Yesterday I voted in Boston's mayoral election where there were two candidates, both women. A little more than a century ago, this could not have happened -- neither me in the voting booth nor women on the ballot. Upstate New York had a lot to do with making it possible.Read More
This month, I'm talking about art again. Actually, a book about art, The Mirror and the Palette, by Jennifer Higgie, where she covers five hundred years of women's self-portraiture, a genre women have long practiced, even if mostly under the radar.Read More
In last month's newsletter, I ruminated on how women can move history. Now I'm back with more on the subject, specifically Phebe Lord Upham, born in Maine in 1804.Read More
Two years ago I was invited to give a reading in New York. My husband Andrew came with me and, naturally, we added museums and restaurants to the trip. One evening we went to Prune, a wonderful place on East 1st Street (now regrettably closed) run by chef Gabrielle Hamilton and her wife.Read More
Vaccines are all the buzz these days. Saturated with news coverage, we’ve absorbed new terms like spike protein and messenger RNA, and learned that some vaccines, like Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s, are really a new breed. Without recent advances in biotechnology, we wouldn’t have these vaccines at all. Did you know that the polio vaccine, which...Read More
Susan Smith was born in 1847 into a farming family that raised pork in Weeksville, a section of Brooklyn, New York sandwiched between Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and Crown Heights. Her nine siblings became school teachers and principals, but she went into medicine, graduating as valedictorian from New York Medical College for Women in 1870. When she...Read More
I first saw these women at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. The obvious whimsy of the picture appealed to me, but I found myself thinking about it long after I had left the museum. Did that mean there was some deeper meaning for me and my work? Ida Crie took the photograph. She...Read More
