Ha Jin Revisits Nanjing’s Rape

“Doing what can’t be done is the glory of living.” When American missionary Minnie Vautrin cites this old Quaker saying to an admirer in Ha Jin’s Nanjing Requiem, she means to be humble, explaining her work helping Chinese refugees in wartime as merely her Christian duty. But the quote underscores that what Vautrin accomplished was heroic to [...]

As Newsrooms Downsize, Is Diversity Doomed?

By Susan McHenry Amy Alexander has amassed the credentials to be called, in the parlance of 21st century digital media, “an award-winning content producer,” as she’s described on the cover of this slim, somewhat elegiac and not quite triumphant book. But she is more invested in her roots in traditional media and in her role as [...]

Fragmented By Abuse, But Not Broken

By Nada L. Stotland On a very bad day, every one of us has wished we were somewhere else or someone else. Some unfortunate children have many more, and much worse, bad days; they are physically, psychologically and/or sexually abused. How do they survive? In her opening chapters, Olga Trujillo describes the almost unimaginable physical [...]

Sex, Doves and the Divine Feminine: Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers

By Jessica Stites The Fall of Masada is one of the most incredible real-life David-and-Goliath stories ever recorded. After the Roman sacking of Jerusalem in the year 70, about 900 Jews took refuge in the Masada, a fortress on an isolated desert plateau. There they held off a Roman legion of 10,000 before committing mass suicide. [...]

Are Women Struggling in a “Post-Post-Feminist” Career World?

Are women unhappy in their life paths? According to mother-and-daughter author team Barbara and Shannon Kelley, who have written a new book, Undecided: How to Ditch the Endless Quest for Perfect and Find the Career–and Life–That’s Right for You, women are having a tough time picking and then sticking to a satisfying career. Having been [...]

Where Were the Chicana Feminists? Right Here

In my Chicana Feminist Theory classes, there’s one text I never fail to teach: Alma Garcia’s 1997 Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, a collection of newspaper articles, broadsides and essays by Chicana women activists of the 1960s and ’70s. Students identify with the sense of political urgency in these writings. Chicanas were struggling [...]

Ms. Readers’ Choice: Top 100 Non-Fiction Books?

Time’s recent article on the 100 best non-fiction reads got us Ms. bloggers thinking about what we’d put on our own list. Time included a respectable number of arguable feminist classics such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Margaret [...]

Media, Critics Shun “Maggie Goes on a Diet”

The children’s book Maggie Goes on a Diet hasn’t even been released yet, but it’s already been deemed problematic by many, and rightly so. Even without reading the book, much can be gathered from both the title and the cover, which shows Maggie, the book’s 14-year-old protagonist, holding a dress while looking in the mirror [...]

How To Model Healthy Sexuality for Our Daughters

As a toddler, my daughter started asking about body parts. Pretty soon it became apparent that she was the only 2-year-old at her daycare who knew and used the word vagina. Even her teachers changed the subject. Was I supposed to feel guilty about teaching her about her body? Joyce McFadden, psychoanalyst and author of [...]

Epic Longing in Bengal

Anuradha Roy’s debut novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has much to boast about. Published in the UK and India in 2008, and just recently in the U.S., it was named one of the 60 most essential books in contemporary India by World Literature Today. Its reviews stateside and abroad have been glowing and well-deserved, [...]

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