What Bishop does not say in this 1977 interview is that she had, with a few important exceptions, dissociated herself from women's writing, both as an influence and as a movement contemporary with her own poetry. On the one hand, she subscribed to a feminism that maintained, as Louise Bogan put it in a 1963 review of women's poetry: “To separate the work of women writers from the work of men is, naturally, a highly unfeminist action.” Although academic and cultural feminism was in 1977 actively asserting and exploring gender difference, Bishop believed that gender marking (as well as racial marking) contributed to inequality. On the other hand, her refusal to take a stand as a woman writer was consistent with her general privacy regarding most things personal, including, especially, her sexual identity and, until some interviews in the 1960s and 1970s, her political views.