Nasty Women’s Voices of 2024: The Year in Review

Nasty Women Writers wishes you all a very happy new year full of great reading and more amplification of women’s voices from all times and places.

We are so thankful to all our readers and contributors.

Like the women we feature on Nasty Women Writers, let us stand brave and speak what we need to speak, dream all we dare to dream, give priority to our aspirations and ambitions and be a light and model for other women.

Here are quotes and excerpts from some of the women and posts we featured in 2024 to inspire us for the new year.

Nasty Women’s Voices from 2024

January featured  Siri Hustvedt’s (b. 1955) The Blazing World:

“ I, Harriet Burden, hereby confess that my diverse fantasies were driven:

1. By a general desire for revenge against twits, dunderheads, and fools,
2. By an ongoing, wrenching intellectual isolation that resulted in loneliness because I roamed in too many books that no one could talk to me about,
3. By a growing sense that I had always been misunderstood and was madly begging to be seen, truly seen, but nothing I did made any difference.”

 

And German-Venezuelan artist Gego (1912-1994):

“A reticule is a net-like weave, reticul-área: area of nets . . . It is characteristic of the Reticuláreas to have no beginning and no end, no centre and no edges, no hierarchy or balance. Everything is equal, linked together, infinite. Woven into an interrelated web, the modular configurations are linked to one another by multiple joints and notes; they unite to form a dematerialized object that offers a paradoxical opportunity to look through it as well as at it. The shape of the work constantly changes, depending upon perspective and it is difficult  for the observer to view it from a distance because he is always, it seems, right in the middle.”

February brought us Joan Didion (1934-2021) writing the experience of the female body in Play I As It Lays.

Maria goes through with the abortion, at a time when it is illegal. Didion leads us through the illegal abortion in haunting, stark prose. It’s difficult to read. Once again, all the truth, no slant. Maria experiences complications and hemorrhages yet attempts to push through it while filming a new movie, Interstate 80.

“The bleeding came and went and came again. By late afternoon of her third day’s work on Interstate 80 there were involuntary pain lines on her forehead and she could not stand entirely upright for more than a few seconds. She sat back in the shadows on the edge of the set and prayed that the cameraman would be so slow with the set-ups that the day’s last shot would be delayed until morning. At five-thirty they got the shot in three takes and later in the parking lot she could not remember doing it.

By midnight the blood was coming so fast that she soaked three pads in fifteen minutes. There was blood on the bed, blood on the floor, blood on the bathroom tiles.”

And Dakota woman writer Ella Deloria’s (1889-1971): Waterlily which explores the lives of the Titan Sioux people:

“A family could maintain itself adequately as long as a father was a good hunter and the mother an industrious woman. But socially that was not enough; ideally it must be part of a larger family, constituted of related households, call a tiyospaye (“group of tipis”). In the camp circle such groups placed their tipis side by side where they would be within easy reach for cooperative living. In their closeness lay such strength and social importance as no single family, however able, could or wished to achieve entirely by its own effort.

In the atmosphere of that larger group, all adults were responsible for the safety and happiness of their collective children. The effect on the growing child was a feeling of security and self-assurance, and that was all to the good. Almost from the beginning everyone could declare, “I am not afraid; I have relatives.” To be cast out from one’s own relatives was literally to be lost. To return to them was to recover one’s rightful haven.”

In March we featured the indomitable Margaret Mead (1910-1978):

“If we are to have a world in which women work beside men, a world in which both men and women can contribute their best, women must learn to give up pandering to male sensitivities, something at which they succeed so well as long as it was a woman’s primary role, as a wife, to keep her family intact or, as a mistress, to comfort her lover.”

 

Sisters Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza were also featured in March when we highlighted their co-authored novel Some Sing, Some Cry. The story traces seven generations of the Mayfield family and responds to scholar and writer Kaiama Glover’s musings: 

“For roughly the last half-century, nearly every black female writer of any consequence in America seems to have had one very particular story to tell — or, rather, one particular question she’s tried to answer: Just how in heaven (or hell) have black women managed to survive?”

Characters Mah Bette, Blanche, Eudora, and others offer at least partial answers to the recurrent question of Black women’s survival. Although each woman must find her way, it is the absolute truth that they need one another. If a mother is not able to be present, physically or emotionally, this story shows what a grandmother, aunt, or other nurturing woman can do for another.

Along with music! Ifa Bayeza reminds us:

“Surrounded on all sides by music, while writing this book we discovered again and again how vast and varied the music of African-American people, how vital. There are so many antecedents, it’s impossible to name them, so rich is the panoply. With our collage of characters we can only suggest the singers, players, composers, writers, dancers, and producers; the theaters, churches, living rooms, and sidewalks, the cabarets, juke joints, and dance halls; the solo artists, big bands, and combos – the heavenly choir of legendary and anonymous voices that have filled our nation and world with song.”

In May we were treated to a piece from Arianne MacBean about artist, researcher and psychoanalyst Christiana Morgan (1897-1967):

“At the core of Christiana’s story is a period of nine months in her late twenties where she recorded her personal visions and fantasies in paintings and writing while living in Zurich, Switzerland. This process of revealing and recording her inner life was encouraged by C. G. Jung, her psychoanalyst between June and October 1926. Jung used this process of active imagination to bring his own unconscious material into consciousness. Similar to Jung’s Red Book, Christiana’s artistic manifestations of her unconscious world illuminated the shadow sides of herself, which she faced with rigor and determination.”

In the summer Theresa spent some time with the prolific Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s(1810-1865) novels and Jenny Uglow’s biography:

The life of Esther, a minor character in Mary Barton, illustrates what few options were available to women in that circumstance in the Victorian era. Gaskell gives center stage to such a woman in Ruth. Ruth does not fall into prostitution but is led into an affair, sex and subsequent conception of an illegitimate child. Her life’s trajectory is fully determined by that. The book was seen as scandalous and not allowed in many homes because it dealt with the issue of sex and the desire of a woman, two things which were not openly discussed in the Victorian era.

Of her writing Gaskell said:

“I did feel as if I had something to say about it that I must say, and you know I can tell stories better than any other way of expressing myself.”

In July, Maria spent some time with The Beach Lady: MaVynee Betsch, featuring the children’s book Saving American Beach: The Biography of African American Environmentalist MaVynee Betsch, written by Heidi Tyline King and illustrated by Ekua Holmes.

Opera singer turned activist, Betsch left the stage behind and delivered her message of protecting the environment, its inhabitants, and history with an incredible vocal range, and captivating, memorable drama.

August delivered our 9th Brontë post, focused on Anne Brontë’s first novel, Agnes Grey.

Plot-wise, the story of Agnes Grey is straightforward:  a young woman who wants to help her financially struggling family and experience more of life takes a position as governess, one of the only occupations available to her. Agnes, from whose perspective the story is told, relays her experience in detail, allowing author Anne Brontë to spotlight the ill-treatment and impossible task of the governess. Anne also highlights the cruel treatment of animals, making a strong statement about what that cruelty says about those who inflict it.

“But, for the child’s own sake, it ought not to be encouraged to have such amusements,” answered I, as meekly as I could, to make up for such unusual pertinacity. “‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’”

“Oh! of course; but that refers to our conduct towards each other.”

“‘The merciful man shows mercy to his beast,’” I ventured to add.

Autumn brought us Beatrix Potter (1866-1943): author, environmentalist, naturalist and conservationist as well as beloved author and illustrator of Children’s Books:

“Surely it is cruel to cut down a very fine tree! Each dull, dead thud of the axe hurts the little green fairy that lives in its heart. That fairy in the oak had been a harmless timid spirit for many hundred years. Long ago, when the oak was a sapling, there had been wolves; and the dalesmen hunted them with hounds. The hunt swept through the forest; the frightened fairy leaped into the oak branches. She found the tree a place of refuge; therefore she loved it and made it her home. Because it had a guardian fairy, that oak grew tall and strong. And each of the finest trees in the forest had a fairy of its own as well.

There were birch fairies, beech fairies, alder fairies, and fairies of the fir trees and pines; all were dressed in the leaves of their own special trees; and in the spring when the trees had new leaves, each fairy got herself a new green gown”

~The Fairy Caravan by Beatrix Potter

Woman writer Edna O’Brien passed away in July 2024 at the age of 93. Her first book The Country Girls was the subject an Autumn post.

Irish writer Eimear McBride, in her article “Banned, burned and reviled: What was so radical about Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls?” explains the power of the book and why it was so threatening:

“O’Brien’s invocation of female characters who dared desire more from life than domestic and sexual servitude, emotional disaffection and intellectual abnegation, was nothing short of revolutionary.”

November featured Pomo Master Basketweaver Elsie Allen (1899-1990):

“Mother told me that she did not want this to happen with her as she wanted me to have her baskets help me when I started up basketweaving again. So I promised her I would do this. Mother showed baskets for seven years. She showed baskets at the Boonville Fair, and around. She liked people and noticed how people liked the basket displays. She wanted me to travel and meet people through the baskets and not destroy her baskets and have nothing left  for me and others in the future. Mother died in 1962, and I have tried to keep my promise.”

And Mildred Faintly gifted us with translations of the poetry of Rachel Blaustein 1890-1919.

In the poem “Rachel” we hear the powerful voice of a self-identified woman in deep relationship with her ancestresses.

I always know where I’m going,
don’t need sign or map or even street
to keep to the path that’s mine alone.
My legs remember, my feet repeat:
Rachel!
—as she went then, so now I go.

In December we amplified the voice of children’s books champion Bertha Mahoney (1882-1969):

“Our bookshop for boys and girls exists, not simply to sell good books for children but to increase their love for books, because we believe that good books are so important as to be an essential part of life. We feel that the two main essentials are the power to think truly and the power to feel deeply and that these two essentials result in “preparedness for worthy action.”

Irish writer Edna O’Brien reappeared in December with a look at the other two books in her Country Girls Trilogy, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss.

At the end of The Lonely Girl, protagonist Kate thinks to herself

“Even Baba notices that I’m changing, and she says if I don’t give up this learning at night, I’ll end up as a right drip, wearing flat shoes and glasses. What Baba doesn’t know is that I’m finding my feet, and when I’m able to talk I imagine that I won’t be so alone, but maybe that too is an improbable dream.”

And by the end of the trilogy, it becomes clear: Kate finding her feet and voice under the oppression of patriarchy is tragically improbable.

We’re thankful writer Edna O’Brien found hers.

Some posts we are working on for 2025:

Elizabeth Keckly
Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli
George Eliot
Elizabeth Peabody
Bertha Mahoney and Beatrix Potter were friends
Essie Parrish
and many more.

Happy New Year to all.

Theresa and Maria Dintino