For my mother and grandmother, going to work each day and coming home with a paycheck was not an option.
07 Mothers & Grandmothers
The Strangest Thing
The kicks and punches became so frequent that I couldn’t remember what it was like not to have a burgeoning person inside me.
God’s Gift: The Lessons Motherhood Taught Me
Overall, motherhood is teaching me lessons I would not have learned otherwise. It’s maturing me on a level that I could not have reached without having gone down this path.
Becoming “Mama”: Nurturing Identity Through Gender-Diverse Parenting
I have never identified with being a woman, but I do identify with the name, Mama. That is what my youngest calls me.
The Only Child Box
A 5-year-old with an Anna Karina-esque bob prances into her mother’s nude drawing class in Santa Monica, California. With the focus of a cat, a jet-black-haired woman with striking olive skin and pouty lips sets up her easel and starts to sketch a voluptuous female model.
Poem: Seamstress by Emily Wallis Hughes
Emily Wallis Hughes is a California-born poet currently pursuing an MFA at New York University, where she is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. Her poems have been published in Gigantic Magazine and Sacramento News & Review, and anthologized in Burning the Little Candle (Ad Lumen Press).
My Legacy as a Moroccan Woman
As an avant-garde Islamic feminist, Mernissi explains how illegitimate male domination is. Using the same religious and social grounds men use to oppress, Mernissi demonstrates how women have all the prerogative to conquer their rights and powers.
Poet Mary Ruefle on Menopause: Take My Advice and Throw It Away
Writer Mary Ruefle doesn’t own a computer. Her website (obviously managed by someone else) suggests that in order to contact her you should run into someone she knows personally on the street. Well, I emailed someone she knows personally. Then I sat down to my typewriter and typed her a letter, which she answered (also with a typewriter, and with better margins). And so our conversation began.
What We Learned From “The Golden Girls”
When “The Golden Girls” premiered on primetime television in 1985, the show was considered revolutionary for its portrayal of single women entering their golden years with a zest for life (and sex). I was only four when it first aired, but I discovered it with interest several years later, as an eight-year-old growing up in New York City.
The Late Birth of Birth Control
History of birth control: The science of contraception does not, and has never, lain strictly within the realm of women’s health.
Outside the Home
Artist Dot Vile works in textiles with the delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel, weaving a narrative out of construction materials and cloth that captures the combination, and often juxtaposition, of the male-female dynamic.
Pages: Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle
My grandmother introduced me to “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith. “It was her favorite book,” I’d say, “and I was her favorite grandchild.”