The matter was small, yet I was annoyed by it. Even a little despairing.  After fifty years of fighting for women’s equality, what did I have to show for it? Or others of my sex who had faced jail time and forced feedings to champion women’s rights? That afternoon, as I visited m

Rebecca Solnit, the author of Men Explain Things to Me, tickles my funny bone.  She has a sharp wit and a sharp pen which she exhibits regularly as a columnist for Harper’s. In addition, she is well-versed in a number of subjects, having written about the environment, landscapes, p

In her essay, “Musical Chairs,” Rebecca Solnit parses the numerous splits in American politics. I  particularly like her description of the Republican party.  She charges it “preaches the gospel of austerity while running up deficits,” and extols individual rights, “except

I joked  with a friend, recently, that if religious conservatives have their way, abortions will be illegal at the point of coitus.  We both laughed.  But I’m not laughing anymore.  Iowa’s woman governor, Kim Reynolds, has signed a bill that makes abortion illegal at the first

Female genital cutting (khatna) is alive and well in the United States, even though it was outlawed in 1996. (“It Happens Here,” by Tasneem Raja, Mother Jones, July, August, 2017 ,pgs. 13-15.)  It survives because women, largely of the Muslim Bohras sect, (Click) protect the

I have a program on my computer that critiques my writing.  All too frequently, it gives me a red mark for sentences that are too long or for a vocabulary it says might challenge the average reader.  The computer assumes I want to appeal to the average reader.  And, I d

The saying has been around for a long time:  “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”  A number of people seem to be angry on Facebook, lately. A group of women dumped on Ivanka Trump the other day for defending her father when she was Angela Merkel’s guest at t

The crime of segregation is that it keeps us from knowing one another. Non-profits, educational institutions, churches, governments and the courts have fought this consequence for years.  When white America fled to the suburbs in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, they took their tax dollars wi

Not long ago I sat down to lunch with a woman in our community prominent for her advocacy for Hispanic causes — be it for the  farm worker or the illegal migrant  and everyone in-between.  I admire her as a savvy,  caring business women.  Imagine my surprise , during the co

“There is no good answer to being a woman,” writes Rebecca Solnit in a recent essay. (“The Mother of All Questions,” by Rebecca Solnit, Harpers’, October 2015, pg. 5) Expanding on that thought she explains, a mother is under the gaze of society’s judgment. Too much or too