" The tentativeness, the anxiety, sometimes approaching paralysis, the confusing, described in many of these essays by intelligent, educated, "privileged" women, are themselves evidence of the damage that an be done to the creative energy by the lack of continuity, historical validation, community. Most women, it seems, have gone through their travails in a kind of spiritual isolation, alone both in the present and in ignorance of their place in any female tradition. "

― , Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk about Their Lives and Work