I experienced a peculiarly American split, a neurotic affliction that women of my generation were particularly prey to. I didn’t realize it consciously—few of us did—but the message we internalized in the name of liberation was that we could only be liberated if we became like men. We could be hot and sexy, or we could be smart and taken seriously; we could not be both. So many of us did what we thought we had to do: We suppressed the goddess, the wild wise woman, in order to make it in a world that we’d subconsciously joined in its disdain for the essentially female.
