Feminists soon realised that the 'canon' that was taught in schools was made up almost entirely of males and that any female graduate in the 60s heard only a male's point of view. Many scholars set about reconstructing the history and representation of women within literature. This soon led to female African American and lesbian writers discussing their own experiences and explored the discrimination that they faced both in the past and at the time of writing. Women began to write in ways which men dispised such as diaries and letters. Two perspectives began to form slowly- one was 'constructionist' whereby gender is made by a culture of history and the other 'essentialist' which said that gender reflects the natural differences between men and women. One feminist philospher Luce Irigaray argued that women's physical differences (birth, menstruation etc) make them more aware of the physical world. Essentialists say that as men are the ones who go out and work in the patriarchal society, they must cut ties with those who they are naturally close to i.e their mothers whereas women don't need to do this as all they need to do is adopt the identity of those closest to them which in this case is their mother or other female relatives. Constructionalists are very similar to Marxists in their way of thinking as they say that the identity of women is socially constructed based on patriarchal thinking that men are superior to women. Marxist feminists critised the essentialists' views by saying that the 'good female nature' held by women were actually the attributes needed by capitalists in order to reproduce the labour force and support the workers. Feminists literary began to look into what it meant to use language as a way of stifling someone's voice. They started to question why it was ok to give someone language and yet not let them use it to express their own thoughts, views and opinions.