Category Archives: feminism

Something true deep in your body

My awkward, stumbling search for faith is no secret. I write often of the way I trudge through my days, alternating with lightning speed and cloudy confusion between certainty and doubt. There are times, though, when the idea floating up in my mind seems to be echoed by external messages in a way [...]

Best of 2009: Real Beauty

Today: What advertisement made you think this year?
I know it’s not new this year, but I continue to be awed and moved by Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. The top video is the one I know best, and every time I see it I find myself almost breathless with a combination of anger and [...]

Creativity and procreativity

This picture, of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, was the first page of my thesis. I love the way the image speaks of creativity and procreativity, of the tension and symbiosis between them.The news of Kim Clijster’s US Open win – remarkable because she was the first unseeded winner but also, more notably, because [...]

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. – Adrienne Rich
Cherish your wilderness. – Maxine Kumin
It’s thesis day around here, clearly, with Anne Sexton this morning and Adrienne Rich and Maxine Kumin this evening. I know I have both monsters and wilderness in me, and I know I share Sexton’s view that there is nothing uncomplicated [...]

Shocking

I read about the case of New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services v. V.M. and B.G. with horror. The story of a laboring woman refusing a cesarean section and, as a direct result, having her newborn daughter (healthy after a vaginal delivery) removed from her custody shocks me. She was declared [...]

To be quiet or to speak?

I read Judith Warner’s column last week with a heavy heart. Of course I do not understand the nuances of the situation so I can’t comment on the specific instance she cites. But the trend, the overall observation she makes, had me nodding my head in sad recognition.
Then one of my favorite new [...]

most important of all, on Mother’s Day

To the one who made me a daughter and who shows me every day, in ways big and small, how to be a mother: I love you.

The passage

Many of you know that birth is an important topic to me personally. Let me say that again: to me personally. I do not consider myself an evangelist and hope to never come across as one. It has struck me more than once that it’s interesting that the universe made the process [...]