Reviewed by: Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture Debra Michals Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009; 256 pages. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-1633-6 (cloth) Most studies of the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s have primarily depicted men as the dominant actors and women as the "extras," background players who participated in, benefited from, and were used by the hippie movement but who made seemingly little impact in shaping it or its legacy. When treated at all, they are described as "chicks," playmates and lovers to the movement's male leaders and rank-and-file or objectified in hippie art. At the same time, histories of the women's liberation movement similarly make little reference to countercultural women, except to see them as the antithesis of feminism's goals of either full equality and rights within the existing system—as liberal feminists sought—or [End Page 169] the creation of an entirely new world that would abolish oppressive gender norms and stereotypes—as radical feminists wanted. In fact, histories of the counterculture and feminism have remained largely separate, tracing parallel paths with scant reference to any possible convergence. As such, these works have inadvertently perpetuated the invisibility of hippie women and their significance to the development of and the changes wrought by both the counterculture and women's liberation. It is this void that Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo seeks to address in Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture. A professor of history at St. Mary's College, Lemke-Santangelo not only wants to reclaim the long-silenced voices of hippie women, but more importantly, she hopes to fuse feminist and countercultural histories by staking a claim for hippie women as the "co-architects"—with radical feminists—of what scholars have come to call cultural feminism. She further argues that hippie women's experimentation with and authority around spirituality, peace, alternative health, organic foods, and environmentalism infused what would become the New Age movement that took hold by the 1980s. Lemke-Santangelo makes her case first by reinterpreting the conventional gender roles women played within the counterculture. To be sure, despite its revolutionary zeal, the counterculture was sexist, "heteronormative . . . and hierarchical," and relegated women to domestic and helpmeet roles that on the surface looked very much like the 1950s patriarchy these women claimed to be escaping. But using a range of sources from printed memoirs to oral histories, Lemke-Santangelo points out two important differences. First, hippie women rejected the oppressive social norms around women's bodies; instead of the sanctity of virginity in marriage, hippie women embraced and celebrated their bodies and the right to be sexually expressive with whomever they wanted. Second, and most importantly for Lemke-Santangelo, although men did the intellectual heavy lifting and dominated hippie newspapers and art, women were more than just "domestic drudges." Instead, she argues, because the counterculture created a lifestyle that rejected mainstream middle-class consumerist culture, hippie women imbued their domestic work with a new politics. Living on communes and reclaiming agrarian practices of an earlier America, hippie women understood their domesticity within a larger revolutionary political agenda. As Lemke-Santangelo writes, hippie women revived "an older, agrarian ideal that assigned greater value and visibility [End Page 170] to female productive labor" and made women's work seem "more varied, creative and challenging—performed in the service of countercultural ideals." This view of themselves as agents of change aligned perfectly with another aspect of countercultural ideology: that of the centrality of the feminine in creating a new and better world. Lemke-Santangelo persuasively argues that, although the counterculture embraced separate gender roles and traditional male leadership, it also celebrated the values it defined as naturally feminine. Women's so-called "innate" qualities of nurturing, compassion, and creativity were celebrated in a movement that expected a confluence of the best of masculine and feminine virtue to form the core of a new culture. Empowered, hippie women took these ideas and ran with them, says Lemke-Santangelo. In several compelling chapters, she argues that although essentialist, the celebration of the feminine difference led hippie women to...