And it is feminism that has empowered me to criticize not only my society and myself but—for a moment now—feminism itself. The books-or-babies myth is not only a misogynist hang-up, it can be a feminist one. Some of the women I respect most, writing for publications that I depend on for my sense of women’s solidarity and hope, continue to declare that it is “virtually impossible for a heterosexual woman to be a feminist,” as if heterosexuality were heterosexism; and that social marginality, such as that of lesbian, childless, Black, or Native American women, “appears to be necessary” to form
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