Category: women

On Marghanita Laski’s “The Victorian Chaise-Longue.”

The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski (1953), published by Persephone Books (1999) “We think back through our mothers,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “if we are women.” Marghanita Laski’s terrifying novel The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) spins this proposition sideways. What if becoming a mother makes a woman a time-traveler against her will?  What if mothering allows memory […]

Read more

Confirmation.

When you’re a woman, you try to live in hope, and you try to teach others (especially younger women) the same. Because, after all, the world doesn’t accommodate itself to you and never has. You are the one who must make way, yield the floor, decline to give way to professionally discrediting anger, sit incredulously […]

Read more

The Women’s March: here, there, and everywhere.

Saturday, January 21, 2017 It felt good to be out on our little town’s main street with a sign in my hand again, surrounded by my friends and students and – despite the chilly fog – determination and hope. As I describe in my forthcoming book, The Hands-On Life: How to Wake Yourself Up and […]

Read more

Roots.

This stem of Hibiscus mutabilis, a.k.a. Confederate rose, flourishes in a Mason jar on my kitchen counter, ready for repotting.  Its mother plant, originally a cutting from my parents’ yard in Alabama, is resprouting too.  Last summer I planted a cutting like this in my yard to see whether, as the plant encyclopedia promised, it […]

Read more

Whitney Houston and the women-walls.

On Facebook and even email, this picture meets me at every turn, looming, vaguely Inquisitorial.  You want to explain to us why you *need* birth control, young lady?  Depressed by the image and its context — and by work and other First World Problems, despite even-more-stellar-than-usual moments of conversation with students — I turned to […]

Read more