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times over, as it turned out), we didn’t ride the painted bus with Neal Cassady, or chant Blake with Ginsberg or even poach on Barnard girls as Broyard did. We were too ladylike.
    In college, we passionate future writers studied Blake, Keats, and Byron, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, John Berry-man, Robert Browning, etc. Yes, we knew there was a Mrs. Browning, but hadn’t she written only one treacly poem—“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”? Emily Dickinson lurked in Butler Library in something called the American Men of Letters series. Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Barnard graduate, whom we had pored over as teenagers, was not on the Barnard syllabus. Dorothy Parker, whom we also adored, was deemed a light versifier, not worthy of academic interest. In fact, the whole era of suffragists and flappers—our grandmothers’ generation—occasionally surfaced as social history, but mostly it was invisible, as was its message that free women could change the world. Later we would call that suffragist generation the First Wave of feminism and ourselves the Second Wave. (Actually Mary Wollstonecraft was the First Wave, the suffragists the Second and my generation the Third—but who’s counting?) Feminism, an Enlightenment ideal, is more honored in the breach than in the observance—like free speech, the brotherhood of man and the ideal of racial equality. Feminism ebbs and flows like the sea. Yet the truth remains that my contemporaries and I would have to ride our own wave—whatever number we dubbed it—to believe in ourselves as writers.
    Here’s whom we did not read in college (in addition to Millay and Parker): Amy Lowell, Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Louise Bogan, Ruth Pitter, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Judith Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kathleen Raine, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Kizer, Ruth Stone, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Sara Teasdale, May Swenson, May Sarton, Grace Paley, Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton—though all these women were published then. We do not like to admit that politics plays a part in literary reputations, but without politics we would still be invisible. Our daughters cannot even imagine female invisibility. We raised them telling them they could do anything and everything. We told them God might well be female. We told them we wanted them because they were girls. We filled their heads with female goddesses, women poets and women’s history. (Dear Goddess, don’t make me call it herstory or womyns’ history —I may break out in hives.) The point is: We taught them to love themselves.
    They are still condemned to the ghetto of chick lit, and reviewed poorly for writing about things women care about—proof of second-ctassness—but at least they are no longer silent.
    When my daughter Molly started to write, it never occurred to her to write in a male persona. She knew she could be a writer. Her mother was a writer, her father was a writer and her grandfather was a writer. She did not doubt her right to a voice.
    What a change we have wrought. When I see all these young women writing chick lit, I’m proud. They may be writing about sex and shopping and dumping Mr.Wrong for Mr. Right or Mr. Right for Mr. Wrong. They may have the white weddings and diamond rings we scorned as hopelessly bourgeois, but at least they’re writing. They have their own voices and their voices are loud and insistent. We were afraid to stamp a tiny foot against God for fear that the guys would laugh. And laugh they did. Paul Theroux called Isadora Wing “a mammoth pudenda.” Even intelligent writers were male chauvinist pigs in those days. Reviewing Fear of Flying in The New Statesman, Theroux must have had a full-scale panic attack. What else would explain his calling my heroine, and by extension her author, “a mammoth pudenda”? What was he afraid of? Obviously a huge vagina dentata . I hope he’s gotten over that. I think I