"Many contemporary women writers and artists have attempted to work with new images drawn from an explicitly feminist consciousness or from a female sensibility pulled from the experiences of daily life and made explicit in the context of the women's liberation movement. The struggle to do this requires both the break-up of the interior colonization and the actualization of a women-centered reality. Erica Jong described this process in her own work as she came of age as a writer in the 1970s: "I spent my whole bookish life identifying with writers and nearly all the writers who mattered were men. Even though there were women writers and even though I read them and loved them, they did not seem to matter. If they were good, they were good in spite of being women. If they were bad, it was because they were women. I had, in short, internalized all the dominant cultural stereotypes, and the result was that I could scarcely even imagine a woman as an author." Once Jong could name the problem, however, and see herself as a writer, the content of her work changed: "I stopped writing about ruins and nightingales. I was able to make poetry out of the everyday activities of my life: peeling onions, a trip to the gynecologist, a student demonstration, my own midnight terrors and dreams-all things I would have previously dismissed as trivial.""