Tag: self-identified women

Vera (Atkins) Rosenberg: A Romanian Jewish Woman Spy Who Fought the Nazis with Everything She Had (1908-2000)

Vera (Atkins) Rosenberg: A Romanian Jewish Woman Spy Who Fought the Nazis with Everything She Had (1908-2000)

Posted by | Mar 23, 2021 |

I was unaware that women were sent behind enemy lines by the Allied powers as spies and “guerrilla” fighters in WWII. But they were. Thirty-nine out of the 400 agents who were sent to German occupied France by Britain in preparation for the D-Day invasion, were women. All 400 were sent there by a woman named Vera Atkins who worked under Lieut.-Col. Maurice Buckmaster.  In 1941 Atkins was recruited by the London office of Britain’s newest secret service: The Special Operations Executive or SOE. “SOE was to develop a secret war: building up, organizing, and arming a resistance army...

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Writing at its Best: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Writing at its Best: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Posted by | Feb 9, 2021 |

This book was recommended to me by Amazon. That’s right. It popped up on my kindle as, “you may be interested in,” while purchasing a different book. I found the title compelling so I clicked, then I found the description of the book interesting, so I purchased. I was not disappointed. It has been a long time since I read a collection of short stories I could not put down and wanted to read all over again once I’d finished. Philyaw’s writing is downright addictive.  Philyaw’s voice is powerful and assertive, strong and confident, and also, a bit mischievous,...

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Kamala Harris: A Nasty Woman in the White House

Kamala Harris: A Nasty Woman in the White House

Posted by | Jan 26, 2021 |

What I love the most about Kamala Harris is how much other women love her. When she was first nominated for vice president on the presidential ticket of Joe Biden, I watched Rachel Maddow interview other women, many of them in positions of power and politics, about it and the response was sheer glee. The Indian-American women she interviewed were over the moon. The smiles on these women’s faces were large, genuine and infectious. As time moved forward, when I would hear prominent women running non-profits or holding high office interviewed asked about her nomination, many of them confessed...

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Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: Calling Out White Supremacist Patriarchy for over 170 Years.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: Calling Out White Supremacist Patriarchy for over 170 Years.

Posted by | Sep 8, 2020 |

Wanna read a novel that tells the truth? Check out Wuthering Heights (1847). It is so brutal in its exposure of life in the white supremacist patriarchy that it has left readers shaking their heads for close to two centuries. How could this little lady (Emily Brontë 1818-1848) who lived a quiet life in a parsonage on the Yorkshire Moors write such a dark tale? What got into her? What is she trying to say? What would move her to write of such dark happenings and grim hauntings? I guess it’s because she lived in the white supremacist patriarchy...

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Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All

Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All

Posted by | Aug 11, 2020 |

While reading adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism for #NastyWomenWriters, I was stopped in my tracks by the praise coming forward in that book for black feminist, writer, activist, film maker and mentor Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995). brown writes: “Toni Cade Bambara, author of The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible. Bambara is a main stream in the lineage of pleasure activism, not just because of what she put on the page and into words, but also because of the ways she wove community,...

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