Since 1974, the Florence Howe Award has honored distinguished feminist literary criticism written by scholars in the fields of language and literature study. Seventeen winning essays—many never before published—are collected in one volume, Courage and Tools. Written by leading scholars and theorists, these groundbreaking essays discuss topics such as resistance to the patriarchal order and the development of a feminist literary theory and explore the works of writers such as Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Henry James, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, and Alexander Pope.