Tag: #NastyWomen

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet is a #Nastywoman and Her #Nastiness Changes the World.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet is a #Nastywoman and Her #Nastiness Changes the World.

Posted by | Jul 20, 2021 |

If Donald Trump met Elizabeth Bennet he for sure would have called her a #nastywoman. Why? Because she would have openly and confidently spoken her truth to him and about him. She would have her voice with him and dare to openly question and criticize him. And that, to Donald Trump, makes a woman #nasty.  Elizabeth Bennet would not, however,  have fallen in love with Donald Trump, because unlike Mr. Darcy, Donald Trump doesn’t know how to give proper respect to a #nastywoman.  In Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice, the main character, Elizabeth Bennet  has a voice, a mind...

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Vivian Gornick’s Taking a Long Look: What 2nd Wave Feminism Got Right That We Still Benefit From Today

Vivian Gornick’s Taking a Long Look: What 2nd Wave Feminism Got Right That We Still Benefit From Today

Posted by | Jul 6, 2021 |

I was excited to find a new collection of essays by Vivian Gornick, Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature, and Feminism in our Time in a San Francisco bookstore recently. Gornick was a political and social issues writer for the “Village Voice” and other publications who eventually found the form of memoir and moved in that direction. She earned great acclaim for Fierce Attachments (1987) a memoir about her relationship with her mother.  She is now 84 years old and still going strong. This particular collection of essays literally takes a long look back over fifty years...

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Sonya Renee Taylor: The Map Back to Ourselves

Sonya Renee Taylor: The Map Back to Ourselves

Posted by | Jun 15, 2021 |

Since reading Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love and writing this post a little over a year ago, I have been keeping my finger on Taylor’s pulse, a pulse I value and need as I work to hold myself accountable and better understand systemic racism. (I highly recommend her recent TEDx talk Let’s Replace Cancel Culture with Accountability.) After Derek Chauvin was found guilty this past April, Taylor’s organization, also named The Body Is Not An Apology, stated on its Facebook page: “In @SonyaReneeTaylor’s second to most recent video, “Justice...

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Ada Lovelace: Math, Vision, and Ambition in a Woman Meets Certain Death in Victorian England

Ada Lovelace: Math, Vision, and Ambition in a Woman Meets Certain Death in Victorian England

Posted by | Jun 8, 2021 |

When I think of Ada Lovelace 1815-1852, widely recognized as the first computer programmer, I think of a woman with highly curious intellect, vision, superb math skills, and ambition with absolutely no where to apply them in Victorian England. She chose to find men who had position and power and apply her gifts through them, as that was one of  the only ways a woman could push her own agenda in that time, but the men she chose failed or betrayed her and she was left with nothing. I cannot begin to imagine this woman’s frustration. It boils my...

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Willa Cather: A Forever View of the Mountain

Willa Cather: A Forever View of the Mountain

Posted by | Jun 1, 2021 |

Last week, my sister Theresa and I took advantage of the opportunity to visit the grave of novelist Willa Cather and her longtime partner, Edith Lewis, in the Old Burying Ground behind the beautifully preserved Meeting House in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. I had known for a long time that Cather was buried in Jaffrey, but didn’t know how it had come to be that the woman who wrote “of prairie pioneering…the desert southwest…Quebec City at the end of the seventeenth century…her own birthplace, rural northern Virginia,”( https://www.willacather.org/willa-cathers-biography) chose a small New Hampshire town as her final resting place. That...

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