What strikes you reading Wolf’s words now, as a person born two months after Reagan’s first inauguration, is Wolf’s phrase life in the body, a phrase that separates the theoretical potential of femaleness in the age of equality from the actual, lived reality of it. Born into the first generation of girls whose political and civic equality was already assumed, you are told from the earliest age that you can become an astronaut, a doctor, the president of the United States (if you work hard enough). The potential for your life supposedly has no bounds. But by your twelfth birthday, you have a
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