The Norton Book of Women's Lives: Reflections

Word Count: 368 From The Measure of My Days by Florida Scott-Maxwell “When a new disability arrives I look about to see if death has come, and I call quietly, ‘Death, is that you? Are you there?’ So far the disability has answered, ‘Don't be silly, it's me.’” (705). “It is waiting for death that wears us down, and the distaste for what we may become” (706). “Too often our problem is the fervour of life within us” (706). “Age is not failure, nor disgrace; though mortifying we did not invent it. Age forces us to deal with idleness, emptiness, not being needed, not able to do, helplessness just ahead perhaps … Yet it is the end of our procession through time, and our steps are uncertain” (706). Florida Scott-Maxwell discusses the process of aging and the idea of death as an old woman. Maxwell had evidently learned and thought a lot about this subject. She claims the duality of old age is the fact that our bodies betray us and yet our fervour of life still runs rampant within us....

Word Count: 568 From Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman “‘River’ in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English is cold – a word without an aura. It has no accumulated associations for me… No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection” (387-388). “I love language too much to maul its beats, and my pride is too quick to risk the incomprehension that greets such forays. I become a very serious person, missing the registers of wit and irony in my speech, though my mind sees ironies everywhere” (397). “If I am indeed to write something entirely for myself, in what language do I write? Several times, I open the diary and close it again. I can't decide. Writing in Polish at this point would be a little like resorting to Latin or a...

Word Count: 416 From Zami: A New Spelling of my Name by Audre Lorde “Since my parents shared all making of policy and decision, in my child’s eye, my mother must have been other than woman. Again, she was certainly not man” (497). “I realize now, to hide from us as children the many instances of her powerlessness. Being Black and foreign and female in New York City in the twenties and thirties was not simple, particularly when she was quite light enough to pass for white, but her children weren’t” (498). “It was so often her approach to the world; to change reality. If you can’t change reality, change your perceptions of it” (498). “It was charity, which was bad and demeaning, and besides the milk was warm and might make you sick” (501). Audre evidently saw her mother as a very strong woman and she also recognized that she was different from other women of her time. She found that she both enjoyed it and resented that fact at different points of her life. However, one of the big thi...

  Word Count: 395 From Mules and Men by Zora Neal Hurston “I ask… that the wombs of their women shall not bear fruit except for strangers, and that they shall become extinct. I pray that the children who may come shall be weak of mind and paralyzed of limb” (415). “I was led to drink from the cup containing their mindled bloods, and each of them in turn beginning with Turner drank mine” (418). “He hate me and make all the trouble he can … he must leave this town or die. Yes it is much better if he is dead. Then she burst out, ‘Yeah, he should be dead long time ago. Long before he spy upon me, before he tell lies, lies, lies. I should be very happy for his funeral” (420). Zora’s narrative was truly very different from anything we have read so far. The way Zora described Voodoo was very hardcore and demonic, but even so she seems okay with it, maybe even comfortable. These ceremonies required dedication to this craft but the reason for doing it was for the gaining of your own power...