Daughters of Aquarius

by Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo

It was a sign of the sixties. Drawn by the promise of spiritual and creative freedom, thousands of women from white middle-class homes rejected the suburban domesticity of their mothers to adopt lifestyles more like those of their great-grandmothers. They eagerly learned "new" skills, from composting to quilting, as they took up the decade's quest for self-realization. "Hippie women" have alternately been seen as Earth mothers or love goddesses, virgins or vamps, images that have obscured the real complexity of their lives. The author now takes readers back to Haight Ashbury and country communes to reveal how they experienced and shaped the counterculture. She draws on the personal recollections of women who were there, including such pivotal figures as Lenore Kendall, Diane DiPrima, and Carolyn Adams, to gain insight into what made counterculture women tick, how they lived their days, and how they envisioned their lives. This book to focuses specifically on women of the counterculture