitute gender as having a direct effect on how we live our individual lives and how our social institutions operate.
2). Secondly, a "feminist" is someone who sees the gender systems currently in operation (in our culture and in other cultures) as structured by a basic binary opposition--masculine/feminine--in which one term, masculine, is always privileged over the other term, and that this privileging has had the direct effect of enabling men to occupy positions of social power more often than women
other binary oppositions are always also at work, such as old/young, or rich/poor, which will mitigate the effect of gender alone; hence a rich old woman might have more forms of social power that a poor young man.
if you focus only on the male/female distinction, more men will wield social power (historically and cross-culturally) than women.

Feminism, new or old, is inevitably a touchy subject for almost everyone. Some view it as a heroic movement that won for women the basic rights to vote, to own property, and to be admitted on an equal basis with men in schools and places of employment. Others see it almost exclusively as a movement that gave us a litany of troubles, such as the sexual revolution, abortion, and latchkey kids.
old feminism merely mimicked patterns of "male domination" and "violence" against life, making it one of the engines of the culture of death. Attempting to get to the roots of the culture of death,
as women assume greater roles in many kinds of public and private institutions and as family dilemmas arise, we need a new feminism to address these challenges.
Literature as the majority of fields in humanities and in sciences also, has been reduced to men. Women have always been left in a second place, in the case that they have been capable of publishing their works. This fact is easily noticeable in the fact that many women have had to hide their female names behind a pseudonym, usually a male name or the name of other male writer. This is the case for example of Felicia Hemans who wrote under the name Samuel Clemens. There are also some works by famous writers who have been always considered to be a man and recently he is suspicious to be a man. That is the case for example of the famous British writer T.S, Eliot. And there are other writers who are supposed not to write the works by themselves but by the helping of a woman.
The place of a woman has always been in the house taking care of the family: the husband and the children. Throughout history women have been seen as inferior to men, in the ancient times they were treated as beasts and they were in charge of every hard work even the agriculture work while their men did nothing. The way they were treated in ancient non civilized times is well illustrated in the following fragments of ancient times texts:
"In all unpolished nations, it is true, the functions in domestic economy which fall naturally to the share of the women, are so many, that they are subjected to hard labour, and must bear more than their full portion of the common burden. But in America their condition is so peculiarly grievous, and their depression so complete, that servitude is a name too mild to describe their wretched state. A wife, amongst most tribes, is no better than a beast of burden, destined to every office of labour and fatigue. While the men loiter out the day in sloth or spend it in amusement, the women are condemned to incessant toil. Tasks are imposed upon them without pity, and services are received without complacency or gratitude.
Every circumstance reminds the women of this mortifying inferiority. They must approach their lords with reverence, they must regard them as more exalted beings, and are not permitted to eat in their presence.
There are many districts in America where this dominion is so grievous, and so sensibly felt, that some women, in a wild emotion of maternal tenderness, have destroyed their female children in their infancy, in order to deliver them from that intolerable bondage to which they knew they were doomed. (Robertson's Hist. of America, vol. ii. p. 105)
"Hearne describes the women of the Northern tribes which he visited, as wading through the snow encumbered with heavy burdens, while the men, themselves carrying nothing, urged them on with blows and threats. He mentions other particulars, also illustrative of the wretched condition of the American females, too numerous and too horrid for poetical narration."
"It is supposed that two thirds of the children born in Otaheite are immediately murdered. For the particulars of that dreadful licentiousness which is the consequence of the complete indolence of these islanders, and the countless and nameless evils and enormities which are consequence." (Transactions of the Missionary Society, vol. i.)
"One of the most pathetic passages of Homer thus paints the situation of a female captive:
"As when a woman weeps
Her husband fall'n in battle for her sake,<BR>
And for his children's sake, before the gate<BR>
Of his own city; sinking to his side<BR>
She close infolds him with a last embrace,<BR>
And gazing on him as he pants and dies,<BR>
Shrieks at the sight; meantime the ruthless foe<BR>
Smiting her shoulders with the spear, to toil<BR>
Command her and to bondage far away,<BR>
And her cheek fades with horror at the sound."<BR>
(Odyss. viii. 523.-Cowper)
"A captive Laced&aelig;monian woman, being asked by her master what she understood? replied, "How to be free." And on his afterwards requiring of her something unworthy, she put herself to death.(Valerius Maximus).
Women also were treated as purchasable thinks, firstly by their fathers, to whom they belonged until they became property of their husbands. This situation is illustrated by the following passage:
"An annual tribute of women was exacted by the Tartars, or Huns, from the Chinese; and even the daughters, genuine or adopted, of the eastern emperors were claimed in marriage by the Tanjous as a bond of union between the nations. -The situation of these unhappy victims is described,- says Gibbon, -in the verses of a Chinese princess, who laments that she had been condemned by her parents to a distant exile, under a barbarian husband; who complains that sour milk was her only drink, raw flesh her only food, a tent her only palace; and who expresses, in a strain of pathetic simplicity, the natural wish that she were transformed into a bird, to fly back to her dear country, the object of her tender and perpetual regret."
(Decline and Fall, vol. iv. p. 363, 8vo edition.)
 
 
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
-http://www.colorado.edu/english/engl2012klages/1feminism html
 -http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/theoryhtml
 -http:andromeda.rutgers.edu/jlynch/lit women html