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given me the tools, as well, to affirm the women I love, to help raise the child I love in new and freer ways. I have now curled round another spiral, and can admit that I like good food and enjoy cooking it (when that’s not assumed to be my reason for existing). I have found my own appearance at last. No more “uniforms,” but clothes that are comfortable, pleasant, and me : hair that I cut or let grow as I choose, unconforming to fashion as dictated by Vogue or its inverse image, Rolling Stone . And this process, most of all, has given me the tools of self-respect as a woman artist, so that I am reclaiming my own shameless singing poet’s voice beyond the untenable choices of uninvolved “ivory-tower” pseudo-art or polemical “socialist-realist” imitation-art.
    This reclamation of my own art (and unapologetic affirmation, indeed, of art itself) is inseparable from what I have lovingly named “metaphysical feminism”—the insistence on “going too far,” the refusal to simplify or polarize, the insatiable demand for a passionate, intelligent, complex, visionary, and continuing process which dares to include in its patterns everything from the scientific transformation which stars express as they nova, to the metaphorical use of that expression in a poem; a process which dares to celebrate contradiction and diversity, dares to see each field-daisy as miraculous, each pebble as unique, each sentient being as holy.
    And also, more humbly, this process, this Women’s Movement, has given me the chance to travel through it, to witness the splendor of women’s faces all over America blossoming with hope, to hear women’s voices rising in an at-first fragile, then stronger chorus of anger and determination. Pocatello, Idaho, and Escanaba, Michigan, and Lawrence, Kansas, and Sarasota, Florida, and Northampton, Massachusetts, and Sacramento, California, and Portales, New Mexico—and how many others? It has exhausted me, this Women’s Movement, andsometimes made me cranky and guilty and gossipy and manipulative and self-pitying and self-righteous and sour. It has exasperated me, frustrated me, and driven me gloriously crazy.
    But it is in my blood, and I love it, do you hear? I know that women’s consciousness and our desire for freedom and for the power to create a humane world society will survive even the mistakes the Women’s Movement makes—as if feminism were a card-carrying nitsy little sect and not what it is , an inherently radical and profound vision of what can save this planet. There is no stopping the combined energy potential of Norma Kusske and her daughters and Joann Little and Jan Raymond and Morgan McFarland and Jane Alpert and Audre Lorde and Joan Nixon and Jill Johnston and Connie Carroll and Maria Del Drago and Linda Fowler and Kathleen Barry and Diane Running Deer and Mallica Vajrathon and Antonia Brico and Billie Jean King and Jean Pohoryles and Nancy Inglis. There are millions of us now, and the vision is enlarging its process to include us all.
    I trust that process with my life. I have learned to love that Women’s Movement, that face in the mirror, wearing its new, wry, patient smile; those eyes that have rained grief but can still see clearly; that body with its unashamed sags and stretch marks; that mind, with all its failings and its cowardices and its courage and its inexhaustible will to try again, to go further.
    I want to say to that woman: we’ve only just begun, and there’s no stopping us. I want to tell her that she is maturing and stretching and daring and yes, succeeding, in ways undreamt until now. She will survive the naysayers, male and female, and she will coalesce in all her wondrously various forms and diverse life-styles, ages, races, classes, and internationalities into one harmonious blessing on this agonized world. She will go splendidly “too far.” She is so very beautiful, and I