The CWCW Blog

The 1960’s. . . where was I? In Brooklyn, married for a few years, with a baby and toddler. Around us swirled the movements and politics of the time – in the South: bus rides, sit-ins, peaceful protests, and violent responses. My husband and I were frequently glued to the TV, watching Black Americans, and those White Americans who joined them, [...]

Instead of watching the State of the Union speech, I went to the theater and saw Gloria: A Life, written by Emily Mann, the award-winning director and playwright and a past guest on Conversations with Creative Women. The staging at the Daryl Roth Theater in Manhattan’s Union Square was unique – seating all around with two huge [...]

I truly believe that things happen for a reason – that it’s more than sheer coincidence when people are brought together.  Two years ago, I wrote a piece for the CWCW website about a “creative woman” named Sheryl Lee Ralph who left an indelible mark on me after I saw her one woman show “A Diva Simply Singing.”  A few weeks prior, I [...]

I picked up my new car today. Quite a milestone, but I couldn’t have been more depressed. Even though I’ve been driving for 52 years, I never bought a car. The day after I got my license, I hit a telephone pole, badly damaging my parents’ Pontiac Tempest and leaving us car-less for several weeks while it was being [...]

The midwife is a classic literary heroine. She is brave. She is compassionate. She stands like a warrior on a battlefield: life on one side; death on the other, the defender of women and newborns.  As a nurse-midwife and author, I read every book I could find about midwives. Since our popularity has grown, there are so many stories that [...]

IT WASN’T AN item on a bucket list, though that’s what I had told people. A bucket list was easier to explain than the countless classes I had registered for, attempted, and subsequently quit after six months or six weeks. Then there were the classes I took “on and off” for years, such as tango. I can’t remember how I got into tango, [...]

WHEN I WAS sixteen years old, I was eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant with a close friend when he asked a humorous but pointed question: “So what you’re choosing to do with your life is essentially this: You are going to move your arms back and forth repeatedly in order to make a strip of metal wiggle, which will then cause air molecules to [...]

My mom gave me plenty of great advice over the course of her lifetime. Don’t “should” on yourself.  (I should do this! I shouldn’t have done that.) Don’t date men you wouldn’t consider marrying.  It’s a waste of your time and theirs. Don’t expect people to be more than they’re capable of being. But my favorite, and one of the hardest ideas to [...]

I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about past friendships as I write this blog. My friendships I made in master ballet teacher’s Finis Jhung’s brilliant ballet classes at the Alvin Ailey Extension led me to reconsider my role as a friend.  Mr. Jhung’s classes led me to meditate on seeing myself and how others see me. It was through his classes and the [...]

A FEW YEARS ago, (five, to be exact), I took a job as the executive director of the Feminist Press. Prior to that, I had written six books about feminism (for houses like FSG, Seal, and Akashic), dozens of features for magazines, made two activist documentaries, and was a regular on the Women’s and Gender Studies lecture circuit. I felt [...]