Like every woman who was an adult when Second Wave Feminism came along, I had grown up understanding myself through men's understanding of me. We learned about ourselves from the culture around us, which then belonged to men -- often to men who were more than a little misogynist. I had learned about being female from the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and D. H. Lawrence.

Then, suddenly, in the early 1970s, women's lives were being told in stories, songs, and, most intensely, in poems, written in women's own voices and words -- in many cases, lesbian voices, voices of women who loved women, who found women lovable.

Tilly Olson and Grace Paley had written pioneering short stories very much in women's voices a decade earlier. But their work had had little exposure and was neither as explicitly woman-loving nor as concentrated as the lesbian and lesbian-influenced poetry of the 1970s.

Those poems landed like blows or electric shocks: Audre Lorde's wrenching "To My Daughter the Junkie on a Train," Susan Griffin's incantatory "I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman," and Joan Larkin's wry "Vagina Sonnet."

Most important of all, for me, were Judy Grahn's "The Common Woman" poems. There were seven of them, written in the simplest of language and a lilting waltz rhythm. They taught me how to tell my own stories and ended with a promise that still lives in my heart:

"The common woman is as common as good bread … and will rise … I swear it to you on my common woman's head."